Floor Statements

Mr. President, during August, as many Members of this body did, I traveled to Iraq, met with Tennesseans there, met with General Petraeus, General Odierno. Then I traveled to Tennessee and discussed my visit and listened.

I want to talk for a few minutes about where I believe we should go from here in Iraq. The strongest message I received, both in Iraq and in Tennessee, was this--not that we get out, not that we even win a victory of the kind we won in Japan or Germany, but it is time for the United States Government to speak with one voice on Iraq.

A retired four star general from Tennessee, who has a lot of experience with the special forces, put it this way to me: He said our biggest problem in Iraq is we are divided and the enemy knows it.

It is inexcusable that we in the Senate should spend so much time lecturing political leaders in Baghdad for their failure to come up with a consensus when we ourselves have not been able to come up with a consensus about Iraq.

It is time for the Government to speak with a single voice about where we go from here in Iraq. Our troops deserve it and our enemy needs to hear it. I believe that one voice would be a new strategy to change our mission in Iraq from combat to supporting, equipping, and training the Iraqi troops, and then stabilizing Iraq province by province, neighborhood by neighborhood, tribe by tribe.

If we adopt this new strategy as a nation, and if we speak clearly to our troops and to the enemy with one voice, I believe this would likely bring home half our troops within a year or two.

Such a new strategy would put us on a path to finish responsibly what we have undertaken in Iraq. I believe there is a consensus within this body for such a new strategy. I believe that consensus is sitting there staring us in the face.

The strategy I am describing would implement the unanimous recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group chaired by former Secretary of State Jim Baker, a Republican, and former Congressman Lee Hamilton, a Democrat. It would take into account the lessons and successes of the last few months under the leadership of General Petraeus in Iraq.

Basically the new strategy I am describing would implement the recommendations of Baker-Hamilton province by province. The Baker- Hamilton strategy, the one I am describing, would be grounded upon three basic principles. First, the United States will begin immediately to move our forces in Iraq out of direct combat and into roles of support, training, and providing equipment as security conditions on the ground permit.

This will proceed province by province as Iraqis demonstrate their capacity to manage their own security as they have, for example, in Anbar Province where President Bush visited yesterday.

Generals Petraeus and Odierno told a group of us Senators about 10 days ago that they believe that 6 or 7 provinces are on the way to being ready for this sort of mission change and this sort of stabilization. We have seen it in Anbar. We saw it in northern Baghdad where we flew by helicopter to an edge of Baghdad where about 70 American troops were living in a neighborhood. We had dinner with two Sunni sheiks, two Shiite sheiks, and we talked about the progress there.

What had happened is that the Iraqis had simply become exhausted with terrorists of various kinds killing their relatives and terrorizing their neighborhoods. One of the sheiks with whom we had dinner had seen his teenage son murdered in his front yard.

When sufficient American forces, coalition forces, had come to the neighborhood to work with the fed-up Iraqis, they had proceeded basically to run the terrorists out of town. It was much easier for them to tell, as they said, who are bad guys than for us to tell who they are. They described them as various groups of thugs, criminals, insurgents, militias, all there for no good. But when the Iraqis began to man the checkpoints and when Iraqis worked on the neighborhood watch, and when 600 of their sons were sent to Baghdad to the police academy, as had been done with the prospect that they would then come back and help, then the American officers there said: It may not be long before we are able to shift our mission from combat to support, equipping, and training of the Iraqi troops for this area.

Now, that is not to say that means instantly in every part of Iraq things will be safe. They certainly were not while we were there. Two province governors were assassinated within a 2-week period of time just before we came. Fourteen Americans lost their lives in a helicopter crash 2 days before we were there. On the day we were there, we found out later, two suicide bombers had gone to the nearest other outpost such as the one we visited and killed 4 people and wounded 11 others.

There is plenty of danger left in Iraq. But there is no mistaking the fact that when we begin to see--and under Petraeus's leadership we begin to have--those outposts around Baghdad, and work with the Iraqis in certain parts of the country, significant military progress is being made.

So the first principle of a new strategy would be to change the mission of

our troops province by province. The second principle would be to maintain a long-term presence in Iraq but one that would steadily diminish over time.

The troops who would remain would be there to keep Iraq from turning into a terrorist haven--troops who would be embedded with training Iraqi Army units and police, those troops necessary for force protection and for search and rescue and for intelligence.

The final principle would be we would step up regional and diplomatic efforts to press others in the region to help Iraq succeed. Those efforts are now well underway with a more expansive United Nations assistance mission for Iraq.

There is plenty of evidence that a new strategy such as the one I have described can attract a consensus here in the Senate and in the Congress, and I believe in the country. To begin with, while he has not adopted the Baker-Hamilton recommendation, the President has praised the report and has adopted parts of the report. The Democratic leadership has adopted many parts of the report and, in fact, the main difference, it seems, separating that side and this side in coming to a consensus is whether there should be a specific deadline, which the Baker-Hamilton commission rejects.

Some have said, well, that means the Baker-Hamilton recommendations are toothless, do not have effect. Well, I see the Senator from West Virginia here. He will remember exactly what I am about to say. My grandfather was a railway engineer for the Santa Fe Railway. His job was to drive large locomotives onto what was then called a roundtable. The roundtable's job was to turn that huge locomotive around and head down a different track in a different direction. Once the roundtable had turned the locomotive around and put it on a different track, there was no getting on the other track. You might not know exactly how fast it would go down the new track, and you might have different engineers, but it was headed down a different track. I believe the Baker-Hamilton recommendations, as updated by General Petraeus's experiences, would begin to put our country on a new track with a new strategy in Iraq that would cause us responsibly to finish our job there and could begin to develop a consensus on both sides of the aisle.

In the Congress there is now bipartisan legislation that would make the Iraq Study Group recommendations our national policy. In the Senate, the legislation sponsored by the Senator from Colorado, Senator Salazar, a Democrat, and myself, has 15 sponsors, 8 Democrats and 7 Republicans. In the House of Representatives, the Udall-Wolf legislation, the same legislation as Salazar-Alexander, has 60 sponsors, 26 Democrats, and 34 Republicans.

If the President of the United States and the Democratic leadership in the Senate supported this bipartisan legislation, I am convinced it would get 75 votes and we would speak with one voice on Iraq to our troops and to our enemy. If the President and the Democratic leadership simply did not oppose this legislation, I believe it would attract a majority of votes in the Senate, maybe 60 votes. The Congress could enact this legislation by the end of the month. The President could sign it immediately. He could then begin to implement its recommendations moving us in a new strategy down a different track in Iraq and report to us, as the legislation requires, every 90 days.

This is not a perfect option. The Baker-Hamilton group is 10 distinguished Americans--including Ed Meese, President Reagan's Attorney General; Vernon Jordan, from the National Urban League; Larry Eagleburger, Sandra Day O'Connor, President Clinton's Secretary of Defense, President Clinton's former chief of staff, Secretary Baker, Chairman Hamilton; Chuck Robb, a former Member of this body; Alan Simpson, a former Member of this body--a very diverse group, five Democrats, five Republicans. They met for 9 months. They were unanimous on their 79 recommendations. That did not mean they agreed with every single recommendation. But, taken as a whole, they said we can go from here to there in Iraq. This is how we do it. This is how we go.

What are the other options? I can understand the Democratic leader wanting to have a vote on withdrawal immediately with a deadline. Many Members, maybe every Member on the other side, would vote for that. I respect that. But I would respectfully say we are not going to have a consensus on that approach. Too many of us believe it would strand people who had been loyal in Iraq. Too many of us believe it would not sufficiently honor the lives and the treasure we have invested in Iraq. Too many of us believe there is too great a risk of turning over Iraq to terrorists. And if none of those arguments make a difference, it is simply logistically impossible to move 160,000 American soldiers and marines and airmen out of Iraq overnight. So for all those reasons, while we might have a vote on withdrawal immediately with a deadline, there can't be the kind of consensus that we need in the Senate.

On the other hand, I can understand those, many on this side, who say we should stay the course for a victory in Iraq. But this is not Japan or Germany. After World War II, we had millions of troops in Japan and Germany for a long time. We had an entire division in Germany which did nothing but wait to see where their might be trouble and then go to snuff it out. We were working with two countries which were homogeneous and which had been nations for a long time. We didn't have there the same circumstances we have in Iraq. There is not the possibility of the same kind of victory in Iraq that we had in Japan and Germany. We are spending $2 billion plus a week. We are losing two to three American lives each day. Our armed services are stretched thin. Most of the soldiers I talked with--and they are not complaining--were there for their second or third tour of duty, and some were expecting to come back again.

Finally, I don't believe we can sustain a stay-the-course policy in Iraq because there is not the support for that among the American people.

I suppose there is another option that one could try. The President and some on the ground in Iraq might be tempted to simply say: Let's continue the surge for a while longer because already in some places, as I have described--in Anbar Province, in four or five others, in northern Baghdad where we were--already in some places there is demonstration that we are having some military success. But a surge would be open-ended, a surge by itself. A surge is a tactic; it is not a strategy. We need a strategy about where we go from here.

When I go back to Tennessee, I don't have Tennesseans rushing up to me to tell me what to do about Iraq. They expect me to have some idea about what to do about Iraq, to say where we go from here, and then they will critique that and tell me whether they agree.

I believe there is not sufficient public support for the President simply to go before the American people and say: Let's continue the surge. We know if we put 25,000, 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 of our tremendous American troops in a particular place in Iraq, there will be some good results. We have already seen it. But a surge by itself does not answer the question. In fact, it never has answered the question: Where do we go from here in Iraq? How do we finish the job responsibly? That is the question.

The surge can be a part of the new strategy. The Baker-Hamilton recommendations in December specifically said that as they called for a new strategy that included change of mission. But a surge was a tactic, a part of the strategy, not the strategy itself.

If none of those options are promising for a consensus within this body and in the House of Representatives and the country, then where does that leave us? It leaves us somewhere in the middle, which is often, in a democracy, the right place to be. My father used to say: Finish what you start. We need to finish the job in Iraq.

George Reedy, Lyndon Johnson's Press Secretary, wrote a book, ``Twilight of the Presidents,'' in which he described the job of the President--see an urgent need, develop the right strategy, but, third, persuade at least half the people he is right. We can and no doubt will have votes in this body on withdrawal with a deadline. We will probably have votes on stay the course and victory. We will probably have a vote on indefinite continuation of the surge. But there is not a possibility of consensus on any of these approaches.

There is a good prospect for consensus on a strategy based upon the

Baker-Hamilton principles, updated by the lessons and successes of General Petraeus. If the 10 members of the Iraq Study Group, the Baker- Hamilton group, over 9 months could agree unanimously on where we go from here in Iraq, surely 50 or 60 or 70 of us can agree on where we go from here in Iraq.

I look forward to the President's report. I look forward to General Petraeus's recommendations. He has demonstrated that he is an exceptional leader. We Tennesseans have a special pride in him because of his leadership of the 101st Airborne Division. But once General Petraeus has made those recommendations, I hope the President takes a page from a former President of this country whom President Bush admires, Harry Truman.

In 1947, Harry Truman found himself in about the same shape President Bush finds himself today. Americans were tired of war, even though in that case we had won it. The President's poll numbers were very low. The President had lost both Houses of Congress in the preceding election. The President had an urgent overseas mission that he hoped our country would adopt. According to David McCullough, the biographer of President Truman, Truman said if he sent a plan with his name on it up there to the Senate and the House, it would quiver a couple of times and die. So he called in General George C. Marshall who was his Secretary of State, and he called in Dean Acheson. He said: Let's call it the Marshall plan and go up to Arthur Vandenberg, the leader of the opposition in the Senate, and try to persuade him it is the right thing to do.

We got the Marshall plan, and Truman today is remembered as a near great President. I am certain that President Bush believes as firmly in his heart that finishing the job in Iraq is as essential today as President Truman believed the Marshall plan was essential in 1947. But President Bush, I hope, will also remember the lesson of Harry Truman and borrow the recommendations and the prestige of the Baker-Hamilton group and borrow the lessons and successes of a distinguished general-- in this case General Petraeus--and give us a plan that is a genuinely new strategy, one that can attract significant support on that side of the aisle as well as this, one that, like my grandfather's big round table with the locomotive, can take our country and put it on a different track in Iraq that will assure us of that and that will cause us to change our mission for our troops from combat to supporting, equipping, and training, province by province, as soon as we honorably can.

If it does, as I said earlier, I believe we will see about half our troops come home within a year or two. The principles also include a long-term but steadily diminishing presence in Iraq to fight counterterrorism and a stepped-up effort for diplomatic and political efforts especially in the region. But if the President were to do this, and if the Democratic leadership would make room for consensus in this body, we could end this spectacle of the U.S. Congress lecturing Baghdad for being in a political stalemate when we are in one ourselves. We can speak with a single voice. We are elected to be able to do so. Our troops deserve it. The enemy needs to hear it.

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

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, which I will not do, while the majority leader and the Republican leader are on the floor, I would simply like to say that this is the Reid-McConnell bill we are passing, which represents the fact that so many Members of this body have been a part of it.

After the Senator from Iowa makes his remarks, after wrap-up, I plan to make some remarks about this bill. But I would just simply say now that they have created an environment, in a bipartisan way, that permitted this bill to pass. It has been worked on for 2 years. It has had 70 Members--35 Democrats, 35 Republicans--cosponsoring it. I would judge that there will be no more important piece of legislation to the future of the country that passes the Congress in this session. I wish to thank Senator Reid, Senator McConnell, and Senator Frist from the last session for creating the environment that made it possible.

Mr. President, let me ask, through the Chair, the manager of the previous bill, is he finished with what he would like to do this evening? If I could ask the Senator from Iowa, does he need any more time on the subject he has been talking about? I will be glad to wait.

Congratulations.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Iowa.

Mr. President, this evening the Senate unanimously passed a piece of legislation which we call the America COMPETES Act. Earlier today, the House of Representatives passed it by a vote of 367 to 57. So anyone watching the work of the U.S. Congress must think: Well, that must either be not very important or not very hard to do.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I would suggest that the America COMPETES Act will be as important as any piece of legislation the Congress passes in this session, and it has taken as much work as any piece of legislation that has been passed in this session.

I would like to spend a few minutes acknowledging the work and describing the importance of the bill, but I think the first thing to do is to say actually what the bill does. The point of the America COMPETES Act is very simple. It helps America keep its brainpower advantage so we can keep our jobs from going overseas to China and India and other countries.

The Presiding Officer is from a State that has benefitted greatly from America's brainpower advantage. There is a great deal of higher education and research in his State, and, as a result of that, a number of jobs. I have been in the Edison Museum in New Jersey, which is a good reminder of exactly what we are talking about.

Thomas Edison used to say he failed 10,000 times until he succeeded once. That one success was the lightbulb, and then a number of other inventions, which created millions of jobs in the United States.

The United States, this year, is producing about a third of all the money in the world. The International Monetary Fund says that almost 30 percent of all the wealth in the world is produced in our country, measured in terms of gross domestic product, for just 5 percent of the world's population. That is how many Americans there are.

So imagine if you are living in China or India or Ireland or any country in the world, and you are looking at the United States. It is not so hard to look at other countries today with the Internet and travel and television the way they are. Someone in one of those countries could say: How can those Americans be producing 30 percent of all the wealth for themselves when they are only 5 percent of the world's population? They have the same brains everybody else does. They cannot work any harder than anybody else does.

What is it? There are a variety of advantages we have in this country. But most people who look at this country, since World War II, believe our standard of living, our family incomes, our great wealth comes primarily from our technological advances, from the fact that it has been in this country that the automobile, the electric lightbulb, the television set, the Internet, Google have been invented. Or the pharmaceutical drugs that help cure disease all over the world, they also have come mostly from this country.

It is that innovation that has given us our standard of living and given the rest of the world a high standard of living. That brainpower advantage we have is located in some pretty obvious places. One place, of course, is our system of higher education, the great university system. We not only have many of the best universities in the world, we have almost all of them. Another place is in the great National Laboratories, from Oak Ridge National Laboratory to Los Alamos and across our country.

Another is in the great corporations of America where research is done whether it is in pharmaceuticals or whether it is in agriculture. Those great engines of research and innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit and free market that we have have given us this great advantage.

We, therefore, talk a lot about progrowth policies. What causes our economy to grow? We, on this side--we Republicans--talk a lot about low taxes. I believe that is important and vote that way. When I was Governor of Tennessee, we had the lowest tax rates in the country. But I found very quickly that low taxes by themselves do not create a high standard of living because we had the lowest taxes in our State but we also were the third poorest State. I also found that better schools and better research were the keys to better jobs. That is what this bill is about. So as a result of the America COMPETES Act, over the next few years, we will have done something pretty remarkable.

We asked the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, as well as other business leaders in our country, exactly what it would take to keep our brainpower advantage, and they have told us, and tonight we have done it. All that has to happen now is for the President of the United States to sign it, and I feel confident he will.

I hope what he does is sign it and take credit for a lot of it, because in his State of the Union Address President Bush emphasized the importance of this and talked about his American Competitiveness Initiative 2 years ago.

But this is what we have done. We have authorized the spending, over the next 3 years, of $43 billion to help keep our brainpower advantage by investing in science and technology. Most of that--and this was a part of the President's recommendation--helps to grow research at our major scientific laboratories and Departments by doubling their research budgets over a 7-year term. That would be the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Department of Energy Office of Science, which among other things, supervises the great National Laboratories in our country.

As I said, the act authorizes a total of $43.3 billion, over the next 3 fiscal years, for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics research and education programs across the Federal Government. It will help to prepare thousands of new teachers and provide current teachers with content and teaching skills in their area of education. It will establish an advanced research projects agency for energy--a nimble and semi-autonomous research agency at the Department of Energy--to engage in high-risk, high-reward energy research. This is modeled after what we call DARPA at the Department of Defense which produced stealth technology and the Internet. Perhaps we can do the same as we look for new energy technologies.

It expands programs at the National Science Foundation to enhance the undergraduate education of our future science and engineering workforce, including at our community colleges. There are many provisions in the bill to broaden participation in science and engineering fields at all levels.

There are new competitive grant programs to enable partnerships to implement courses of study in math, science, engineering, technology, and critical foreign languages. There are competitive grants to increase the number of math and science teachers serving high-need schools. The bill expands access to advanced placement courses and international baccalaureate courses by increasing the number of qualified teachers in high-need schools. In other words, in plain English, it will help more children, including those who come from families with less money, have a chance to take the advanced placement courses that will give them a route into college, high achievement, and the ability to produce jobs not just for themselves but for the rest of us.

It expands early-career research grant programs. It strengthens interagency planning for research infrastructure. It does all of this.

Now, one might say: Where did all these ideas come from? Did the Senator from New Jersey just wander in one day and say, ``I have a great idea. Let's stick it in''? Or did the Senator from Arkansas say, ``Well, we have a little program over at Little Rock that we all like, so let's have some money for it''? Or did the Senator from Tennessee say, ``I was down at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory yesterday, and someone gave me an idea, so let's have $10 million for that''?

That is not the way we did it. What we did is, 2 years ago, Senator Bingaman and I, and Representatives Bart Gordon and Sherwood Boehlert of the House of Representatives--two Democrats and two Republicans--we literally went to the National Academy of Sciences and we asked this question: Tell us exactly what we need to do to keep our brainpower advantage, to keep our jobs from going to China and India? And they took us seriously.

The National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine appointed a distinguished committee of 21 Americans chaired by Norm Augustine, the former Chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. On that committee were some of America's most distinguished business leaders, three Nobel laureates, the president emeritus of MIT, teachers, and others, who gave up their summer, reviewed hundreds of proposals, and, in priority order, told us the 20 things we needed to do to keep our brainpower advantage.

All of that was presented to us in a booklet called ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm,'' which is now well-known at universities, in schools, and in the business community as a wakeup call for the United States of America. It says we have been good--in fact, we have been way ahead of the rest of the line--but if we do not watch out, China, India, Ireland, England, and many of the other countries in the world, are going to catch up with us because there is no preordained right for Americans--no matter how bright we think we might be--to produce 30 percent of the world's wealth for just 5 percent of the people. Other people can do the very same thing in their colleges and universities, if they wish.

The members of this commission had countless stories to tell that every American who confronts these issues will find. Every Senator who travels to China sees they have recruited a distinguished professor of Chinese descent at an Ivy League university to come home and help improve a Chinese university. That is happening all over the world, and it is creating a much more competitive environment.

Last summer, Senator Inouye and Senator Stevens led a delegation of Senators to China. We were very well received because Senator Stevens was the first to fly a cargo plane into Beijing in 1944 at the end of World War II. He was flying with the Flying Tigers. Senator Inouye, of course, was a Congressional Medal of Honor winner in World War II. The Chinese remember well their affection for Americans in that war. So we were treated well and got to see President Hu, and the No. 2 man, Mr. Wu, the Chairman of the National People's Congress, for an hour each. These were interviews that many American delegations had not had before.

What was interesting to me was that in those sessions with the No. 1 and No. 2 man in China, where our conversations ranged from Iraq to Iran to North Korea to Taiwan, all the issues one might expect, the issue that animated the leaders of China the most was their efforts over the next 15 years to create an innovation economy. They wanted to talk about how China caught up with America's brain power advantage because they know their skills, they know they are good, they know they can do it and they did it in their way.

The month before, President Hu had walked over to the Great Hall of the People and assembled their National Academies of Science and Engineering and said: We are going on a 15-year innovation plan. We are going to invest 4 percent of our gross domestic product in research and technology. We are going to improve our colleges and our universities and our schools. We are going to create a brain power advantage for China that gives us a higher standard of living. They understand that.

We did it a little different way. Two years ago, we walked down to our National Academy of Sciences. We invited them to give us this report, ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm''. We took the recommendations of the Council on Competitiveness which was already working. The President of the United States gave his recommendations in his American Competitiveness Initiative. And then we went to work in the American way. We don't announce 15-year plans here; our way is a little messier. So we had to go through three committees here in the Senate and two in the House of Representatives.

I have to thank the senior Members of this body for the attitude they took toward this. For example, Senators Stevens and Inouye, Senators Kennedy and Enzi, Senators Domenici and Bingaman, Democrats and Republicans who put aside 3,000 years of seniority and 200 jurisdictional prerogatives and said: Let's just work together and see if we can get this done across party lines. That is not very interesting to people across the country, all this inside baseball about how the Senate works. But it has to work in order for something such as this to happen.

It is not a simple thing to take the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences and actually do them in both bodies, and yet that is what we have done. Not only did we start 2 years ago, when this was a Republican Congress, but we passed this legislation during a Democratic Congress almost without missing a step.

What happened was a bill that was sponsored by the leaders--last time it was Frist and Reid; now it is Reid and McConnell. They just changed the names because we had worked so well together--not only with ourselves but also with the Bush administration--that it was hard to tell whose bill it was.

At one time, this legislation that Senator Domenici and Senator Bingaman first introduced had 35 Republican cosponsors and 35 Democratic cosponsors, and the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, when she was the Democratic leader, was one of the first out to support it. It is especially gratifying to me that Tennesseans, if I may say so, have taken such a role in it in the House of Representatives. Representative Bart Gordon, who is now chairman of the Science Committee, was the lead conferee on this piece of legislation. Representative Zach Wamp, who represents the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, gave I thought the best speech on the House floor today on the Republican side. So again, it was bipartisan.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record at the end of my remarks an overview of the conference report we passed.

I mentioned a number of the Senators who had been so deeply involved in this. I mentioned the committee chairmen and the ranking members. But I would like to especially acknowledge the work of Senator John Ensign of Nevada, who was especially effective in reminding Republicans that investments in research and technology and science is as pro-growth as tax cuts. Senator Ensign was powerful on that subject. I believe it as strongly as he does. I believe he was more effective than I was. Senator Hutchison had been working with Senator Bingaman for years on advanced placement courses. Senator Mikulski was out front from the very beginning on this. There is an enormous list of Senators who made this happen.

There is also a long list of Democratic and Republican staff members who deserve thanks. The list is too long for me to read all those names tonight, but I ask unanimous consent that this list of staff members be printed in the Record following my remarks, with the thanks of all of us for their work.

I would like to especially thank Matt Sonnesyn who is sitting here beside me. When I was permitted to be on the faculty of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard at the time when the Senator from Arkansas's father was the Director of the Institute of Politics, Matt Sonnesyn was my course assistant. He came with me to my campaign, and then he came with me to the Senate. For the last 2 years, he has worked on this legislation with Senator Bingaman's staff and Senator Ensign's staff on this side--a tremendously effective staff group who has made this bill possible.

I see the Senator from Arkansas here, and I know he is going to close out in a few minutes, and I think I am coming toward the end of my remarks.

I would like to conclude by emphasizing two points--one about substance and one about process. I know the Senator from Arkansas and I have talked about this often. We are working together right now on a bipartisan project that has to do with the Iraq war. We believe there shouldn't be any partisan votes on the Iraq war. For example, we, Senator Salazar and I, are joined by 6 Republicans and 7 Democrats in cosponsoring legislation that would make the bipartisan Iraq Study Group the law of our country. If the Congress and the President would agree on this bill, we could send to our enemy and our troops and the world the message that as we go forward to wherever we go next in Iraq, we go together; we are united.

Each Tuesday we have a breakfast that Senator Lieberman and I host-- no staff, no media, no policy positions adopted--so that in the midst of all our team meetings among Republicans and Democrats, when we talk about what to do to each other, we can have a session where we build relationships and talk about how we move the country ahead. We have had as many as 40 Senators at those breakfasts.

It is important for the people of this country to know that we spend a lot of time working that way. We did tonight on the Children's Health Insurance bill with Senator Baucus and Senator Grassley working together in a bipartisan way. For 2 years, we have done that on legislation that goes straight to the heart of how we keep our jobs from going to China and India, which is what we passed tonight.

So the word I wish to say about process is that when the Senate tries and when we focus on big issues, we are perfectly capable of acting the way the rest of the country would hope we would act. We compromise on our differences and come up with a result that benefits family after family.

This legislation, the America COMPETES Act, will mean, for example, in my home State of Tennessee, opportunities for hundreds of math and science teachers and for thousands of students to go to summer academies and institutes of math and science. It will mean opportunities for thousands of students who now can't afford to take advanced placement courses in science and technology to be able to do so and for hundreds of teachers who aren't trained to teach those courses to have that training.

It will mean distinguished scientists will hold joint appointments at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, for example. It will mean support for a residential high school for science and math, which we have wanted to do in our State ever since I was Governor 20 years ago but didn't feel like we had the money. Now other States have it, and this bill provides some support for such a school.

It will mean a steady growth over 7 years in research funding, new support for early-career research grants in science and technology, and more support for all those kinds of studies that create the jobs that will keep our standard of living. That is what it means for my State. It means the same for New Jersey, and it means the same for Arkansas. So that bipartisan consensus we have seen here happens more often than most Americans know, but it doesn't happen as often as it should.

So this has been a privilege for me to work, especially with Senator Bingaman and Senator Domenici on the committee that I was a part of, to help get this started with Bart Gordon, my colleague from the House, the Democratic Congressman who is chairman of the Science Committee, and with all the other Senators. This is the kind of thing I hoped to do when I came to the Senate. I think each of us hopes when we come here to get up every day and do a little something constructive and then go home at night and come back the next day and see if we can find something more to do along that way. If all of us participate in that way in other big issues, as we have in this, the America COMPETES bill, the Senate will be a stronger institution and the country will be a better country.

So I thank my colleagues for their support and for the time tonight. I thank the Senator from Arkansas for staying late so I can make these remarks. This legislation, the America COMPETES Act which passed the House today overwhelmingly and passed the Senate unanimously, is at least as important as any piece of legislation that passes in these 2 years because we have accepted the advice of the wisest men and women in our country about what we ought to do to keep our brain power advantage so we can keep our jobs.

The President has done a big part of it. I am sure he will sign it. I hope he takes some credit because he deserves it. There is plenty of credit to go around. I think the country will be glad we acted.

I yield the floor.

Exhibit 1

Overview of the Conference Report on H.R. 2272, the America Creating

Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology,

Education, and Science Act (COMPETES)

Earlier this year, both the U.S. House and Senate passed

comprehensive legislation (H.R. 2272, S. 761) to ensure our

nation's competitive position in the world through

improvements to math and science education and a strong

commitment to research.

The Conference Agreement follows through on a commitment to

ensure U.S. students,

teachers, businesses and workers are prepared to continue

leading the world in innovation, research and technology--

well into the future.

In summary, the Conference Agreement:

Keeps research programs at National Science Foundation

(NSF), the National Institute of Standards and Technology

(NIST) and the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science

on a near-term doubling path;

Authorizes a total of $43.3 billion over fiscal years 2008-

2010 for science, technology, engineering and mathematics

(STEM) research and education programs across the federal

government;

Helps to prepare thousands of new teachers and provide

current teachers with content and teaching skills in their

area of education through NSF's Noyce Teacher Scholarship

Program and Math and Science Partnerships Program;

Creates the Technology Innovation Program (TIP) at NIST

(replacing the existing Advanced Technology Program or ATP)

to fund high-risk, high-reward, pre-competitive technology

development with high potential for public benefit;

Establishes an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy

(ARPA-E), a nimble and semiautonomous research agency at the

Department of Energy to engage in high-risk, high reward

energy research;

Expands programs at NSF to enhance the undergraduate

education of the future science and engineering workforce,

including at 2-year colleges;

Includes provisions throughout the bill to help broaden

participation in science and engineering fields at all

levels;

Authorizes two new competitive grant programs that will

enable partnerships to implement courses of study in

mathematics, science, engineering, technology or critical

foreign languages in ways that lead to a baccalaureate degree

with concurrent teacher certification;

Authorizes competitive grants to increase the number of

teachers serving high-need schools and expand access to AP

and IB classes and to increase the number of qualified AP and

IB teachers in high-need schools;

Expands early career grant programs and provides additional

support for outstanding young investigators at both NSF and

DOE; and

Strengthens interagency planning and coordination for

research infrastructure and information technology (i.e.

high-speed computing).

Following are more detailed summaries of the conference

agreement's eight titles:

TITLE I--Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)/Government Wide

Science

The conference agreement directs the President to convene a

National Science and Technology Summit to examine the health

and direction of the U.S. STEM enterprises; requires a

National Academy of Sciences study on barriers to innovation;

changes the National Technology Medal to the National

Technology and Innovation Medal; establishes a President's

Council on Innovation and Competitiveness (akin to the

President's Council on Science and Technology); requires

prioritization of planning for major research facilities and

instrumentation nationwide through the National Science

and Technology Council; and expresses a sense of Congress

that each federal research agency should support and

promote innovation through funding for high-risk, high-

reward research.

TITLE II--National Aeronautics and Space Administration

The conference agreement establishes the National

Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as a full

participant in all interagency activities to promote

competitiveness and innovation and to enhance science,

technology, engineering and mathematics education. The

agreement also affirms the importance of NASA's aeronautics

program to innovation and to the competitiveness of the

United States. It urges NASA to implement a program to

address aging workforce issues at NASA and to utilize NASA's

existing Undergraduate Student Research program to support

basic research by undergraduates on subjects of relevance to

NASA. Finally, the conference agreement expresses the sense

of Congress that the International Space Station (ISS)

National Laboratory offers unique opportunities for

educational activities and provides a unique resource for

research and development in science, technology, and

engineering which can enhance the global competitiveness of

the U.S.

TITLE III--National Institute of Standards and Technology

The conference agreement authorizes a total of $2.652

billion over fiscal years 2008-2010 for NIST. This includes

funds for the NIST labs, for lab construction, the TIP

program, and the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP)

Program: This funding level keeps the NIST labs on a path to

doubling in ten years.

The conference agreement funds the NIST Labs at $502.1

million for FY08 and increases the funding by 8% per year

(10-year doubling), which result in $541.9 million in FY09

and $584.8 million in FY10. The conferenqe agreement provides

$150.9 million in FY08 for lab construction. This funding is

reduced in each of the next two fiscal years, with funding

provided at $86.4 million in FY09 and $49.7 million FY10.

These out-year funding levels will allow the completion of

construction projects at NIST's Boulder, CO and Gaithersburg,

MD facilities. The MEP program is funded at $110 million in

FY08, $122 million in FY09 and $131.8 million FY10.

The conference agreement creates a new initiative, the

Technology Innovation Program (TIP) which is based on the

proven success of the Advanced Technology Program (ATP), but

better reflects global innovation competition by funding

high-risk, high-reward, pre-competitive technology

develoment, focusing on small- and medium-sized companies.

The TIP allows for greater industry input in the operation of

the program, allows university participation for the first

time, and firmly focuses the program on small- and medium-

sized high-tech firms.

TIP will replace ATP and bridge the funding gap between the

research lab and the marketplace. The conference agreement

provides an authorization of $100 million FY08, $131.5

million FY09 nd $140.5 million in FY10. These funding levels

will allow for a viable program, with approximately $40

million per year for new awards.

The agreement includes language to clarify that the focus

of TIP is to support, promote and accelerate innovation in

the U.S. through high-risk, high-reward research in areas of

critical national need. It specifies that large companies may

not receive any TIP funding.

Further, it provides a list of award criteria to ensure

that the proposed technology has a strong potential to

address critical national needs through transforming the

nation's capacity to deal with major societal challenges that

are not currently being addressed; that the applicant

provides evidence that the research will not be conducted

within a reasonable time period without TIP assistance; that

reasonable efforts were made by the applicant to secure

funding from alternative sources and that no other

alternative funding sources were reasonably available; and

that other entities have not already developed,

commercialized, marketed, distributed or sold similar

technologies. In addition, the NIST Director shall issue an

annual report on the program's activities. TIP may accept

funds from other federal agencies, and these funds will be

included as part of the federal cost share of any TIP

project.

TITLE IV--National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

The conference agreement establishes a coordinated ocean,

Great Lakes, coastal and atmospheric research and development

program for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric

Administration NOAA) in consultation with NSF and NASA. In

addition, NOAA is required to build upon existing educational

programs and activities to enhance public awareness and

understanding of the ocean, Great Lakes, and atmospheric

science. As a result, a science education plan is to be

developed that would set forth the goals and strategies for

NOAA, and be reevaluated and updated every 5 years. NOAA

would also be recognized for their historic contributions to

the innovation and competitiveness of this country, as well

as be recognized as a full participant in interagency efforts

to promote innovation and competitiveness.

TITLE V--Department of Energy

The conference agreement provides nearly $17 billion to

Department of Energy (DOE) programs over fiscal years 2008-

2010, keeping Office of Science on a seven-year doubling path

and establishes an Advanced Research Projects Agency for

Energy, or ARPA-E.

ARPA-E will address long-term and high-risk technological

barriers in energy through collaborative research and

development that private industry or the DOE are not likely

to undertake alone. Because of its autonomy within DOE, and

the flexibility and resources afforded to its technical

personnel, ARPA-E is structured to respond very quickly to

energy research challenges, as well as terminate or

restructure programs just as quickly. A fund is established

in the U.S. Treasury separate and distinct from DOE

appropriations, as will be the budget request for ARPA-E.

With this separate fund, ARPA-E will be independent of the

DOE bureaucracy, and likewise should not operate at the

expense of other programs at DOE, particularly the Office of

Science. The conference agreement authorizes $300,000,000 in

FY 2008, and such sums as are necessary thereafter for fiscal

years 2009 and 2010.

As the nation's largest supporter of the physical sciences,

the DOE Office of Science funds basic research and world-

class facilities that play an integral role in the effort to

maintain the technological competitiveness of the U.S. The

conference agreement contains an authorization for the Office

of Science which extends the 7 year doubling track prescribed

in Energy Policy Act of 2005 by authorizing Fiscal Year 2010

at a funding level of $5.8 billion.

The conference agreement provides $150 million for K-12

science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)

education programs that capitalize on the unique scientific

and engineering resources of the national laboratories. These

programs include a pilot program of grants to states to help

establish or expand statewide specialty high schools in STEM

education; a program to provide internship opportunities for

middle and high-school students at the national labs, with

priority given to students from high-needs schools; a program

at each national lab to help establish a Center of Excellence

in STEM education in at least one high-need public secondary

school in each lab region in order to develop and disseminate

best practices in STEM education; and

a program to establish or expand summer institutes at the

national labs and partner universities in order to improve

the STEM content knowledge of K-12 teachers throughout the

country.

All of these programs would be coordinated by a newly

appointed Director for STEM Education at the Department, who

would also serve as an interagency liaison for K-12 STEM

education. In keeping with ongoing efforts to improve

coordination and evaluation of K-12 STEM education programs

across the federal government, all of the programs authorized

in this conference agreement require evaluation and reporting

of program impact.

In addition, the conference agreement highlights the

critical role of young investigators working in areas

relevant to the mission of DOE by establishing an early

career grant program for scientists at both universities and

the national labs; and a graduate research fellowship program

for outstanding graduate students in these fields. The

agreement also brings attention to research and education

needs in the nuclear sciences and hydrocarbon systems

sciences by establishing programs of grants to Universities

to establish or expand degree programs in these areas.

Finally, the conference agreement helps DOE recruit

distinguished scientists to the national labs and foster

collaboration between universities and the labs by providing

competitive grants to support joint appointments between the

two.

TITLE VI--Department of Education

To enhance teacher education in the STEM fields and

critical foreign languages, the conference agreement

authorizes two new competitive grant programs. The programs

will specifically enable partnerships to implement courses of

study in STEM fields and critical foreign language that lead

to a baccalaureate degree with concurrent teacher

certification and at the graduate level the conference

agreement implements 2- or 3-year part-time master's degree

programs in these areas for current teachers to improve their

content knowledge and pedagogical skills. The conference bill

authorizes $151,200,000 for the baccalaureate degree program

and $125,000,000 for the master's degree program for fiscal

year 2008 and the two succeeding fiscal years.

The conference agreement authorizes competitive grants to

increase the number of highly qualified teachers serving

high-need schools and expand access to AP and IB classes; as

well as authorize the Secretary of Education to contract with

the National Academy of Sciences to convene a national panel

within a year after the enactment of this Act to identify

promising practices in the teaching of science, technology,

engineering and mathematics in elementary and secondary

schools. It also authorizes appropriations of $65,000,000 for

fiscal year 2008 and such sums as may be necessary for each

of the two succeeding fiscal years.

The conference agreement authorizes new grant programs to

enhance math education in elementary and middle school

mathematics and provides grants to support the following

activities to assist states to implement programs for

secondary schools and in addition to other best practices and

in-service training, the bill provides targeted help to low-

income students who are struggling with mathematics. The

conference agreement also authorizes a competitive grant

program to increase the number of students studying critical

foreign languages, starting in elementary school and

continuing through postsecondary education programs.

The Secretary of Education is authorized to award

competitive grants to states to promote better alignment of

elementary and secondary education with the knowledge and

skills needed to succeed in academic credit-bearing

coursework in institutions of higher education, in the 21st

century workforce and in the Armed Forces. The Secretary is

also authorized to award grants of $50,000 to three

elementary and three secondary schools, with a high

concentration of low-income students in each state, whose

students demonstrate the largest improvement in mathematics

and science.

TITLE VII--National Science Foundation

The conference agreement provides $22 billion to the

National Science Foundation (NSF) over fiscal years 2008-

2010, putting it on a path to double in approximately 7

years. Particularly strong increases are provided in fiscal

year 2008 for K-12 STEM education programs at NSF. These

programs, including the Noyce Teacher Scholarship program and

the Math and Science Partnerships program will help to

prepare thousands of new STEM teachers and provide current

teachers with content and pedagogical expertise in their area

of teaching.

In addition to providing increased support for programs

that address the earliest stages of the STEM workforce

pipeline, the conference report will help create thousands of

new STEM college grduates, including 2-year college

graduates, through increased support for the STEM talent

expansion (STEP) program and the Advanced Technological

Education (ATE) program.

For those STEM graduates who continue on the path toward

academic careers, the conferece agreement provides critical

support for young, innovative researchers by expanding the

graduate research fellowships (GRF) and integrative graduate

education and research traineeship (IGERT) programs,

strengthening the early career grants (CAREER) program, and

creating a new pilot program of seed grants for outstanding

new investigators. Such programs have an additional benefit

of helping to stimulate high-risk, high-reward research by

identifying and taking a chance on the best and brightest

young minds.

Finally, the conference agreement includes provisions

throughout the bill to help broaden participation in STEM

fields at all levels, from kindergarten students through

academic researchers. These include several programs of

outreach and mentoring for women and minorities, a request

for a National Academy of Sciences report to identify

barriers to and opportunities for increasing the number of

underrepresented minorities in STEM fields, and an emphasis

on inclusion of students and teachers from high-needs

schools.

Mr. President, will the Chair let me know when 6 minutes has expired?

Mr. President, when I was first elected to the Senate in 2002, I recognized the so-called maiden speech tradition, and I came here expecting to talk about U.S. history. I was so disappointed by the debate that I found going on in February of 2003 about the President's appointment of Miguel Estrada to the Supreme Court that I spoke for a long time one night about the unfairness that I felt about that. I thought he was a superbly qualified individual and that a case was being manufactured against him to try to prevent an up-or-down vote.

Then, along came the nomination of Judge Charles Pickering, of Mississippi, who in the 1950s and 1960s, while others were making speeches about civil rights, was living it out in the middle of Mississippi, testifying against someone who was described as the ``most violent living racist'' in Mississippi and putting his children into desegregated schools at a time when others weren't. There was a manufactured, unfair case against him.

The Senate came to its senses shortly thereafter and began to develop a procedure where judges could get an up-or-down vote, which brings me to the matter of Judge Leslie Southwick, of Mississippi, whom the President has nominated to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit--the same position for which Judge Pickering was nominated. Yet, despite his excellent qualifications, his nomination has not been reported to the floor by the Judiciary Committee for a fair up-or-down vote. It seems that Judge Southwick may be the first target in a new round of character assassination by some in this body.

That seat has been vacant for 6 years. This is one of the most important courts in America. I was a law clerk on that court--actually a messenger, but I was treated like a law clerk--to the great Judge John Minor Wisdom, who served with Judge Tuttle, Judge Rives, and Judge Brown, all of whom presided over the segregation of the South. I value that court and the quality of judges who have been there.

Judge Southwick has that same quality. He has 11 years of service as a Mississippi State appellate court judge. He had military service in Iraq as a staff judge advocate. He has been a professor

at Mississippi College of Law. He has had service as a senior Justice Department official. He has had more than 20 years in private practice in Jackson. He is rated unanimously ``well qualified'' by the American Bar Association. He has been honored by the Mississippi State Bar with its Judicial Excellence Award.

What is it about the Democrats and Mississippi judges? This is an enormously well-qualified judge from Mississippi, and the Democrats, apparently because he is from Mississippi, do not want to give him a fair up-or-down vote. That is totally unfair and it is beneath the dignity of this body and I object to it strenuously. This judgeship has been labeled a ``judicial emergency'' by the nonpartisan Administrative Office of the Courts.

What is the manufactured case? The case that has been made against him, if a student were to send it in to any accredited law school, would be sent back with an F and the student would be told to prepare better.

First, it is said he participated in an opinion he didn't even write which put the first amendment ahead of a racial slur. That is always-- always--a difficult decision to make, but the Mississippi Supreme Court said it was the correct decision. Judge Southwick reiterated his disdain for racial slurs. He said the racial slur in question is ``always offensive'' and ``inherently and highly derogatory.''

He did not even write the opinion. Yet for some reason that is thought to be inappropriate.

Then they said he joined in a case that used the words ``homosexual lifestyle.'' He didn't write the opinion. That phrase ``homosexual lifestyle'' may not be preferred by some, but it is very commonly used in American legal opinions by the U.S. Supreme Court, for example, in Lawrence v. Texas, striking down the Texas ban on sodomy. It was also used by President Bill Clinton when he announced his ``don't ask don't tell'' policy. That is the manufactured case.

So I ask my colleagues to remember the difficulties we had in 2003 and 2004, when the Senate did not look at its best, when it was manufacturing cases against otherwise well-qualified and distinguished men and women who had been nominated to the court.

I hope the Judiciary Committee will bring Judge Leslie Southwick's name forward to the full Senate so we can have an up-or-down vote. He deserves a vote. The Senate deserves to respect its traditions regarding nominees, and the American people deserve to be served by a man of such quality.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, today I joined Senators Klobuchar and Lieberman in introducing the Regional Presidential Primary and Caucus Act. Our legislation would establish a rotating schedule of regional presidential primaries and caucuses.

We introduced this legislation because we agree that the Presidential nomination system is broken. The American dream that ``any boy or girl can grow up to be President'' has become a nightmare.

Crowded schedules and government restraints on contributions close primaries to worthy competitors. States racing to schedule early contests have made the nomination process too long and expensive. As a result, media and money make decisions voters should make.

The National Football League schedules 16 contests over 5 months to determine its champions. The Presidential nominating process uses the equivalent of two preseason contests in Iowa and New Hampshire to narrow the field to two or three and sometimes pick the winner.

If professional football were Presidential politics, SportsCenter would pick the Super Bowl teams after two preseason games.

The problem is not Iowa and New Hampshire. The problem is what comes after Iowa and New Hampshire. At least 18 States will choose delegates in a 1-day traffic jam on February 5 next year.

The legislation we introduced today requires States to spread out the primaries and caucuses into a series of regional contests over four months. Beginning in 2012, States could only schedule primaries and caucuses during the first weeks of March, April, May, and June of Presidential years.

The traditional warm up contests in Iowa and New Hampshire would still come first, but they would return to their proper role as ``off- Broadway'' opportunities for lesser known candidates to become well- enough known to compete on the 4-month-long big stage.

In addition, at the appropriate time I will offer an amendment to this legislation that would allow Presidential candidates to raise up to $20 million in individual contribution amounts of up to $10,000, indexed for inflation. The current limit of $2,300 makes it too hard for many worthy but unknown candidates to raise enough early money to be taken seriously--leaving the field to the rich--who constitutionally can spend their own funds--and famous.

Together, these two reforms--spreading out the primaries and allowing a ``start-up'' fund for candidates--will increase the pool of good candidates willing to run for the White House and give more Americans the opportunity to hear their ideas and to cast a meaningful vote.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have the following documents printed in the Congressional Record: a David Broder column, ``No Way to Choose a President,'' that ran in the May 10, 2007 issue of The Washington Post; Remarks that I delivered on the floor of the Senate on February 2, 2004 titled ``Two Super Bowls''; and a lecture I delivered at the Heritage Foundation on May 23, 1996 titled ``Off With the Limits: What I Learned About Money and Politics When I Ran for President.''

Mr. President, today I joined Senators Klobuchar and Lieberman in introducing the Regional Presidential Primary and Caucus Act. Our legislation would establish a rotating schedule of regional presidential primaries and caucuses.

We introduced this legislation because we agree that the Presidential nomination system is broken. The American dream that ``any boy or girl can grow up to be President'' has become a nightmare.

Crowded schedules and government restraints on contributions close primaries to worthy competitors. States racing to schedule early contests have made the nomination process too long and expensive. As a result, media and money make decisions voters should make.

The National Football League schedules 16 contests over 5 months to determine its champions. The Presidential nominating process uses the equivalent of two preseason contests in Iowa and New Hampshire to narrow the field to two or three and sometimes pick the winner.

If professional football were Presidential politics, SportsCenter would pick the Super Bowl teams after two preseason games.

The problem is not Iowa and New Hampshire. The problem is what comes after Iowa and New Hampshire. At least 18 States will choose delegates in a 1-day traffic jam on February 5 next year.

The legislation we introduced today requires States to spread out the primaries and caucuses into a series of regional contests over four months. Beginning in 2012, States could only schedule primaries and caucuses during the first weeks of March, April, May, and June of Presidential years.

The traditional warm up contests in Iowa and New Hampshire would still come first, but they would return to their proper role as ``off- Broadway'' opportunities for lesser known candidates to become well- enough known to compete on the 4-month-long big stage.

In addition, at the appropriate time I will offer an amendment to this legislation that would allow Presidential candidates to raise up to $20 million in individual contribution amounts of up to $10,000, indexed for inflation. The current limit of $2,300 makes it too hard for many worthy but unknown candidates to raise enough early money to be taken seriously--leaving the field to the rich--who constitutionally can spend their own funds--and famous.

Together, these two reforms--spreading out the primaries and allowing a ``start-up'' fund for candidates--will increase the pool of good candidates willing to run for the White House and give more Americans the opportunity to hear their ideas and to cast a meaningful vote.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have the following documents printed in the Congressional Record: a David Broder column, ``No Way to Choose a President,'' that ran in the May 10, 2007 issue of The Washington Post; Remarks that I delivered on the floor of the Senate on February 2, 2004 titled ``Two Super Bowls''; and a lecture I delivered at the Heritage Foundation on May 23, 1996 titled ``Off With the Limits: What I Learned About Money and Politics When I Ran for President.''

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my amendment described by Senator Murray be modified. The modification is at the desk.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Washington for her courtesy. I thank the Senator from Mississippi for his help with this amendment, facilitating its coming to the floor last night at a late hour. I am grateful to him for that.

This is an amendment which I described on the Senate floor yesterday. It is an amendment involving REAL ID. I am offering the amendment with several cosponsors, including Senator Collins of Maine, Senator Warner, and Senator Voinovich. It is my intention to use about 10 minutes of our 30 minutes on this side and to reserve the rest of that time for Senators Collins, Warner, and Voinovich, if they choose to come to the floor in support of this.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Kyl of Arizona be added as a cosponsor to the amendment.

Mr. President, this amendment would provide $300 million in funding to the States to implement the program known as REAL ID. It is offset with a .8-percent across-the-board cut in the rest of the bill. The total pricetag of the rest of the bill, the Homeland Security appropriations bill, is about $37.6 billion.

I will have a word to say about the offset in a moment. I know the Senator from Washington will have a few more words to say about the offsets when her time comes. I would prefer another offset, but I will talk about that a little later.

First, let me describe again what the amendment does. I would ask the Chair if I can be informed when 10 minutes has expired.

Mr. President, after 9/11, the 9/11 Commission recommended that in light of the terrorism our country faces, we begin to study how we can have more secure identification cards. A number of the terrorists had stolen cards or had fraudulent cards or had ID cards that were not real.

As a result of that, the Congress passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act at the end of 2004 which established a process by which we could look at the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission. It established a negotiated rule-making process.

Because most of the ideas about ID cards involved State and local governments, all of them involved issues of privacy, all of them involved the possibility of great inconvenience to most Americans, this negotiated rule-making process would basically create a seat at the table for representatives of all the affected groups and try to work out the most sensible thing to do.

I have historically been opposed to the idea of an ID card. When I was Governor of Tennessee, I twice vetoed the photo driver's license bill because I thought it was an infringement on liberty. But the legislature overrode me, I accepted it, and today, after 9/11, I agree it would be wise for our country, with a combination of terrorism and the difficulties within immigration, to have more secure identification cards.

The question is, which one? Then suddenly, in 2005, along came an appropriations bill for our troops, and in the middle of it, the House of Representatives stuck something called the REAL ID Act, which set minimum standards for State driver's licenses as an effort to deter terrorists from easily obtaining that form of identification.

Well, that could be a good idea. But there are 245 million Americans with driver's licenses or ID cards. Many of us send those in by mail or online to renew them. Last year in the State of Tennessee, for example, there were 1.7 million driver's licenses issued. There are 53 driver's license identification stations. I believe the only group of people who could have passed REAL ID in the dead of the night, without any hearings, were Congressmen who had never been to a driver's license examining station in Tennessee or maybe in their own State, because these are not State employees who are trained in catching terrorists. They are not equipped to deal with the large number of new responsibilities, in a State which is going to have REAL ID, that include having to come in person to that driver's license office and show a number of documents, including the Social Security card and a valid U.S. passport.

We would have to prove, I would have to prove, that I am lawfully a citizen of the United States. Our family has been here for 12 generations. Senator Salazar has been here for 13 generations. The Presiding Officer has written a book about the number of generations his family has been here. We would have to go down to one of these driver's license stations and prove we belonged here. Nobody else ever had to do that before in my family that I know about. But in an age of terrorism, we might have to do that.

At the very least, I would think we would want to do one of two things: One would be that in the Senate, in the Homeland Security Committee or other appropriate committees, we might want to think about whether there might be other ways to come up with a better secure identification card, rather than add that to the burden of the driver's license.

For example, most of the problems that surround the immigration bill have to do with work, people coming into this country illegally to get a job. That is what most of it is about. Senator Schumer and Senator Graham have a piece of legislation that would create a secure Social Security card.

Now, I wonder if, over a period of years, having workers with a Social Security card that is secure, includes biometrics, and a good employer verification system, might not be a more sensible way for us to improve the question of whether we have secure identification cards.

There is the idea of more passports. Already we have a backlog because of the number of American who are getting a passport. But passports are a more secure identification. Maybe there should be a secure travel card we could use when we travel on airplanes. For example, there are a couple million

of us at a time who are up in the air. If we all had one of those cards, you begin to add all those up--you may have some driver's licenses that are more secure, a secure work card, a passport and a travel card, a variety of secure cards would begin to avoid the terrors we imagine from a ``Big Brother'' national ID card.

We remember what happened with that sort of thing in Nazi Germany and in South Africa, where you had to carry around a wallet and a portfolio describing how mixed your blood might be so they can determine your race. We do not want that in the United States.

So that would be the kind of discussion we should have had in hearings before any of this was adopted. We were going to have that with the negotiated rule-making process, before suddenly this so-called REAL ID card comes through here at night and we have to vote for it, up or down, or not send any money to support the troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We can get an idea of what the REAL ID surge might cost by looking at what is happening right now with the passport backlog in the United States. There were 12 million passports issued in 2006. This year there are going to be 17 million because of new travel requirements. The Passport Office employees are working hard, but they grossly underestimated, or we did, what the new demand would be.

As a result, there was a backlog of 3 million passports in March. Today it is 2.3 million. The turnaround time used to be 6 weeks, now it is 12 to 14 weeks on regular service and 4 to 6 on expedited service. We have destroyed summer vacations, we have ruined weddings and honeymoon plans, we have disrupted business meetings and educational trips. People lost days of work waiting in line. If we think the passport backlog has created consternation, imagine what it is going to be like when 245 million Americans, many who have been used to renewing their driver's licenses by mail, many who have thought of themselves and their parents and grandparents as good, legal Americans, have to go to their driver's license station with a pack of documents and prove they are legally here.

Then they might get right up to the door and somebody says: You forgot one thing, and they have to go all the way back home, get it, and stand back in line again. I bet we get more calls on that than we did on immigration.

There is another problem I would like to describe. It is one I am trying to address with this amendment. I am trying to provide three hundred million dollars next year to help States who wish to comply with REAL ID pay for it. Now, not all States will take advantage of this because 17 States have already

The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Nelson of Nebraska.) The Senator has used 10 minutes.

I will continue with my time because I do not see Senator Collins or Senator Warner or Senator Voinovich. I will take another 4 or 5 minutes. If they don't come, then I will give back my time, except a minute or two to the Senator from Washington and let the Senator from Washington be recognized.

But let me talk about the money a minute. Seventeen State legislatures, including Tennessee, have passed legislation against REAL ID. We do not want it. We want something else. But for those who do have it, they have to get cracking because it says here: States have to be ready to comply with these new measures by May of next year.

The Department of Homeland Security has not even issued final regulations about what the compliance must be. But the Department, thanks to the good work of Senator Collins and others with an amendment we had earlier this year, has agreed to grant waivers to States for delayed implementation. So States have a little bit of time to work on this, if they choose to.

But 17 States do not want to. However, we have a principle here called federalism. Much of it is incorporated in the 10th amendment to the Constitution. I see our constitutional expert, the Senator from West Virginia, on the floor. When I was Governor, I said on the floor many times, nothing made me madder than when some Congressman or Senator would stand up with a big idea, pass it, hold a press conference taking credit for it, and send the bill to me. I would have to either raise tuition or cut this or change that, and then that same Congressman would be home making a big speech about local control the next weekend.

I did not like that. It was called unfunded Federal mandates. I have also stated many times on this floor that the Republican Congress got elected in 1994 running against these mandates. They stood on the steps of the Capitol in 1994 with Newt Gingrich. They said: No more unfunded mandates. If we break our promise, throw us out. Maybe that is one of the reasons they did throw us out, because we forgot that promise.

We forget it with REAL ID because, according to the National Governors Association, implementing it would cost $11 billion over 5 years. The Department of Homeland Security itself expects the cost to reach $20 billion over 10 years.

Today, the Federal Government has appropriated only $40 million for the States to comply with those mandates, even though it could cost $20 billion over 10 years.

We are not supposed to be doing that. If we want to require it, we should pay for it. My view of unfunded mandates is we ought to either fund REAL ID or we ought to repeal it. We should not require it unless we are going to pay for it. I see the Chair, the distinguished former Governor himself, the Senator from Nebraska. When I described how I felt about unfunded mandates as Governor of Tennessee, I imagine he felt exactly the same way. I have sought, working with Senators Collins, Warner, Voinovich, and Kyl, to identify a way to begin to deal with this issue of the unfunded Federal mandate. That is where this $300 million amendment comes from.

The National Governors Association met last weekend. They issued the following statement regarding REAL ID:

If Congress is truly committed to transforming REAL ID into

a reasonable and workable law that actually increases the

security of our citizens, it must commit the Federal funds

necessary to implement this Federal mandate. As the Senate

considers the Homeland Security appropriations bill for

fiscal year 2008, the Nation's Governors urge Senators to

support Senator Alexander's efforts to begin funding the

mandates imposed by REAL ID. States estimate the cost of REAL

ID will exceed $11 billion over 5 years, including $1 billion

in up-front costs merely to create systems and processes

necessary to implement the law and prepare to re-enroll all

245 million driver's license and identification cardholders.

To date Congress has appropriated only $40 million to assist

States.

I only have one more point to make. Then I will yield the floor and reserve the remainder of the time.

The chairman of the Appropriations Committee and the ranking member allowed me to discuss this and bring up this amendment during committee deliberations. I thank them for that. I offered offsets from other funds that States were receiving. A majority of the members of the committee didn't like the offsets. That is not so unusual in the world in which we live. My amendment was defeated in the Appropriations Committee. I am coming to the floor with a different offset. It is 0.8 percent across the board cut in the rest of the bill. I know very well that the chairman of the committee and the chairman of the subcommittee and other Senators don't like that offset, but I suggest to my colleagues that there are others of us who don't like underfunded Federal mandates. If the Congress is going to impose on the States a $20 billion cost over 10 years, then we should pay for it. We have only appropriated $40 million.

As the Governors said, it is time for us to move ahead and appropriate $300 million this year, only a downpayment on what we should pay, and if the offset we adopt today is not the one the chairman and others would prefer, then perhaps there is an opportunity during conference on an this appropriations bill of $37.6 billion to make that adjustment.

I thank the managers of the bill for giving me a chance to bring the amendment to the floor. I will yield the floor and wait to see if Senator Collins or others decide to come. If they do not come, I will yield back the rest of my time except for 2 minutes.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I know Senator Collins, Senator Voinovich, Senator Warner, and Senator Kyl--all cosponsors of the bill--had hoped to speak, but I am not sure any of them are able to come now, so I wish to reserve 2 minutes prior to the vote, but other than that, I say to the managers and to the distinguished chairman of the committee that on this side we are ready to go forward.

Mr. President, if I might ask the managers of the bill, if I am not mistaken, after my 2 minutes, we can proceed to a vote?

If I am not mistaken, after the 2 minutes I have, we may proceed to a vote?

Mr. President, I agreed with the last half of the Senator from Montana's statement, but the first half was an eloquent argument for a $20 billion unfunded mandate for the States of Montana and Nebraska and Tennessee and everybody else. If we are going pass it, we ought to fund it. And if we are not going to fund it, we ought to repeal it. That is my position.

We passed the law in 1995, the Federal Unfunded Mandate Act, but the REAL ID program imposes on the States, according to the Department of Homeland Security, an up to $20 billion unfunded mandate. It will require up to 245 million of us to go in and prove we are lawfully here and stand in line at our driver's license offices. Seventeen States have said they don't like it, including mine.

The National Governors Association meeting in Traverse City, MI, last week generated a letter to all of us saying: If you are going to require it, fund it. That is what we are beginning to do.

If you think the passport backlog is a big problem, wait until the driver's license backlog comes if we don't properly fund REAL ID or repeal it. There will be weddings. There will be vacations. There will be honeymoons. There will be trips. But there will be work days messed up. There will be a lot of mad Americans, and rightly so.

So this amendment would make a small installment payment of $300 million for the REAL ID program we imposed on the States. Surely the conference can find, in a $37.6 billion bill, $300 million to do what we are supposed to do. If we require it, we should fund it. The Republican Congressmen were right in 1994 when they said it, and if we can't remember that, they should throw us out.

I urge a ``yes'' vote on behalf of myself, Senator Collins, Senator Warner, Senator Kyl, and Senator Voinovich, the cosponsors of this amendment.

I yield the floor.

I ask the manager of the bill if it would be appropriate for me to speak now on the amendment I propose to offer. Seeing no objection, I will proceed.

Mr. President, I will not ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside because I understand from the bill's managers that at this point there would be an objection to that.

That disappoints me. I have an amendment I would like to offer. It is an amendment we discussed in the full Appropriations Committee when it was considered, and I hope I have the opportunity to offer the amendment at another time.

The amendment was filed earlier today. It is No. 2405. The amendment has as cosponsor Senator Collins.

I ask unanimous consent at this time that Senator Voinovich and Senator Warner be added as cosponsors to amendment No. 2405.

Mr. President, this amendment, the Alexander-Collins- Voinovich-Warner amendment, has to do with the law we call REAL ID.

I will describe REAL ID in a moment, but fundamentally what the amendment proposes is to offer $300 million in funding to the States to implement REAL ID. The offset would be a 0.8-percent across-the-board cut in the rest of the bill. The total bill is $37 billion, more or less. I know that offset is not one the chairman and ranking member of the committee are likely to approve of, but during our committee discussions I offered other offsets which weren't approved of, and I feel strongly that if the Congress requires the States to adopt REAL ID or something similar to REAL ID, then the Congress ought to pay for it--hence the $300 million amendment.

Someone once said about me last year--and I haven't been here very long, this is my fifth year as a Senator, but I have been around a while--they said the problem with Lamar is he hasn't gotten over being Governor, which I was privileged to be in my home State of Tennessee for several years.

I hope when I get over being Governor, the people of Tennessee send me home because I think one of the contributions I can make is to remind the Congress and remind the country that our country's strengths begin with strong communities and strong counties and strong cities and strong States and that the central government, according to our traditions and our Constitution, is for the rest of the things that States, communities, cities and counties can't do. According to the 10th amendment and its spirit, if we require it of the State and local governments from here, we should fund it from here.

Nothing used to make me more angry as a Governor than for some Senator or Congressman to pass a bill with a big-sounding idea in Washington, DC, hold a press conference, take credit for it, and then send the bill to me to pay. Then that same Senator or Congressman more than likely would be back in Tennessee within the next few weeks making a big speech at the Lincoln Day or Jackson Day dinner about local control.

This is such an important issue that the 1994 elections turned on it, to a great extent. I remember dozens of Republican Congressmen and candidates standing with Newt Gingrich on the Capitol steps, saying:

No more unfunded Federal mandates. If we break our promise,

send us home.

That may be one of the reasons the Republican Congress got sent home last year, because we hadn't paid enough attention to that promise. I can remember Senator Dole, when he was the majority leader in the Senate in 1995. He was campaigning for President, campaigning around the country and I was often at the same events. He would hold up his copy of the Constitution and talk about the 10th amendment. That is the spirit I wish to talk about today.

The REAL ID Act began in a good way. The 9/11 Commission recommended, in some fairly vague language, that we needed to improve our identification documents in the United States. The Commission found that:

[a]ll but one of the 9/11 hijackers acquired some form of

U.S. identification document, some by fraud. Acquisition of

these documents would have assisted them in boarding

commercial flights, renting cars, and other necessary

activities.

So said the 9/11 Commission. The Commission added that the Federal Government should:

. . . set standards for the issuance of . . . sources of

identification, such as drivers' licenses. Fraud in

identification documents is no longer just a problem of

theft.

The Congress began to implement the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission soon thereafter, and in December of 2004 the Senate passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 which called for States to create secure driver's licenses and ID cards under section 7212 of the bill.

It established a negotiated rulemaking process that included State government officials, which was a direct effort to deal with the problem I discussed. Through that, standards would be promulgated that would make it more difficult to create and obtain fraudulent driver's licenses.

The purpose of the negotiated rulemaking process was so that as Congress said that our national needs called for more secure documents, the State and local governments could say let us talk with you about the realities at home, about what we use driver's licenses for, about how many there are, about what the cost would be of implementing new standards, and about how long it might take. In addition, we might have some other ideas about a different kind of secure document that might be better than a driver's license for this purpose. And there are some privacy standards we are worried about.

In addition to that, the experience with national identification cards around the world hasn't been all that promising. In Nazi Germany it wasn't a good story. Those who remember the more recent history of South Africa, when every citizen had a card to carry around which would decree what their race is and whether they were of mixed blood, that sort of ``Big Brother'' attitude is of great concern in the land of liberty, the United States of America. So the negotiated rulemaking process was to take into account all of that.

Then came along the REAL ID Act of 2005 in the midst of all this careful consideration. It was attached to the emergency supplemental appropriations bill of 2005. In other words, it was stuck in, by the House of Representatives, on the troop funding bill and it was signed into law by the President in May. We had no choice but to pass it. We had our men and women in Afghanistan and Iraq. We had to pay the bills for their service. This was just stuck in there. We had to vote it up or down and REAL ID became law. The Senate didn't hold any hearings. It was swept through Congress.

The REAL ID Act superseded that negotiated rulemaking process included in the Intelligence Reform bill, in which the States and the Federal Government were working back and forth to set minimum standards for State driver's licenses in an effort to deter terrorists. REAL ID established a de facto national ID card by setting Federal standards for State driver's licenses and making the States create and issue them.

One might say the States don't have to do it. They don't have to do it unless they want their citizens to be unable to fly on airplanes or obtain other necessary Federal services. It is a Hobson's choice. So, in effect, the REAL ID law, with no hearings, no consideration of whether there might be some other kind of card or set of different cards that would be more appropriate, became law. The States had to comply with that and that meant 245 million U.S. driver's licenses or ID holders would have to get new identification.

The Department of Homeland Security has not yet issued final regulations of this massive act, even though the States are supposed to be ready to comply with these new standards and measures by May 11 of next year, 2008. Final regulations are expected to be released in the early fall, and this will give States just months to reach the May 2008 deadline.

It is true that, thanks to Senator Collins and others, and our willingness to forgo an amendment earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security agreed to grant waivers to States to delay implementation. But, still, under the present route, 245 million people in America will need to get new ID cards by May of 2013.

REAL ID is a massive unfunded mandate on the States to begin with. Last fall the National Governors Association and others released a study putting the cost of REAL ID at $11 billion over 5 years. The Department of Homeland Security itself said the cost may reach $20 billion over 10 years. To date, the Federal Government has appropriated $40 million for the States to comply with REAL ID, and only $6 million of the $40 million has actually been given to the States.

Here we go again. After a lot of promises from Washington, DC, on this side of the aisle and on that side of the aisle--we say no more unfunded mandates, but we have a real big idea, we announce it, take credit for it and send the bill to the Governors and the legislatures. We let them worry about whether to raise college tuitions, raise property taxes, or cut services over here--worry how do we pay for this new mandate?

No wonder 17 States now have passed legislation opposing the REAL ID Act, including Tennessee, which became the 16th State on June 11 of this year.

To get an idea of what REAL ID would require, first, you have to prove the applicant's identity, which would take a passport, birth certificate, a consular report--there are a number of other documents that could be used. Then you have to prove your date of birth. That might mean you have to bring in two documents. Then you have to prove your Social Security number. That might mean you have to go find your Social Security card. I wonder how many people have their Social Security card today. You are up to three documents. You need the address of your principal residence--you have to prove that. Then you have to prove you are lawfully here. That is not just for someone who is becoming a citizen or someone coming here, this is for every single person who drives a car or gets an ID; he or she has to prove they are lawfully here under REAL ID. In all the States, that is 245 million people.

In Tennessee last year, there were 1,711,000 new or renewed driver's licenses. I renewed mine by mail; 154,000 renewed theirs online. There will be no mail renewals, there will be no online renewals in Tennessee or Maryland or Mississippi or Washington State. Everybody will get to go to the driver's license office. There are 53 of those in Tennessee, and 1.7 million of us will show up at those 53 offices, not just at one time, not just in 1 week, but just in 1 month, scrambling around, trying to figure out what documents we need to have. I can imagine there are going to be phone calls coming into our offices that make the phone calls on immigration look like a Sunday school class.

We need only look at the recent passport backlog to imagine what might happen with the REAL ID backlog. We remember that the passport quagmire in which we have been in the last few months was triggered by a very well intentioned policy change designed to thwart terrorists. Specifically, new rules were implemented in January of 2007 requiring Americans to have passports for travel between the United States and Canada, Mexico and most of the islands of the Caribbean. This caused a massive surge in passport applications. There were 12 million passports issued in 2006. The State Department expects to issue 17 million this year--a 42-percent increase. Prior to the passport regulations, applications were increasing at a rate of 1 to 2 million a year. We are expecting an increase of 5 million applications from 2006 to 2007.

In March of this year, there was a backlog of 3 million passports. The current backlog is 2.3 million passports. Prior to the new regulations, turnaround time was 6 weeks on regular service and 2 weeks on expedited service. At the worst part of this year, they were running 12 to 14 weeks on regular service and 4 to 6 weeks on expedited service. This massive backlog destroyed summer vacations, ruined wedding and honeymoon plans, disrupted business meetings and educational trips, caused people to lose days of work waiting in line, and caused people to lose money for nonrefundable travel and hotel deposits and reservations.

My office has worked with the passport office over the last few months. I would compliment them for the dedication of the employees and how they were trying to deal with this massive surge, but we imposed upon them a burden they simply could not handle.

What do we say to the people of Tennessee: Show up at our 53 driver's license offices with the correct documentation; otherwise, you may wait for 2 hours, you get up to the window, and then they tell you've forgotten your Social Security card and you must come back again. If they show up over 1 month, this is going to make the passport application surge look like a small problem.

I believe we have a choice in Congress. I think insofar as REAL ID goes, we should either fund it or we should repeal it. Fund it or repeal it.

It may be that we need to have a national identification card. I have always been opposed to that, but we live in a different era now. But I would much prefer to have seen the Senate debate this in the usual way and let us consider, for example, whether a secure work card, such as the kind Senator Schumer and Senator Graham have proposed and Senator Cornyn and I have talked about, might not be a better form of ID card.

Most of our immigration problems, for example, are related to work. Maybe a secure identification card would be better, a secure Social Security card would be better, or maybe, because of privacy concerns and our memory of Nazi Germany and our memory of South Africa, we want to be very careful about having anything that is actually called a national ID card or even a de facto ID card. So maybe we can work over a period of years and help to create several cards: maybe a travel card that some can use on airplanes or other forms of travel; maybe a work card; maybe some States would want to use the driver's license as that form of ID card. But the point would be that there would be three or four choices which could be used for ID which would be secure and would help with the terrorism threat we face.

I regret very much that we did not have a chance to take this problem, this recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, properly through the Senate and consider it. I was glad to see the legislation that created the negotiated rulemaking process that at least involved the States in what is going on.

We have an obligation in this body to recognize the fact that if we are going to have something called REAL ID--and according to our own Department of Homeland Security, it is going to cost $20 billion over 10 years--then we have a responsibility to appropriate that money or most of that money to pay for it. Today, we are at $40 million. That is why Senator Collins and Senator Warner and Senator Voinovich and I intend to offer this amendment to the appropriations bill to provide $300 million in funding to the States to

implement REAL ID. In the meantime, I am going to work with other Senators to either reestablish the negotiated rulemaking process or to repeal REAL ID and let us move ahead with a different way of developing a secure identification card.

I yield the floor.

I thank the Senator from Massachusetts.

The American people should be grateful to Senator Kennedy and the committee and I believe this Senate, for increasing the opportunity for Americans of all ages to continue their education and, second, for continuing what arguably is our strongest asset in competition worldwide, our system of higher education.

I can recall the former President of Brazil saying to a number of us before he went back to Brazil: What we remember about the United States, he said, is the American University. There is nothing like it anywhere in the world and we have a responsibility to continue to keep it excellent and provide access to it.

I thank the chairman for offering me this time.

Mr. President, I would ask through the Chair to the managers, would it be appropriate now to speak on the bill or would they prefer to go ahead with other business that they have?

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 20 minutes and that following me, Senator Menendez be allowed to speak for----

For 15 minutes.

Mr. President, I congratulate Senator Kennedy and Senator Enzi and the members of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee for their work on this bill. I have been around awhile, but I have not been in the Senate for very long, and we have been working on this bill since I came to the Senate, which was 4 years ago. It needed to be reauthorized some time ago. But similar to some other things, it has gotten a little better with age, and it is a very good bill.

Although we have been working on this bill for some time, I believe it has gotten better over time. It has a number of excellent provisions in it. There is one major concern I have which I intend to speak on. Let me say what that is at the outset before I begin to talk about what I like about the bill. My late friend, Alex Haley, used to say, ``Find the good and praise it,'' and I can do that with this bill, but I do have one concern. My concern is the creeping regulation of higher education.

I believe the single most important thing we could do to help improve excellence in higher education in America, which is already pretty good--the best in the world--is to deregulate, not add more federal regulations. Unfortunately, with this bill, we significantly add to the stack of regulations that college and university presidents all over America have to wade through every year in order to accept students who receive Federal grants and loans.

Let me talk about some of the good things about this bill. In the first place, it was an excellent decision to separate this piece of legislation from the work we acted on last week--what we call the reconciliation bill. This reauthorizes the Higher Education Act for the next 5 years, and it has separate provisions which deserve separate attention. For example, it increases the amount of Pell grants from $4,300 to $6,300 over the next 5 years. Pell grants are for the lowest income students. They don't help the middle-income families very much because the dollars don't get up to that level. Those families are eligible for other aid from universities and other grants and loans. But $6,300 for a Pell grant is a significant amount of money.

For example, if you go to Harvard, it doesn't come close to paying the cost, but if you go to the University of Tennessee, it pays almost the entire tuition for the year. In fact, if you go to the University of Tennessee with a Pell grant, you are very likely to show up with what we call a HOPE scholarship, which also pays for tuition. So you would start off with a HOPE scholarship of--I think the amount is about $4,000--plus your $6,300 from the Pell grant, if you needed that additional amount of money. So the Pell grant would be increasing from its current level of $4,310 to $6,300. If there are families across the country who are watching our debate and thinking they can't go to college, it is important for them to know that the community colleges of America cost several hundred dollars a quarter, and that the great State universities of America typically cost $5,000 or $6,000 or $7,000 a year in tuition. Now, that does not include living expenses, but we all pay living expenses, whether we are in college or we are not in college.

This decision to move up the Pell grant to $6,300 is a big help. I hope it sends a signal across this country to families without means that their son or their daughter may start their higher education, for example, at a community college for 2 years, living at home and paying a few hundred dollars and letting the Pell grant pay for the total cost of the tuition, the total cost of the books. So there will be zero charge for that family for 2 years, and then after 2 more years, go on to a State University, where the tuition might not be very much more than the Pell grant. In addition, the Pell grants will be even larger for students who are majoring in math, science, critical foreign languages, and thereby encouraging students to pursue those fields.

This Congress is taking a number of steps to try to refocus our country's attention on our brain power advantage, to make sure we keep that so we can keep our good jobs from going overseas. Senator Kennedy and Senator Enzi and Senator Frist last year changed the law and created the SMART grants to focus on our competitiveness, and the increase to the Pell grants do that significantly more in this legislation.

In addition, this legislation, in an overdue way, recognizes the importance of a year-round Pell grant. Many people still have in their mind the idea of the traditional college student on the traditional campus. That life has changed. Many of the students who take Pell grants have to work. They are older. They may be moms going back to school to get the training to get a better job or a dad doing the same, and they may not have time to take the summer off, or that might not fit their schedule. The way the law has been, they couldn't get the Pell grant, if there were, say, three quarters, they could only get it for two. This says that--and Senator Clinton, I congratulate her for working on this as well. A number of Senators have worked on

making the Pell grant a year-round opportunity.

I am also delighted about legislation I introduced, again with Senator Clinton, to expand Teach For America. Teach For America attracts some of the brightest young men and women in our country who have a passion for serving. There are many ways to serve our country. Some of our most valued are in Iraq and Afghanistan. Others are in the inner city helping children who haven't had a chance to learn to read, to learn to compute, and learn to have a chance in this country. As Lyndon Johnson used to say, we want people to be equal at the starting line, but we need to help some people get to that starting line, and through Teach For America, young men and women can do just that. This will build a corps of young college graduates who will spend 2 years in those schools, and it will expand the group of influential alumni of Teach For America who care about our public schools.

I actually think that what may end up being more important about Teach For America than their service for 2 years in the inner city schools is that we will expand these young men and women who will grow to be the leaders of this country in a relatively short period of time. Then they will always have within their personal missions the idea of giving every student an opportunity to go to a first-class public school. Having a corps of Americans who value education and who value public schools, especially, will do our country more good than almost anything I can think of.

Mr. President, I believe we have the best colleges and universities in the world. We don't just have some of them, we have almost all of them. They have their problems, but we should recognize the asset that they are. One of my primary goals as a Senator is to relieve the burdensome, oppressive paperwork that the Federal Government places upon our colleges and universities, freeing up scarce dollars to spend on improving quality teaching and research rather than paperwork.

The higher education system--and I want to be careful saying this because I don't want to drive anyone away from this idea--is a Republican's dream, a conservative's dream. We have 6,000 autonomous institutions. Some are public, some are private. Some are religious, some are secular. Some are historically Black, some are Native American, some are Jewish. Some are in cities. There is Harvard and there is the Nashville Auto Diesel College. There are 6,000 autonomous institutions that compete. We don't give money directly to those institutions, for the most part. We give the money to the students, and students take those vouchers--one-half of America's college students attend our autonomous institutions with a Federal grant or loan that helps them to pay for college, and they are flat out vouchers.

I have introduced several times a Pell grant for kids, saying that is what a voucher is for K-12, but we will reserve that discussion for another day.

Since World War II, quite by accident, we have said to the world: Here is the way we organize our education. It is a marketplace of 6,000 institutions, where (1) colleges compete for students, (2) Government money follows those students to the institution of their choice, and (3) the Federal research money is, for the most part, competed for in peer-reviewed efforts. The rest of the world is scrambling to catch up with our system.

In China, they are deregulating. In France, they are deregulating and creating a more competitive system and trying to emulate the model that we have.

So what concerns me about our Government's attitude toward higher education is the number of forms each institution has to fill out. I have a stack of forms this tall in my office. I didn't bring it here to the Senate floor. Every institution has to fill that out in order to accept students who bring with them Federal grants or loans, which are almost all of the students. That means the small church-related schools have to hire somebody else. They have to go through all that. The President of Stanford--not a small, church-related school--said 7 out of 10 cents of every tax dollar is spent on complying with Government regulations.

Would it not be better if we allowed Stanford and the small schools and the Nashville Auto Diesel College, as well as Harvard, to use more of their money to help students and less to comply with paperwork?

With passage of this bill, we will require the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Aid to review regulations imposed under the act and report to the Secretary and Congress ways to reduce regulation, streamline procedures, and simplify for the benefit of students. That will be one small force moving in the right direction.

It would create a discretionary grant program for an institution of higher education to maintain a Web site that keeps track of Federal regulations that have an impact on institutions of higher education. A small, church-related college might only have to hire a person who spends half of his or her time keeping up with the rules and regulations because the Web site might have done it for them.

We require the Secretary to develop an annual compliance calendar for disclosures required by the Higher Education Act.

These provisions might seem not very important, but I can guarantee you, as a former president of a university, they can make a lot of difference. I would like very much to have spread out before me a calendar from the Government that said we have listed all of the rules and regulations and forms and papers that you have to file. That would mean I knew what it was and that would save me a lot of time in figuring it out.

Despite that good news, I am afraid there are, nevertheless, problems in this bill. Currently there are 24 reporting categories and 74 reporting requirements with hundreds of data points. That is today, before this bill passes. My staff has identified 26 new categories and over 100 new reporting requirements imposed on higher education with this law, and that is even before the department starts its regulations.

So I hope we can figure out a way to create competitive forces in favor of deregulation. It is as bad on our side of the aisle as it is on that side of the aisle. Very often, my Republican friends say, for example, prices at colleges have gone up, so let's put on price controls.

When the pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts, they said we know what religious oppression is, so let's practice it ourselves. We are supposed to be for markets and choice and less Federal regulation. So let's apply that to Federal higher education.

I have worked on a number of provisions in the bill, and I thank Senators Kennedy and Enzi for permitting me to do that, working with others, including Senators Gregg and Reed, and I have worked on provisions that have been included that simplify the application form for students who apply for grants or loans.

As I mentioned, I worked with Senator Clinton to help allow students who have Pell grants to use them year-round so they can finish earlier and get back to work and back with their families, rather than the antiquated requirement that they may only use them part of the year. I mentioned the compliance calendar to make it simpler for colleges, and the Teach for America plan, which Senators Harkin and Reid and others have cosponsored.

There is an accountability research grant and a state data system pilot project. I thank Secretary Spellings for agreeing with these. As a result of her study of higher education, which pointed out a number of important things, we do have a fine system of higher education, but it needs to be challenged if we are going to keep our advantage. I felt that the Secretary, in her recommendations, was going too far in federalizing higher education, whether it be transfer of credit provisions, or whether it might be proposals mandated from Washington about student accountability. I thought that was a good goal but the wrong way to go about it.

So Secretary Spellings has agreed to step back and focus instead on challenging our State boards of education and our college boards of trustees and our university presidents and our Governors and legislators to do their own on accountability. We are not going to kick it to Washington, DC, and let us conduct oversight of how they are doing their jobs, rather than to try to

impose more of the one-size or a few-sizes-fit-all ideas from Washington. A part of doing that would be these new grants from the Department.

In this bill, we have provided grants from the Secretary to create new measures for assessing student achievement in higher education. There is a difference in the Harvard classics department and the Nashville Auto Diesel College. I mention that because Harvard classics might be the best department for classics. I know the Nashville Auto Diesel College is the best training for mechanics. There is no need for us to figure out what is the appropriate accountability at those institutions.

With great respect to the chair and Senators Kennedy and Enzi and the Department of Education, the institutions of higher education know more about accountability in higher education. We ought to make sure they are doing their job, not try and do it for them from here.

I am happy to.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Massachusetts and the Senator from Wyoming. Another example of what I would call the propensity to federalize education is to regulate the transfer of credit policy that individual institutions have. If we are going to have a marketplace, and if students are going to have choice, then it is the job of the students to find out from the colleges and universities what their rules are. Otherwise, we go to a European system or a Chinese system, or a system like our K-12 system where we, knowing all, tell everybody what to do, what the transfer of credit policies might be.

So I strongly resist saying that the Federal Government ought not to have anything to say about whether the Nashville Auto Diesel College ought to be required to accept a transfer of credit from the Harvard classics department. I am not sure that a graduate or student in Harvard classics would know anything about a Nissan engine in Nashville, and vice versa. I am pretty sure we don't need to interfere with that, particularly if so much of the excellence in our system comes from this competition, and these autonomous institutions and this marketplace that allows students, followed by Government money, to choose and allows researchers to compete to see who deserves the money.

So my hope is that as time goes on we can have a serious discussion in the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee and in the Education and Labor Committee in the House about deregulation of higher education. We all have good ideas about what to do. Some will be voted on as amendments tomorrow. If we all impose our good ideas from here, then they add up to another stack like this, and our higher education system begins to be smothered.

I have had the privilege of working at several levels in higher education. When I was president of the University of Tennessee, I had a lot of oversight. The Governor was chairman of the board. The legislature approved the largest share of money that I received. I had a board of trustees to which I had to respond. There was a faculty council to which I paid a lot of attention. In terms of student accountability, the professors graded students on a regular basis. The dean graded the professors. The trustees, the president, the provost, the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, the Governor, and the legislature all had their say. There is plenty of supervision of higher education based on my experience. So we need to be careful. We have been wise since World War II with our loans and grants that half of Americans use to go to college to say here is the money.

If the college is accredited, a student can take their choice. You may go to Notre Dame or to the community college down the street. You may go to the University of Tennessee or to Rhode Island. That is your choice, as long as it is accredited. Of course, some mistakes are made. I am sure that at the fringes some colleges are teaching goofy courses. Some schools are better than others.

Overall, we don't have any enterprise in America that today has consistently outperformed the rest of the world as well as our system of higher education--not our automobile business, not our aluminum business, and not our K-12 system. Even the Senate rarely raises above the level of the Baghdad Parliament when it comes to getting consensus on the war in Iraq. But the system of higher education, with all its sometimes stuffiness and its disagreeable political correctness, and even with the lengthy vacations and even with more tenure than probably is deserved, as a whole, is by far the finest in the world; and more regulation, as a whole, will make it worse, not more excellent.

There is one other provision I want to mention. I am glad the committee included this. It is a statement about the protection of free speech.

Willie Morris, who wrote the ``North Toward Home'' about his days in Mississippi and the University of Texas and New York, wrote an eloquent statement about how the American Association of University Presidents rose up about the political correctness at the time he was a student. That was in the 1950s--I guess early 1960s. At that time, the political correctness in part of Texas, or all of Texas, was segregationist, very conservative, and oppressive to those who had different points of view.

Today, the shoe is often on the other foot. Some deny that, but we know that is true. There are not many conservative speakers at college graduation ceremonies.

I ask unanimous consent for 3 more minutes.

Often legitimate speakers with different points of view are booed and not welcomed in the academic environment.

I testified about this situation before Secretary Spellings' committee on higher education. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record following my remarks my testimony in Nashville last year.

Mr. President, I hope my friends in the university community will see in me someone who values higher education, who defends the importance of it in our society, who is working hard to keep our brainpower advantage in the world marketplace, who supports funding it generously, but who also believes that the greatest Achilles' heel of our system of higher education today is political correctness and a failure to take it seriously.

Colleges and universities are places where people ought to be allowed to say even outrageous things from the right and from the left. It is not a free and academic environment if you are only allowed to say outrageous things from the left.

Without belaboring that point, I conclude my remarks by expressing my appreciation once more to Senators Kennedy and Enzi. This is a first- rate bill. It will help students. It will help our country. It has a great many good ideas in it, and I hope there are others in this body and in the House of Representatives who will join me in recognizing that along with political correctness, the greatest threat to quality of higher education, in my view, is overregulation by the Federal Government, and perhaps over time we can find some sensible ways to give it a little more freedom from this big stack of regulations that piled up over the years.

I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Exhibit 1

Remarks of Senator Alexander to Commission on the Future of Higher

Education, Nashville, Tennessee

Thank you for the time you are giving to this Commission's

work, and thank you for inviting me to testify.

I've seen higher education from many sides, so I'm

sometimes asked, ``What's harder: being governor of a State,

a member of a president's cabinet, or president of a

university?''

My answer is, ``Obviously, you've never been president of a

university, or you wouldn't ask such a question.''

I have six suggestions for recommendations you might make:

First, I hope you will urge the Administration that

appointed you to make the National Academies' ``Augustine

Report'' a focus of the President's State of the Union

address in January and of his remaining three years in

office.

This 20-point, $10 billion a year report is the National

Academies' answer to the following question that Senator Pete

Domenici, Senator Jeff Bingaman and I posed to them in May:

``What are the ten top actions, in priority order, that

federal policy makers could take to enhance the science and

technology enterprise so the United States can successfully

compete, prosper and be secure in the global community of the

21st century?'' The report was written by a distinguished

panel of business, government and university leaders headed

by Norm Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin.

As 2005 ends, we Americans--who constitute just five

percent of the world's population--will once again produce

nearly thirty percent of the world's wealth.

Most of this good fortune comes from the American advantage

in brainpower: an educated workforce and our science and

technology. More Americans go to college than in any other

country. Our universities are the world's best, attracting

more than 500,000 of the brightest foreign students. No

country has national research laboratories to match ours.

Americans have won the most Nobel Prizes in science, and have

registered the most patents. We have invented the Internet,

the automobile and the computer chip, television and

electricity. From such advances have come a steady flow of

the world's best paying jobs.

As one scientist has said, we don't have science and

technology because we're rich. We're rich because we have

science and technology.

Yet I am worried that America may be losing its brainpower

advantage. Most Americans who travel to China, India,

Finland, Singapore and Ireland come home saying, ``Watch

out.''

The Augustine panel found I am right to be worried:

Last year, China trained 500,000 engineers, India 200,000,

while the U.S. trained 70,000.

For the cost of one chemist or engineer in the U.S., a

company can hire five chemists in China or 11 engineers in

India.

China is spending billions to recruit the best Chinese

scientists from American universities to return home to build

up Chinese universities.

They also found signs that we are not keeping up:

U.S. 12th graders performed below the international average

of 21 leading countries on tests of general knowledge in

math.

In 2003, only three American companies ranked among the top

10 recipients of new U.S. patents.

Of 120 new chemical plants being built around the world

with price tags of $1 billion dollars or more, one is in the

U.S. and 50 are in China.

Among the Augustine Report's 20 recommendations were:

Recruit 10,000 new science and math teachers with 4-year

scholarships and train 250,000 current teachers in summer

institutes.

Triple the number of students who take Advanced Placement

math and science exams.

Increase Federal funding for basic research in the physical

sciences by 10 percent a year for 7 years.

Provide 30,000 scholarships and graduate fellowships for

scientists.

Give foreign students who earn a PhD in science,

engineering and computing a ``green card'' so they can live

and work here.

Give American companies a bigger research and development

tax credit so they will keep their good jobs here instead of

moving them offshore.

Some may wince at the $10 billion a year price tag. I

believe that the cost is low. America's brainpower advantage

has not come on the cheap. This year, one-third of State and

local budgets go to fund education. Over 50 percent of

American students have a Federal grant or loan to help pay

for college. The Federal government spends nearly $30 billion

per year this year on research at universities and another

$34 billion to fund 36 national research laboratories.

Just this year, Congress has authorized $75 billion to

fight the war in Iraq, $71 billion for hurricane recovery,

$13 billion in increased Medicaid spending and $352 billion

to finance the National debt. If we fail to invest the funds

necessary to keep our brainpower advantage, we'll not have an

economy capable of producing enough money to pay the bills

for war, Social Security, hurricanes, Medicaid and debt.

Aside from the war on terror, there is no greater challenge

than maintaining our brainpower advantage so we can keep our

good paying jobs. That is the surest way to keep America on

top.

I have attached an executive summary of the Augustine

Report to my comments.

Second, I suggest that you recommend that presidents of the

United States appoint a lead adviser to coordinate all of the

Federal government responsibilities for higher education.

My greatest regret as U.S. Education Secretary was that I

did not volunteer to be that lead person. Secretary

Spellings, with the appointment of this commission, has

assumed at least some of that responsibility. But the

authority of the Secretary of Education over higher education

is somewhat like the authority of the U.S. Senate majority

leader or a university president: overestimated. Almost every

agency of the federal government has something to do with

higher education, tens of billions of taxpayer dollars are

invested every year and someone should be looking at all

of this in a coordinated way.

Third, I urge you to join me on the bandwagon for

deregulation of higher education.

The greatest threat to the quality of American higher

education is not underfunding. It is overregulation. The key

to the quality of our higher education system is that it is

NOT a system. It is a marketplace of 6,000 autonomous

institutions. Yet, thanks largely to the last two rounds of

the Federal Higher Education Act, each one of our 6,000

higher education institutions that accepts students with

Federal grants and loans must wade through over 7,000

regulations and notices. The president of Stanford has said

that seven cents of every tuition dollar is spent on

compliance with governmental regulations.

I have attached to my testimony remarks I made to the U.S.

Senate in June when I introduced the Higher Education

Simplification and Deregulation Act of 2005, much of which

was incorporated in the Higher Education Act reauthorization

bill this year.

Fourth, I urge the Congress to overhaul the Medicaid

program and free states from outdated federal court consent

decrees so that states may properly fund colleges and

universities.

You have two charts before you that tell the story.

Nationally, during the five year period from 2000 to 2004,

State spending for Medicaid was up 36 percent, while State

spending for higher education was up only 6.8 percent. As one

result, tuition was up 38 percent.

The story in Tennessee was worse. Medicaid spending was up

71 percent, while higher education was up only 10.5 percent,

and tuition was up 43 percent.

By the way, during this same four year period, Federal

spending for higher education was up 71 percent.

When I left the governor's office in 1987, Tennessee was

spending 51 cents of each State tax dollar on education and

16 cents on health care, mainly Medicaid. Today it is 40

cents on education and 26 cents on health care, mainly

Medicaid.

To give governors and legislatures the proper authority to

allocate resources, Congress should give States more

authority over Medicaid standards and more ability to

terminate outdated Federal court consent decrees that remove

decision-making authority from elected officials.

In addition to the two charts on spending trends, I have

attached my remarks when Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas and I

introduced the Federal Consent Decree Fairness Act.

Fifth, I hope you will put a spotlight on the greatest

disappointment in higher education today: colleges of

education. ``At a time when America 's schools face a

critical demand for effective principals and superintendents,

the majority of programs that prepare school leaders range in

quality from inadequate to poor.'' Those are not my words,

but those of a new report by Arthur Levine, the president of

Teachers College, Columbia University. Or ask Richard Light,

the Harvard professor, who is working with university

presidents trying to find and inspire a new generation of

leaders for our colleges of education. Sometimes colleges of

education are even roadblocks to the very reforms they ought

to be championing. In 1983, when I asked colleges of

education to help me find a fair way to pay teachers more

for teaching well (which not one State was doing at the

time), they said it couldn't be done. So we invented our

own system for thousands of teachers, with virtually no

help from the very people who are in business to figure

out such things. And still today, despite the good work of

Governor Hunt and others, the lack of differential pay is

the major obstacle to quality teaching.

I have attached an executive summary of Dr. Levine's

report, ``Educating School Leaders.''

Finally, I hope you will put a spotlight on the greatest

threat to broader public support and funding for higher

education: the growing political one-sidedness which has

infected most campuses, and an absence of true diversity of

opinion.

To describe this phenomenon, allow me to borrow some words

from the past, which may sound familiar to your chairman,

Charles Miller, who was once Chairman of the Board of Regents

of the University of Texas: ``systematic, persistent and

continuous attempts by a politically dominant group to impose

its social and educational views on the university.'' This

was what the American Association of University Professors

(AAUP) called it in its censure of Texas Governor Pappy

O'Daniel's Board of Regents when the Board fired University

of Texas President Homer Rainey in the 1940s. This is

reported in Willie Morris' book, ``North Toward Home.'' Then

the AAUP was talking about one-sidedness imposed by the

right, instead of by the left--but political one-sidedness is

political one-sidedness, no matter from what direction it

comes.

There is more to this charge of one-sidedness than the

academic community would like to admit. How many conservative

speakers are invited to deliver commencement addresses? How

many colleges require courses

in U.S. history? How many even teach Western Civilization?

How many bright, young faculty members are encouraged to earn

dissertations in the failures of bilingual education or on

the virtues of vouchers or charter schools?

I am not surprised that most faculties express liberal

views, vote Democratic and that most faculty members resist

authority. That is the nature of most university communities.

But I am disappointed when true diversity of thought is

discouraged in the name of a preferred brand of diversity.

This one-sidedness is not good for students. It is not good

for the pursuit of truth. And it undermines broad public

support for higher education. The solution to this political

rigidity lies not in Washington, D.C., but in the hands of

trustees, deans and faculty members themselves.

Last year Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas invited

former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso to join

a small group of U.S. senators in the majority leader's

office for a discussion. Dr. Cardoso was completing a

residency at the Library of Congress.

``What memory of the United States will you take back to

your country?'' Senator Hutchison asked Dr. Cardoso.

``The American university,'' he replied immediately. ``The

uniqueness, strength and autonomy of the American university.

There is nothing like it in the world.''

I salute Secretary Spellings and this Commission for

undertaking to preserve and improve higher education,

America's secret weapon for its future success.

In coming to your conclusions, I hope that you will urge

the President to adopt the Augustine Report and to designate

a lead advisor for higher education, that you will jump on

the bandwagon to deregulate higher education and preserve its

autonomy, that you will urge Congress to overhaul Medicaid

and Federal court consent decrees so States can properly fund

higher education, and that you will urge trustees to revamp

colleges of education and ensure a campus environment that

honors true diversity of opinion.

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

Mr. President, I guess the parliamentary procedure is that I can speak on the bill.

Mr. President, I thank the managers of the bill for giving me the opportunity to speak. I wish to say a few words--general words--about the student loan program in our country.

The Direct Loan program--the program by which the Federal Government itself loans money to college students across our country--began when I was the U.S. Secretary of Education, and the distinguished Senator from Massachusetts was chairman of the Health and Education Committee. We had a Democratic Congress and a Republican President named Bush, although a different Bush. Senator Kennedy will remember the Deputy Secretary was David Kearns, a very distinguished former business leader, head of Xerox. Bill Ford was chairman of the House Education Committee. Chairman Ford very much wanted a so-called Direct Loan Program. He wanted the Government to loan money to students. The law we have today is named after him. He made a great contribution to our Nation's education.

I thought about the Direct Loan Program at the time and, generally speaking, I wasn't in favor of it. There were three reasons for my skepticism then. One was that it seemed to me the enormity of the program would mean the Government--our Federal Government--would suddenly find itself being a massive bank. Ever since Andrew Jackson, the idea of a big national bank had been something our country hasn't liked. We let the private sector have the banks. The problem with the government operating as a bank was we would have to borrow a lot of money and add to the Federal deficit.

Second was the size of the student loan program. Millions and millions of students--one-half of our college students across the country--have a Federal loan or grant to help them pay for college, and may choose among any of the accredited colleges. We have about 6,000 institutions that qualify or receive students with these loans. So it is a massive administrative challenge.

I could not see how the Federal Government--the department I was in charge of at that time, the U.S. Department of Education--with the personnel, as dedicated as they are--could do a better job than the private sector on such a big administrative challenge.

Finally, while I didn't know at the time, I didn't believe there was a way for the Federal Government, with its built-in efficiencies, to do a less expensive job of managing this massive program than the private sector could. I was relying on my gut instinct, which is generally that if you can find it in the Yellow Pages, the Government probably ought not to be doing it. So I came down on the side of having a federally backed student loan program, a generous one, which has grown since then, but that was managed by the private sector.

The Government can do a great many things well. Regulation is one of the things it does well. One of the things it generally doesn't do as well--with the exception of the military--is manage large programs. The result of that debate was the creation of the Direct Loan Program. In the end, I saw that as an advantage for the country because it at least would give us the opportunity to measure the way the Government would administer a loan program against the way the private sector did it. In other words, it was something we could look at and compare. That is the way we have operated over the last 15, 16 years that this has been in place.

Now, I have not changed my view on the so-called Government program, or the Direct Loan Program. I believe almost every aspect of our higher education system in our country can be viewed as a success, including the FFELP student loan program. There are roughly 3,200 lenders today participating, with a loan volume of over $50 billion in the current year. The Direct Loan Program was approximately $13.5 billion. The total outstanding amount of loans, FFEL and direct loans, now approaches half a trillion dollars, about $448 billion. We are talking about an immense program that creates great benefits for students all over America.

Now, the question that is before us is, if we have this private sector program out there--and we have been debating this in committee and we have had innumerable meetings on it and we had a vote earlier today--is the subsidy for the private lenders set at the right level? Obviously, we have all agreed that it is too high. Congress agreed it was too high last year. The President agreed it was too high this year, and he proposed some cuts. Now our committee in the Senate is making additional cuts. My concern is that we are guessing what the subsidy level ought to be. We have our finger up in the wind and are making arbitrary judgments.

I am interested in the auction model that has been introduced into this bill. I think that is a useful way to find out what the private markets would tell us about what the right level of taxpayer subsidy is, so this program which loans

money to students, who aren't the best credit risks, is at about the right level. But the last auction program was a colossal failure. So that auction program may not tell us much.

Another way we might find out the proper level of subsidy would be to try to develop a body of knowledge in the same way that State utility commissions do. In Tennessee and other States--well, Tennessee is different because we have the Tennessee Valley Authority. But in most States, a State utility commission regulates the rate set for telephones or electricity, and it allows the private company providing that service a reasonable profit. Over the years despite there being a lot of politics involved, which I remember that very well--there has developed quite a body of knowledge around the idea of what is an adequate level of subsidy for private companies providing a public service, such as electricity or telephones or, as I suggest, federally backed student loans. Perhaps that is something we could do more of.

There was talk about asking the Government Accountability Office to study the subsidies in this bill. I don't know whether that sort of study ended up in the legislation. I hope it did. Looking ahead to the next time we reauthorize this ordeal with student loans, I would like to find out if there is a way to set up an appropriate way to measure what the level of subsidy ought to be for a private company.

So we have, first, the idea of the auction which might teach us something. We have the cost of the Direct Loan Program. That could teach us something about the appropriate cost. Finally, perhaps in this legislation, before it is through, if it is not in already included, we can ask GAO to create indices that would help legislators make a better judgment than guessing what an appropriate level of subsidy is. We have an indication from the marketplace. Last week, an equity firm that was seeking to buy Sallie Mae, I believe, said our changes in the level of subsidy made that deal such that they felt it was not profitable for them. So as I understand it, they have backed down. That is a signal the levels we are setting in this bill may make it more difficult to attract a large number of private lenders to the program and, in effect, turn the student loan program more and more towards the Direct Loan Program.

In other words, by cutting the subsidies deeper and deeper, we will be driving banks out of the business, especially the smaller ones--the ones that serve students perhaps in rural areas or in different areas-- and we might be reducing the opportunities students have to benefit from the services that these banks offer.

I know some of my colleagues would prefer we turn the whole thing over to the Government. I hope we don't do that--through the front door or through the back door--by squeezing out all of the private lenders. My concern is not for the lenders; my concern is for the students who today get loans from 3,200 lenders. I like for students and universities to have those choices. And over the last 15 years, generally speaking, they prefer the program that involves private lenders instead of dealing with the Direct Loan Program that the Government runs. Eighty-three percent of the schools prefer to use the privately backed student loan program, and 76 percent of the student loans are originated by those lenders. Only 1,310 schools participated in the Direct Loan Program, which is a small proportion of the loan volume. The reason may be that the consumers who like choice and who like to have different options have looked at both options--the program run by the Government and the program run by the private lender--and they find, the universities and the students, that the privately operated program is better for the students.

I am here today more to talk about looking ahead, not condemning this bill or the effort that has been made here. I am here today also to say that the work of the Senate and House committees and some of the States has uncovered abuses by student lenders, some of which have been corrected and the rest ought to be. There is absolutely no excuse for that. But correcting abuses by private student lenders is one thing; cutting the rates to such a point that we end up through the back door pushing the student loan program into a Government-run program, or largely into a Government-run program, is another thing. It would be an unwise step for us to take, and if we are to consider that step, I hope we will do that on a very careful basis.

In conclusion, my opinion has not changed based on experience over the last 15 years about the merits of a program largely run by private and nonprofit organizations--3,200 of them right now--to offer choices to millions and millions of students who attend 6,000 universities. To me, almost by definition, the Government is not a good manager of such a large program. In fact, if it were a Government-run program, the Government would have to contract it out.

In general, I still support a properly regulated and appropriately subsidized program that allows for the maximum number of student private lenders leaving students and universities choices.

Second, I am not persuaded that the Government-run program costs less than the student program. I know there are reports and studies which suggest that it might, but that is because we count money up here in strange ways. If you just take real dollars and compare them to real dollars, I have seen no real evidence that the Direct Loan Program is cheaper for the taxpayers than the program run through the private lenders.

Finally, I don't like the idea of the Federal Government suddenly beginning to assume a debt which approaches a half trillion dollars and put it on our books at a time when we are trying to reduce the deficit.

If it doesn't cost less, and if the Government is not likely to manage it better, and if we don't need another half trillion dollars of debt in the Federal Government, then why would we want to encourage the growth of a Government-run program over a privately run program?

I appreciate the chairman being here while I am making these remarks. I look forward to working with him because he has long experience on this program and he has distinct views on it. I suggest that one of the most constructive things we can do over the next few years is try to create, either through the auction suggestion or by listening to the private markets or from the Government Accountability Office or some other way, something other than a guess about what the private level of subsidy is. Otherwise, we will be doing through the back door something that I really don't think we should be doing through the front door either.

I thank the Senators from Massachusetts and Wyoming for their time.

I ask unanimous consent to print in the Record some elaboration of my remarks that have to do with the cost comparisons of the Federal and the private programs, the evidence, or lack of it, that the Government can do it better than the private sector, and some questions about why the Federal Government would want to assume more debt.

I yield the floor.

Reserving the right to object, could we have the next Republican speaker be Senator Alexander?

Mr. President, with this political stunt tonight, the Senate has reached the approximate level of the Iraqi Parliament in dealing with the war on Iraq. There will be no more votes for a fixed deadline for withdrawal from Iraq at 3 a.m. than there would be at 3 p.m. This demeans and trivializes the foremost issue facing our country. It does not show the proper respect for the men and women who have been fighting there and their families.

Here we are, issuing milestones, talking about benchmarks to an infant democracy on the other side of the world, issuing reports and report cards about how well they are doing on what we have told them to do, talking to them about why they haven't passed oil sharing and debaathification and why they have not had more elections, and we cannot come up, ourselves, with a consensus about what we are doing in Iraq.

Here we are, the oldest democracy in the world, alleging ourselves-- the Senate--to be the greatest deliberative body in the world, and we are lecturing Iraq, a new democracy, an infant democracy. We are lecturing them for not coming up with a consensus when we can't come up with one ourselves.

I think it is important for the American people to know it is not necessarily that way in the Senate. I began this day at 8 a.m. at a breakfast, as I did last week, as I did the week before, which we call our bipartisan breakfast. This morning we had about a dozen Republicans and Democrats around the table--only Senators. Last week, we had two dozen around a table. Our subject was Iraq and the Defense authorization bill.

I will not say any more about what was discussed because one of the benefits of this breakfast is it is the only time during the week, except for our prayer breakfast on Wednesday, when we are not in team meetings, when there is not a group somewhere plotting what this side will do to that side or what that side will do to this side. It is amazing what sort of discussion we can have when we sit down around that sort of table. We have many of the same principles who have talked tonight on the Senate floor, people who have strongly held views and they are different views and they were stated clearly and explicitly and each of us respected those views. We heard them.

But at least as strong as the difference of opinion in that bipartisan breakfast--as it is each week when we talk--was the feeling that our main job was, as soon as we could, to come to some sort of consensus about where we go from here. Because the single most important thing we can do as a government, other than fund our troops, is to send them a clear signal that we agree on why we sent them there to fight and perhaps be wounded and perhaps to die and we failed in that responsibility. To compound it, we are in the midst of a political stunt which does not do anything to encourage us toward a consensus.

In my remarks tonight, rather than heap oil on the fire, what I would like to do is talk for a moment about how we could come to that consensus and about both Democrats and Republicans in this body who are working that way. Mrs. Feinstein, the Senator from California, mentioned a number of Senators who do that. My experience with Members of this body began when I came to work here for the first time 40 years ago this year as a very junior aide. I have only been a Member of the body for 4 years. My experience is that most of us prefer to conduct ourselves like grownups, to not engage in petty kindergarten games, to not have partisan efforts where we taunt one another and try to put one another at a disadvantage but actually recognize we are here to look at big, difficult issues and to see if we can come up with a solution for one.

If there is such an issue that demands such a solution, it is America's role in Iraq. How would the Senate--if I am right that most of us would like

to have that kind of result--how would we go about working toward consensus, when we obviously have strongly held different views? For example, Senator Levin and Senator Reed, two of the most senior Members of our body--one a distinguished graduate of West Point, one who has served as chairman or ranking member of the Armed Services Committee for a long time--they strongly believe, as the Senator from California believes, that unless the Congress imposes upon the President a fixed deadline for withdrawal, that we will not have any motion in that direction.

I respect that. I disagree with that. I believe that interferes with the constitutional prerogatives of the President. I do not believe it is practical in a time of war to say that a group of legislators, 100 generals here in this body, can guess a year out, even if that is the direction we want to go, exactly how to do it and exactly when to do that. That is why we have a Commander in Chief.

The Founders didn't pick this particular President, but they picked a President, a Chief Executive, with that responsibility. I respect that. That is of a difference of opinion. So we have profound and real and honest differences of opinion and they are reflected all the way across our country.

I hear them in Tennessee. The Presiding Officer hears them in his State. We hear them everywhere, and we feel them especially strongly because so many of our men and women have been there. In my State, 10,000 members of the National Guard and the Reserves have been to Iraq and Afghanistan; almost all of them more than once.

We think of General Petraeus as almost a hometown boy because he commanded the 101st Airborne Division. When he was there as its commander, he was accidentally shot through the heart in a training exercise. His life was saved, when he went to Vanderbilt Hospital, by none other than Bill Frist, our former majority leader, who was then a heart surgeon at Vanderbilt University. So we have unusual respect for General Petraeus.

We are the ``Volunteer State.'' We have sent more men and women to fight, we think, than almost any State, and we instinctively have great respect for the President of the United States.

That is where we start in our State. But, still, there are a great many Tennesseans who say to me it is time for a new strategy in Iraq. It is time for a change. We have helped depose Saddam Hussein. We have helped Iraq have an opportunity to have a democratic government. We have stayed a long time to help build their security. But now it is time for us to agree on a different strategy.

How would a country and how would a body such as the Senate go about that? One way to do it might be to pick 10 people from outside the Senate, 10 of the most distinguished Americans, and say to them: We are stuck here. We have a problem. The country has a problem. We need a shift of direction. We have a Senate that is divided, a President who is insisting on his constitutional prerogatives, and we have men and women fighting and dying in Iraq--what do we do? Ten Americans, let's pick five Democrats and five Republicans, to give it a little bit more prestige.

That happened last year. Frank Wolf, a Representative from Virginia; John Warner, Senator from this body, was a part of this as well--they created something called the Iraq Study Group. The Iraq Study Group was cochaired by Jim Baker, the former Secretary of State for President Bush, and by Lee Hamilton, the former Democratic chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. There were 10 prestigious Americans who served on the Iraq Study Group--if all of us were to put in a hat the names of Americans who might be good members of such a commission to help us unravel this problem, the 10 who were picked would come out of that hat pretty fast, in pretty good order, with a lot of Members on both sides of the aisle suggesting them.

For example, Larry Eagleburger, the former Secretary of State for the first President Bush; Vernon Jordan, the former president of the National Urban League and a very close associate of former President Clinton; Ed Meese, President Reagan's Attorney General; Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who was the first woman to be appointed to the United States Supreme Court by President Reagan; Leon Panetta, who was President Clinton's Chief of Staff and who now in California has his own institute, the Leon & Sylvia Panetta Institute for Public Policy in Monterey, CA; Chuck Robb, our former colleague, married to Lynda Bird Johnson. We have been thinking about that family these past 2 weeks with Lady Bird's death; Chuck Robb, a former marine, former Senator, a member of that panel; Allen Simpson, who had the No. 2 position right over here, a whip in the Senate from Wyoming; and, at one point, Robert Gates, the current Secretary of Defense, was a member of this panel before he had to step aside when he went to the administration.

So those 10 people--five Democrats, five Republicans. It would be hard to improve on that.

Then, let's say you said to this group of 10: This is an especially difficult problem. The Senate is fractured, the President is insisting on his prerogative, and the country is divided and tired, and we need a solution. So what we need for you to do, commissioners, is not come back with a majority vote, not come back with a filibuster, not come back with an all-night political stunt, but come back with a unanimous set of recommendations of where we go from here in Iraq, you five Democrats, you five Republicans with years of experience.

That is precisely what they did in December of last year, after 9 or 10 meetings all over America, and meetings in Iraq, with a distinguished staff that consisted of an honor roll list of generals and experts. They visited with former President Clinton, former Vice President Mondale, former Secretary of State Albright, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Warren Christopher, they visited with Colin Powell and George Shultz, Tony Lake, General Scowcroft, to ask about everybody whose judgment one would hope they would ask, and they came up with 79 recommendations in December, and they released it to the public.

They unanimously agreed in 9 months about what to do in Iraq. They also did not pull any punches. They said in December, even though this was chaired by Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton, they said: The situation in Iraq is ``grave and deteriorating.'' They said there is no magic bullet. But they did unanimously agree, unlike the Levin-Reed amendment, that we did not need a fixed deadline. They unanimously agreed that troop deployments should be subject to conditions on the ground.

So what did they recommend? Well, in a few minutes I cannot summarize 79 recommendations, but I can boil it down to three points. First, we should move our troops from a combat mission to a support, equipping, and training mission as soon as we honorably can. They said, as a goal, that should happen in about a year, which then would have been the first quarter of 2008. Now, some time has gone past since then. But they said in about a year. The practical effect of that would have been to remove about half our combat forces--to reduce the number of American forces in Iraq by about half.

And, rather than subject that goal of reducing troops to a fixed deadline, as the Levin-Reed amendment says, they said it should be subject to developments on the ground, which is practical in a time of war, and respects the Commander in Chief's constitutional prerogative.

They said, No. 2: We should have a long-term interest in Iraq. It should be a limited interest, but there should be sufficient troops to help make certain that in that new mission we deal with that interest. They listed some of the things the troops would be expected to do who stayed: guard the Embassy, search and rescue, intelligence, special forces to go after al-Qaida--the point being, even though our troops have a different mission, out of a combat role into a support, equipping, and training mission, there would be enough of them there to send a message to the Middle East and the rest of the world: Stay out of Iraq. Give Iraq a chance to succeed, while also protecting U.S. forces that remained there. That was the second point.

The third point was step up. Step up the political and diplomatic efforts in the region by a significant amount, including talking with everybody in the region, to try to bring a result in Iraq.

So those are the three points. One, move out of the combat mission to the support, equipping, and training mission over about a year, without a deadline; two, a long-term but limited interest in Iraq, with some specifics; and, three, step up political and diplomatic efforts. Plus, the Iraq Study Group emphasized that we would still have a considerable presence in the region in Qatar and Kuwait and in Bahrain. So that is what the Iraq Study Group said.

What happened with the Iraq Study Group report? Well, I was very disappointed by the reaction to the report, especially when I saw that the recommendations were unanimous. When I first saw who were the distinguished members of that panel, I was convinced that at the State of the Union Address, President Bush would seat them in the gallery, and at the appropriate time, as Presidents often do, he would say: There they are, from the Reagan administration, from the Clinton administration, from my father's administration, and they have unanimously agreed on where we go from here in Iraq. And it is not exactly my proposal, it is their proposal, but because it is important to our troops and to our country and to the world that we move forward in a unified way, I accept their recommendations. I will develop a plan based upon their report. I ask you and the Congress to accept it.

I think there is a good chance that the Congress would accept such a plan, and an important part of that reason is because even the President needed someone else to help him develop support for whatever proposal he came up with. So that would be the first thing I think we would do if we were trying to solve this problem: go ask 10 of the most distinguished Americans of both parties to tell us what to do in specific recommendations, and do it unanimously.

Now, what is the second thing we would do? Well, I think we would come to this body and say: Every time we turn around there is a political stunt going on. Someone has had an early morning meeting and decided we are going to do this to the Republicans, and then some Republicans get excited, and they have an early morning meeting and say: We are going to do this to the Democrats. And you do not have the kind of discussion that these 10 Americans had or the kind we have in our bipartisan breakfasts.

But the second thing that needs to be done to move us in a consensus on where we go from here in Iraq would be to find some Senator in this body who would say: We are going to accept this Iraq Study Group report, and we are going to ask that the President agree to it and develop a plan based upon it and report to us on it in 90 days.

That is precisely what Senator Salazar did with his legislation. After saying in January that I was disappointed the President did not adopt the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, I made a speech on the floor in March. I find that sometimes you have to say things more than once in order to have anybody pay attention.

I said: Why didn't the President, in March, take the Iraq Study Group down off the shelf and use it for something other than a book end? And then I made another speech to that effect, and Senator Pryor of Arkansas came by to see me and said: We need to do something about this. We need to find a way to work together rather than to continue to have Democratic and Republican votes on Iraq.

Then Senator Salazar called me and said: I have been working with Secretary Baker, and with Lee Hamilton and their staffs. I put together legislation that accurately reflects the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. And it simply adopts those recommendations as our law. If the President agrees to it, he is asked to develop a comprehensive plan based on those recommendations.

Since that time, there are now 14 of us in the Senate on both sides of the aisle who are cosponsors of that idea. Senator Salazar is the leader. He has done a terrific job on that. He is a Democrat from Colorado. In addition to my cosponsorship, we have been joined by Mark Pryor, a Democrat from Arkansas; Bob Bennett, a Republican from Utah; Robert Casey, a Democrat from Pennsylvania; Judd Gregg, a Republican from New Hampshire; Blanche Lincoln, a Democrat from Arkansas; John Sununu, a Republican from New Hampshire; Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine; Pete Domenici, a Republican from New Mexico; Bill Nelson, a Democrat from Florida; Mary Landrieu, a Democrat from Louisiana; Claire McCaskill, a Democrat from Missouri; and Kent Conrad, a Democrat from North Dakota.

My guess is that if the Democratic Senate leadership would back off a little bit, if the President would be more flexible, there are probably 60 votes coming from both sides of the aisle for the Baker-Hamilton report, and if that should be adopted by the Congress, we can move forward, which brings me to my final point.

What would be the third step in having a bipartisan consensus for our country that would say to our troops and the world: We agree on why you are there, and we support that mission? It would be for the President to embrace the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. The President of the United States does not want to do that. I respect that. He has an absolute constitutional right to say: Our Framers created the Executive, I am the Commander in Chief, we cannot have 100 generals, I will develop the plan, and I will command the troops. That is my job.

He is right about that, except he has another part to his job. George Reedy, who was the Press Secretary to former President Lyndon Johnson, wrote a book called, ``Twilight of the Presidency.'' In it he defined the President of the United States. He said, No. 1, his job is to see an urgent need; No. 2, to develop a strategy to meet the need; and No. 3 is to persuade at least half of the people that he is right.

I do not believe that President Bush, even if he is right in September, is likely to be able to persuade enough people to support his strategy to be able to sustain the strategy. Let me say that again. Even if he is right in September, even if he takes many parts of the Baker-Hamilton group and announces it as his strategy, at this stage in our history, I do not believe he can persuade enough Americans to support his strategy to sustain the strategy.

I believe this strategy should be sustained. So how does he do that? The way he does that is to embrace those who wrote this and those who support this so that it is not just his strategy, so that it is our strategy, so that he can say to the troops in the Middle East, and to the rest of the Middle East, and to the world: The Congress and I have come together around a set of principles. I am developing a plan on those principles. And not everyone agrees, but a consensus of us agree, which is why I would say to the Democratic leader, with respect, I do not mind requiring 60 votes on the Iraq issues. We need a consensus. We do not want to have an Iraq policy that passes by 51 to 49. We need a consensus. I believe we can have it.

There are some who say adopting the Iraq Study Group principles, the Salazar-Alexander legislation, is toothless. I respectfully disagree. My grandfather was a railroad engineer, a Santa Fe railroad engineer. He lived in Newton, KS, and his job was to drive the big locomotives onto the roundtable it was called. And that was how you turned a locomotive around. A locomotive might be about as hard to turn around as a country in the middle of a war. But that is what my grandfather did. He turned that locomotive around. And it was turned around. They put it on a different track and off it went in a different direction.

If we and the President were to agree on the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, it would be just like my grandfather putting that big locomotive on the roundtable in Newton, KS. It would be turned around and sent down a different track. And, for now, at least, those on the other side would pick another engineer. But the engineer cannot do much about that track once he is on it. It would be headed down the track, the world would know it, and in good faith we could work together.

When I was an impatient young man working in the White House 40 years ago, a wise man named Bruce Harlow said to me: Lamar, just remember that here--he meant the White House--just a little tilt makes big waves out there.

If this Congress and this President adopted together the Iraq Study Group recommendations this week, that

would make big waves out there, and that would be a new consensus for our country.

Some said: Well, the Iraq Study Group is a little stale. It is out of date. It was done in December.

Lee Hamilton, the Democratic cochairman said: No. He said: We said in December the situation was grave and deteriorating. It still is. We said in December we need to move from a combat mission to support, equipping, and training. We still do. This week he said: In addition, we need to have a long-term limited role in Iraq. And we still do. And finally he said: We need to step up our diplomatic and political efforts in Iraq, and we still do.

To the President, I would say with the greatest respect, because he is a member of my own party, and I have talked with him about this before, I would say: Mr. President, I do respect your prerogative. I know you can draw the plan up. I know you want to sit down first with General Petraeus, whom we all respect and whom I especially do, as a friend, because he spent so much time in Tennessee. But the Salazar- Alexander legislation has no chance of taking effect until September. And all it asks you to do is to draw up a comprehensive plan based upon the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. The first person you sit down with can be General Petraeus.

And I would ask the President whether it be better for him to ignore the Iraq Study Group and come up with his own plan, or would it be better for him to come to the Congress and say: Congress, I will adopt these. Why don't you adopt these and let's send our troops a message that we are united in what they are fighting for?

So there are 14 of us, 8 Democrats, 6 Republicans at this point, who support and cosponsor the Iraq Study Group. But I believe there are many more of us who could be comfortable with it, who could vote for it, even if it is not our first choice.

So I regret this all-night political stunt, but I respect this body. I see it every week in those bipartisan breakfasts, talking like the people of this country wish we always would when confronted by a major issue. I salute Senators Salazar and Pryor and those on that side, and Senator Gregg, Senator Bennett, Senator Collins, and those on this side who are working together to fix that. I hope more of our colleagues will join us soon.

The President and the Congress could agree on the Baker-Hamilton recommendations, and we would say to our troops: We not only will fund you, but we can now also say to you and to the Middle East that we agree on your mission, on why you are fighting, and why you are being wounded, and why you are dying.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I would like to say a word about Lady Bird Johnson.

We have had many graceful First Ladies in the United States, but Lady Bird Johnson can truly be said to have been the First Lady of America the Beautiful. Her husband used to joke that he would hear rustling in the hall at the White House. It would be, as he would say, Lady Bird and Lawrence Rockefeller meeting to work on conservation projects. Her legacy was the Highway Beautification Act of 1965. She understood that we have a great many important issues in our country but that one of our great characteristics is the beauty of our country. Italy has its art, Egypt has its pyramids, and we have the great American outdoors. Lady Bird Johnson knew that for everybody--not just the wealthy with big homes and big lawns--the beauty of our country was something to preserve. She did that, and she changed our entire national attitude about its importance. She brought out the best in us in terms of appreciating the beauty of America.

I visited the Wild Flower Garden in Austin, TX, before. I have seen the blue bonnets there in the spring, and I have seen how she influenced the flowers to grow in the rights-of-way on Texas highways. They even adopted the motto in Texas ``Don't mess with Texas.'' I am sure that is a legacy of Lady Bird Johnson as well. But not only did flowers begin to grow along the rights-of-way in Texas, they did in Tennessee and in a lot of other places--in States such as Colorado. Lady Bird Johnson has made her mark in our country.

Our family had the privilege of knowing the Johnsons and especially Linda and Luci--Linda married to Chuck Robb, a former Senator. We were good friends. We spent many times together at Governors' conferences, and our children know one another. We express to Linda and Luci and that family our sympathies. We know they have great pride in their mother as well as their father. But we think of their mother tonight as we think of her as the First Lady of America the Beautiful and remember her contributions.