Mr. President, the Senator from New Mexico, Mr. Bingaman, has been tireless in helping to create the America COMPETES Act, which passed unanimously here. But even more important than that, he did not walk away from it once it became law.…
Mr. President, the Senator from New Mexico, Mr. Bingaman, has been tireless in helping to create the America COMPETES Act, which passed unanimously here. But even more important than that, he did not walk away from it once it became law. He has attended to the details of trying to make sure we implement it. One of those details is what we are doing today.
I wish to, in support of what he has said so eloquently--and I also commend Senator Domenici from New Mexico, who has had such a key role in this effort--I wish to tell a story that helps put in perspective what we are talking about.
Two years ago, a group of Senators traveled to China, led by Senator Stevens and Senator Inouye. We were received very well because Senator Stevens had flown with the Flying Tigers. He flew the first plane to land in Beijing after World War II, and the top Chinese leaders had not forgotten. And, of course, Senator Inouye is a Congressional Medal of Honor winner for his heroic service to our country in World War II.
So we saw President Hu, and the No. 2 man in China, Mr. Wu. What struck me about those two meetings--which were about an hour long, and during which we could have talked about Taiwan or Iraq or Iran or China's military buildup or America's intelligence system--the subject about which they wanted to talk the most and which animated them the most in their conversation was the subject Senator Bingaman just discussed: how China can use its brainpower to create a higher standard of living for the people of China.
We are in an economic slowdown in America today, and we are debating and talking here about how we restore our level of progress economically. We are talking not only about the Federal budget, we are talking about the family budget. We are talking about family incomes. We are talking about jobs. That was the same subject the No. 1 and No. 2 men in China wanted to talk about as well. What were they focusing on? The fact of trying to give to China the same kind of brainpower advantage in creating a high standard of living we have had in America, since World War II especially. This year, despite the economic slowdown, the United States of America will create about 30 percent of all the world's wealth for 5 percent of the world's people, who are those of us who live in the United States. That is an astonishing fact. There are many reasons for it, including our free market system, our geography, our character, the immigration that has brought talented people from all over the world who are entrepreneurial in their spirit. But most people agree that the major fact in the high standard of living for this country since World War II has been our brainpower advantage. We have not only some of the best universities in the world, we have almost all of them. We have a set of national laboratories that is unequaled in the world. Until recently, at least, our system of kindergarten through the 12th grade education has been the envy of the world. As a result of all that brainpower, we have created a lot of jobs and a high standard of living. Increasingly, that is where the new jobs come from. That is why we like to have foreign students come here, because they become educated in our universities and we are, in effect, insourcing brainpower, so they create Google in the United States of America rather than in India or in China, and the jobs are here in the United States of America.
So the America COMPETES Act, to which Senator Bingaman referred, had broad support here. It is the only legislation we have had in the last 4 years that I remember was supported by Senator Frist and Senator Reid. Then, when the Senate changed hands and the Democrats were in the majority, it was sponsored by Senator Reid and Senator McConnell. At one point, it had 70 Members of the Senate backing it, 35 Senators who are Democrats and 35 Republicans. It all came from a request that Senator Bingaman and I and others--including House Member Bart Gordon of Tennessee, the chairman of the Science Committee now--made of the National Academy of Sciences: Please tell us, in priority order, what are the 10 things we in Congress ought to do to help keep our brainpower advantage so our jobs will not go overseas. Norm Augustine, the former chairman of Lockheed Martin, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, assembled a group of Nobel laureates, university presidents, and others, and they came back with 20 specific recommendations in the Augustine report. There was also other important work being done by the Council on Competitiveness. We put all that together over 2 years. The President weighed in, in a big way, in two straight State of the Union Addresses and budgets. The Speaker of the House also weighed in, in an important way. So in this endeavor, on this important issue, we are all on the same team. But what we are doing today with this amendment is making sure we get where we have agreed we want to go.
Now, for President Hu in China, all he had to do was walk over to their National Academy of Sciences in China, he convened them all in the Great Hall--and said: This is what we will do over the next 10 years. We are going to increase support for our universities and research through a percent of our domestic product. We are going to recruit from American universities talented Chinese professors who have distinguished themselves in the United States and they are going to come back and help improve Chinese universities. So, in China, the top man gave the order and they are on their way. Here, a lot more of us have to be involved, but we are all involved. The President has said we need an 18-percent increase for Fiscal Year 2009 to stay on a track to double funding for the physical sciences over the next 10 years; 18 percent for the Office of Science, which is our principal funder of our national laboratories and science programs, and 13 percent in the National Science Foundation. That is bigger than it normally would be because of the way the appropriations process worked last year. We didn't do what we all agreed we wanted to be able to do.
So the Budget Committee did a pretty good job in reporting to the floor a budget resolution with sufficient provisions to fund this year's version of the America COMPETES Act. There are a wide range of those programs. There are opportunities for low-income children to take advanced placement courses which they now can't afford and to train the teachers who need to be trained to teach those courses. There are opportunities for summer academies at our laboratories and at universities to interest our students in math and sciences. The Augustine Commission reviewed programs all over America and recommended only a handful that ought to be emulated, and they included programs such as the UTeach program in Texas at the University of Texas which attracts outstanding students in chemistry and physics, for example, and gives them scholarships if they will agree to become teachers of chemistry and physics.
Former Gov. Jim Hunt of North Carolina told me the University of North Carolina only graduated one physics teacher in one recent year. We are not going to learn much physics in America, to keep up with the Chinese and Indians and Irish and all the others who are trying to increase their brainpower to increase their jobs if we don't graduate physics teachers. So the Budget Committee did a good and important job.
What we are trying to do is to get back on track to double funding for the physical sciences over 10 years, which is what we all agreed we should try to do. That was our goal. A huge majority in the House, the Senate, and the President himself, we are asking that the Senate make room in the budget for the President's number for the America COMPETES Act. That is what this amendment does.
So I feel confident we will have substantial support, because so many of us worked so hard for so long on this idea.
We Republicans are talking these days in unflattering ways about the Democratic budget. Senator Reid, the majority leader, said he hadn't heard about tort reform yet. Well, he will, before we are through. One way to help the family budget is to make it easier for pregnant women in rural areas to get medical care without driving 60 miles, and one way to do that is to put some limits on medical malpractice suits. That is tort reform. That will help the family budget. Lower taxes help the family budget. Lower energy costs help the family budget. But on this side of the aisle, we also believe that better schools and investments in science and technology, so we can keep our brainpower advantage and keep our jobs from going overseas, is an important part of a pro-growth plan.
When I was Governor of Tennessee, Tennessee's taxes were the lowest in the country. I say this with great respect to the Senator from New Hampshire, who is also here. I double
checked this fact when I came in. But we were the third poorest State. So we kept our taxes low, but we also had to enact some other pro- growth policies, which included getting rid of a usury limit, preserving the right to work law, reducing the number of employees in government, but it also included building highways. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that the single most important thing we could do to improve family incomes in our State was to focus on improving the quality of schools, colleges, universities, and research, so we began to pay teachers more for teaching well. We created chairs of excellence at the universities and centers of excellence at the universities. I believe that partly because of all those things together, our State began to increase its family incomes at a rate that was faster than any other part of our--any other State in the country during the 1980s. It was no coincidence we were also increasing funding for our education during that time at a rate faster than any other State.
So an important part of a pro-growth plan--a Republican pro-growth plan, but obviously many Democrats agree with this as well--is fully funding the America COMPETES Act, making sure we keep our brainpower advantage so we can keep our jobs.
I congratulate the Senator from New Mexico, Mr. Bingaman, for his leadership on this, and the senior Senator from New Mexico, Mr. Domenici, for his leadership on this. I thank the majority leader and the Republican leader for their co-sponsorship of this act.
I say to Senators Conrad and Gregg, I am glad you made room in the budget for much of the America COMPETES Act. I hope we can complete the job with the Bingaman amendment so we can keep those jobs from going overseas. That is one good way to help advance a pro-growth plan that will help balance the family budget.
I thank the President, and I yield the floor.
I would be happy to proceed. Senator Domenici is going to join me in making our presentation.
Mr. President, there is no other Senator whom I know wishes to speak at this moment. Senator Domenici will be to the floor shortly.
I will consume not more than 20 minutes. I would assume Senator Domenici would consume not more than 20 minutes.
Mr. President, I thank the Senator from North Dakota for his courtesy. Senator Domenici is here and Senator Salazar is here.
I send to the desk an amendment and ask for its immediate consideration.
Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
I will be happy to.
Amendment No. 4196, as Modified
Mr. President, we are talking this week about the Federal budget. Senator Gregg, Senator Grassley, and others have pointed out, with appropriate response from the Senator from North Dakota, that in our belief we will wreck the Federal budget by raising taxes and increasing debt.
At the same time we have an obligation on our side to say what our plan is, and we have a progrowth Republican plan which we have been detailing this week which focuses on lower taxes, less government, lower energy costs, making health insurance affordable for every American, without the Government choosing your doctor, support for better schools, the support for the kind of investments it takes to increase science and technology. That has been
our plan. That has been our progrowth economic plan to help balance the family budget.
So while they would wreck the Federal budget, we would help balance the family budget, and no part of that would be more important than dealing with energy costs. Energy costs to most American families worried about the family budget come down to $3.50 gasoline or electric bills that might be constantly rising. We have the goal of making sure that in this Nation, which consumes 25 percent of all the energy in the world, that we have a realistic policy for making sure we have a low- cost supply of clean electricity, dealing with the clean air issues-- nitrogen, sulfur, and mercury--and with the climate change issue, carbon, that we have a low-cost supply of clean electricity and that we gradually begin to reduce our dependence on foreign oil so we can clean up our environment, No. 1, and so we can stop shipping billions of dollars to people who are not friends of the United States, and so we can lower the price of gasoline over time to help balance the family budget.
We will have other opportunities during this year to offer proposals for keeping energy costs low, realistic proposals, not proposals that fit some desert island which uses electricity occasionally but for the United States which uses 25 percent of all the energy in the world and whose demand for energy is growing, not declining.
For example, in my part of the country, in Tennessee, we have the Tennessee Valley Authority, which is the largest utility in the country. It covers several States. They operate at about 27,000 megawatts all the time. Sometimes they go as high as 33,000 megawatts. That is 33 big, new nuclear powerplants and twice that many gas or coal plants. All that electricity for our local region is supplied by the Tennessee Valley Authority.
So we have selected five different proposals which would create a deficit-neutral reserve fund to lower energy costs for families by encouraging energy efficiency on the one hand and increasing oil and natural gas supply on the other. There are only two ways we can reduce the price of gasoline or electricity. One is to increase the supply and the other is to reduce the demand. There are other ideas, but particularly in a big economy, that is what we need to do.
No. 1, the Senator from Maine, Ms. Collins, has suggested one way to increase the supply of clean electricity would be to allow the Finance Committee or the Energy Committee to encourage the use of biomass by enacting legislation that would encourage the replacement of old, pre- 1920s wood stoves with new EPA-certified wood pellet or corn stoves, Environmental Protection Agency certified. These new EPA-certified stoves will help families save money on heating bills because the new stoves are up to 50 percent more fuel efficient than the old stoves. Given the rise of oil and natural gas prices, this idea would produce savings that would be much appreciated by families in Maine, all of New England, and in much of America.
Secondly, the amendment allows the Finance Committee or the Energy Committee to encourage energy efficiency by enacting legislation that rewards the installation of smart electricity meters in homes and businesses. Let me give an example of what I mean by that. With this chart, we see how electricity is generated in America today. This is the reality. Half of it comes from coal, 19 percent from nuclear power, 7 from hydroelectric, 1.4 from biomass--that is what Senator Collins is talking about--and 20 percent from gas. We don't want the gas to go up because when it does, the price of natural gas goes up, and our chemical companies move to other parts of the world. Farmers pay four times as much for fertilizer. So we need to look for another way to create clean electricity. The first way to do that is through conservation.
Let me take the hometown example of Tennessee. The TVA is a big utility, maybe the biggest in the country, $10 billion of revenue a year. I saw an article in the newspaper that said if we have plug-in hybrid cars, we will create a lot more pollution because we will have to build new plants such as coal plants. That is dead wrong because the Tennessee Valley Authority, even though it operates at 27,000 megawatts on the average every day, that is between 3 and 7 o'clock when we are all turning on lights, coming home from work, using our electricity. The TVA has lots of spare electricity to use at night, 7 or 8,000 megawatts. That is 7 or 8 nuclear plants for the Tennessee Valley Authority. We could plug in our hybrid cars in the middle of the night without building another new nuclear plant, another new coal plant, another new any kind of plant because we have excess capacity in our region and so does virtually every other part of the country. We encourage consumers to use smart meters so they know that electricity is going to cost more between 4 and 7 o'clock and less at night.
Then if the car companies wanted to develop a plug-in hybrid car with advanced battery technology, we can operate on that electricity and reduce our dependence on foreign oil without building any new plants for that purpose. So that is the second proposal we have. The same applies to water heaters. People have their water heaters on at all times. Any utility should be able to make an agreement with the Senator from New Jersey or the Senator from Tennessee or from Colorado to say: Turn your water heater over to me and some of your other appliances, and I will turn them off and on at peak hours so your electric bill will stay flat or go down. We could save enormous amounts of electricity and avoid building new plants. That is what this amendment would do.
This would permit us to clean up existing coal plants. Here is how we would propose to do that. Forty-nine percent of our electricity is produced by coal. We are the Saudi Arabia of coal. Other countries in the world are building coal plants because it is the technology they know how to build. Some people are putting up large wind turbines. We are spending $11 billion of taxpayer money on wind turbines, but it is hard to find wind turbines on this list for the United States because it doesn't produce much energy. But coal does. What we need to do is clean up the coal production. This amendment would allow the relevant committees of Congress to give tax credits to recapture the carbon that comes from coal. A great many people are concerned about climate change and the use of carbon. This would help meet that demand in a realistic way in the near term.
A fourth idea: I said earlier there are two ways to lower the price of $3.50 gasoline. One is more supply, and one is less demand. The advanced battery technology car, the plug-in hybrid car that runs more on electricity than it does on oil, will help reduce demand. We have a proposal for that direction. Another proposal--and I am sure the Senator from New Mexico will want to say something about this--is the idea of, in appropriate places, using our existing oil and gas that exists offshore. Two years ago, the Senator from New Mexico, then chairman of the Energy Committee, pushed through legislation that permitted us to expand drilling in lease 181 in the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas. We took some of those revenues and helped mitigate some of the problems that exist on the coast; in other words, used it for conservation purposes. For the first time, we put some of those revenues into the land and water conservation fund on a permanent basis, which has been a 40-year goal of the conservation community.
The Senator from Colorado, Mr. Salazar, was key to that effort. I am proud of that bipartisan effort. We could do more of that. This amendment doesn't specify exactly what we would do. That would be up to the authorizing committees. But an example of the next step might be to allow the State of Virginia, as it has asked Congress to permit it to do, to go 50 miles out and look for gas and then take half the revenue and put it in a trust fund for the State of Virginia to improve beach nourishment or to keep taxes down or to have a trust fund so the already excellent higher education system can be among the best in the world. If I were Governor of Virginia, I would want to do that. I was Governor of Tennessee, and we don't have an ocean. But many States do. If they asked for that and if they can produce more oil and gas, which will lower the price of $3.50 gasoline, then they ought to be allowed to do so.
Finally, oil shale development--the Senator from New Mexico will direct
more of his attention to the oil shale development issue--the amendment would allow the Energy Committee to enact legislation that would increase domestic oil supplies by allowing the development of oil shale deposits in green basins in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.
So what we have suggested is an amendment that is sponsored by Republicans, but we hope it is compelling enough to attract a great many Democrats to support it. It is an amendment that will help balance the family budget by lowering the cost of energy. It would be the Collins amendment to help use biomass--wood pellets, corn--in more efficient stoves in New England and other parts of America. It would be to create incentives for electricity meters, smart meters which could make more effective use of hybrid cars or water heaters and avoid building dozens of new powerplants. It would create room for the creation of incentives to allow existing coal plants to deal with carbon. If we want to deal with climate change in this generation, we have to deal realistically with the coal plants we have today which are producing one-half of the electricity we use in this country or 12.5 percent of all the electricity that is used in the world. To lower the cost of gasoline and natural gas or to stabilize it, we want to create new supply in two ways: By, in appropriate instances, allowing offshore drilling. We would suggest, not in this legislation but as the committee works on it, that it be offshore 30 or 50 miles and that the royalties go to conservation purposes or to the States. The final idea was to use our oil in shale.
In conclusion, there is one glaring omission in this set of five recommendations that we have made, and we need to work on it. The Senator from New Mexico is the leading Senator on this subject, but we don't have anything in our amendment about nuclear energy. I believe it is important to repeat, every time we talk about electricity, if we want to talk about realism, the United States, in the next 10 years, having control of mercury, having control of sulfur and nitrogen so it doesn't create health problems, and dealing with climate change in this generation, that after conservation, nuclear power is the only real technology we have today for that purpose.
We do want to recapture carbon from coal, but we cannot do that in a wholesale way yet. We will never be able to put up enough wind turbines to make much of a difference. Someday maybe solar thermal powerplants may make a difference. But if we are talking about the next 10 or 12 years, nuclear power will make the difference.
Here is why I am saying that. As shown on this chart, this is the clean electricity generated in the United States of America last year. Sixty-six percent of the clean electricity--meaning electricity with no sulfur, no nitrogen, no mercury, and no carbon--came from nuclear power, a technology we invented in the United States in the 1950s, that our Navy has used without one single incident in submarines since the 1950s; nuclear power that has now been adopted by France: 80 percent of their electricity is nuclear power; nuclear power that has been adopted by Japan: They build a new nuclear plant every year or so.
We appropriated $5 billion to lend to Westinghouse in this body to help China build nuclear powerplants. When are we going to get serious about cleaning up the air?
So we have ideas about that--not in this proposal. One would be to reprocess the waste, reduce it by 95 percent, so we can store it more safely. That is one idea. Another idea would be giving increased credits for the production of nuclear power. If we were to subsidize nuclear power by the kilowatt hour in way proportional to how we subsidize wind, we would be subsidizing nuclear power with about $340 billion a year.
So the Republican proposal to help balance the family budget on lower energy costs has five general areas as part of a reserve fund the appropriate committees can make a difference with. They have to do with conservation, and they have to do with increasing this supply. But what it means is, these are realistic ways to deal with the $3.50-a-gallon gas price and realistic ways to make sure we have large amounts of clean electricity, so we can deal with clean air as well as climate change in the near term instead of some later time.
This is a real proposal and not a fairytale. This is for the country that produces 25 percent of all the energy in the world and not for some desert island. This will help balance the family budget. We hope it earns strong Democratic support as well as Republican support.
Mr. President, I yield the floor. The next speaker is the Senator from New Mexico, the long-time chairman of the Energy Committee as well as the Budget Committee and the leading spokesman for nuclear power in the Senate.
Thank you.
Madam President, I wonder if I might ask the Senator from New Hampshire a question before he leaves the floor.
Madam President, I have some vague memory in my mind that in the late 1960s, or some time in that time period, a millionaire's tax was proposed. I am wondering if the Senator from New Hampshire remembers that and remembers how many millionaires it was to apply to, how many rich people was it whose money they were going to get?
Madam President, the great danger with these conversations about ``let's get the rich'' is, we got 115 of them, I think, with the so-called AMT tax. Today it traps, according to the Senator from New Hampshire, 20 million Americans. That seems to be the way things go.
So I thank the Senator for his time, and I wish to move on to a different
subject. We are talking really--it is the same subject--about the Federal budget and how to fix the family budget. The Senator from New Hampshire has eloquently described how the Democratic budget will wreck the Federal budget by raising taxes--which we have just had a beautiful speech about the need for higher taxes--more debt, and more spending. That is one view of how we move ahead in this country.
The view on this side is that we wish to help balance the family budget.
Now, the subject I wish to talk about has to do with where most families get their jobs. We balance the family budget by lower energy prices, which we talked about earlier, by lower taxes--that is one way to do that--by helping every American have access to health insurance without the Government picking their doctor.
Another way is to make sure the small businesses of America have the opportunity to make a profit, to create jobs, to take some money home, and to avoid unnecessary costs.
Amendment No. 4222
Madam President, I wish to speak for a moment about an amendment I propose to send to the desk in a moment that relates to keeping the family budget in balance by reducing the costs of small businesses, and it has the even more important advantage of helping to unify our country. The subject is the same subject that is chiseled into stone there: e pluribus unum--the motto of our country, what has been the motto of our country: one, from many.
Let me begin with this story.
In March of 2007, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a Federal agency, sued the Salvation Army for allegedly discriminating against two of the Salvation Army's employees in a Boston area thrift store. What had the Salvation Army done to earn this lawsuit from the Federal Government? Well, it had required its employees to speak English on the job.
The English rule was clearly posted, and the employees were given a year to learn it. But this lawsuit, in plain English, means that a shoe shop in Tennessee or a small business in Missouri or in Washington State would have to hire a lawyer in order to make sure they have a clear business reason to require their employees to speak our common language on the job. So I have an amendment to bring some common sense to this subject. It would be to take $670,000 used by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which it is using to bring actions against employers who require their employees to speak English, and instead uses the money to help teach English to adults through the Department of Education's English Literacy/Civics Education State Grant program, which is one of the principal ways we help American adults learn our common language.
So, Madam President, I send an amendment to the desk and ask for its immediate consideration.
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.
Madam President, this is not the first time I have offered this amendment. I offered it in the Appropriations Committee of the Senate in June of 2007. Enough Democrats as well as Republicans voted for it to be reported to the Senate floor as a part of the Commerce, Justice, Science appropriations bill.
On October 16, 2007, the full Senate voted 75 to 19 to approve that appropriations bill, containing similar language to the amendment I have just sent to the desk.
On November 8, 2007, the House of Representatives, with the support of 36 Democrats, voted 218 to 186 to instruct its appropriations conferees to recede to the Senate position on the EEOC.
However, the Speaker of the House canceled the conference of the Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations Subcommittees over this issue, even though the Senate and the House both voted that a Federal agency should not be suing businesses that ask their employees to speak English on the job. The Speaker of the House, for some reason, thought it was so important that she canceled the entire appropriations bill rather than accept this language. So it must be a matter of great significance. I hope the Senate, having already passed this language before in the appropriations bill, as I have said by a vote of 75 to 19, will do it again when the opportunity comes tomorrow.
Madam president, there are thousands of small businesses across America. They may be a Japanese restaurant where the owner may say: I would like for my employees all to speak Japanese. That is fine. They might be an Irish pub, and the owner might say: I would like for them all to speak with an Irish lilt. Or it might be a Chinese restaurant, and for a whole variety of reasons, the owner of the restaurant might say: We would like for all our employees to speak Chinese. That's fine. But in America, if the owner of a business wants to ask his or her employees to speak English on the job, that ought to not be an issue. You shouldn't have to go ask a lawyer to come up with a business reason why you can tell some Federal agency why you asked your employees to speak English on the job. There are practical reasons for it. There are safety reasons for it. There are communications reasons for it. There may be customer reasons for it. But it is a bigger picture than that.
We have, in this country, valued English as our common language for a long time, and let me go back to the reasons why. One of our country's greatest characteristics is its diversity. But diversity is not our greatest characteristic. Our greatest accomplishment as a country may be that we've taken all that diversity and molded it into one common country. It is a source of our great strength. No other country has been able to do it as well. We see many European and Asian countries that wish they had our practice in inviting people from all over the world to come to their country and becoming one country. How do we do it? Because we say at the beginning in our Constitution that we do not make any distinctions based on race or gender or where your grandparents came from.
We say to anyone who wants to become a citizen here: You must become an American. You have to raise your right hand. You have to say essentially the same oath that George Washington and his officers said at Valley Forge, and you basically renounce where you came from. You prove you are of good character. You wait for 5 years. You learn our history. You must learn our common language. Then we are all Americans.
We are proud of where we came from, but we are prouder to be Americans. We have made that a great part of our tradition.
The late Albert Shanker, the head of the American Federation of Teachers for many years, felt passionately about the importance of helping children and new Americans learn what it means to be an American. Once he was asked the rationale for a public school. He said the rationale of a public school is to help children learn English, to learn the ``three Rs,'' and what it means to be an American. The hope was that these students would then go home and teach their parents.
Since 1906, we have required every new citizen to learn English. Federal law requires that all children learn English in public school. We have programs to help adults learn English--including the program I wish to put the EEOC's lawsuit money into. We have in No Child Left Behind, passed not long ago by this Congress, programs to help children learn English, and schools are held accountable for students learning our common language.
When the Senate has recently debated immigration, it has passed two amendments to help value our common language. One was that by 64 to 33 we declared English as our national language. Another, I introduced, was to say that if a new citizen or an applicant for citizenship learned English to a proficient level, that person would be able to wait only 4 years instead of 5 years to become a citizen--a way of valuing our common language. We even said we will give a $500 scholarship to any applicant for citizenship who wishes to learn English, helping them learn English. So in many ways through the last century we have asserted the importance of our common language.
I am sure many of us in the Senate--and many Americans--saw Ken Burns' epic series on World War II. My wife and I went to see a preview of that series last fall, and we were struck by how magnificent it was. Ken Burns said he felt, after doing years of work on World War II, the war was the period of the greatest unity in our country's history. Quoting a book by the late Arthur Schlesinger, ``The Disuniting of America,'' which was written in the 1990s, Ken Burns said: Maybe what we need is a little less pluribus and a little more unum.
Where do we get our unum? We do not get it from race. We do not get it from gender. We get it from learning American history, and we get it from our common language.
The reason we learn American history is so we can understand and learn the principles that unite us. It is those principles and that language which makes it possible for us to say we are all Americans.
So the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has turned the civil rights laws upside down when it sues the Salvation Army and says: You cannot ask your employees to speak America's common language on the job.
The purpose of the civil rights laws is to unify us, to say no distinctions based on race. We want to be one country. Well, if we want to be one country, we need to have a common language, and in this country that language is English.
It was my hope when I was Education Secretary that every child would grow up to speak at least two languages well. One of them would be English. That is still my hope today.
As I look at the motto above the Presiding Officer's desk, and I think about whose century this is going to be--is it going to be a Chinese century, a Japanese century, an Indian century, a European century, an American century?--part of it has to do with our economy, part of it has to do with our military strength, a big part of it is whether we can stay one country or whether we become just another version of the United Nations--the United States of America or the United Nations; whether we can say we are all Americans or whether we can't. One way to help us be able to say we are all Americans, one way to unite us is to value, not devalue, our common language.
So in some ways this is a very small and simple amendment, taking the approximate amount of money that a Federal agency is using to sue the Salvation Army and other businesses to say: You can't require your employees to speak English on the job, and let's instead use that amount of money to help adults who want to learn English.
We have been sacrificing our unity in the name of diversity for too long. Diversity is a great strength, but our most magnificent accomplishment is our unity. You can't become German, you can't become Japanese, you can't become French very easily, but in order to be a citizen of this country, you must become an American. The way you become an American is by showing good character, waiting 5 years, learning our history, and speaking our common language. The Federal Government ought to be consistently on the side of valuing that common language and not on the side of devaluing it.
So I hope the Senate, when it has the opportunity, will find the same sort of bipartisan support that it had last year, October 16, 2007, when the Senate voted 75 to 19 to approve the Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations bill containing substantially the language in this amendment. We will then be able to say to American small businesses, of which there are hundreds of thousands: No, you don't have to go hire a lawyer to come up with some business reason why you need to ask your employees to speak English on the job.
I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.