Floor Statements

Madam President, I wonder if the Republican leader would answer a question.

Madam President, is it the intention of the Republican leader to cause the Senate to take up the issue of $4 gas prices and stay on it and debate it and amend it and come to a substantial result, including ways to increase supply and reduce demand, so we can say to the American people we have done our job?

Madam President, if I may ask a second question of the Republican leader. Has the Republican leader not from the very beginning said that the solution to $4 gasoline is both supply and demand; that we want to find more and use less; that, yes, we want to drill offshore, but we also want to make it commonplace to have plug-in electric cars and trucks, as an example, and that the major difference between us is that we are willing to find more and use less and the other side is not?

Madam President, if I may ask a last question of the Republican leader. The Republican leader and I and many other Senators probably took economics 101. When I took it, the law of supply and demand had both supply and demand, finding more and using less.

I wonder if the Republican leader knows of any movement in academic circles to repeal half of the law of supply and demand, and to say that the law of supply and demand does not anymore include supply?

Reserving the right to object, Senator Voinovich wishes to have 20 minutes and Senator Allard wishes to have 15 minutes.

No objection.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, there will be no objection if an equal amount of time that is used by the Democratic side will be added to the Republican side.

Mr. President, how much time do we now have?

I intend to consume about 12. Would the chair please let me know when 10 have expired?

Mr. President, I wish to say first that I had the chance to hear not only the Senator from North Dakota but the Senator from New Mexico, Mr. Bingaman, and what was going through my mind is that this is exactly what the Senate ought to be doing every day--every day--until we have a full and complete debate about all of the causes of the current high gasoline prices, all of the solutions that we can put in place today, until we consider all of the amendments that we need to bring up, and that we come to as a result. That is what the Senate is supposed to do. It is wonderful that we have 36 minutes to get up and present our sides, but our mode of business for the most difficult problem facing our country ought not to be back-and-forth arguments, or it ought not to be just to consider one bill brought up by the Democratic leader just because he is the majority leader and can do that and not consider all of the other ideas.

I would like to hear all that Senator Bingaman has to say, for example, about why he doesn't like the idea of State options for offshore exploration. He is a thoughtful Senator and chairman of the energy committee. I would like to hear all that Senator Dorgan has to say about speculation. He is a thoughtful Senator and, as he said, has been willing to support more offshore exploration in some cases, and might do more.

We need to have a full debate about the extent to which speculation is a problem. For example, Senator Dorgan cited speculation as one reason we have gas prices above $4 a gallon. Republicans believe speculation is part of the problem as well. The Gas Price Reduction Act we introduced, with 44 Republican Senators supporting it--and we hope it earns significant support on the other side--has as one of its four parts speculation and putting 100 more cops on the beat to deal with it.

But we are also aware that Warren Buffett, who is invited to lunches on the other side of the aisle because he is a well-admired person who understands the market well enough to make a lot of money on it, Warren Buffett said in June: ``It is not speculation; it is supply and demand.''

The International Energy Agency, an energy policy organization with 27 member nations, says:

Blaming speculation is an easy solution which avoids taking

the necessary steps to improve supply side access and

investment, or to implement measures to improve energy

efficiency.

So we need to consider a full debate on the extent to which speculation makes a difference.

We believe--and we are not the first to have this idea--that the solution to $4 gasoline prices is to find more oil and to use less oil. I wasn't the best student in economics at Vanderbilt University years ago, but that is what I was taught in economics 101, that the reason gas prices are high is because we have had growing demand and diminishing supplies. Also--I will get back to this more--what we do today about future prices can make all the difference in today's prices. I am not the only one who believes that.

Martin Feldstein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Reagan, a Harvard professor and member of the Wall Street Journal's board of contributors said in an article a few days ago: Any steps that can be taken now to increase the future supply of oil--that is finding more--or reduce the future demand for oil in the United States or elsewhere--that is using less--can, therefore, lead to lower prices and increased consumption today.

Not 10 years from now, not 5 years from now; what we plan for the future can make a difference in the prices today, and we need to be doing that.

April is a single mother of two in Sevier County, TN, who took a job 40 miles away 2 years ago so she wouldn't have to live off welfare. With gas prices rising, she is spending about $160 a week on gas and can't afford to pay all the bills. She sent me that letter in the past couple of weeks.

Dave from Murfreesboro was laid off from his job at a trucking company in Jackson because they had to declare bankruptcy. They couldn't afford the gas. The company just expanded the dispatch office and they bought new trucks when they ran out of money from rising fuel prices. He is now worried our middle class is disappearing.

Robert in Elizabethton, TN, a retired police officer, worked his whole life so he could retire. But now with gas prices so high, he says he has to cut back on his trips to the doctor and the grocery store because it has gotten so expensive.

Glenna from Lafayette is on social security and lives on a very fixed income. She can barely afford to leave

home. Even the food at her local grocery store has gotten more expensive because they have to pay a gas fee for deliveries.

David from Knoxville has had to cancel his family's vacation this year. He will be having a ``STAYcation,'' as he says. He just got a promotion and raise at work, but the increase in living costs with food and gas has left him with no net gain. Instead, he is struggling to pay his bills.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record these five letters and e-mails from Tennesseans who are Americans hurt by high gas prices.

The writers of these letters may say: All right, you are United States Senators. You are in charge of the Congress. Do something.

Well, we say find more, use less. We have a bill, 44 Senators cosponsored the bill, and we asked to bring it up. Senator Vitter of Louisiana brought it up the other day, and on behalf of the Democratic side, it was objected to. Now, I can understand that. Maybe it wasn't convenient to bring it up that day, but it is not convenient for the letter writers who wrote to me to wait another 2 days for us to seriously deal with the issue of gasoline prices either.

So my suggestion is that the Democratic leader--and the whole Nation should understand this. The Democratic leader may not have much of a majority, but he has control of the agenda. If he wants to put gasoline legislation on the floor of the Senate, he can do it the next hour. He can do it before noon.

When he does it, I would respectfully ask that the American people expect us to have a full discussion and full debate about how we can fix this problem, and that means what can we do about finding more, what can we do about using less.

We just heard two of the most prominent Democratic Senators who understand energy and who say we do need to do a variety of things. They say that. We had a second bipartisan breakfast yesterday morning on gas prices. Fifteen Senators attended--

eight Democrats, seven Republicans--or maybe it was the reverse. I wasn't there because I was in Chattanooga for Volkswagen's announcement of a new plant in Chattanooga, for which we are grateful. But we had a good discussion the week before, and we had a good one yesterday. We should be having that discussion on the Senate floor.

Our plan, the Republican plan, which we hope earns Democratic support, is very simple. It would increase American production by one- third over time--by one-third, one, by giving States the option to explore offshore for oil and gas and keep 37\1/2\ percent of the revenues. If I were the Governor, as I once was--we don't have a coast in Tennessee, but I would have been delighted to have that money. I would have put it in the bank and built the best higher education system in America, kept taxes down, and done some other things. That is what the four States in the South do. Virginia might decide to do it, North Carolina, Florida might. The oil market would get the oil and our prices would begin to stabilize. That would be 1 million barrels a day the Department of Interior estimates. Remember, 85 percent of the area on the Outer Continental Shelf in which we could drill is now off limits. We are going to have to deal with that issue. We should be dealing with it on the Senate floor.

Two, we could go to three Western States and lift the moratorium on oil shale development. We should proceed with that in environmentally sound ways. That should produce, according to the Department of the Interior, 2 million barrels a day. What do those numbers mean? It means we could increase our production by one-third--increase American energy by one-third.

Now, we only produce maybe 10 percent of the world's oil, but we are the third largest producer. Many on the other side have said: Well, let's sue OPEC, the Middle Eastern countries, and make them produce more oil. By analogy, we should be suing ourselves for not allowing the U.S. to produce more oil. We produce about as much oil as Saudi Arabia. We are the third largest producer. We should make our contribution to finding more American energy by producing more oil, and there are many Republicans and some Democrats who are ready to do that. So why are we not debating that and acting on that and voting on that on the Senate floor? That is what the Senate is expected to do.

Then, use less. We are willing to do both. We understand both parts of the equation of supply and demand. Our suggestion and our legislation--and I believe, personally, the most promising way for our country to rapidly reduce our reliance on foreign oil--is to use plug- in electric cars and trucks.

Now, when I first began talking about this, some people thought I had been out in the sun too long. But Nissan, Toyota, Ford, General Motors, are all going to be making and selling to us within a year or two or three electric hybrid cars, or in Nissan's case an electric car that you simply plug in at night. Where do we get the electricity to do that? We have plenty of electricity at night when we are asleep. In the TVA region, for example, where I am from, the Tennessee Valley Authority, we produce about 3 percent of all of the electricity in America. We have the equivalent of 6 or 7 nuclear powerplants worth of electricity available at night which is unused. So TVA can bring me a smart meter and say: Mr. Alexander, you can fill up with electricity at night and drive your car 30 miles a day without using any gas. When I am here in the Senate, that is about all I drive. Three-quarters of Americans drive less than 40 miles a day. Over time, the Brookings experts believe we could electrify half our cars and trucks, and do it without building any more new powerplants because we already have unused electricity at night. So we are willing to do more and use less.

We hear too much coming from the other side of the aisle to avoid the finding more part. They are dancing around the issue. We say: More offshore exploration with some exceptions. We hear: No, we can't.

We say lift the moratorium on oil shale, with some exceptions. They say, no, we can't. We say more nuclear power, which is clean and we can use it for electricity and to plug in our cars and trucks. They say, no, we can't. We need to be finding ways that we can say, yes, we can, to finding more and using less.

My last comment is this: I hope not to hear anybody else ever say on the floor of the Senate that we cannot do something because it will take 10 years. Did President Kennedy say we could not go to the Moon because it would take 10 years? Did President Roosevelt say we could not build a bomb to win World War II because it might take 3 years? Did our Founding Fathers say we cannot have a Republic or a democracy because it might take 20, 30, or 40 years? Our greatest leaders have said this is the way we go in America. This is what we should be like in 5 or 10 years. We should have a new ``Manhattan Project'' for clean energy independence, to put us on a path toward that independence with 5 or 10 years.

From the day we take those actions, the price of oil and gasoline stabilizes and begins to go down. That is what was so eloquently said in the Wall Street Journal article by Mr. Feldstein. Let me conclude with the very words he said 2 days ago:

Now here is the good news. Any policy that causes the

expected future oil price to fall can cause the current price

to fall, or to rise less than it would otherwise do. In other

words, it is possible to bring down today's price of oil with

policies that will have their physical impact on oil demand

or supply only in the future.

The United States and this world are waiting for us to enact a plan that will find more American energy and use less oil, so it can see that in the future we are on a path to energy independence and, as a result, the prices of oil today will stabilize and begin to go down.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I saw the majority leader. I wonder if he needs time to speak or wrap up. I will be glad to forego if he wants to do that. I will speak for 10 or 15 minutes as in morning business, but I will be glad to wait for the majority leader to see if he wishes to speak.

Mr. President, sometimes American lives are lived so eloquently that nothing needs to be written about them. Sometimes even eloquent lives can be eloquently written about. Such was the case over the Fourth of July weekend. When I had a little extra time, I came across Peggy Noonan's article in the Wall Street Journal on July 5 about John Whitehead of New York.

John Whitehead was on Normandy Beach. He chaired Goldman Saks. He was President Reagan's Deputy Secretary of State. He headed the International Rescue Commission. He has been in the middle of New York's efforts after 9/11. As Peggy Noonan wrote, he is a model public citizen.

For the eloquence of his life and the eloquence of her article, I ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, the majority leader, Senator Reid, has spoken about an energy roadmap. He talked about it on Friday. He talked about it again today. I am glad he is talking about it. I want to make a suggestion to him, which I hope he can accept. I am sure that in his home State, Nevada, as well as in my home State, Tennessee, the first thing out of anybody's mouth has to do with gasoline prices.

I try to read on the floor of the Senate regularly letters that have been e-mailed to me from Tennesseans whose lives are changed by the $4 and $4.25 gasoline. What Senator Reid said in his remarks was that he has an energy roadmap. I say, with great respect, that I am afraid his roadmap is only half a roadmap because he is willing to use less energy but not willing--as far as I can tell--to find more energy.

In 1961, President Kennedy said: Let's go to the Moon in 10 years. But if the astronauts had a roadmap that took them only halfway there, they would be floating in space. That is where I am afraid we would be as a country if we only do half our job as we address $4 gasoline.

The problem that we have is a very simple one, even though a difficult one. It has to do with economics 101, the law of supply and demand. We have low supplies and more demand because around the world, the Chinese, the Indians, and others are growing wealthier and using more oil, from which gasoline is made.

Mr. President, the only real solution to the $4, $4.25 gasoline prices is to find more and use less--find more, as well as use less.

Now, the majority leader's suggestions that he mentioned--and I don't think they are part of the bill yet--include some very promising ideas. Curb speculation. We on the Republican side have introduced legislation that would put 100 more cops on the beat to curb speculation. Say that oil produced in America should be used here. That is what is happening today.

Increase our focus on renewable energy; renewable energy is important. It is only 3 percent of the total amount of electricity that we use in the United States today. We have a long way to go before solar, wind, and other energy of that kind can be a major part of what we need to do. Most of that is devoted to electricity. Of course, that is important. On the Republican side, we have supported that.

But what we have done on our side is introduce legislation that would do both: find more and use less. We don't do that with the hope that we will have a Republican bill because we don't want to see a Democratic bill either. We want an American bill. We believe our legislation deserves--and will earn--Democratic support. In fact, Democratic Senators have voted for some of the provisions in our legislation before.

In terms of finding more oil, we propose allowing deep sea exploration--give a State the option to drill for oil, if the State wishes to do that, and then take 37 percent of that money and put it into the State treasury for universities, beach nourishment, lowering taxes, or whatever. Put 12\1/2\ percent into the Land and Water Conservation Fund and half to the Federal Treasury. We could unlock, conservatively, 1 million barrels of oil a day if we were to allow deep sea exploration.

Today the President has taken off the Presidential moratorium on deep sea exploration. So it is up to us in the Congress to say: Will we or will we not find more oil by exploring in the deep seas off our coast?

Two, we have suggested in our legislation that we take the moratorium off oil shale development in four Western States. That could produce, over time, 2 million barrels a day. Just those two ideas--drilling offshore and oil shale--would increase by one-third the American production of oil, almost all of which we use here. So that is the supply part.

We are also interested in using less. The most promising way to do that, I believe--and 44 of us have agreed, and I will bet many do on the other side--has to do with plug-in electric cars and trucks. When I first started talking about that, people thought I had been out in the sun too long. In fact, Nissan, General Motors, Toyota, and Ford are all going to be selling us cars that we can plug in at night--hybrid cars. Three quarters of us drive less than 40 miles a day, and I am one of those. I can drive back and forth to the Senate using very little gasoline, if any. We could electrify half of our fleet of cars and trucks in the United States. That would take time, but it would be a clear direction toward using less oil.

With just those provisions I have talked about--finding more and using less--we could cut our oil imports in half. That would reduce your gas prices.

If you are driving a plug-in electric vehicle, by the way, there is plenty of electricity. At night, while we are asleep, most utilities have plenty of cheap electricity they would sell us. You plug your car or truck in at night for just about the same amount of charge that your water heater would use, and you could fill up with 60 cents of electricity instead of $100 worth of gasoline.

Just these three ideas--deep sea exploration, oil shale, and plug-in vehicles--would cut oil imports in half. We are ready to do that.

We would like for the majority leader to bring to the floor of the Senate an energy bill that is directed toward reducing the price of gasoline. Let each Democratic Senator put up their best idea, and let the Republicans put up our best ideas. Let's have a debate and votes, and they would probably take 60 votes.

We cannot get everything done before we leave in August, or even before October, but we can begin. From the day the United States of America--the third largest producer of oil and the user of a quarter of all of the oil in the world--finds more and uses less, the future expected price of oil will go down, and today's price of oil will stabilize and begin to go down.

I say to my friend, the majority leader, as one Senator, I welcome his interest and attention to energy, and specifically to gasoline prices. We Republicans have offered--44 of us--a slimmed-down bill, a modest bill. We don't say drill everywhere offshore. We don't say drill in Alaska in this piece of legislation. We say give States the option, and lift the moratorium on oil shale. Make electric plug-in cars and trucks commonplace and cut our oil imports in half over time. That is the way to reduce gasoline prices.

We hope if we are able in this Senate to act like a Senate and spend a week or two on this legislation and consider a number of amendments, we can come up with a result and we can go home to our constituents in August and say: Yes, we got a result. And when we come back in September, if we can do more, we will. When we come back in January, if we can do more, we will.

Everybody in Tennessee is saying to me: Senator Alexander, why don't you get together and work something out? I would like to do that, Mr. President. I didn't come here to play politics, talk trash, or stick my fingers in the eyes of the other side.

In my first speech on, for example, U.S. history, the majority leader, who was then the whip, was on the Senate floor, and he stood up and cosponsored my bill. Senator Kennedy got 20 cosponsors for it. It is now law today. Surely, if we can do that with U.S. history summer academies, we can do it with gasoline prices when it is the No. 1 issue.

Last Tuesday we had a bipartisan breakfast that was attended by 14 Senators. We heard from Senators Conrad, Chambliss, Domenici, and Bingaman. We talked about what we could agree on that had to do with both finding more and using less.

We cannot repeal the law of supply and demand. We know that mostly on the Republican side we talk about supply. Over on the Democratic side, they talk about demand. We have to put it together if we want to bring gasoline prices down. That is what we should be doing. I think that opportunity exists today.

In that closed room last Tuesday--and there is another bipartisan breakfast in the morning--I heard some Senators say things such as:

If we cannot deal with this across party lines, we don't

deserve to be here.

I think that is right, and most Americans feel that way.

The majority leader has many issues that have to be dealt with in the next 2 or 3 weeks. I hope he can find a way to bring his best ideas to the floor and allow us to do the same. Let's bring up

the debates and let's talk and let's vote and come to a result, and let's begin to lower gasoline prices. From the day the United States of America says to the world that we are going to find more American oil and we are going to use less oil, the expected price of oil and gas will begin to go down, and so will today's price of gas and oil go down.

I yield the floor.

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

I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to speak for up to 10 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. President, I have received 600 e-mails and letters from Tennesseans in response to a request I put out asking them to share their personal stories about high gas prices. It has been my practice each week to put a few of those into the Congressional Record to remind my colleagues and to remind our country that we understand that people are hurting. Tennesseans are hurting in their jobs, in their families, and in their homes. Mr. President, $4-plus gasoline is a big problem for Tennesseans.

Today, I wish to submit for the Congressional Record five more letters from among the nearly 600 that I have received, and I ask unanimous consent that following my remarks these letters be printed in the Record.

The first comes from Christy Long in Maynardville, TN. She works at the East Tennessee Children's Hospital in Knoxville, but she is worried about the cost of her commute. She is a diabetic. She is having trouble paying for her insulin shots due to the rising gas prices. She says:

Gas for work or insulin to live. That is the decision I

have had to make several times daily.

James Edwards from Charlotte, TN: James drives a rural route for the Postal Service, and he uses his own car, but the $26-a-day allowance doesn't cover the gas he uses anymore. He says that since the 10- percent ethanol mandate, he gets less mileage and has to use more gas. His wife's 40-mile commute to and from work every day is also cutting into their budget.

Kaye Nolen in Dyer, TN: Kay used to drive across the country once a year to see her family in Illinois, Utah, and New Mexico, but can't afford to do that this year. She says she is afraid that she will not be able to spend Thanksgiving with her family this year and that she will not be able to afford gas to make it to work if the prices keep going up.

Ruthann Booher of Crossville, TN: Ruthann and her husband have had to make significant cuts in their driving and grocery buying because of escalating costs. Her husband, who is 62, is now considering quitting his job at Wal-Mart and drawing Social Security since driving to work is so expensive. They can't afford the payment on a new car with better mileage.

Brenda Northern in Walland, TN, which is in the same county in which I live: Brenda is 60. She can barely afford to drive to visit her mother, who is 79 now, and it is getting harder and harder to make all of her payments. Her

husband has to use diesel for his truck because he moves mobile homes for a living and diesel prices keep going up too.

She says: I just do not know how we are going to make it.

I want Christy and James and Kaye and Ruthann and Brenda to know that I believe Senators on both sides of the aisle care about this matter, understand what is happening, and are ready to deal with it. I know on the Republican side, here is what we believe: We believe the answer to $4 gas prices is to find more and use less; that is, find more oil and use less oil.

Economics 101 taught us the law of supply and demand. The problem today fundamentally--and most Americans understand this; Americans know this--our problem is our supplies worldwide are not growing as fast as our demand worldwide for oil, and so the price of gasoline is going up. So if we had more supplies, and if we used less oil, the price of gasoline would go down. So we say on the Republican side: Find more, use less.

There seems to be a lot of agreement on both sides of the aisle about the using less part. For example, last year, the Senate did the most important thing it could do to reduce our dependence on foreign oil by passing higher fuel efficiency standards that said that cars and trucks had to be up to 35 miles a gallon by 2020. We did that together, Republicans and Democrats.

We on the Republican side are ready to try to make plug-in electric cars commonplace. I had a TVA Congressional Caucus hearing on that the other day in Nashville. Major car companies such as General Motors, Toyota, Nissan, and Ford are making plug-ins that are going to be available next year. TVA and other utilities have plenty of extra electricity at night to plug in, so literally you can plug your car in at night for 60 cents and fill it up with fuel instead of $70 worth of gasoline. I believe tens of thousands of Tennesseans and millions of Americans are going to be doing that.

If we set as our goal and take all the steps we need to take in the Senate to make plug-in electric cars and trucks commonplace, we could use less. Many estimates from General Motors and others is that just the plug-in electric vehicles would cut our imported oil by one-third, which is now about 12 million barrels a day. That is a significant reduction.

We can use less oil if we have a crash program in advanced biofuels. There is a lot of concern about ethanol and its effect on food prices. Well, we can grow a lot of crops that we don't eat such as switchgrass, for example, and with more research on cellulosic ethanol we can use less oil.

The other half our strategy to lower gas prices is finding more. That is where we have a difference of opinion. It seems that the other side of the aisle wants to repeal half the law of supply and demand. It is a new form of economics. Maybe we could call it ``Obama-nomics'' or some other name. But we say: All right, we agree on using less; now let's talk about finding more. What about, for example, allowing other States, such as Virginia, whose legislature says it wants to, to do what Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama do, which is to explore for oil offshore. We have a lot of it. We permitted an enlargement of that in the Gulf of Mexico a couple of years ago. Already the money is beginning to come in from the bids, and 37\1/2\ percent of the money goes to the States for their use for education or to nourish their beaches or whatever, and one-eighth goes to the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

The Presiding Officer and I both were Governors of our States. Neither one of us was fortunate enough to have an ocean on our State, so we don't have any potential for offshore drilling. I can't speak for the former Governor of Nebraska, but I can for Tennessee. If we had the opportunity in Tennessee to put oil and gas rigs 50 miles offshore where we couldn't see them and explore for oil and gas, and keep 37\1/ 2\ percent of the revenue and put it in a fund for our universities to make them among the best in the world, and to keep taxes low, and to use the money for greenways or to nourish the beaches or for other purposes, we would do it in a minute. I would think sooner or later Virginia will say they would like to do that. Maybe North Carolina will. Maybe Florida will.

Our proposal is simply, if the State wants to do it, the State can do it. No one is saying Virginia must do it or North Carolina must do it. It simply gives them the option, and it gives us more American oil and more supply to help stabilize and bring down the price of $4 gasoline.

But Senator Obama and most of the Democrats on the other side of the aisle say: No, we can't. No, we can't to offshore drilling. No, we can't to oil shale, which is in four Western States. There is, conservatively speaking, according to the Department of the Interior, 1 million barrels a day that we could get from offshore exploration and 2 million barrels a day that we could get from oil shale. If we added 3 million barrels a day to our production in the United States, we would increase by one-third the production that we have in the United States. We would be making more of our contribution to the world supply of oil.

We are the third largest producer of oil in the world. Why should we go begging the Saudis to drill more when we can produce more ourselves. That is part of it: Find more, use less.

So we need to come to some conclusion. We want a bipartisan result. We know in the Senate we have to get 60 votes to make anything happen. But I would be hopeful that the Democratic leadership, which is in charge of the agenda, would allow us in July to bring up these matters and act like a Senate. Let's vote. Let's debate. Let's talk about ways to use less. We could find substantial agreement, whether it is on plug-in vehicles, research for advanced biofuels, or conservation.

Senator Warner has suggested that the Federal Government ought to use less as a good example for the rest of the country. That is a good idea. Senator McCain and others have lots of good ideas as well.

Let's talk about finding more, too, for gasoline in terms of offshore drilling or in terms of oil shale. We can leave drilling in Alaska out of the discussion if that keeps us from having a bipartisan agreement, although it is the fastest way to get 1 million new barrels of oil a day. Let's put it aside for just a moment and say we want to work across the aisle to get a bipartisan agreement. We know we can't reach that agreement with ANWR included, so we will put that aside for the moment. But can we not as a Senate, in a bipartisan way, agree that we should be finding more and using less and not be saying when it comes to offshore exploration, no, we can't, and not be saying when it comes to oil shale: No, we can't. When Senator McCain says we need to double our number of nuclear plants, we can't say that we have enough clean, carbon-free electricity to deal with clean air, global warming, and plug-in cars, but from the other side comes: No, we can't. We cannot say ``no, we can't'' to finding more if we want to bring down $4 gasoline prices.

So I say to Christy, James, Kaye, Ruthann, Brenda, and the 600 Tennesseans who have written me about $4 gasoline, over this Fourth of July recess, a good thing to say to your Members of the Senate and Members of Congress is: Find more and use less. Yes, we can find more. Yes, we can use less. Yes, we can bring down the $4 price of gasoline.

Some have said it will take 10 years. Well, President Kennedy didn't shy away from asking us to take 10 years to go to the Moon. President Roosevelt didn't shy away from putting in the Manhattan Project to split the atom and build a bomb to win the war even though he knew it would take several years. What is wrong with it taking several years? Are we supposed to sit here and let our 2-year-old grandchildren have the same energy crisis to deal with 10 years from now that we have today? Leadership is about looking ahead. It might take 1, 2, 5, or 10 years, but the time to start is today. The way to do it is working across the aisle. The formula for it is economics 101: More supply, less demand, find more, use less. Today, the Republicans are ready to do that. We are ready to do both, find more and use less. But the Democrats are not.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Exhibit 1

1. Christy Long, Maynardville, TN--Christy works at the

East TN Children's Hospital in Knoxville but is worried about

the

cost of the commute. She is a diabetic and is having trouble

paying for her insulin shots due to the rising gas prices:

``Gas for work or insulin to live . . . that is the decision

that I have had to make several times daily.''

2. James Edwards, Charlotte, TN--James drives a rural route

for the Postal Service and uses his own car, but the $26-a-

day allowance doesn't cover the gas he uses anymore. He says

that since the 10% ethanol mandate, he gets less mileage and

has to use more gas. His wife's 40-mile commute to and from

work everyday is also cutting into their budget.

3. Kaye Nolen, Dyer, TN--Kaye used to drive across country

once a year to see her family in Illinois, Utah and New

Mexico, but can't afford to do that this year. She says she

is afraid that she won't get to spend Thanksgiving with her

family this year and that she won't be able to afford gas to

make it to work if prices keep going up.

4. Ruthann Booher, Crossville, TN--Ruthann and her husband

have had to make significant cuts in their driving and

grocery buying because of escalating costs. Her husband, who

is 62, is now considering quitting his job at Wal-Mart and

drawing Social Security since driving to work is so

expensive. They can't afford the payment on a new car with

better mileage.

5. Brenda Northern, Walland, TN--Brenda is 60 and can

barely afford to drive to visit her mother (who is 79)

anymore, and its getting harder and harder to make all her

payments. Her husband has to use diesel for his truck because

he moves mobile homes for a living and diesel prices keep

going up too. She says, ``I just do not know how we are going

to make it!''

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

Mr. President, this week high school students from all across the Nation have come together to celebrate National History Day at the University of Maryland. I would like to commend these students, their parents, and their teachers for demonstrating such interest to the study of history. History education is the foundation of a quality education, and ensuring that we have passionate and dedicated students of history is an important accomplishment of the competitions and events at the University of Maryland this week.

The National History Day program delivers yearlong programs dedicated to improving the teaching and learning of history across our country. Over 1.5 million students, teachers and parents, participate in the instructional and research projects each year. Since 1994, millions of Americans from all across the country have improved their knowledge of history through participation in this creative program.

We know that there is a need for better teaching and learning of history. The 2006 National Assessment of Educational Progress, NAEP, U.S. History report card shows that 82 percent of 4th graders, 83 percent of 8th graders, and 77 percent of high school seniors scored below proficient in historical knowledge. These results are similar to results for the past decade in NAEP assessments, and it concerns me greatly.

As an advocate for putting American history and civics back into its rightful place in our school curriculum, I chose to do my maiden speech on the education of our children and the principles that unite us as Americans. Along with several other distinguished cosponsors, I introduced the American History and Civics Act in 2003 to create Presidential and Congressional Academies for Teachers of American History and Civics--and was pleased when that legislation was signed into law.

I have had some experience with such academies when I was Governor of Tennessee. In 1984, we began creating Governor's Schools for students and teachers. Eventually there were eight Governor's Schools helping thousands of Tennessee teachers improve their skills and inspiring outstanding students to learn more about core curriculum subjects. When the school year began, students and teachers brought with them a new enthusiasm for learning and teaching that directly impacted their peers. Governor's Schools were one of the most effective and popular educational initiatives in our state, and I am pleased that we have been able to use that as a model for the Nation.

I applaud the organizers National History Day for recognizing the importance of educating today's youth of the many great feats that were accomplished, the struggles that were overcome, and the events that took place to make this country what it is today. I also congratulate all of the students, teachers, and parents who participate in it--and in particular wanted to congratulate the following Tennessee students participating in this event:

Emilee Frazier--Chuckey Doak Middle School, Afton, TN;

Katie Adams--Chuckey Doak Middle School, Afton, TN; Gary

Moats--Polk County High School, Benton, TN; Nick Ramsey--Polk

County High School, Benton, TN; Matthew Vandevander--Polk

County High School, Benton, TN; Anthony Joslin--Polk County

High School, Benton, TN; Jon Rivers--Tyner Academy,

Chattanooga, TN; Manish Jethva--Tyner Academy, Chattanooga,

TN; Jacquelyn Benford--Tyner Academy, Chattanooga, TN;

Markcus Kitchens--Tyner Academy, Chattanooga, TN; Walker

Thompson--St. George's Middle School, Collierville, TN; Ryan

Grover--St. George's Middle School, Collierville, TN; Mason

McGough--St. George's Middle School, Collierville, TN; Andrew

McBride--St. George's Middle School, Collierville, TN; Nikki

Martinez--St. Benedict at Auburndale, Cordova, TN; Anna

Cabe--St. Benedict at Auburndale, Cordova, TN; Mary Barczak--

St. Benedict at Auburndale, Cordova, TN; Andrew Grayson--Fred

Page Middle School, Franklin, TN; Adam Anderson--Fred Page

Middle School, Franklin, TN; and Olivia Smith--Fred Page

Middle School, Knoxville, TN.

Dylan Rasnick--Fred Page Middle School, Knoxville, TN;

Katherine Ballew--Fred Page Middle School, Knoxville, TN;

Willis Walker--Fred Page Middle School, Knoxville, TN; Erin

Stapleton--Fred Page Middle School, Knoxville, TN; William

Coe--Greenway School, Knoxville, TN; Sophie Yates--Greenway

School, Knoxville, TN; Shannon Gleason--Knoxville Catholic

High School, Knoxville, TN; Hannah Armendarez--Knoxville

Catholic High School, Knoxville, TN; Xrista Christopoulos--

St. John Neumann School, Knoxville, TN; Alexander Grimm--St.

John Neuman School, Knoxville, TN; Claire Northern--St. John

Neuman School, Knoxville, TN; C.C. Hermes--St. John Neuman

School, Knoxville, TN; Sarah Gallagher--Lebanon High School,

Lebanon, TN; Jennifer Melroy--Lenoir City High School, Lenoir

City, TN; Rachel Collins--Fort Loudoun Middle School, Loudon,

TN; Sarah Aldy--St. Agnes Academy-St. Dominic School,

Memphis, TN; Ali Delgado--St. Agnes Academy-St. Dominic

School, Memphis, TN; Alex Arcamuzi--White Station High

School, Memphis, TN; Sahaj Singh--White Station High School,

Memphis, TN; Bhavna Kansal--White Station High School,

Memphis, TN.

Melissa Swauncy--White Station High School, Memphis, TN;

Breanna Morrow--Mosheim Elementary, Mosheim, TN; Brittany

Loveall--Mosheim Elementary, Mosheim, TN; Melissa Kinser--

Mosheim Elementary, Mosheim, TN; Melody Zurawski--Martin

Luther King Jr. Magnet-Pearl High School, Nashville, TN;

Quidra Cothran--Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet-Pearl High

School, Nashville, TN; Kayla Garrett--Martin Luther King Jr.

Magnet-Pearl High School, Nashville, TN; Amber Jackson--

Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet-Pearl High School, Nashville,

TN; London Colbert--Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet-Pearl High

School, Nashville, TN; Sonali Mahendran Meigs Magnet Middle

School, Nashville, TN; Vivian Hughbanks--Stone House School,

Signal Mountain, TN; Grace Hughbanks--Stone House School,

Signal Mountain, TN; and Caitlyn Sudkamp--Walden Home School,

Signal Mountain, TN.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 12 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. President, I see the Senator from Delaware. I wonder, through the Chair, if he needs to speak.

Mr. President, I have invited Tennesseans to send me e-mails or to write letters about how high gas prices are affecting their daily lives. I am hearing from a lot of them.

Pat Taylor of Morristown, TN, who is the director of the local Meals on Wheels program, tells me the drivers travel 1,100 miles a day to deliver meals, but food and gasoline prices could force many meal recipients into retirement homes if something is not done. Mileage reimbursements are not sufficiently covering the expenditures of drivers.

Dr. Kathryn Stewart, of Winchester, TN, tells me that the school nutrition director has had to raise school lunch prices 50 cents per meal to compensate for the rise in gas and food prices, but they will still lose money this year. She worries about the future of her business there.

Abbie Byrom, of Johnson City, TN--that is in the eastern part of our State--is a third-year medical student at East Tennessee State University. She lives on loans through the school system. But, she says, cost-of-living loans do not cover expenses on traveling to all the area hospitals and medical centers. She says most of her fellow students are living by maxing out their credit cards.

Jerry and Judy Wilson, of Monterey, TN, run a weekend concessions business, but sales have been cut in half because of rising gas prices. They say: People can't come to the events because of fuel prices.

Joshua Yarbrough, of Franklin, TN, moved his family with three children to a larger house in Franklin, outside Nashville, 4 years ago, and is now having trouble paying his mortgage because of rising gas prices.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record, following my remarks, each of these letters.

So, Mr. President, given the extraordinary impact of $4-a-gallon gasoline on the people of Tennessee and the people of this country, they are looking to us in the Senate and the Congress to do something about this.

I noticed there are some interesting new professors of economics on the Democratic side of the aisle who seem to be trying to repeal the law of supply and demand. I have been studying this strange development, and I am trying to trace the source of it. It would appear that maybe the source of it is the young new chairman of the department of economics on that side of the aisle, because the New York Times reports this morning that Senator Obama opposes drilling in Alaska, and says he is ``not a proponent,'' in his words, of nuclear power, which provides 20 percent of our electricity today and 70 percent of our clean carbon-free electricity. He would consider banning new coal plants without clean coal technology. Coal produces 45 percent of our electricity today. In 2006, he voted against further exploration in the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas, in a portion of the Gulf known as Lease 181. More than 70 Senators from both sides of the aisle voted for it, which, so far as I can tell, leaves Senator Obama with not much more than a national windmill policy, as opposed to a national energy policy, for this great United States of America, which consumes every year 25 percent of the energy in the world.

Of course, it leaves these new professors of economics with the demand

part of the supply-and-demand equation.

We Republicans also believe in demand. We are for green buildings. We believe most of the new buildings ought to be green buildings. That is probably the easiest way to save electricity. Japan has discovered over the last several years that most of its failure to reach the Kyoto standards it was trying to achieve came from the inefficiency of buildings.

Half of us on the Republican side voted for the fuel efficiency standards in December. That has to do with the demand side of the equation--using less oil, less energy. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists told me that the single most important thing we could do as a Congress would be to increase the fuel efficiency standards by 40 percent. That means the cars and trucks in America should average 35 miles per gallon by the year 2020. We voted to do that in a bipartisan way. So we agree on that part of demand as well.

Then we Republicans, as well as many Democrats, I am sure, are ready to give strong support to the idea of plug-in electric cars and trucks.

I was in Nashville on Monday with Congressman Bud Cramer, who is a Democratic Congressman from Alabama. He and I cochair the TVA Congressional Caucus.

The question we presented for the hearing was, Will electric plug-in cars and trucks help lower $4 gas prices? I believe the answer is yes, and so did a lot of the people who came to see the cars.

One of the vehicles there was a plug-in electric car made by the A123 company in Boston. It is a Toyota Prius, of which there are now a million on the road, and the A123 company had converted the Prius, which is a 40-miles-per-gallon car, into an electric plug-in vehicle, and it is now a 100-miles-per-gallon car. All they did was replace the car's smaller rechargeable battery with a larger rechargeable battery, and they put a cord on the back of it and the driver plugs the cord in at night at his house in a wall socket and he charges it up for 60 cents. So instead of filling it up for $70, he is charging it up for 60 cents.

According to the General Motors Company witness who testified at our hearing on Monday, 75 percent of us drive fewer than 40 miles a day. I know I drive less than 40 miles a day going back and forth when I am in Washington, so if I were driving that electric plug-in car, I would be using no gasoline whatsoever.

So plug-in cars and trucks are a real prospect and a real important part of the demand part of the supply-and-demand law we strongly support on this side of the aisle, and so do many Democrats as well. It is 100 percent American energy. GM, Toyota, Nissan, Ford--all are going to be selling these cars to Americans in the year 2010, which is a model year that is about a year and a half away. Sixty cents is the cost of the charge for a 30-mile drive. It is about the same amount of electricity it takes to use your water heater for 1 day. It doesn't require new powerplants because the Tennessee Valley Authority chairman who was at the hearing told us that they have plenty of extra electricity at night when our lights are off, so we can plug in at night.

This involves trucks too. There were FedEx delivery truck witnesses at the hearing. They are already using hybrid delivery trucks, and they are planning to use that technology for big trucks.

If we were to electrify half our cars and trucks in America over time--which is 120 million, since we have about 240 million cars and trucks in this country--we could cut in half the amount of oil we import. That would cut from $500 billion to $250 billion the amount of money we are sending overseas to people, many of whom are funding terrorists who are trying to kill us. It would strengthen the dollar. It would certainly lower fuel costs for those who are plugging in their cars instead of driving them--or plugging them in instead of filling them with gasoline--and it would reduce the demand for oil so much that it would surely reduce the price of gasoline as well.

Plug-in electric cars and trucks would lead us to support a number of other initiatives: Smart meters so that in our homes we could pay TVA-- or whoever our electric utility is--a little more in the afternoon for electricity used at peak power, but at night we would have cheap power for our plug-in vehicles. Battery research. The additional cost of such a plug-in vehicle is determined primarily by how rapidly we can develop batteries that will take a charge to allow 40, 60, 80, 100, or even more miles each time because we will be running coal plants at night to provide this electricity. We would need to clean up our coal plants, but we should be doing that anyway, whether they are in Pennsylvania or Tennessee or Ohio. We need to get rid of the sulfur and the nitrogen and the mercury, and we need a crash program to find a practical way to recapture the carbon from coal plants if we are serious about dealing with climate change.

So there are a number of policy changes we on the Republican side of the aisle are ready to make to lower gas prices and to honor the law of supply and demand. But the problem is the new professors of economics on that side of the aisle, led by Senator Obama, are trying to take the word ``supply'' out of the law of supply and demand. If we are going to drive plug-in electric cars and trucks, we are going to need a supply of electricity, so we need to be building five or six nuclear powerplants a year. But the professors on that side say they are not proponents of that; they don't think it's part of the solution. It has to be a part of the solution in a country that uses 25 percent of all of the electricity in the world.

It would be embarrassing to say that France is ahead of us in this, but they are. Eighty percent of the electricity in France is from nuclear powerplants. It is clean--no mercury, no sulfur, no nitrogen, no carbon. They meet the climate change standards today, and if they shift in France to driving electric cars and trucks, they will have no problem. They can plug them in at night to recharge them. They will have no pollution problems. They will reduce their dependence on oil. They will save money in their pockets. They won't be exporting money to Middle Eastern countries or to others that may be funding terrorists. They will be ahead of us if we don't advance the technology we invented and begin to build five or six new nuclear plants a year for the foreseeable future.

We also need to take the ill-advised moratorium off oil shale. We have plenty of oil shale in the ground and new environmentally sound ways to get it out of the ground. That is a part of supply as well. Most of that is in our Western States.

We also need to give other States the opportunity to do what Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi already do, which is to explore 50 miles offshore for oil and gas. We have plenty of that. We could be producing an extra million barrels a day of oil and gas from offshore exploration, and by adding to the supply we would be reducing the price of gasoline and bringing it down below $4. We need to change the law and do that. Senator McCain says we need to do it.

What would it involve to give States that option? The Virginia State Legislature, for example, has said they would like to explore off the coast of Virginia, at least for natural gas. So we need to lift the Federal moratorium and the Presidential Executive order that keeps them from doing that offshore. If I were the Governor of Virginia, I would certainly want to do it. I would put the rigs 50 miles out where no one could see them.

We know we can do it in an environmentally clean way. We heard a lot of bad things as a result of Hurricane Katrina, but we didn't hear of one oil spill from any of the oil and gas rigs that are all in the Gulf of Mexico. So we know how to drill cleanly. The oil spills we have are from cargo freighters that are bringing oil from overseas to us. That is where the problem is. If we were exploring offshore for our own oil and gas, we would not only be lowering our gas prices, but we would be providing States and the Federal Government with additional revenue as well. Under the formula we passed in 2006 for Lease 181 in the Gulf of Mexico, Virginia would get 37.5 percent of the dollars. What would that do for Virginia? They already have a good higher education system, but I think if I were the Governor, I would say: Let's put a lot of that in a trust fund for higher education and make the Virginia colleges and universities the best in the world

without raising taxes. Let's put some of it to nourish the beaches of Virginia. Let's maybe use some of it for roads or for health care or for lowering taxes. They could do all of that with their three-eighths of those revenues.

We also said that one-eighth of the money from that offshore exploration in Lease 181 would go to the State side of the Land and Water Conservation Fund for city parks and greenways and open spaces in Pennsylvania and Tennessee and all across this country, which we have been trying to do for 40 years. The whole idea of the Land and Water Conservation Fund enacted in the 1960s was to say: We will fund it up to $900 million a year from money from offshore oil and gas exploration; we recognize that exploration is an environmental burden, so we will turn part of it into an environmental benefit. We have never fully funded the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and this is a way to do that.

There are other ideas--Senator Salazar, Senator Kyl, and I join in this as well--to take some of the excessive money from offshore drilling and fully fund the National Park Centennial Initiative that President Bush has proposed to celebrate the 100th anniversary of our National Park System. I know of the excitement around the Great Smoky Mountains National Park as we have added 55 new park personnel to that park and a lot of new private funding for park projects simply because of this Centennial Initiative the President has proposed. We need to fund it, and this would be a way to fund it.

So we need a supply of electricity if we are going to drive electric cars. We need oil shale if we are going to continue to produce oil, from which gasoline is made. We need offshore exploration--another way to increase the supply of oil.

I believe, as do many others on our side of the aisle, that we should also be exploring in Alaska. Jay Leno said the other night that the Democrats objected to that because they said it wouldn't produce any oil for 10 years. Well, as Jay Leno said, that is what the Democrats said 10 years ago. Presidents and Senators are supposed to look ahead, to look down the road. If we can add a million barrels of oil a day from Alaska; if we can add a million barrels of oil a day from offshore exploration; if we can add 2 million barrels of oil a day from oil shale, which we can do; if we can build five or six nuclear plants a year and help us create carbon-free, clean energy so we can electrify our cars and trucks and reduce our demand for oil, then we will have lower gas prices because we will be honoring the immutable law of supply and demand which says find more and use less.

The difference between us is that on this side of the aisle we believe in the law of supply and demand: find more and use less. On that side of the aisle, they seem to believe in a different economics, which is use less. They want to repeal supply and only insist on demand. So there is a fundamental difference.

I am glad Senator McCain must have gone to a different college of economics than the one I think I sense on the other side of the aisle. He has suggested that we do both, that we increase our supply and we reduce our demand by finding more oil and using less oil. He has specifically supported offshore drilling if States want to do that. He has specifically said we should lift the moratorium on oil shale and proceed in an environmentally responsible way to explore for that. He has said as well that we need to move ahead with five or six nuclear powerplants a year, and he has been a strong advocate for green buildings, for fuel efficiency, and for plug-in electric vehicles. At the same time, he has said he believes we need to take steps to deal with climate change, emphasizing the importance of nuclear power because that provides 20 percent of all of our electricity but 70 percent of our carbon-free power.

So I look forward to the debate over the next few months. It is beginning to come into shape. Two different views of economics: an attractive young head of the department from that side of the aisle who wants to change the law of supply and demand to only include demand, which apparently would leave us with a national windmill policy; or a more grizzled Senator who apparently went to a different college of economics who believes in the old-fashioned law of supply and demand and would like to focus on both.

This will be a debate worthy of the Senate. It will be important to all of those Tennesseans who are writing me wanting that $4 per gallon price to go down. My recommendation to them is to vote for Senators and vote for Presidents who will both increase our supply and reduce our demand--who will find more, use less, and not try to invent a new theory of economics which will leave us with our lights off and our gas prices high.

I yield the floor.

Exhibit 1

From: Pat Taylor

Sent: Thu 6/12/2008 9:43 AM

To: Alexander,Senator

Cc: Susan Luker

Subject: Gas Prices Affect Meals On Wheels In East Tennessee

Dear Senator Alexander: My name is Pat Taylor. I am Program

Director for Douglas Cherokee Economic Authority Senior

Nutrition Program (Meals On Wheels). We are currently serving

hundreds of elderly and disabled citizens in the counties of

Cocke, Grainger, Hamblen, Jefferson, Monroe, and Sevier. I am

writing to you on behalf of all of these homebound clients

who receive our meals five days a week. We currently drive

1,100 miles per day to deliver these meals. With the increase

in food costs as well as gasoline prices, this has become a

burden for our program and our delivery aides. They use their

own vehicles to deliver. With gas prices rising daily, the

mileage reimbursement they receive desperately needs to be

increased in order for meal delivery to continue.

Anything you can do will be greatly appreciated. Many

elderly and disabled Tennesseans are able to avoid being

institutionalized because of the daily contact and nutrition

provided by the Senior Nutrition Program.

Sincerely,

Pat Taylor,

Director, Douglas Cherokee Economic Authority, Senior

Nutrition Program.

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

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the hour of morning business under the Republican control be divided equally among the following Senators: Senators Alexander, Kyl, Hatch, Cornyn, Bond, and Murkowski.

Madam President, I ask that I be informed when I have consumed 9 minutes and have 1 minute remaining.

Madam President, Republican Senators--men and women-- welcome this opportunity to talk about the checklist for change offered by Democratic Senators. As Senator McCain has said: We all want change. But there is a right change and a wrong change. So I wish, in my few minutes, to take a few of the items on the Democratic checklist for change and talk about what I consider to be the right change and the wrong change.

Let's start with taking care of our military families and veterans. That probably should go at the top of our list because of our respect not only for the men and women who are fighting overseas but for those who are at home, both families without children or families with children. Those who are here also served.

We all have been seeking to update the GI bill for veterans so we can provide educational benefits to veterans today and to men and women who are on active duty that fit today's circumstances. Here is the major difference between Republicans and Democrats, an example of what I would consider to be the right change and the wrong change. Most Republicans favor an updating of the GI bill for veterans, as recommended by Senators McCain, Graham, and Burr, that would allow more servicemembers to transfer educational benefits to dependents. It would allow servicemembers to transfer educational benefits to their spouses or to their children. After serving at least 6 years, a member could transfer up to half of his or her education benefits to a spouse or children, or both. After serving for 12 years or more, a servicemember could transfer all of his or her education benefits to a spouse, children, or both.

In bottom-line terms, the Republican bill would do what the Democratic checklist says--take care of our military families and veterans--but most Republicans support the idea of giving this transferability of benefits, which could provide up to $72,000 for a dependent or a spouse's education. The bill sponsored by most Democrats did not include that transferability of benefits. We believe we have the right change and that they have the wrong change.

Let me take another item on the checklist--enforced fiscal accountability, or protect the family checkbook, both of those. Here is an example of what we believe would be the right change in fiscal accountability and helping balance the family budget.

The Democrats had an opportunity, because they have the majority in this Chamber--remember, when we are talking about change, change in this Chamber would mean we would go from a Democratic majority to a Republican majority. The Democrats are in charge here. They set the agenda. What we talk about is what they bring up, the same as in the House of Representatives.

The Democratic budget provided a tax plan which will cause most Americans to be paying a lot more. Over the next 5 years, their tax plan provided for 84 million women to see a $1,970 increase, because they would allow the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts to expire. Also, 48 million married couples would see a $2,700 increase, and 12 million single women with children would see a $1,000 increase. And more than 6 million low-income individuals and couples will no longer be exempt from the individual income tax.

Again, the right change for women and men in America would be the Republican version of lower taxes. The Democratic version is higher taxes.

Let me go to a third item--making America energy independent. How will we do that? The new economics professors on the other side of the aisle have come up with a brand new economics theory which would repeal supply from the law of supply and demand. They

are led by Senator Obama, who is the leading economics professor on that side with this new theory. In the New York Times this morning he said he opposes drilling in Alaska for oil and gas. He is not, in his words, a proponent of nuclear power, which provides 70 percent of our carbon-free electricity. He would consider banning new coal plants--and coal provides 45 percent of our electricity--and in 2006 he voted against expanding oil and gas exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. That leaves him, it seems to me, with very little to supply electricity and oil for a country that uses 25 percent of all the energy in the world. Instead of a national energy policy, that side has a national windmill policy.

They still have demand, but we agree with demand; that is, using less oil. Many of us on the Republican side voted for fuel efficiency standards. We believe in green buildings. We are ready to move toward electric plug-in cars and trucks to reduce our demand. But we are going to have to plug them into something. So we need five or six new nuclear plants a year, we need to explore offshore, we need to take the moratorium off oil shale, and we need to go into the very narrow part of Alaska where we would propose to explore there, still leaving nearly 17 million acres for wilderness.

We believe in the law of supply and demand. They do not believe in supply. We have the right change, we believe. They have the wrong change when it comes to energy independence.

In health care, the right change we believe would be a policy that would merge the idea of giving every American an opportunity to afford health insurance by reforming the Tax Code but using at the same time two words, ``private sector,'' to make sure you can buy your own policy and choose your own doctor. They want the wrong change which would create a Government system where you could not do that.

Finally, I notice that education is not even on the Democratic checklist. I am not so surprised. I wouldn't put it on either if I had their set of priorities because they are opposed to the one thing that most women in America want more of, which is flexibility of time. They are opposed to giving parents more choices of schools. We have choices of colleges and universities and community colleges, but working moms cannot have a choice of the school or of an afterschool program. Some bureaucrat decides that. That is the wrong change. We would give them the right change. The Democrats oppose a Pell grant for kids, which I proposed, which would give $500 to every low-income child for afterschool music lessons, programs, other afterschool education activities. We support charter schools. Some of the other side do, but mostly they are opposed to that.

We would favor paying teachers more for teaching well. I did that in Tennessee when I was Governor. That mainly benefited women because there were more female teachers than men. We wanted them to have a better professional career and time in the classroom, but it was the Democrats who said no to that. And it is better for the students, to pay outstanding teachers more for teaching well because then the classrooms keep better teachers which is good for students.

Finally, in No Child Left Behind there is something called the Teacher Incentive Fund. I thank Senator Durbin for joining me in trying to support that, but many of the Democrats on the other side have said no because that money is being used to find ways to pay principals more for being better principals, and to pay teachers more for being better teachers. They want a flat pay for all of them because that is what the unions want. So we want the right kind of change on education, but it is not even on the Democratic checklist.

Madam President, I believe it is a good thing for us to talk about change. There is a right change and a wrong change. We believe in the law of supply and demand. They believe only in demand. We believe in lower taxes; they in higher taxes. We believe in change that allows you to buy your own policy and choose your own doctor. They would have a Government program. We believe in giving moms and dads more flexibility in choosing schools. They believe in letting the bureaucracy do it.

I welcome this debate. We look forward to change. We just want to make sure it is the right change instead of the wrong change.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I congratulate the 2007 winners of the Alfred P. Sloan Award for Business Excellence in Workplace Flexibility, which recognizes companies that successfully have used flexibility to meet both business and employee goals.

As I did last year, I wish to draw attention to the Sloan Awards because I think these companies should be commended for their excellence in providing workplace flexibility practices which benefit both employers and employees. Achieving greater flexibility in the workplace--to maximize productivity while attracting the highest quality employees--is one of the key challenges facing American companies in the 21st century.

For 2007, businesses in the following 24 cities were eligible for recognition: Aurora, CO; Boise, ID; Brockton, MA; Chandler, AZ; Chattanooga, TN; Chicago, IL; Cincinnati, OH; Dallas, TX; Dayton, OH; Detroit, MI; Durham, NC; Houston, TX; Long Beach, CA; Long Island, NY; Melbourne-Palm Bay, FL;

Morris County, NJ; Providence, RI; Richmond, VA; Salt Lake City, UT; Savannah, GA; Seattle WA; Spokane, WA; Tampa, FL; Washington, DC; and Winona, MN.

The Chamber of Commerce in each city hosted an interactive business forum to share research on workplace flexibility as an important component of workplace effectiveness. In these same communities, businesses applied for--and the winners that I am about to name were selected for--the Sloan Awards through a process that considered employees' views in addition to employer practices.

In Aurora, CO, the winners are Arapahoe/Douglas Works!, Lee Hecht Harrison, and The Medical Center of Aurora.

In Boise, ID, the winners are American Geotechnics, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Southwest Idaho, Children's Home Society of Idaho, DJM Sales & Marketing Inc, Group One Real Estate, J-U-B Engineers, KPMG, The Leavitt Group of Boise, Prime Equity Mortgage Group, St. Luke's Regional Medical Center, and TitleOne Corporation.

In Brockton, MA, the winner is Old Colony Elderly Services.

In Chandler, AZ, the winners are A&S Realty Specialists, Abalos & Associates PLLC, AHM Mortgage, Arizona Spine and Joint Hospital, Cachet Homes, Chandler Chamber of Commerce, Chandler Connection, Chandler Unified School District, Clifton Gunderson LLP, Hacienda Builders, Henry & Horne LLP, Intel Corporation, Jewish News of Greater Phoenix, Johnson Bank, MDI, Microchip Technology Inc., Omega Legal Systems Inc., RIESTER, Spark, Technology Providers Inc., Today's Women's Health Specialists, US Airways, and Wist Office Products.

In Chattanooga, TN, the winners are Center for Community Career Education at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Management Recruiters of Chattanooga, Reading Education for Adult Development (READ) of Chattanooga, and Unum.

In Chicago, IL, the winners are Ernst & Young, First Midwest Bank, KPMG LLP, Lee Hecht Harrison, and Perspectives ltd.

In Cincinnati, OH, the winners are Barnes Dennig, CSC Consulting Group, Deloitte & Touche, FSCreations, and Physical Therapy Options.

In Dallas, TX, the winners are Accenture, BDO Seidman LLP, The Beck Group, Community Council of Greater Dallas, Deloitte, Direct Energy, Kaye/Bassman International, Lee Hecht Harrison, Nortel Networks, and State Farm Insurance.

In Detroit, MI, the winners are Albert Kahn Associates Inc., Amerisure Mutual Insurance Company, Brogan & Partners Convergence Marketing, Detroit Regional Chamber, Humantech, and Menlo Innovations.

In Durham, NC, the winners are Durham's Partnership for Children, Greenfire Development, Horvath Associates, P.A., and VirtualOfficeAmerica.

In Houston, TX, the winners are Access Sciences Corporation, Binkley & Barfield Inc., Continental Airlines, Deloitte, Direct Energy, El Paso Corporation, Fullbright & Jaworski LLP, Klotz Associates Inc., KPMG LLP, PGAL, PKF Texas, and Simdesk Technologies Inc.

In Long Beach, CA, the winners are KPMG and PeacePartners Inc.

In Long Island, NY, the winners are CMP Technology, Girl Scouts of Nassau County, and KPMG.

In Melbourne-Palm Bay, FL, the winners are Melbourne-Palm Bay Area Chamber of Commerce and Wesche Jewelers.

In Morris County, NJ, the winner is Solix, Inc.

In Providence, RI, the winners are Embolden Design Inc., Family Service of Rhode Island, KPMG, LGC&D P.C., Lighthouse Computer Services, Inc., Rhode Island Housing, and Rhode Island Legal Service, Inc.

In Richmond, VA, the winners are Bon Secours Richmond Health System, Capital One Financial, Chesterfield County Government, and VCU Health System.

In Salt Lake City, UT, the winners are Cooper Roberts, Enterprise Rent-A-Car Company, Intermountain Healthcare, Jones Waldo Holbrook & McDonough P.C., McKinnon-Mulherin Inc., Prince, Perelson & Associates, Redmond Minerals, Inc., and Select Health.

In Savannah, GA, the winners are Lazard Dana LLP and Wachovia.

In Seattle, WA, the winners are Blue Gecko, Cascadia Consulting Group, Child Care Resources, Consejo Counseling and Referral Services, Friends of the Children, Leadership Institute of Seattle, MarketFitz Inc., NRG::Seattle, PACE Staffing, Washington Health Foundation, WithinReach, Worktank, and URS.

In Spokane, WA, the winner is Gonzaga University.

In Tampa, FL, the winners are Argosy University Tampa, CIBERsites, Citigroup, Greenacre Properties Inc., Kerkering, Barberio & Co. P.A., Residential Drywall Inc., Self Reliance, Inc., Success 4 Kids & Families, and TEKsystems.

In Washington, DC, the winners are Capital One Financial, Discovery Communications Inc., and MorganFranklin Corp.

In Winona, MN, the winner is Wells Fargo Bank.

The Sloan Awards are presented by the When Work Works initiative, which is a project of the Families and Work Institute, in partnership with the Institute for a Competitive Workforce, an affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Twiga Foundation. The When Work Works initiative is sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Building on the success of the first 3 years, the next phase of the When Work Works initiative will extend the number of participating communities to 30 in 2008 to include: Atlanta, GA; Birmingham, AL; Charleston, SC; Dayton, OH; Lexington, KY; Louisville, KY; and San Francisco, CA. Again, I congratulate the 2007 winners of the Sloan Awards and look forward to the continuing expansion of this worthwhile initiative.

Mr. President, could you let me know when 5 minutes have expired, please.

Mr. President, I will give the Senator from New York an A+ for creative imagination. Here we are wanting to debate the climate change bill--which is a 53-cent-per-gallon gas tax increase proposed primarily by Members of the other side, and which includes a $6.7 trillion slush fund that Members of Congress could spend as they see fit--and members of the majority party were so embarrassed by it they tried to bring it down and pull it from the floor. This is a bill we should be spending all month talking about. If it is really important to deal with gas prices and electricity prices and climate change and clean air and our overdependence on foreign oil, where are the debaters on climate change? That is the bill we are on today. We-- the Republicans--said let's continue to discuss this important issue. They said: No, let's bring it down. And for what purpose? To bring up their no-energy bill. Their solution to gas prices--very cleverly disguised by the Senator from New York--is more lawsuits, more taxes, and no exploration. Our solution is more American energy now.

The Senator from New York said: Well, why should we drill in the 2000 acres of Alaska that would produce a million barrels of oil a day? It would be 10 years before we would see that oil. The answer is that it would be 1 million barrels of oil a day, which would add 1 million to the 6 million we produce. Ten years ago, President Clinton vetoed legislation passed by a Republican Congress to permit more oil exploration in Alaska. If he had not, we would have 1 million more barrels of oil a day of American energy.

So that is the reason we should go ahead. We need more American energy now. We are for it; they are not. We are for it; they are not. More American energy now.

We know the future is a different kind of future for energy. I have suggested--with support from many of my colleagues--that we have a new Manhattan Project, in effect, to focus on things we do not know how to do. How do we get solar power down to the cost of fossil fuel? How do we make plug-in electric cars commonplace? How do we safely dispose of nuclear waste by reprocessing it? How do we have more research for advanced biofuels, made from crops we do not eat? We want that kind of future, where America has achieved clean energy independence. We want to start today to move toward it with the same intellectual horsepower and speed and dollars that we moved toward splitting the atom and building a bomb in World War II.

But that is the future. The bridge to the future is to use more American energy now. Gasoline is made from oil. We use 25 percent of the world's oil. Until we get to this future, we are going to need more of it. We can either buy it from the Middle East and from Venezuela, or we can make more of it here. It is that simple.

Today, and in days to follow, I will be reading letters from Tennesseans who have written to me about the effect of gas prices on their families. I received 400 such e-mails in the last few days. Let me read one from Lounita Howard from Lascassas, TN, which is in Rutherford County:

The high gas prices have hit my husband and myself

especially hard. We are both self-employed. Bobby is a full-

time farmer (one of few remaining in Wilson County,

Tennessee), and I own a small community newspaper, The

Watertown Gazette.

I live nearly 20 miles from my office, but working from

home is not an option. I'm spending close to $70 a week on

gas just commuting to Watertown from our farm in Lascassas.

(We live just in Wilson County.) Two years ago, it cost me

$30 to $35 a week.

Diesel fuel is another story. Road fuel is running around

$4.70 a gallon. Off-road fuel for tractors is around $4.30 or

$4.40.

She goes on to tell about her husband Bobby, who is a seventh generation farmer.

I have a letter, also, from Jonathan Henry, a marine for 18 years, who is a Tennessee native who returned from 12 months in Iraq. His family was given a flat rate for moving costs. Gas is so high, they have had to make cuts in about everything else, he says. He had to forego his family vacation. It is too expensive to go on now.

Thank you, Mr. President. I will continue for about another 60 seconds, and then I will conclude my remarks.

I have letters from Kathy Crowe from Hendersonville, TN; Joseph Rizzo from Townsend, TN, where I live; and Marti Lewis from Pleasantville,

As we debate high gas prices, and as we hear these stories from Tennesseans and other Americans, let's be clear what we need to do. We all want an energy future where America has achieved clean energy independence, but that is very different than what we have today. But the bridge to that future in a country that uses 25 percent of all the energy in the world is more American energy now.

We Republicans support that, and most of the Democrats do not--which is why they propose more lawsuits and taxes, but no exploration.

Just as one example, to conclude: Why not let Virginia do what four other States do and put oil and natural gas rigs 50 miles out where you cannot see them, and take 37.5 percent of the revenues and put it in a trust fund for schools or beach nourishment, give 12.5 percent of the revenues to the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and put some more American oil now into the world marketplace so prices would stabilize and begin to go down? I offered that amendment to the Budget Resolution earlier this year. It was defeated 52 to 47. Most Republicans voted for it. Most Democrats voted no.

We are for more American energy now, and they say no.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, as I understand it, that is what the practice has been recently in the debate.

That would mean a Senator who had 20 minutes could reserve an amount of time used for rebuttal.

Parliamentary inquiry, Mr. President: Could the Chair state the existing unanimous consent agreement?

Mr. President, I yield to the Senator from Tennessee up to 5 minutes to rebut the Senator from Pennsylvania.

Mr. President, I understand under the regular order that leaves me with a couple of minutes plus 20 minutes, is that correct?

May I ask the Chair to let me know when 3 minutes remains in my time.

Mr. President, this is an important day in the Senate because we are debating an important issue. It is one the country cares about and should care about. It is one which a great number of Senators here on both sides of the aisle have discussed. I congratulate Senator Warner and Senator Lieberman for their leadership. The chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee is here. She has worked diligently on this and made it a priority. We are doing what the Senate ought to do.

What the American people do not like is when they see us engaged in what I like to call playpen politics--when we start trying to see who can stick fingers in each other's eyes. What they do like to see is for us to have principled, vigorous debates about important issues that have to do with the future of our country, and how we deal with climate change is one of those issues.

That is how we are dealing with this. We voted by a large margin, Democrats and Republicans both, to proceed with this debate and say this is important enough to put on the floor. The majority leader apparently is giving us a significant amount of time to debate this--as we say in Tennessee, to air out the issues--and that is surely what we ought to do.

We began this morning in a bipartisan breakfast. Senator Lieberman and I are the hosts, along with some others, of a bipartisan breakfast on Tuesday mornings. The Presiding Officer often attends those meetings as well. The purpose of that is for Democrats and Republicans to sit around a table in a room, with no staff and no media, and discuss issues about which we do not agree in hopes we can find a way to deal with them.

This is an important day in the Senate. We are doing exactly what we ought to be doing on an issue of importance to the American people. The Lieberman-Warner bill is the basis for this discussion. We are going to be hearing this week a lot of criticisms of the Lieberman-Warner bill and I am going to make some of them myself. But that is not to criticize the effort, because we have to start somewhere. These are two of our most distinguished Members. The bill has gone through the committee and it is now on the floor. We would be derelict if we didn't say let's deal with climate change in the correct way.

What I wish to do in the time I have remaining is to talk about three things: No. 1, what is wrong with this bill; No. 2, to suggest a better way to deal with the climate change issue; and No. 3, to suggest what I believe is the best way to deal with the entire range of issues that are presented to us which I believe are much larger than climate change.

Let me jump to the end of my remarks at the beginning by simply saying: I believe climate change is a real issue, that humans are a contributor to

climate change, and we must deal with it. But I also believe that an unusual demand for energy in the United States and the world is a real issue. In our region where the Tennessee Valley Authority produces about----

I thank the Chair.

In our region where the Tennessee Valley Authority produces about 3 percent of all electricity in the country, estimates are that we would need 700 new megawatts of power in the next year. That is a coal plant and a half. That means 30 or 40 new coal plants around the country just to meet that, if the rest of the country is like TVA. That is a real issue as well.

Our Nation's overreliance on oil from other countries is a huge issue for us. We don't like being in the pocket of people who are selling us oil, including some who are trying to kill us by bankrolling terrorism. We want to be more independent than that in the world. It affects almost every aspect of our national security. It is costing $500 billion a year. Overdependence on foreign oil is driving down the value of the dollar. That lack of independence in our supply is a major issue.

Clean air is an issue. Carbon is not the only pollutant in the air that I am concerned about, coming from Tennessee, nor would it be for a Senator from California either. We have a real concern about sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury. I have, since I have been in the Senate, supported legislation in a bipartisan way--first with Senator Carper-- to stiffen requirements on mercury, nitrogen, and sulfur as well as begin to cap powerplant emissions for carbon. That is a little different perspective as well, rather than just saying carbon is the only problem. There is a range of problems we need to deal with.

My preference, as I will say in my remarks, is that we should have a new Manhattan Project for clean energy independence. That is the real way to deal with high gas prices, high electric prices, climate change, clean air, and the national security implications of too much dependence on foreign oil. But let me go back to the beginning and start with some problems with this bill.

What is wrong with Lieberman-Warner? The first thing wrong is that the Warner-Lieberman bill, according to an analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency, would increase the tax on gasoline by 53 cents per gallon by the year 2030, and an additional 90 cents or so after that. That's a 53-cent-per-gallon gas tax increase, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. That is not some Republican policy group speaking--that is the EPA.

I intend, when the opportunity comes, to offer an amendment to strike from the bill the provisions that would put a 53-cent gas tax increase on the American people. That is the first thing wrong with the bill.

The second thing wrong with the bill is that the Environmental Protection Agency says a 53-cent gas tax increase may hurt the pocketbook of the American consumer, but it will not reduce the carbon. It is not enough to cause people to drive much less and it is an ineffective way to do what the sponsors of the bill want to do, so we would have the worst of both worlds--we would be increasing the gas tax by 53 cents per gallon, and we would not be doing what we aim to do which is to reduce carbon with that effort.

The third thing wrong with the bill is it creates, over the next 10 years--according to the Congressional Budget Office--what I would call a trillion dollar slush fund. It would collect money--in effect a carbon tax, through a cap-and-trade system on the entire economy of the United States--and bring it to Washington, DC, where Members of Congress would, over the next 40 years, create about 42 mandatory entitlement spending programs for that money. Nothing is more dangerous in Washington, DC than a $1 trillion slush fund with a group of Congressmen with ideas about how to spend it.

My cure for that, and I think there will be amendments to this effect, is that to the extent there is any money brought into Washington as a result of a cap-and-trade auction--whether it is only on powerplants or the whole economy--that money ought to be returned directly to the taxpayers, especially the working people who will be having to pay for the higher electric rates or the higher gas prices caused by this legislation.

Those are three problems I have with the bill. No. 1, the 53-cent- per-gallon gas tax increase--that is what the EPA says. I don't think anyone doubts that. No. 2, it doesn't work because the EPA also says-- and so does other testimony before the committee of which Senator Boxer is chairman--that an economy-wide cap on fuel is not an effective way to reduce the amount of carbon produced, at least in the early years. And third is the trillion dollar slush fund for Members of Congress to use for their own great ideas they come up with. I can't think of a worse way to spend the money.

It is well intentioned, but the bill as it has grown has become, in effect, with all respect, a well-intentioned contraption and it creates boards and czars and commissioners and money, and it is too complicated and too expensive. It has the potential for too many surprises. It overestimates what we in the United States have the wisdom to do in writing legislation about an economy that produces about 30 percent of all the wealth in the world every year and uses 25 percent of the energy. This is a very complex free market economy we have here and we have to be very careful about how we affect it.

Having said that, would there be a better way to deal with climate change? The answer is, I believe so. I wish to say briefly what I think that is. I believe it would be to put a cap-and-trade system on powerplants alone--that is 40 percent of the carbon produced in the American economy--and a low-carbon fuel standard on fuel. A low-carbon fuel standard, which is already in this legislation, is very simply the idea that beginning in the year 2023 we would control the amount of carbon that fuel in cars and trucks could produce, and that is it. In other words, instead of putting cap and trade on the whole economy as the Lieberman-Warner bill would do, we should only put cap and trade on powerplants--nothing else--and use a different approach for fuel.

Why would cap and trade work for powerplants? We have a lot of experience with cap and trade for powerplants. Cap and trade is simply a system of setting limits on the amount of carbon to come out of the smokestacks at a powerplant--if it is a coal plant or whatever kind of plant it might be. We have experience with measuring that. We actually have measurements for sulfur, nitrogen, and now mercury. We could do it for carbon. We could select effective enforcement dates that had some realistic relationship to the development of technology--for example, the technology to recapture the carbon that comes out of coal plants. And, in doing so, I believe that could be an effective way to begin to control the source of 40 percent of the carbon produced in the United States--the powerplants.

Would it add to the cost of electricity? Yes, it would. What would we do with the revenues from credits that were auctioned if there were a cap-and-trade system? We would give the money back. Not through a lot of federal spending programs, not to the State governments, not to pet projects; we would give it straight back to the working people to help pay their electric bills because they are the ones who would have those higher rates.

That would leave manufacturers alone. It wouldn't drive them overseas. It would avoid setting up all these boards and commissions and czars and government bureaucracies.

Then what would we do about fuel? Already we have done the single most important thing we could do as a Congress for climate change when we passed higher fuel efficiency standards at the end of last year. We did that in a bipartisan way, too. In 2007, we increased by 40 percent the fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks in the United States for the first time in over 30 years. Testimony from David Greene of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory said that is the single most important thing the Congress can do to deal with climate change, overdependence on foreign oil, or clean air. And we did it. That is the first thing.

But there is another step we could do and that is already in this bill. It is the low-carbon fuel standard that I talked

about a few moments ago. As it is now presented in the bill, it would require fuel suppliers to lower the carbon content of transportation fuels by 5 percent less per unit of energy in 2023, and 10 percent less in 2028. The advantage of a low-carbon fuel standard, unlike the cap- and-trade system which is ineffective in terms of reducing carbon in fuel, is that it would be 100 percent effective because it would require a certain amount of reduction. Second, it is the way we normally deal with fuel and pollution. For example, the low-sulfur diesel standards for big trucks that the Clinton EPA started and the Bush EPA finished is making a big difference in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee by reducing the amount of sulfur in the air starting this year. That is a form of fuel standard. This would be a low-carbon fuel standard, just like the low-sulfur diesel standard is for big trucks. It is simple. There would be a timeline that we could prepare for, and it might actually lower gasoline prices rather than adding 53 cents per gallon to the price of gasoline as the Lieberman-Warner bill would, because if you know that there needs to be a low-carbon fuel standard, then you might, for example, choose electricity as a fuel and have a plug-in hybrid vehicle and that would reduce the amount of carbon for fuel.

Or you might advance research for biofuels made from crops we don't eat, such as cellulosic ethanol, and use more of that kind of fuel. But we wouldn't have Senators and Congressmen and people who are elected to office making judgments about picking and choosing winners and losers.

If you are asking me how I would do it, I would imagine that if we looked ahead a couple years and had to guess today what kind of climate change legislation might actually pass the Senate, the House of Representatives, and be signed by the President, I think it will be a very simple piece of legislation, probably cap and trade for powerplants, with effective dates regulated or adjusted to the development of technology that would permit powerplants to meet the standards. Then, for fuel, it would be the higher fuel efficiency standards we already passed into law last year, plus a low-carbon fuel standard. That would cover two-thirds of the carbon we produce in the United States. The current bill only presumes to cover 85 percent. The approach I am suggesting would fairly distribute the burden because most people buy electricity and most people buy gasoline. It should be lower cost, fewer surprises, and much less complicated than the bill we are debating in the Senate today.

I might add to that framework I suggested, we would take whatever money was auctioned off in the cap-and-trade system on powerplants and--rather than building what I call a slush fund--refund it to the taxpayers. That money would come right in and go right back home, right back to the taxpayers. It wouldn't stop.

Finally, how much time do I have remaining?

Finally, the best way to deal with the climate change issue would be a different agenda--one that focuses on clean energy. I would much prefer to see the Senate today talking about clean energy independence rather than the President asking the Saudis to drill for more oil or the Democratic majority saying: Don't explore for oil but raise taxes on gasoline by 53 cents per gallon. I would rather see a Republican or a Democratic President work with the Congress and say: Let's say to the world we are going to launch a new Manhattan Project for clean energy independence. So within 5 years we will be well on our way to saying to the Saudis: We want to be your friends, but we can take or leave your oil.

The way to do that would be, first, to begin to do the things we know how to do to increase supply. For the next 30 years, we are going to use oil; it might as well be ours rather than importing it. Explore for oil offshore, and use it from the 2,000 acres in Alaska that is next to 13 million acres of wilderness. Then agree on six or seven grand challenges, such as those I suggested at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory a couple of weeks ago, to give us a chance to make breakthroughs that would give us that kind of clean energy independence. Those would include making plug-in cars and trucks commonplace, a crash program for carbon recapture, for making solar costs equal or as low as fossil fuel costs, advanced research for biofuels from crops that we don't eat, more new green buildings, even fusion for the longer term.

I believe from the day the American President and the Congress announced to the world that we were engaged in a new Manhattan Project for clean energy independence that included both supply, demand, and research, what would happen is that the rest of the world would change its way of thinking, that the speculators would get nervous, that the oil-producing countries would get real, and that the price of gas would stabilize and eventually go down. Within 5 years, we would be well on our way to clean energy independence. That is the way to deal with high gas prices, high electric prices. That is also the way to deal with clean air, climate change, and the national security implications of our overdependence on foreign oil.

I yield the floor.

If I may answer the Senator briefly, the answer is, correct, to the Senator.

Except that the rest of my answer to the Senator from Virginia is, any increase in revenue that came into the Government as a result of the cap-and-trade system on powerplants would then go straight back to the working people who pay their electric bills instead of coming into the unwieldy contraption this bill sets up which creates what I call a slush fund.

Mr. President, I resent being resented and ask unanimous consent for a couple minutes to get into this colloquy, if I may.

Mr. President, I am trying to get to a result here. Ever since I have been a Senator, I have proposed a cap-and-trade system on powerplants to deal with climate change. All I am saying is it would be better to keep it simple, to take the money collected and send it straight back home rather than bringing it up here and putting it in a slush fund. If ``slush fund'' is offensive to the Senator from California, I am sorry, but that is what large funds tend to be here. It is mandatory spending that is earmarked for the next 42 years.

So removing that slush fund would be an improvement on their bill. Take that out. Send the money back to the people. Return it to the individuals who paid it. That is all I am suggesting. No one ought to be offended by that. If we need to invest dollars in solar research, for example, I sponsored the amendment for the solar energy tax credit that is in the law now. Let's do that separately and with a clear appropriation, rather than a 42-year mandatory spending program that is drawn from $800 billion.

I thank the Chair and Senators for their courtesy.

Mr. President, I first came to the Senate in 1967 as a young aide to Senator Howard Baker and was here during the last two years of the Johnson Presidency. So, I heard firsthand stories about Lyndon Johnson, the Senator, and his larger-than-life, in-your-face personality with other Senators. I felt, in the elections of 1966 and 1968--which were my first in politics--how his support for civil rights legislation had made him a controversial President. I felt, also, at my age, the agony of the war in Vietnam. And I watched, with surprise, on television in 1968 when he said he would not run for another term in the Presidency.

Now, today, 40 years later, I see him as I think most Americans clearly see him: as one of our most consequential Presidents and public figures.

Every January or February, my youngest son and I go to Cotulla, TX. Senator Hutchison spoke of Cotulla, TX as the place where Lyndon Johnson taught in the elementary grades. I never cease to go to Cotulla, TX without thinking of what a remarkable comment it is upon our country to think that a graduate of San Marcos State could go to Cotulla, TX, and be teaching in an elementary school, and then 13 years later be in the Senate and on his way to being the Minority leader, the Majority leader, the Vice President, and then President of the United States.

There are many examples of how in our country anything is possible. I know of no better example than the life of Lyndon Johnson.

Others will say more about President Johnson and his contribution to the Senate and to our country, but today I want to say a few words about his family. My contemporaries were the Johnson children, Luci and Lynda, and especially Lynda and Chuck Robb. Chuck was Governor of Virginia when I was Governor of Tennessee. We have known each other well since that time.

I saw their daughter, Jennifer, this morning, and I can remember when she had our youngest son Will in a headlock one time at a Governors Conference. I can remember learning, either from Lynda or perhaps it was from Luci, lessons about how children--and the Presiding Officer will appreciate this, especially since his father was a distinguished Governor of Pennsylvania--about how to grow up in a family where your parents are public officials, as Senators or Governors or even Presidents, in their case.

One of the Johnson girls told me she did not like very much going to political events--our children were much the same--until one day their father, President Johnson, said: Let me make a suggestion to you. I want you to find one interesting thing about three people at the event you go to, and then come back to me afterwards and tell me what you found out. Lynda told me that changed the way she thought about going to those events. It gave her a way to go to them and make them more interesting. I told all of our children that, and they did it as well. It was good advice for children of parents in public life.

But in speaking of the family, I want to especially speak of Mrs. Johnson, Lady Bird, and her contribution to preserving the natural beauty of America.

Mrs. Johnson convened the first White House Conference on Natural Beauty, saying:

Surely a civilization that can send a man to the moon can

also find ways to maintain a clean and pleasant earth.

She became the de facto leader of the scenic conservation movement. She raised our consciousness about the natural world in our lives. It is fair to say she is probably the most influential conservationist in America since Teddy Roosevelt.

When I visit my wife's home in the State of Texas in the spring, there are bluebonnets everywhere. Texans are immensely proud of those flowers. In Austin--and Luci Baines reminded me today it is still going stronger than ever--is the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.

Many States copied Texas' idea of planting wildflowers in the interstate medians. Lady Bird and Lyndon passed the Highway Beautification Act to free us from highway billboard blight and rampant ugliness.

With her encouragement, President Johnson also persuaded Congress to pass the Wilderness Act, the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act, and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. She became the first woman to serve on the National Geographic Society's board of trustees.

President Johnson used to joke about how he would turn around and there would be Laurence Rockefeller and Lady Bird in the East Room of the White House cooking up some new conservation agenda for him to pass in the Congress.

Her legacy of natural beauty is secure, but because she is now gone, America's legacy of natural beauty is not so secure. We seem to have forgotten how much natural beauty is an essential part of our national character. Someone once said: Egypt has its Pyramids, Italy its Art, and our country the Great American Outdoors. Or, to put it less grandly, when I am at home in Tennessee, I see the streets named Scenic Drive and Blue Bird Lane, and I read the real estate ads describing the beautiful mountain views. And, if you ask Tennesseans why they live in Tennessee, even the most grizzled will say: Because there is not a more beautiful place in the world.

Many Americans feel that way about our hometowns. After Lady Bird, there have come a number of stronger and more outstanding environmental organizations devoted to clean air, clean water, and climate change, and more recently, other conservation causes. But most of them seem to have diminished interest in scenic beauty.

There was recently on the Senate floor an effort that nearly succeeded to gut Lady Bird's Highway Beautification Act. It would have allowed hundreds of illegal billboards to become legal. There has been almost no organized outcry about the profusion of thousands of cell towers along the same interstates and in the same communities that Lady Bird sought to protect from junkyards and billboards. These cell towers have replaced almost every available scenic view in America with a tall tower, usually ugly, always with blinking lights. And, most of it is unnecessary because they could have been co-located, or be smaller, or they could have been put below the ridge tops, or even camouflaged. And we still could have had access to our cell phones and our blackberries. The National Park Service even erected a cell tower in clear view of Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park.

In our enthusiasm to deal with climate change, we are spending billions of dollars to encourage Americans to erect thousands of giant wind turbines that are twice as tall as football stadiums and can be seen for 20 miles, without thinking to pass legislation that would keep them away from our most scenic views, beaches, and mountaintops.

If Ansel Adams were alive today, he would probably be distraught because

he would have fewer and fewer beautiful places in America at which to aim his camera.

Lady Bird left America a legacy that honors an essential aspect of the American character, one that today is, unfortunately, too often ignored. If it continues to be ignored, it will never be undone. It is almost impossible to unclutter a highway or renew a view scape once that has been obliterated by ugliness.

So, I would hope that one result of this commemoration of Lyndon Johnson's birthday would be to encourage someone among us--or more among us--to revive in us Lady Bird's passion for the natural beauty of America, to encourage once again the planting of wildflowers, to preserve the view scapes, and to remind American communities of how satisfying it can be to live in one of the most beautiful places in the world.

Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment.

I send to the desk an amendment and ask for its immediate consideration. I believe Senator Kennedy has seen a copy of it.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. President, this is an amendment to the pending legislation which would give the mayors and chief administrative officers of cities and States the opportunity to opt out if they conclude that this law would be, in their circumstances, contrary to the best interest of public safety, No. 1, or would result in an increase in local taxes or a decrease in the level of public safety or other municipal service. In other words, if this legislation amounted to an unfunded Federal mandate, it would not be effective.

Let me speak to the unfunded mandate aspect of this legislation and its interference with the prerogative of States. Those are two different ideas and two very important ideas in the American fabric. Let me begin by saying we are talking about some of the most honored men and women in our country--firefighters, policemen, and other public safety workers. That is true in Tennessee as well. We have over

700 fire departments, and we were grateful for the heroism of firefighters everywhere on 9/11. Local fire fighters in Tennessee and across the Southeast were among the first on the scene after the deadly tornadoes earlier this year. We are deeply grateful for that.

Charles Martinez from Maryville, my hometown, was named Tennessee firefighter of the year in 2004 for giving his kidney to a fellow firefighter. We deeply admire him for that.

In 2006, Lieutenant Terrance Andrews of Chattanooga was named Tennessee firefighter of the year for his dramatic rescue during a house fire in which he pulled the security bars away from a window to save Virginia Humphrey. Ms. Humphrey was injured and spent some time in a hospital, but she fully recovered. I admire Lieutenant Terrance Andrews' bravery.

Another example, firefighter Shane Daughetee of the Highway 58 Volunteer Fire Department in Chattanooga died in the line of duty in January of last year when he was trying to rescue a family. We mourn Shane Daughetee's death and admire the bravery of that individual. All of us admire and respect the bravery of firefighters and other public safety employees in all our communities. But that is not what this legislation is about.

A better name for this bill would be the ``Washington knows best unfunded mandate act.'' In the name of some of the men and women we respect the most, our firefighters, policemen, and others, we are about to commit two of Washington's worst and most flagrant sins. That is, No. 1, to take away from States and communities their right to decide their own labor relations, what they ought to be; and, No. 2, to pass an expensive piece of legislation, make it sound good, take credit for it, and then send the bill home to mayors, Governors, and local officials who will have to either raise taxes or cut services to deal with it. It is an unfunded mandate in that sense.

Current Supreme Court law suggests that the tenth amendment permits the Federal Government to require State compliance with the general regulatory scheme but does not permit the Federal government to require States in their sovereign capacities to regulate their own citizens.

The argument made by the distinguished Senator from New Jersey basically boiled down to this: We have it in New Jersey, so we are going to make Tennessee have it. We have decided in New Jersey that it is a good idea, so I am going to fly to Washington and impose it on Tennessee, Georgia, Wyoming, and all 21 States which have different laws.

This is not a new subject. We haven't been waiting a long time to discuss this. We debated and discussed this law every year I was Governor of Tennessee in the 1980s, which is where it is supposed to be discussed, because we are discussing the labor relations of the State of Tennessee. It was discussed almost every year in the 1990s and rejected by the legislature of Tennessee in an entire series of years. I have here the years in which it was considered and rejected by our State. Tennessee considered this specific question in both the State House and the State Senate which, I might add, are majority Democratic during all of this time. In 1997, Tennessee said: We prefer to have a law in Tennessee that provides that mayors and local officials deal directly with public safety employees such as firefighters and police officers. We believe that is the best way to encourage public safety, to have strong communities, and to provide the best labor-management relationship in our State.

The State legislature said that in 1997. The Democratic State legislature said it again in 1999. They said it again in 2001, 2003, and 2005. In our State of Tennessee, we will grant that a different rule might be good for New Jersey, but we have decided over the last two or three decades that way is not good for our State.

What are we talking about here? What we are saying in this Federal law--which will be imposed, as the Senator from Wyoming has said, on every State, but in 21 States like ours, it overturns our law--is basically that a mayor is required to recognize a union leader, if he or she wants to sit down and talk instead of with the policemen and firemen and other public safety employees about pay, benefits, and work rules. It takes away the State's decision that says we believe it is better for the mayor to deal directly with those employees. I don't know what that will do to improve working conditions or cooperation or the public safety, but I am confident it will coerce hundreds of thousands of local policemen and firemen to pay union dues and fatten those treasuries.

This bill is saying what is good for New Jersey, what is good for Massachusetts, is good for Tennessee. What I am saying is we have 90 towns in Tennessee that will be forced to change how they deal with their public employees, because someone in New Jersey or someone in Massachusetts or other States thinks that is what we ought to do. Not only does Washington know best, according to the advocates of this legislation, but also that Washington knows best how to spend our money. Because what are these discussions about? They are discussions about towns such as Pulaski, 7,800 people; Mumford, 5,000 people; Dyersburg, 17,000; Alcoa, 7,700; my hometown of Maryville, 23,000.

Let me take Maryville as an example. We have good schools there. My father ran for the school board after World War II with a ticket of men and women who said: We will take all the money we have and we are going to focus on having great schools. So in that blue-collar town where at the time most of the people worked for the Alcoa plant, middle-income community, lower middle income, by and large, we slowly built up a culture of very good schools. About 75 percent, if I remember the figure correctly, of the local tax dollars go to make those schools superior. They win academic scores year in and year out.

What we are saying to Maryville is: OK, the Senator from New Jersey and the Senator from Massachusetts have a better idea for you folks in Maryville. We are going to impose on you a different way of dealing with your policemen and firemen. As a result, some labor union leader from Massachusetts and New Jersey may come into Maryville and say: Instead of spending 75 percent of your money to make schools better, we want you to do this, that, or the other about public safety and reduce spending on schools and increase spending for salaries of public safety people.

One could make that argument.

But so far, the people in my hometown have said: We would rather not do it that way. We would rather make education our priority. We think we have a super police force. We are very proud of them. But we like the way we are doing things. The same in Sweetwater and Erwin and Bolivar and Rockwood and Church Hill and Millersville. Ninety of our towns in Tennessee would suddenly be doing things the New Jersey way, the New York way. If we wanted to do things the New Jersey way, we would move to New Jersey. We would move to Massachusetts. We would move to New York. Those are wonderful States, but we don't choose to live there. We like to do things our way, and we have always been able to.

We don't have a chance to do that just out of common sense. Common sense would suggest that a big, complex country of 300 million people, where people come from all over the world and freedom and liberty are our values, that we allow people as much as possible to do things in different ways, so long as they meet with certain constitutional rights. Senator Byrd likes for us to carry around in our pockets the Constitution to which we took an oath to honor. It says in amendment X:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the

Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are

reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

In other words, it says that in the United States of America--it might not be true in some other countries--unless the Constitution says the Federal Government shall do it, the States do it. And so the States have been doing it. We don't say in this country if New Jersey does it and the Senator from New Jersey thinks it is a good idea to do it in Tennessee, make Tennessee do it. That is not the way we do things. So I don't believe this legislation is constitutional, among other things.

Let me also say that as a former Governor, I am trying to make a temperate speech about this legislation, because I feel so strongly about it. But

as a former Governor, when I was sitting there in Nashville, nothing made me madder than to look up to Washington and see some Congressman-- and I will have to say, sometimes they were Republicans and sometimes they were Democrats--who flew to Washington and got smarter than they were when they were back in the small towns in which they grew up. They would say in Washington: I have a great idea. They would pass it into law and hold a press conference and take credit for it, and then they would send the bill to me, the Governor. Then what would happen? The next week that same Congressman, if it was a Republican, would be home in Knoxville making a Lincoln day speech bragging about local control, and the Democrat would be in Nashville making a Jackson day speech bragging about local control, and I would be paying the bill. That is not right. That is called an unfunded Federal mandate.

The American people don't like it. I will tell you how much they don't like it. I was one of those Senators--there are a lot of us--who felt a calling to run for the Presidency of the United States a few years ago in the middle of the 1990s. I didn't make it. My preacher brother-in-law said it was a reverse calling and that I should be doing something else for the people. So I am here. But I remember in 1994, 1995, and 1996, there was a strong resentment in this country toward being told what to do from Washington, DC. People had had it up to here. The Republicans seized on that. I remember Newt Gingrich and a lot of Republican candidates for Congress standing on the Capitol steps and saying: No more unfunded mandates. They put it in something they called a Contract with America. And the first piece of legislation that was passed by the new Republican Congress, elected overwhelmingly by the people, S. 1, was the no unfunded Federal mandate act. That was S. 1. We are not going to pass unfunded mandates anymore. If we are going to pass something, we are going to pay for it.

This legislation doesn't pay for it. It might tell Erwin and Maryville and Alcoa and Pulaski and 90 other towns in Tennessee what they need to pay firefighters and policemen. It might tell them what to pay them or create an environment that creates a higher salary, perhaps, or a bigger benefit, but it doesn't pay the bill.

Now, the Republican Congress said in 1994: No more unfunded mandates. If we break our promise, throw us out. In fact, the people have, and I think part of the reason is because some Republicans forgot about no unfunded Federal mandates.

So I urge my colleagues to recognize that to impose upon a State--as different as Tennessee might be from New Jersey; as different as Wyoming might be from Georgia--we do not need the same rules and regulations. We are capable in our hometowns of making a good decision about how to have good labor relations, or how to deal directly with our volunteer firemen. We have over 700 fire departments in Tennessee-- 700--and lots of different ways of dealing with them. We do not need anybody from New Jersey or Massachusetts or somewhere else telling us how we should deal with them.

This is an ominous trend. Tennessee is also a right-to-work State. Now, I know this legislation has a little section that says this does not interfere with right to work. Well, I wonder about that. Maybe this legislation by itself does not in its explicit terms. But if the Federal Government can say, in New Jersey, in New York, and other States: We have a union shop--in other words, employees do not have the opportunity to make a choice about whether to join a union--why cannot they say: It is good for New Jersey; let's have it in Tennessee? It is not a very big step.

Or if New Jersey or some other--I am not just picking on New Jersey, but their Senator was here saying if this is good for them, it would be good for us--State might say: We do not see any need for the secret ballot in union elections. Let's just let employees sign cards. It makes it a lot easier to organize, and if it is good for New Jersey or New York or California, it is good for Tennessee. A lot of people moved to Tennessee because they prefer our level of taxes. They prefer the right to work. They prefer the relations we have between employers and employees.

I imagine the auto industry, which is now one-third of our manufacturing jobs in Tennessee, is there because we have a different labor environment than in some other parts of the country. Now, that does not mean we do not have union workers. We have a lot of union workers.

In fact, in the mid-1980s, a lot of people paid attention to our State because here came the Nissan plant, which even today is nonunion, and it is the largest, most efficient automobile plant in North America, making 500,000 or 600,000 cars and trucks a year. Right next door, 15 miles away, is General Motors' Saturn plant. When General Motors came, the United Auto Workers came, and they are a partnership. Both plants are successful. There has been some shifting and changing at the General Motors plant, but it is back on track.

So we have both plants there: one where employees are required to join the union, one where people have a choice to join the union. We like it that way, and I think they like it that way.

Now, we are the third or fourth largest State in suppliers. They seem to like it that way. So why would we do it the way some other State does it, especially if we figured out a better way to do it, in our opinion. Particularly in the United States of America where we have a 10th amendment to the Constitution, we believe in federalism, and we are a decentralized society.

So I am very worried about this piece of legislation. I think it is bad for Tennessee. It is bad for our labor-management relations. We have enough common sense in our State--with our Democratic Governor, our Democratic House of Representatives, our Republican State senate now--to make these decisions for ourselves. Why do we need U.S. Senators telling us this? Then, when we get in the majority, we might say: What is good for us in Tennessee is good for New Jersey, and change their law; or what is good for us in Tennessee is good for New York, and change their law. We don't care about New Jersey's law. As long as we follow the constitutional rights of the people of the United States, we would like to settle things.

I come from the mountains of Tennessee. My great-grandfather was asked about his politics. He said: I am a Republican. I fought with the Union and I vote like I shot.

The reason we were unionists and Republicans in the Civil War--and still today--was because we did not want the Federal Government telling us what to do. This is an extreme example of serious meddling.

One last example, and then I will stop.

The argument is, if we can only force all these 90 Tennessee communities to collectively bargain, that will improve public safety. Well, how do we know that? Is New Jersey and New York safer than Tennessee? Do we know that for sure?

Or let's take the one example in Tennessee where we have required communities to collectively bargain, and that is with teachers. The unit is an arm of the National Education Association. I have had some pretty important disagreements with my friends in the Tennessee education association over the last 25 years about what is good for education. For example, I thought it would be a good idea to reward outstanding teaching, pay teachers more for teaching well. Twenty-five years ago, our State became the first State to do so. We created a career ladder system, and we raised taxes in order to offer every single teacher a 70-percent pay increase on the State's share. Ten thousand teachers went up that ladder. Guess who the No. 1 opponent to that was. The teacher's union. Not Albert Shanker and the American Federation of Teachers, but the National Education Association.

I am not criticizing them. They are very open about that. They do not like the idea of paying teachers more for teaching well. I think to improve education we should. So does that really improve education in Tennessee to require that collective bargaining?

Another example: I notice a lot of teachers were worried about being sued by parents. I think that is not right. Why not offer teachers the same liability insurance the State provides to State employees?

The Tennessee Education Association raised its dues to defeat my proposal

because they offer liability insurance. Did that improve education in Tennessee?

Or charter schools? I think charter schools are a good idea, public charter schools that leave teachers free to make their own decisions about the kids who are there. But the teachers union disagreed. That is a legitimate difference of opinion. But I think I am right. They think I am wrong. But does that improve Tennessee's schools to have them there?

Choices for parents: I think the best thing to do in Nashville, for example, where schools are having a very difficult time, might be to ask all the parents where they would like to send their kids to school and see if we could do it. Give them their first, second, and third choice to see if we could probably supply that. The teachers union is opposed to that.

Everyone, when we were bringing in the auto industry to Tennessee, bringing in the Nissan plant--the first time we had ever had those jobs, which raised our family incomes--I wanted to build a road out to the plant with State dollars, and the teachers union objected because they wanted me to give the money to the teachers. I thought that was short-sighted because if we improved the tax base, we would have the money to improve education.

So there are differences of opinion about what would improve education, and there are differences of opinion about what would improve public safety. We like our opinions in Tennessee. That is why we do not like this bill.

So I will be seeking a vote on my amendment when the appropriate time comes. I would urge my colleagues, you may be right about your own home State. Maybe it is better to require all your communities to collectively bargain. Maybe that improves safety in New Jersey or New York or somewhere else. But in Tennessee, we have considered it almost every year for the last 25 years, and we have decided a different way. We believe States ought to have the right to decide what their own labor relations ought to be. We do not believe it is a right of the Federal Government to impose unfunded mandates on us and cause us to pay our extra bills at a time when the Governor is laying off people in our State because there are not enough tax dollars coming in.

This is the grossest sort of interference to the sovereignty of our State. We have a strong bipartisan opinion about this in Tennessee. That is why I am so vigorously opposed to this piece of legislation.

It should be called the Washington Knows Best Unfunded Mandate Act. I am going seek to amend it. I am going to do my best to defeat it.

Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.