Floor Statements

Mr. President, today, Senator Carper and I introduced the Internet Tax Freedom Extension Act of 2007. Other cosponsors were Senators Feinstein, Voinovich, and Enzi. All of those Senators have been interested in this subject for the last few years.

The bill would, very simply, extend a moratorium on Internet access taxes by State and local governments for another 4 years. This is a commonsense compromise of what can sometimes be a very complicated discussion about continuing the moratorium, without blowing a hole in the budgets of State and local governments.

We all want to be careful about so-called unfunded Federal mandates. We want to respect State and local governments. But at the same time we want to create an environment that encourages technology. We believe this would do that.

The background of all this is, briefly, that originally Congress passed the Internet Tax Freedom Act in 1998, which did an extraordinary thing. It said State and local governments could not tax Internet access for three years. That sounds like a good thing, but we could just as easily pass a bill we might call the food tax freedom act, because that would keep State and local governments from taxing food; or because we are against income taxes, we might say the income tax freedom act and ban Tennessee from having an income tax; or we might say the sales tax freedom act, or the property tax freedom act, or the telecommunications tax freedom act. But instead we created the Internet Tax Freedom Act, meaning, in effect, that States could not tax Internet access. The rationale was that the Internet and electronic commerce is a fledgling industry, and Congress extended that in 2001.

In 2004, after extensive debate, we worked out a compromise extending this moratorium over the next 4 years.

The compromise we worked out in 2004, according to the National Governors Association, may have saved

State and local governments up to $12 billion in revenue. All of us want to keep taxes low, but here is where I am coming from. When I was Governor, nothing made me angrier than for Members of Congress coming up with a big idea to pass a law, take credit for it, and send the bill to the Governors, legislators, mayors, and county commissions. That is what we will do if we are not careful about the Internet access tax because, as we saw 4 years ago, telephone calls moved to the Internet. If we banned taxes on telecommunications as part of Internet access, telephone calls over the Internet would be free from taxation.

That sounds good, except States might have to increase college tuition, increase sales tax on food, or some States might have to put in, for the first time, a State income tax.

Mr. President, $12 billion in revenue is a lot of money. The definition of Internet access that is in this new compromise that Senator Carper and I introduced on the moratorium would, for the next 4 years, protect State and local governments, while continuing the moratorium on Internet access. It is sensible. I think we will debate it more over time. Maybe it will even be accepted by all parties. I wanted to signal on my behalf, Senator Carper's behalf, and on behalf of the National Governors Association, the National Conference of Mayors, and the National Association of Counties, that we believe it is very important to do no harm to State and local government. If we want to give a tax break to the telecommunications companies or to Internet companies, then we in Congress should pay for that and not send a bill to State and local governments.

This avoids our having to do that because the moratorium carefully defines Internet access to mean States are free to continue to make their own decisions. This doesn't mean States should attempt to tax the Internet; it means States may, if they choose, impose a sales tax on Internet services, just as States may impose a tax on food, or on medicine, or on gasoline, or may impose a tax on income. That is the job of State and local government. That is not the job of the Congress.

I am glad to join with Senators Carper, Feinstein, Voinovich, and Enzi in introducing the Internet Tax Freedom Extension Act of 2007. I am glad to extend a commonsense moratorium on State and local taxation of Internet access, and I look forward to passage of that legislation before long.

Mr. President, I think I am next in order, but I see some of Senator Dodd's colleagues, and if they want to speak to Senator Dodd, I would be happy to defer.

Mr. President, I am glad I have had an opportunity to hear this and will only say, to make certain the same sentiment is expressed from this side of the aisle--I knew Senator Dodd's father. I didn't know him well or personally, but I knew him because I was Senator Howard Baker's legislative assistant at a time when Senator Dodd served here. I admired him. I respected him. More importantly, I remember the respect Senator Baker and others had for him and for his long and distinguished career.

My own father would be 100 years old this year, so I understand the enormous pride this Senator Dodd has for his father, Senator Dodd. Senator Durbin and Senator Conrad and others said this as well: The father would be proud of the son.

I had the privilege of serving as sometimes the chairman, sometimes the ranking member, of committees with Senator Chris Dodd. It is a tremendous pleasure to see how he cares, especially for children and families in the workplace and contributions he has made here.

This is a day for a tribute to the father and a day that we are sure his father would have great pride in his own son.

If there are no other comments regarding Senator Dodd, I would like to talk about immigration.

I thank the Chair.

(The remarks of Mr. Alexander pertaining to the introduction of S. 1393 are located in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, Senators from both parties are working very hard these days to put together an immigration bill. The majority leader is working hard to create an environment in which that can happen, and I appreciate his doing that. It is not easy to do. But it is absolutely essential that we have a comprehensive immigration bill.

This is not something Members of the Congress can blame on anybody else. It is not the Governors' job, it is not the mayors' job, it is not the county commissioners' job, it is not the Sheriff's job, it is our job to decide what our immigration policy should be. It is our job to secure the border. It is our job to make certain that those who come here are legally here. It is also our job to make sure that those who come here legally have an opportunity to become Americans, a chance to become part of our country.

We have a motto above our wall that says, ``One from many.'' It doesn't say ``Many from one.'' We are very proud of our magnificent diversity in this country. People come here from virtually every country in the world. Anyone who has gone to the naturalization ceremonies can attest, where last year 650,000 new citizens stood in courthouses all across America, raised their right hands and swore their allegiance to this country--nothing is more moving than that. But as much as we prize that diversity, what we prize even more is our ability to turn all that diversity into one country.

Unity is harder than diversity. There are a lot of diverse countries in the world, and they are ripped apart by their differences. We have been fortunate. As other countries struggle with the idea of becoming French, becoming German, becoming Japanese--it is hard to do. But in this country, if you become a citizen, you have to become an American.

How do you do that? You don't do it by your race. In fact, our Constitution says that race cannot be used.

You don't do it by any other form of ancestry. It doesn't matter where your grandparents came from. What does matter is that you subscribe to a few principles and that you learn a common language. Those are the most basic elements of the unity, this fragile and important unity that makes us the United States of America instead of just another United Nations.

In anticipation of the immigration debate next week, I introduce today, along with Senators Cochran and Cornyn, what we call the Strengthening American Citizenship Act. It is an essential part of any immigration bill because it addresses what happens after one lawfully becomes a resident of this country and begins to think about lawfully becoming a citizen.

This legislation will help legal immigrants who are prospective American citizens learn our common language and learn about our ways of government. I introduced this legislation last year, in the 109th Congress, when we considered an immigration bill. It had several cosponsors and it passed this body 91 to 1. It was an amendment to the Senate immigration bill, in April of 2006.

I hope the Senate will agree again to make it a part of the bill. It might not make the most headlines, but it will make as much lasting difference in immigration legislation as possible.

Here, in brief, is what the legislation would do. First, it would help prospective citizens learn English and it would do that in two ways. It would provide education grants of up to $500 for English courses for immigrants who declare their intent to become American citizens. They might use these grants of $500, for example, to go to any accredited agency such as ``Fuentes,'' in Los Angeles, a place I happen to know about, which can do, for that amount of money, an excellent job of helping, in that case mostly Spanish-speaking citizens, learn also to speak English. So it is a $500 voucher, in effect, to help any lawful person learn English.

Second, it will change the citizenship rules to allow those who learn to speak English fluently to reduce from 5 to 4 years the amount of time they have to wait to become a citizen. These are two ways we are trying to help people learn English and by doing that value our common language.

There are other ways to do that. Senator Kennedy and I have talked about the fact that there are lines of people in Boston, his State, and Nashville, in my State, of adults who want to learn English, but there is no room for them in the adult education programs we fund. Perhaps when we pass the Workforce Investment Act, or other appropriations bills, we can find other ways to help people who want to learn English, learn English. But this legislation focuses specifically on prospective citizens who want to learn English by giving them a grant to help them do it and by giving them an incentive to learn the language fluently. They can become a citizen then in 4 years instead of 5.

Also, it helps prospective citizens learn more about the American way of life. Albert Shanker, the late President of the American Federation of Teachers, said the common school was created in America, the public school, to help largely immigrant children learn reading and writing and arithmetic and what it means to be an American, with the hope they would go home and teach their parents.

The last time we had such a large percentage of foreign-born people in our country was in about 1900, the turn of that century. Organizations all over America got busy helping new arrivals learn about our country, learn about our Declaration of Independence, learn about our Constitution and the ideas that were part of it because they knew that, since you do not become a citizen based upon your race or your ancestry and you do it upon the idea of America, that someone needed to help these people learn about the idea of America. Many were very eager to do that.

The legislation I introduced today would establish a foundation to support the activities of the Office of Citizenship within the Department of Homeland Security so that organizations that want to support and cooperate in efforts to reach out to prospective citizens can do so.

It would provide grants to organizations to provide classes in American history and civics. We are talking about a lot of prospective citizens--650,000 or so last year. After this immigration bill it may be more, because if you become a citizen, you are going to have to be legally here. So we want to make sure we have plenty of help for these who want to do that.

Third, codify the oath of allegiance. One of the most remarkable oaths, I suppose, in the American language, is the oath of allegiance that the 650,000 new citizens take when they become Americans. It is an oath that goes all the way back to George Washington's time and Valley Forge. It was essentially the oath that Washington and his officers took at the beginning of the American revolution. It says that I, George Washington, or I, the new citizen, declare that we owe no allegiance or obedience--in that case, to King George;

. . . and that we renounce, refuse and abjure any allegiance

or obedience to him and do swear that I will, to the utmost

of my power, support, maintain and defend the said United

States.

Essentially, that same oath of allegiance is the oath new citizens take. This elevates that oath of allegiance from a bureaucratic rule to a part of the law and gives it the same dignity that the Pledge of Allegiance has and the national anthem has. Finally, this legislation would celebrate new citizens by focusing on these hundreds of ceremonies that we have, in which people from all over the world wear their best clothes, prove that they have good character, that they have waited 5 years, that they have learned English, that they have passed a test about citizenship, and they are ready to say: As proud as I am of where I came from, I now pledge my allegiance to the United States of America.

We want to celebrate those events. This instructs the Secretary of Homeland Security to develop and implement a strategy to make those naturalization ceremonies more important in the fabric of our everyday life, and establish an award for citizens who have been naturalized in the last 10 years who have made an outstanding contribution to the American Nation. We all know in our own experiences that new Americans are sometimes the best Americans. They make the largest contribution. They have the best understanding of our country. We want to celebrate what they have done.

This is legislation the Senate adopted before. Senator Cochran, Senator Cornyn, and I are introducing it to make sure we adopt it again when immigration comes up.

I also wish to mention that I intend on looking at a comprehensive effort toward the same goal, which I like to call the American citizenship agenda; learning English and what it means to becoming an American. I have identified several areas, and I may introduce amendments in many of these areas to the immigration bill.

These were not introduced the last time, but they would include clarifying the mission of the Office of Citizenship within the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, establishing State citizenship advisory boards in a number of States, coordinating efforts toward helping immigrants learning English, American history, and civics. It would create an employer tax credit for businesses that help their employees learn English. As I mentioned earlier, at the beginning of the 20th century, there were a great many businesses hiring new Americans who spent their money, their time, and their effort to make sure those new employees understood what it meant to become Americans.

One way to meet this need of a large percentage of foreign-born people in our country is to provide tax incentives to businesses that help their employees learn English. Another proposal is to require a demonstration of English language proficiency when an individual renews his or her green card; establishing a Presidential award for companies that go above and beyond in bringing their employees together as Americans; finally, asking for a Government Accountability Office study to identify the need of lawful permanent residents not speaking English and the associated costs; in other words, how many people living in our country do not speak English and what would be the cost and the most effective programs of helping them learn English.

That is my purpose today, to introduce the Strengthening American Citizenship Act, legislation that passed when we considered the immigration bill in 2006, and which Senators Cochran and Cornyn and I hope will be a part of this legislation; then to discuss what I call the Strengthening American Citizenship Agenda, which will be looking for a variety of other ways to help make sure we not only celebrate our diversity but we find ways to celebrate our unity.

We can look across the ocean at Europe and see the struggle in Turkey right now for that nation's identity. We can see the difficulty France and Germany are having as Muslim workers have a hard time integrating into their country. We do not want the United States of America to become a country where we have enclaves of people who have no loyalty to the idea of this Nation. We want to create an environment where everyone has an opportunity to think about loyalty to this country, where almost all have a chance to think about becoming a citizen one day, and where every single person who lives here has an opportunity to learn to speak our common language, not just for their benefit but so we do not become a tower of Babel or a United Nations, that we become a United States of America, as our Founders envisioned.

Mr. President, I salute the Senator from Colorado for his leadership, initiative, and patriotism, and the way he is approaching the foremost issue facing our country: Where do we go from here in Iraq?

There is too much partisan game playing on the issue of Iraq. We owe it to our country and our troops to find a bipartisan consensus to support where we go from here. We need a political solution in Washington, DC, as much as we need one in Baghdad. We need to get out of the combat business in Iraq and into the support, training, and equipment business as soon as we honorably can.

That is why Senator Salazar and I have drafted legislation to implement the recommendations of the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group.

As the Senator said, we will introduce our legislation after Congress and the President have worked out the Iraq supplemental appropriations bill. We invite our colleagues--both Democrats and Republicans--to join us. We believe the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group offer the best opportunity for a bipartisan consensus on a new course in Iraq.

In fact, these recommendations seem to already be guiding the President's efforts and the efforts of those on the other side who were calling for change.

For example, the administration has begun to act on these recommendations by increasing the number of troops embedded with Iraqi forces, using milestones to help chart progress, and by meeting with Iraq's neighbors, including Iran and Syria. The President's national security adviser has pointed to the Baker-Hamilton report as authority for the surge of troops in Baghdad.

Just last week, the President himself told the Associated General Contractors of America at their convention that he liked what Baker and Hamilton had to say. ``It is something we should seriously consider. Their idea was that, at some point in time, it makes sense to have a U.S. presence configured this way,'' the President said. ``It is an interesting idea.''

At the same time, Democratic proposals in Congress have also been guided by the ISG report, for example, working on milestones for improvement in Iraq, limiting the role of the United States to one of training, equipping, and counterterrorism operations, and stating as a goal a drawdown of combat forces by March of next year.

In short, the seeds of bipartisan consensus about how the United States should go forward in Iraq are best found in the Iraq Study Group report.

Former Secretary of State Jim Baker and former Congressman Lee Hamilton prefaced their report by saying this:

Success depends on the unity of the American people in a

time of political polarization. Americans can and must enjoy

the right of robust debate within a democracy. Yet, U.S.

foreign policy is doomed to failure--as is any course of

action in Iraq--if not supported by a broad, sustained

consensus. The aim of our report is to move our country

toward such a consensus.

Yesterday and today, I talked with Secretary Baker and Congressman Hamilton. Each said the Salazar-Alexander legislation accurately reflects the recommendations of their report.

I have learned that sometimes a Senator has to say something two or three or more times on the Senate floor before anybody pays much attention.

For example, on March 14, I said that it was time for the President to take the Iraq Study Group report down off the shelf and use it for something other than a bookend.

I ask unanimous consent to have my statement of that date printed in the Record at the end of my remarks.

Today, I am making that same suggestion again, and I am going one step further. The Senator from Colorado and I are offering to our colleagues on both sides of the aisle--and to our country--a way to go forward on a bipartisan basis.

I was surprised and disappointed that the President didn't take advantage of this opportunity during his State of the Union Address in January. He knew then that a majority of Americans didn't support his strategy. Fewer do today. He knew then his strategy cannot be long sustained without that support. That is still true today.

The President could have invited the distinguished members of the Iraq Study Group to sit in the gallery during his speech and, as Presidents often do, introduced them, 10 of America's most distinguished citizens from the Reagan, Carter, and George H.W. Bush administrations, and the U.S. Supreme Court. One of these is now the Secretary of Defense. They are ideologically and politically diverse. They spent nine months, met nine times, went to Baghdad, interviewed 171 individuals, and made 79 recommendations. They are all in this book. They didn't shy away from the unpleasant facts.

They told us 79 percent of Iraqis have a mostly negative view of U.S. involvement in their country. Then they said 2,900 American lives were lost, and another 21,000 wounded; $400 billion was spent, with estimates as high as $2 trillion for the final cost. They said this is not a perfect option, but it is the best option.

The President could have said in January: This isn't my recommendation, it is theirs, and I accept it for the good of our country, and I ask the American people to accept it.

That is not Presidential weakness, that is Presidential leadership. The President's job is not only to see urgent issues and lay out a strategy. It is the rest of his job--at least for a sustained military strategy--to persuade half of the people he is right. It is not too late.

The President has the option before him today, and we are trying to make it easier for him. What we are respectfully saying in our legislation is, if the President should choose to develop a

way forward based upon the Iraq Study Group's recommendations, we will support that plan and we will encourage our colleagues and our country to do so on a bipartisan basis, so that Iraq, the Middle East, our troops, and the world will know that in the United States we are unified in our purpose.

Such a plan will not satisfy everybody. It will not pull out our troops tomorrow. It will not get us out of the combat business immediately. It won't add 100,000 or 200,000, or 300,000 troops for ``victory'' in Iraq. It will get us out of the combat business in Iraq and into the support, training, and equipping business, in a prompt and honorable way. It will reduce the number of forces in Iraq. Because there will still be a significant but limited military presence in Iraq, it will signal to the rest of the Middle East to stay out of Iraq. It will give support to General Petraeus and his troops, who are in the midst of a surge. It will expand diplomatic efforts to build support for Iraq national reconciliation and sovereignty. It will recognize, as Prime Minister Blair said, it is time for the next chapter of Iraq's history to be written largely by the Iraqis themselves.

As a Republican Senator, my message with respect to the President is that I hope he and the White House seriously consider this.

We are not introducing this bill today. It will be introduced in 2 or 3 weeks. Then, we hope other Senators will support it. I hope the President will embrace it. There is plenty within this report that gives him the opportunity to continue our mission in Iraq. The difference is that this is not the President's report, and that is its advantage. It has a better chance of success, in terms of developing bipartisan support here and in our country.

Finally, there are some issues that are simply too big for one party to solve. Iraq is, as the Senator from Colorado has said, the foremost among these.

Here we are, the oldest democracy, lecturing Baghdad, an infant democracy, for not coming up with a political solution, when we ourselves cannot come up with one.

Until we do come up with one, we should spend less time lecturing Baghdad and more time working together to fashion a way forward on the foremost issue facing our country. Coming together in support of the plan based upon the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group offers that best opportunity. We invite our colleagues to join us.

Exhibit 1

President Bush Should Take the Iraq Study Group Report Down Off the

Shelf

My purpose today is to say that it is time for President

Bush to take the Iraq Study Group report down off the shelf

and use it for something other than a bookend.

There is a reason why we don't have 535 commanders-in-chief

or 100 commanding generals each saying charge down this

street or over that hill.

The founders of our country made the President Commander-

in-Chief and gave to Congress the power to declare war and to

pay for it.

That is why I will vote against any of the resolutions that

seek to micromanage this war. Once a war is authorized, as

this one was by a bi-partisan vote of 77-23 in 2002, it is

the president's job to manage the war.

As an example of why we don't need 535 Members of Congress

micromanaging this war, consider this: since last January,

the new Democratic majority has offered 17 different bills

and resolutions outlining what to do in Iraq. Undoubtedly

there will be more in the coming weeks.

And I am not about to cut off funds for General Petraeus'

troops in the middle of the current military exercise, which

congress clearly does have the power to do but should not do.

I do have the responsibility as a United States Senator, to

say what I believe is the right way forward for our country

in Iraq, and my belief is this: the President would be wise

to take down off the shelf the recommendations of the

bipartisan Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, to develop a

strategy based upon those recommendations, and to ask

Americans to accept that strategy as the way forward in Iraq.

The President would have been wise to do this in January

during his State of the Union address. The country was then

looking for a new way forward in Iraq. The Iraq Study Group,

after nine months of careful, bipartisan work, offered such a

plan.

Instead, the day after the report was announced in

December, some who wanted another 100,000 or 200,000 troops

to ``win the war'' said the report was a ``recipe for

defeat.''

On the other side, those who wanted the U.S. out of Iraq

immediately dismissed the report as more of the same.

So the report was put on the shelf. Not much was heard

about it.

That is, until lately.

Lately, the President's national security adviser has cited

the Baker-Hamilton report as authority for the surge of

troops in Baghdad which, in fact, on page 73, the report did

say might be necessary.

Over the weekend, the United States participated in

meetings with Syria and Iran, perhaps the most controversial

recommendation in the report.

Now, the timetable and strategy for reducing U.S. combat

strength in Iraq contained in the newest Democratic senate

resolution sounds very much like the Iraq Study Group report,

calling for combat troops to be largely withdrawn from Iraq

by March of next year. But the Iraq Study Group specifically

opposed setting timetables or deadlines for withdrawal,

noting that its recommendation should be ``subject to

unexpected developments on the ground.''

At the same time, like one of the Republican-sponsored

resolutions, the Iraq Study Group recommended that the U.S.

work closely with Iraq's leaders to support the achievement

of specific ``milestones'' on national reconciliation,

security, and governance.

In short, if there is any bipartisan consensus emerging

about how the United States should go forward in Iraq, the

best blueprint of that consensus can be found in the Iraq

Study Group report.

The membership and process of the Iraq Study Group is as

important as the substance of what it said. It included 10 of

America's most distinguished citizens from the Reagan and

Carter and George H.W. Bush administrations, from the

Congress and from the Supreme Court. One of its former

members is now the Secretary of Defense. On its face, it was

ideologically as well as politically diverse. The group spent

nine months, met nine times, including a trip to Baghdad, and

interviewed 171 individuals in the U.S. and in Iraq. Its

report is comprehensive, with 79 specific recommendations.

Its assessment of the ``dire'' current conditions in Iraq

is honest and sobering. It did not shy away from reporting

unpleasant facts--that 79 percent of Iraqis have a mostly

negative view of the influence that the United States has in

their country, that 2,900 (at that time) Americans had lost

their lives and another 21,000 wounded, that we have spent

roughly $400 billion on the Iraq war and that estimates run

as high as $2 trillion for the final cost. The group

acknowledged that its recommendations were not perfect

options but seemed to be the best options.

As much as America needs a new strategy in Iraq, we also

need a consensus in support of that strategy. To put it

bluntly, a majority of the American people do not now have

confidence in the President's course in Iraq. The Iraq Study

Group offered the President an opportunity to say, ``Okay,

here is a different approach suggested by a bipartisan group

of distinguished Americans. It is not my strategy. It is

theirs. I accept it and, for the good of our country and the

armed forces fighting for us, I ask you to accept it.''

Such a statement would not exhibit presidential weakness.

This would be presidential leadership--recognizing that the

president's job is not only to choose the right strategy but

to successfully persuade at least half the people he is

right.

The president still has this option before him.

He would be wise to exercise it today--this week. Come back

to Congress. Report on the last few weeks' progress in Iraq.

Invite the Iraq Study Group members to sit in the gallery.

Compliment their work. Accept their recommendations. Ask the

Congress and the country also to accept their

recommendations.

This course will not satisfy those who want 100,000 more

troops for victory in Iraq.

Neither will it satisfy those who want all troops out on a

specific timetable.

But it will get U.S. troops quickly out of the combat

business in Iraq, and into the support business.

It will reduce the number of American forces in Iraq over

the next year.

It will leave American special forces in Iraq to go after

al Qaeda and troops to help guard the borders.

Because there will still be a limited U.S. military

presence, it will send a signal to the rest of the Middle

East to stay out of Iraq.

It will give support to General Petraeus and his troops who

are in the midst of a surge to make Baghdad safer.

It will expand diplomatic efforts to build support for

Iraqi national reconciliation and sovereignty, including with

Iraq's neighbors.

And it will begin to recognize that America has done most

of what it can do to help Iraq. As Prime Minister Blair has

said, it is time for the next chapters in Iraq's history to

be written by the Iraqis themselves.

Finally, this course will recognize that while the United

States can and should be a shining example of democracy and

does have the mightiest military force in the world, that a

conservative view of human nature and our own national

interest places limits on what we can do to make it possible

for others to adopt our democracy and our way of life.

Madam President, I ask the managers through the Chair--I have about a 10-minute speech on another subject I would like to make at an appropriate time. I don't want to interfere with the progress of the bill. I ask the Chair whether now would be an appropriate time or whether they would like me to wait.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 10 minutes as in morning business.

Madam President, at the end of March, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued the Salvation Army for allegedly discriminating against two of the Salvation Army's employees in a Boston-area thrift store by requiring them to speak English on the job. This lawsuit means that every business in America, from the shoe shop to Wal-Mart, will need to hire lawyers to prove it has a legitimate business purpose if that business wants to require employees to speak our national language while at work.

I asked the chair of the EEOC in what language she holds staff meetings. She said, in English.

We conduct Senate debates in English.

Since 1906, no immigrant has been able to become an American citizen without first learning English. At Hillsboro High School in Nashville, where my daughter graduated, students speak 28 native languages, but classes are conducted in English.

Federal law requires that all children in public schools be tested in English, and that if they do not know English, they must learn it as soon as possible.

Over the last 40 years, I have voted for or supported, I believe, almost every civil rights or anti-discrimination law that has been offered. But in America, requiring English in the workplace is not discrimination; it is common sense. More important, it is our common language. Our common language helps unite the diversity in this Nation of immigrants.

That is why, during the debate on immigration a year ago, the Senate adopted my proposals: First, to provide $500 grants to help prospective citizens learn basic English; second, to allow someone who becomes fluent in English to become a citizen after 4 years instead of 5.

The Senate also declared English to be America's national language and provided that anyone illegally here must first learn English before gaining legal status.

A few Senators said we were wasting our time debating national unity and language. But other nations are discovering just how important and difficult it is to unite one's country. Look at how today Turkey is struggling with whether to become more secular or more Muslim, struggling with what to do about its Kurdish minority. Germans are struggling to absorb Turkish workers. Italians are establishing agencies to help new Muslim residents ``feel Italian.'' Three alienated British citizens, children of Pakistani immigrants, blew up a London subway 2 years ago. The children of disaffected Muslim immigrants in France burned cars during that country's elections this weekend, a small echo of much larger riots 2 years ago.

We Americans are rightly proud of our diversity. But Iraq and Jerusalem and the Balkans are also diverse. America's greatest accomplishment is not our magnificent diversity. Our greatest accomplishment is that we have united that diversity into one country.

Our original national motto inscribed in the wall right above the Presiding Officer's chair is ``One from Many,'' not ``Many from One.''

Most nations unite around ancestry or race, making it hard for newcomers. Imagine ``becoming Japanese'' or ``becoming German.'' In other words, the United States Constitution says race or ancestry can have nothing to do with someone becoming an American. Instead, American unity is based upon ideas, principles found in our founding documents-- such as liberty, equal opportunity, and the rule of law. New citizens must, therefore, pass an exam, which was recently improved, about the Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and United States history.

The first Europeans in America were French and Spanish, but our cultural beginnings and primary institutions

and laws were Protestant and English. So English became the way Americans of many backgrounds communicated with one another.

In the 20th century, according to the late president of the American Federation of Teachers, Albert Shanker, American common--or public-- schools were created primarily to help immigrant children learn arithmetic and to read and write in English with the hope that they would go home and teach their parents. Then, in 1906, all new citizens were required to know English.

That has turned out to be a fortunate choice. English has also become a unifying language internationally. For example, every Chinese student is expected to study English. When Carlos Ghosn, who speaks several languages, became chief executive officer of Nissan, he began conducting business meetings in Nissan's Tokyo headquarters in English.

The most fortunate children in our country are those who grow up learning more than one language, but American parents know that one of those must be English. Mastering English is how an American succeeds in school, in the workplace, on the computer, and in international affairs.

A century ago, many American companies and private associations led an effort to Americanize new immigrants. They taught their employees English and the National Anthem. Today, the EEOC is suing the Salvation Army for doing the very same thing, insisting that its employees learn and speak this country's common language.

According to an article that appeared today in USA Today:

The number of charges filed with the Federal Equal

Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) alleging

discrimination based on such English-only policies is . . .

six times as large as 10 years ago, [growing] from 32 charges

in 1996 to about 200 in 2006.

This is not only an astonishing waste of the EEOC's time and taxpayers' money--the EEOC has a backlog of 56,000 cases--but it is also contrary to everything we know about the importance of achieving unity in our country.

Speaking English is not a punitive requirement; it is a requirement to help us communicate with one another. A 9-1-1 telephone call isn't of much help to a Chinese-speaking person if the employee answering the phone speaks only Spanish.

In this case, the Salvation Army posted its requirements that employees in thrift stores speak English. The two employees in question had worked for the Salvation Army for 5 years. They were then given an extra year to learn English. When they didn't, they were let go.

I intend to introduce legislation to put an end to these lawsuits by making it clear that requiring employees to speak English is not illegal discrimination as long as the policy is clearly posted.

More than that, I can think of nothing that would be more in our national interest than helping anyone in our country learn our common language. That is why later this month, when the immigration legislation comes to the floor, I will introduce again my amendment that the Senate adopted last year giving every adult immigrant a $500 voucher to receive English instruction and allowing those immigrants who want to become citizens to do that in 4 years instead of 5 if they become proficient--rather than just achieve a basic level--in English.

Senator Kennedy and I have discussed the fact that there are too many adults eager to learn English standing in line in Boston and Nashville for adult learning programs. They need help learning English, and I hope we can rectify that soon.

For 10 years I have suggested, most recently to Bill Gates at a hearing, that I would like to see established a private foundation that would loan $500 to any person living in this country who wants to spend it at an accredited institution learning English, with the hope that someday that student would pay it back. The payoff to American unity would be worth the cost by itself. But I believe such a bank would eventually grow to a huge size funded by grateful new Americans.

Without our common language we would be a giant Tower of Babel. It would be difficult for Americans to talk with one another, to debate political issues, and to vote. It would be harder to function as a democracy and to unite as one country. Without English, we would risk becoming just another United Nations instead of the United States of America.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the article from the USA Today to which I made reference.

Mr. President, first I would like to congratulate Senator Dodd and others who over the past 10 years have developed this piece of legislation. It has been remarkably effective. I think it is important as we talk about this that we remind ourselves what we are saying. What we are saying is, we live in this country with all of these wonderful pharmaceutical drugs for adults, but in many cases, before this legislation had been enacted, doctors were flying blind. They were guessing about the effect of these drugs on children.

That sometimes had very unfortunate results. I know that in my home State of Tennessee a drug for whooping cough was given to a number of children. There had been a clinical trial for the effect it would have on adults but not on children. And the children were so seriously harmed by the drug that the Centers for Disease Control later found that the drug was the reason they needed stomach surgery.

So it is remarkable that 10 years ago Senator Dodd and others-- Senator DeWine, Senator Hatch, and many others who have been mentioned--came up with the idea that if we strike this balance that Senator Dodd has referred to several times and give the companies that make the drugs a little more time, 6 months with their patent, that they in return would then conduct trials on these drugs on how they affect children.

No one knew at that time exactly what would happen. They were guessing. This is long before I came to the Senate. But they guessed well. As a result, as has been said, about one-third of the drugs that are given to children now have had testing and trials for use in children. Now doctors, when we bring our babies and grandbabies in, have a better idea of what they are doing. They are guessing less. It is better for the children.

In my family we have two new grandchildren under the age of 2. Senator Dodd, being younger than I am, has two children who are young like that. Maybe he has heard what I have heard. My mother used to say to me when I would go to the babies and they were happy, she would say: ``Son, don't try to make a happy baby happier.''

In effect, what she was saying is, leave it alone if it is happy. Well, this is a happy piece of legislation for which Senator Dodd and others should have a lot of credit. My suggestion would be let's not try to make a happy piece of legislation happier. It is happy because one-third of medicines are being studied, and doctors know more about what they are giving to their patients who are children.

What the Allard amendment would do is keep the law the way it is. It is the bill that is on the Senate floor that would change things.

I understand this is an estimate, but I listened to the testimony. The Senator from Connecticut suggested we are all racing here at the last minute and changing it. Wait a minute. We had a hearing on this some time ago. It was a terrific hearing. I was there. We heard various points of view, a lot of celebration about the effect of this act over the last 10 years. The only reason I was not a cosponsor of this legislation was because I wanted to hear the testimony about what the effect would be of changing this law that is a happy law that has worked so well for so long. As a result, it created the situation where a third of the children have drugs that doctors know more about.

After listening to all the testimony, if I were going to change the law, I would make the incentive 7 months or 8 months or 9 months. Why would I do that? The reason is, at the hearing it was said that while a third of the drugs that are administered to children have had been tested for use in children, probably we need two-thirds of the drugs that are ready for adults to have that sort of testing. In other words, we are about halfway where we want to go if we want to have drugs that are tested to see what their effect will be on children.

So my question was, if giving 6 months' incentive has gotten us halfway where we want to go, then maybe to get all the way where we want to go, we should go to a 7 months' or 8 months' incentive. But my feeling at the end of the hearing was, well, the existing law has worked well by providing an incentive of 6 months. Let's leave it like it is. The end result of the legislation that is on the floor is not to

leave it like it is but to change it, to reduce it from 6 months to 3 months, which is exactly backwards.

What the effect of this reduction will be is to reduce the opportunities for tests of drugs for children, which would fail to move us along toward the goal of having two-thirds of drugs studied for use in children.

I applaud Senator Dodd. I give him great credit for this. When he retires from the Senate in another 30 years, this will be one great feather in his cap, as well as for Senator Clinton and others who have worked on this. But I would go back to what my mother said: ``Don't try to make a happy baby happy.'' Let's not try to make a happy piece of legislation happy. Let's leave it the way it is. It has worked for 10 years. Let's let it work for another 5 years the way it is. Adopting the Allard amendment would keep it the way it is.

I have one suggestion for Senators Kennedy and Enzi, if I may. Maybe they would want to consider it as part of the managers' amendment. We heard testimony at our hearing that perhaps our goal should be someday to get two-thirds or three-fourths of the drugs that are for adults studied for use in children. Today it is one-third. I think it would be useful for us at a future time to know exactly what our goal ought to be. Maybe it ought to be 90 percent. Maybe it ought to be 50 percent. But I wanted to suggest to the Senator from Massachusetts and the Senator from Connecticut that we might want to include in this legislation asking the FDA or the appropriate agency to study what percent of drugs approved for adults should also be tested for children, what is that proper goal, so that the next time this issue comes up we have some informed judgment about it. A quick review of the medical literature shows there hasn't been any such study. I could be corrected if there has been. If there hasn't been, I suggest we make that a part of the legislation. I make that simply by suggestion, not amendment. I intend to vote for the Allard amendment, and I have stated the reasons why. If we have a happy piece of legislation, let's keep it happy. That will do it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, last week, while the media covered Iraq and U.S. attorneys, the Senate spent 3 days debating and passing perhaps the most important piece of legislation of this 2-year session. Almost no one noticed. The America COMPETES Act, which was the name of the legislation, authorized $60 billion over 4 years to, among other things, double spending for physical sciences research, recruit 10,000 new math and science teachers, and retrain 250,000 more, provide grants to researchers, and invest more in high-risk, high-payoff research.

These were recommendations of a National Academy of Sciences task force that had been asked to tell Congress--to tell us--exactly what we needed to do to help America keep its brainpower advantage so we can keep our jobs from going to China and India.

Last year, the Senate--but not the House--enacted task force recommendations to encourage ``insourcing brainpower'' by giving legal residency to skilled foreign students and researchers. Both Houses extended the research and development tax credit.

The process for this legislation was as exemplary as the substance. Senators and their staffs worked across party lines for 2 years. Senior committee members, chairmen and ranking members, waived jurisdictional prerogatives. The administration participated in extensive homework sessions with Senators and outside experts. The effort was so bipartisan that when the Senate shifted to the Democrats in January, the new majority leader and minority leader introduced the same bill their predecessors had in the last Congress. Seventy Senators cosponsored the legislation. Even though no cloture motion was filed, 9 amendments were voted upon, and 32 more amendments were addressed within 4 days. The final vote was 88 to 8.

Anyone who knows the Senate knows that the final margin masks how difficult passage was. There were concerted efforts to derail the bill by those with different ideas about policy and about spending. Yet this success with competitiveness suggests three lessons for dealing with other issues that are simply too big to be solved by one party alone, such as immigration, to which the majority leader has indicated we will turn in May, such as health insurance, such as energy independence, such as terrorism, and such as Iraq.

These are the three lessons as I see them:

First, most ideas in the Senate fail for lack of the idea. The first step in our success was when Senator Jeff Bingaman and I asked the National Academy of Sciences the following question more than 2 years ago:

What are the top 10 actions, in priority order, that

Federal policymakers can take to enhance the science and

technology enterprise so that the United States can

successfully compete, prosper and be secure in the global

community of the 21st century?

The Academy's 21-member task force, headed by former Lockheed Martin chairman and CEO Norm Augustine and including 3 Nobel laureates, gave up their summer, reviewed hundreds of proposals, and presented us with 20 specific recommendations in response to our question. These 20 recommendations, along with the work of the Council on Competitiveness and the President's ideas, gave us something to work with other than pet projects of various Members of Congress.

The second lesson is that bipartisanship is possible, even on complex issues. From the framing of the question to the introduction of the final legislation by the majority and minority leader, every effort was bipartisan. When Senator Domenici, for example, went to see President Bush, he invited Senator Bingaman, a Democrat, to go, as well as me, a Republican. Staffs worked so closely together that no one could say whether it was a Republican bill or a Democratic bill.

Third, and finally, the last lesson is that, unfortunately, bipartisan success, even on the biggest, most complex issues, has an excellent chance of remaining a secret. Despite the size of the accomplishment, the passage of the 208-page America COMPETES Act was barely noticed by the major media. This is not a complaint, merely an observation. More than ever, the media,

outside interest groups, and party structures reward conflict and the taking of irreconcilable positions. There is little reward for reconciling principled positions into legislation.

Here is another example: The work of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group was consigned almost immediately to the shelf as a bookend. Somewhere, there is a letter to President Bush from 10 Senators, 5 from each party, offering to work together with him to help every American have affordable health insurance.

Although there is not much attention paid to this kind of legislative activity, I am convinced the American people and most Senators are hungry for it. I believe the last election was as much about the conduct of business in Washington, DC, as it was about the conduct of the war in Iraq. Americans are tired of what they perceive as Senators playing petty, kindergarten, partisan games while there are big issues that cannot be solved by one party alone. Americans know we need a political solution to Iraq in Washington, DC, as much as we need one in Baghdad.

The irony is that last week's culmination of 2 years of work on the America COMPETES Act demonstrates that the Senate is capable of tackling big, complex issues in a bipartisan way, but that we will have to look beyond the influences of the media, special interest groups, and the political party apparatus for encouragement to do it.

Virtue, as ever, will be its own reward.

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

Mr. President, how much time remains?

Mr. President, if you would let me know when 3 minutes remain.

I am trying to respect Senator Sununu's amendment, because he is a very careful student of these matters, and I am looking at the authorization bill, and I want to ask the Senator a few questions in a moment, if I may, and I will do it on my time.

I am looking at the authorization bills for fiscal years 2003, 2004, and 2005, which is the current authorization bill. In each of those years--the authorization bill--there is a number for specific authorized allocations for, first, research; next, for education and human resources, which is the area the Senator is objecting to; next, a specific authorized allocation for research equipment; next, for salaries; and next, for the Office of Inspector General. Then we go to 2004 and it is the same there. In each year, there is a specific authorized allocation for each area; one for research, one for education, and one for each of the others.

The difference in this proposed authorization is that for education it says the number. The allocation for education shall go up as much as the specific authorization for research. Would the Senator be more comfortable--and this is my question, through the Chair, if I may ask this--would the Senator be more comfortable if there were specific number allocations which are enacted now for future years? In other words, if we turn the percentages or the suggestion that it ought to go up the same amount and say, instead of that, we will take a number and insert it in there for each of those years? Because that is exactly the way it is done in the current bill.

Mr. President, I will take 30 seconds, if I may. I think I am reading this differently than is the Senator. I am reading the authorization language for the year 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006--the existing law, there are specific authorization allocations for each year, not just for education but for research and for research equipment and for salaries and expenses. It goes up each year in the authorization language that exists today. So we are reading a different bill. I will be happy, if I am a part of any conference discussion, if it would help with his concerns,

to translate the ``as much as'' into specific numbers, if other Senators agree with that.

That is my understanding as well. Senator Grassley still has an amendment about which he

wants us to talk. That is the only other amendment I know about, other than the one you said. It is my hope we could follow the schedule the Senator from New Mexico suggested and finish the bill before 4 o'clock. I think that would be the sentiment of most Senators to whom I talked. It will permit us to move promptly to the business before us concerning Iraq.

I concur in the comments of Senator Bingaman. I hope by now we have had such extensive participation in this legislation over the last 2 years that everyone believes he or she has had a good hearing. The Coburn amendments and Inhofe amendment are the only ones I know about for sure. They are scheduled, or will be, and we will have to talk with Senator Grassley about his proposal.

Mr. President, I wonder if the Senator from Oklahoma would permit me a couple of minutes to comment on something.

Mr. President, I want to describe how this bill got to the floor because it has been suggested it might not have come through committee. The energy parts of this bill were fully considered by the Energy Committee when it was chaired by Senator Domenici last year, and it was then reported to the Senate in March. The Commerce Committee parts of it were fully considered by the Commerce Committee in May or June and reported to the full Senate then. The only parts of the legislation that didn't go through the regular committee process were from the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. That was the decision of that committee to do that. They had a series of roundtables and a series of meetings and made recommendations to the working group.

The working group then had meetings with the administration officials, and Senator Domenici presided over most of them--we called them homework sessions--and then Senator Frist and Senator Reid introduced this legislation last October. It has been public all that time. Then Senator Reid and Senator McConnell introduced the legislation in January of this year, and it has been public all that time.

I wanted to make sure it was known that this is legislation that has been fully exposed to the light of day, whatever the merits. I am not commenting on the merits of the comments of the Senator from Oklahoma, but I did want everyone to be reminded of the process through which this went to get to the floor.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator for his courtesy.

Amendment No. 921

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Georgia for his leadership on the issue of competitiveness. He has been one of the foremost advocates for this legislation, which has made its way through so many committees and reached the floor, and we are close to passage today. I thank him as well for his consistent advocacy for historically Black colleges and universities of which Georgia has several of the most prominent. He has talked to me and other members of the HELP Committee about that. He is exactly right. Reauthorization of the higher education bill is fairly imminent. Hopefully in the next couple of weeks we will begin to mark up a bill. Senator Chambliss has made it clear he expects the committee to take seriously his amendment. I have assured

him that for my part, the committee will. I know Senator Kennedy and Senator Enzi feel the same way. Senator Warner of Virginia has also noted he wants to make certain that what we do in this legislation takes into account historically Black colleges and universities. He, too, is looking toward the Higher Education Act reauthorization. It is very helpful of both of them to, in this case, take the floor and in other conversations to make us aware of what needs to happen as that act comes up in the next couple of weeks. The Chambliss amendment and his advocacy will be an important part of the discussion. I thank him for his leadership.

Amendment No. 930

Mr. President, I yield back the time on this side.

I thank the senior Senator from New Mexico for bringing this matter to our attention. I, too, recognize the significant contributions of the Department of Energy Office of Science to our Nation's commitment to basic research. It is the largest Federal funding source of basic research in the physical sciences. So it is, of course, extremely important that we get the funding right. I will also be pleased to work with my colleagues to make certain we provide optimal support for these programs.

Madam President, out of respect to our colleagues, I am going to defer my remarks until after the vote except to say--all of the thank-yous, except to say one thing: There are a number of issues before this body that are too big for one party to solve. This has been one of them. But after 2 years of work across party lines, we ended up with 63 cosponsors, 208 pages of legislation. We dealt with 40 amendments in the last 3 days without any cloture. I hope this sets an example for dealing with some of the other large issues we have that are too big for one party to solve.

I thank my colleagues for working with us in this way. I will be more specific about those thanks to the leaders and the other Senators after the vote.

I ask unanimous consent to add the following Senators as cosponsors of S. 761, the America COMPETES Act: Senators Snowe and Hatch.

Madam President, let me say to Senator Bingaman, I greatly appreciate working with him. I do not believe there will be a more important piece of legislation to come before Congress this year because it goes right to the heart of something every American understands, which is, How do we keep our jobs? This is the way we do it. We keep our brainpower advantage. We keep our jobs in competition with China and India. There are other factors as well, but what we know is--and we have a broad consensus in the Senate--that most of our remarkable standard of living, a situation where we have 30 percent of all the money in the world produced in this country for about 5 percent of the people, comes from our brainpower advantage, kindergarten through the twelfth grade, a wonderful higher education system, and our research institutes. That is the importance of this legislation.

The second thing about the legislation is that, to a remarkable degree, we rely on the people we ought to rely on in giving the answer to the question, How do we keep our brainpower advantage? Senator Bingaman and I, with the encouragement and under the leadership of Senator Domenici, who last year was chairman of the Energy Committee, asked the National Academy of Sciences: Please tell us the 10 things we need to do in order to keep our brainpower advantage so we can keep our jobs.

So they asked Norm Augustine, the former head of Lockheed Martin, to chair a distinguished group of about 21, and they gave up their summer 2 years

ago. They included three Nobel laureates, the former head of MIT, and others of that caliber, and they gave us 20--in priority order--things to do. At about that same time, the Council on Competitiveness had finished its work. Senator Lieberman and Senator Ensign had introduced their bill.

That legislation, which was the Domenici-Bingaman legislation, after a lot of work with the Bush administration, became the Frist-Reid bill toward the end of last year. Then, when we changed parties in the Senate, the very same bill became the Reid-McConnell bill. So we had worked closely together in a bipartisan way where we were able to overcome differences.

I do not want the 88-to-8 vote to fool anybody. This was not that easy to do. This has been 2 years of work, with lots of different committees, many different ideas. But it has been a successful effort.

As I said, briefly, just before the vote, it is a privilege always to be a Senator. It has especially been a privilege this week because the Senate is acting as the Senate should. We are dealing, first, with one of the biggest issues facing our country. Second, we are recognizing it is one of that handful of big issues that cannot be solved by one party alone. The Democrats could have charged up and down the hill all night long, and they could not have done it. The Republicans could have done the same, and we could not have done it. We could only have done it in the way we did it, and we did.

There are other issues out there like that. I think of immigration, which the majority leader has said we will be moving to soon. There is the question of affordable health insurance for every American. There is the question of energy independence. I hope this is a model for how we can work together and avoid some of the petty bickering we sometimes fall into. I think the American people would appreciate that, and I hope they will appreciate this.

I wish to thank especially the Senators whom Senator Bingaman talked about. He and his staff have been a delight to work with. Senator Domenici, of course, has been terrific to me as a junior member of his committee last year, allowing me to work on this. But when Senator Stevens and Senator Inouye and Senator Kennedy and Senator Enzi, basically, lent their prestige and sense of urgency to this legislation and stepped back and allowed it to proceed and participated rather than claim some jurisdictional advantage, that is what really helped.

Senator Ensign made a tremendous difference within the Republican caucus, and Senator Hutchison and Senator Bond, and Senator Mikulski on that side. Senator Chambliss and others from the very beginning have worked on this issue. That is why we had 70 Senators on the Domenici- Bingaman bill last year--35 Republicans, 35 Democrats. And that is why we had 63 cosponsors of the Reid-McConnell bill.

Finally, Senator Reid allowed this to come forward, and Senator McConnell worked with him in a way that permitted this environment. It is pretty remarkable. We have had nothing like this in the Senate this year. We had no cloture--not one bit of cloture. We had a very complicated bill. We dealt with 40 amendments, and we got it all done within a week--on one of the most important pieces of legislation. That is a significant achievement. We should not forget the role Senator Frist played last year in helping to move things along. So I thank my colleagues for the privilege of being a part of it.

Senator Bingaman read the names, I believe, of all of the Democratic staff and Republican staff. I do not think he left anyone out. I want to especially, therefore, say--I hope this is appropriate to do--to Jonathan Epstein and Senator Bingaman's staff how much we appreciate all of them. They really have been indispensable to this effort. I also thank Matt Sonnesyn, who has been our lead. He has been indispensable, as well, and David Cleary; and Kathryn Clay on Senator Domenici's staff, who has been crucial to the effort. The staff have spent hundreds of hours, literally, in the last 2 years working carefully through the bill.

I might say this, in conclusion--I know Senator Domenici has something to say--I took the legislation home over the weekend and reread it, all 208 pages. It is remarkably coherent, well written, and well organized. Maybe this process would be a good model for other legislation.

The House of Representatives is already moving. Congressman Gordon and Congressman Boehlert joined Senator Bingaman and me in asking the National Academies for their recommendations 2 years ago. Those recommendations have been introduced in the House. It is my hope that after our legislation goes there, the House will act soon, and we will be able to send this legislation to the President.

Senator Domenici took us to the White House last year to talk with the President about this issue. He secured the invitation, and it was not just a Republican Senator or another Republican Senator, it was a Republican senior Senator and a Democratic senior Senator meeting with the President. That is the way we worked on this issue. So we appreciate the President's attention and priority to this issue. It would not have happened without that, either.

Thank you, Madam President.

Mr. President, I am waiting on the Democratic manager of the bill, Senator Bingaman, who should be here right away. Following that, we hope to go to the Senator from South Carolina, who has some amendments to offer, but it is not appropriate for me to do that until Senator Bingaman is here. That will take a moment. Then we will go forward, if that is all right with the Senator from South Carolina.

We had a good discussion yesterday on the America COMPETES Act. To remind all Senators, this is the Reid-McConnell legislation, with 56 cosponsors, which seeks to help our country keep our brainpower advantage so we can keep our jobs. It is the result of 2 years of work within this body through three committees principally but really five or six.

We asked the National Academy of Sciences to tell us exactly what we need to do to keep our competitive advantage in the world in competition with China and India so our jobs don't go there, so we can keep this remarkable situation we have of producing 30 percent of all the money each year for 5 percent of the people, with at least half of that based on our technological advantage. The National Academy of Sciences gave us a list of recommendations in priority order. The Council on Competitiveness formed the basis of a Lieberman-Ensign bill, the President made his own recommendations, and all that now has been worked through into this legislation.

I see Senator Bingaman. If I may, I would like to finish 3 or 4 minutes of remarks and then go to Senator Bingaman.

Yesterday, Senator Inouye, Senator Stevens, Senator Domenici, all of whom have been leaders on this legislation, spoke on the floor. Senator Chambliss as well spoke on the floor. Senator Bingaman, of course, has been a leader from the very beginning, asking the questions that helped produce this result. So we have before us a leadership bill on a subject that is as important as any.

Almost all Members of the Senate over the last 2 years have had plenty of opportunity to influence this bill, and most have in one way or the other. It has been a remarkable exercise. But there still is time today and tomorrow for us to consider more options.

The President, last night by e-mail--someone in the White House--sent a Statement of Administration Policy to Capitol Hill which outlines the administration's views on the pending legislation.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the President's remarks on January 31, 2006, from his State of the Union Address in which he spoke about the importance of the competitiveness initiative.

As a courtesy to the administration, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the administration's Statement of Administration Policy following my remarks.

Mr. President, I know how important the President believes this is. I have talked with him about it at least a half dozen times personally, usually in bipartisan sessions with a number of Senators, sometimes individually. I know the Vice President has been deeply involved.

When there is some more time on the floor this afternoon, if we have a lull in the debate, I will go through the Statement of Administration Policy and talk about it a little bit. Basically, it is very helpful to us. It points out that there is not much difference between the amount of money the President proposes to spend over the next 4 years and the amount we would propose to authorize to spend in this bill. As one might expect, the President likes his new programs but doesn't like some other new programs, and there are some other suggestions that are well taken that we can talk about, perhaps accept amendments, at least discuss with the Democratic majority those amendments, and there will be some amendments that are offered on the Senate floor.

I will reserve my comments on the President's Statement of Administration Policy. It is good to have it. We will make it part of the debate--and taking the President at his word--given the President's statement and the administration policy statement that ``The administration looks forward to working with Congress to address these various policy concerns as the legislative process moves forward.''

I defer to Senator Bingaman, if I may. Senator DeMint is ready to offer amendments and speak about them whenever that is appropriate.

Exhibit 1

State of the Union Address by the President, Jan. 31, 2006

``And to keep America competitive, one commitment is

necessary above all: We must continue to lead the world in

human talent and creativity. Our greatest advantage in the

world has always been our educated, hardworking, ambitious

people--and we're going to keep that edge. Tonight I announce

an American Competitiveness Initiative, to encourage

innovation throughout our economy, and to give our Nation's

children a firm grounding in math and science.

First, I propose to double the federal commitment to the

most critical basic research programs in the physical

sciences over the next 10 years. This funding will support

the work of America's most creative minds as they explore

promising areas such as nanotechnology, supercomputing, and

alternative energy sources.

Second, I propose to make permanent the research and

development tax credit--to encourage bolder private--sector

initiatives in technology. With more research in both the

public and private sectors, we will improve our quality of

life--and ensure that America will lead the world in

opportunity and innovation for decades to come.

Third, we need to encourage children to take more math and

science, and to make sure those courses are rigorous enough

to compete with other nations. We've made a good start in the

early grades with the No Child Left Behind Act, which is

raising standards and lifting test scores across our country.

Tonight I propose to train 70,000 high school teachers to

lead advanced-placement courses in math and science, bring

30,000 math and science professionals to teach in classrooms,

and give early help to students who struggle with math, so

they have a better chance at good, high-wage jobs. If we

ensure that America's children succeed in life, they will

ensure that America succeeds in the world.

Preparing our Nation to compete in the world is a goal that

all of us can share. I urge you to support the American

Competitiveness Initiative, and together we will show the

world what the American people can achieve.''

Mr. President, I want to thank the Senator from South Carolina for his amendments and for his initiative for being here and offering them. He is helping us jump-start the discussion, and I want him to know what we are doing is working on ways to get to action on his bills, not the reverse.

In fact, as far as his suggestion about considering the impact of taxes as barriers to innovation, I think he is right about that. That was a part of the original legislation. It had 70 sponsors at one time, the PACE Act. It was the Domenici-Bingaman act at that time. It is also a part of the Augustine report. These were the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences team, which included 21 individuals who spent the entire summer and early fall of 2005 looking at exactly what we needed to do, and they recommended tax incentives for U.S.-based innovation.

This was a practical group, this Augustine committee. They made 20 recommendations. They knew there were a number of things that, if they recommended them, we wouldn't pass because we would have differences of opinion about them. So they stayed away from some areas. For example, since kindergarten through the 12th grade was their No. 1 priority in terms of improving education and encouraging innovation there, they might have felt giving low-income families scholarships or vouchers to go to private schools would be a good thing to do. But they didn't put that in their top 20 because they knew it was unlikely we would be able to agree on that here.

I think the same is true here with taxes. They specifically said on page 10 of the summary of their ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm'' that while they recommended making permanent the research and development tax credit as one change in tax policy, they realized that wasn't enough to consider it. They mention other alternatives that should be examined to see if it would be beneficial to the United States. These alternatives, the summary said:

. . . could include changes in overall corporate tax rates

and special tax provisions providing research of high-

technology and manufacturing equipment, treatment of capital

gains, and incentives for long-term investment innovation.

The Council of Economic Advisers and the Congressional Budget

Office should conduct a comprehensive analysis to examine how

the United States compares with other nations as a location

for innovation and related activities with a view to ensuring

the United States is one of the most attractive places in the

world for long-term innovation related investment and the

jobs relating from that investment from a tax standpoint.

That is not now the case, is what the Augustine report said. So I believe the Senator from South Carolina is making a real contribution to the debate here. His amendment which he proposes to bring up would improve the bill, in my

opinion. It was once a part of the legislation that was similar, and I am hopeful the Finance Committee will recognize this simply amends a study that is already in the bill so tax barriers can be included as part of that study.

Mr. President, I look forward to the response by the Democratic manager as to how we shall proceed.

Reserving the right to object--I have no objection.

I ask unanimous consent to speak for 2 minutes before the Senator from Oklahoma.

Mr. President, I thank Senator Kennedy, the chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and Senator Enzi, who was chairman last year, when all this began. I hope our colleagues can see that these senior Members of the Senate--in the case of Senator Kennedy and Senator Enzi, they have a large amount of jurisdiction over this subject; Senator Stevens and Senator Inouye, who spoke yesterday, have a large amount of jurisdiction over this subject; Senators Domenici and Bingaman, who introduced legislation last year that attracted 70 cosponsors--a number of their ideas are within this legislation, but they have also demonstrated something you don't see every day with Senators, which is a forbearance.

In other words, they recognize this is a big, 208-page bill with the President's ideas and those of the Council on Competitiveness and the Augustine Commission. It is well and carefully crafted, but not every single section is exactly the way every single Senator would like it. Also, it has permitted us to have a procedure that brings this bill to the floor so it has a good chance of being enacted this week. I thank Senator Kennedy and Senator Enzi, who really have the largest amount of jurisdiction, for forbearing, being active, leading, and showing a sense of urgency about this subject by permitting it to come to the floor in the way it has, and then, in addition to the other contributions they have made, we have the Kennedy-Enzi HELP Committee managers' package which is now before the Senate for its consideration.

Madam President, reserving the right to object.

No objection, Madam President.

Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Madam President, as I understand what we are doing: We have a few amendments pending. We are working to clear those amendments so we can come to a vote on Senator Coburn's amendment. In the meantime, Senator Sununu has more than one amendment. He has one he wants to talk about today. He wants to bring it up as soon as he can and schedule it for a vote. It is a meritorious amendment. I hope we can do that as soon as possible.

Senator Coburn has reserved the rest of his time. But as I understand the procedure, Senator Sununu could go ahead and speak until the next scheduled speaker, who is scheduled to speak at 4 o'clock; is that correct?

Thank you, Madam President.

No objection. Could we have 4 minutes equally divided?

Any objection? Prior to the vote, if and when the vote is set?

Thank you.

No objection.

Senator Ensign will not be here. Senator Hutchison and then Senator Cornyn would like to take that time. I ask unanimous consent that Senator Hutchison and Senator Cornyn be allowed to take the time between now and 5:10 when the vote begins.

I asked that Senator Hutchison have 10 minutes, followed by Senator Cornyn for 10 minutes.

Could we ask the intention of the senior Senator from Texas?

Mr. President, within 3 or 4 minutes, we will be moving to amendments as described by the Senator from New Mexico. But before he speaks, let me thank the Senator from Texas both for his leadership on the amendment and for his spirit of cooperation and willingness to withdraw the amendment.

It is my hope that this is not the end of that discussion. I strongly agree with him. Our immigration laws are archaic in this regard. We have 650,000 legal new citizens every year, and we should, in our own interests, allow highly skilled men and women--the brightest people in the world who come here to study, earn these degrees in science, technology, math--to stay here and create jobs instead of going home and creating jobs. We should do that. So he has highlighted that. The Senate adopted that last year. I hope we will have a chance to adopt it again before Memorial Day. I salute the Senator for that, and I hope this is just the beginning of his insistence on this and other types of legislation that would reform our immigration policy.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Oklahoma and the Senator from Ohio for their courtesy.

I simply want to acknowledge the comments of Senator Bingaman from New Mexico and say I think our day has been productive and to say our colleagues have been very helpful in bringing their amendments to the floor.

I ask the Senator what he envisions for tomorrow beyond what he already announced.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from New Mexico. The majority leader and the Republican leader would both like us to finish tomorrow, if we can. I think we have a good chance of doing that. Senator Inhofe is staying tonight to talk about an amendment he hopes to bring up tomorrow. I talked with Senator Grassley. The number of amendments that seem to need to be offered seems to be narrowing down. I would say to my colleagues, with the briefing that is scheduled for tomorrow afternoon at 4 o'clock, we are going to do our best to get as many of those as possible in before 4 o'clock so we can finish the bill tomorrow, if possible.

I am going to defer any other remarks I have until after the Senator from Oklahoma and the Senator from Ohio and the Senator from New York have had a chance to speak.

Mr. President, before the Senator from Ohio goes forward, I simply say to the Senator from New York I applaud his work on the math program. I remember last year when we talked about it, and I met with his constituents who have done so much good work with that model.

Among the other things which are important about the program is that it defines a fair way of identifying a high-need set of teachers--in this case math and science--and when they go into teaching, to pay them more for being good teachers. That is a tough thing to do. It is tough to do that in a fair way, but the Senator has found one way to do it. We have a variety of other ways to do it. Senator Durbin and I have supported an amendment, the teacher incentive fund, which encourages that sort of experimentation, a not-made-in-Washington formula.

But if we are to have areas of high need such as math and science and low-income children who can't achieve, we are going to have to find some fair ways for outstanding school teaching and leadership. The Senator from New York has taken an important step in that direction as part of what he has done today, and I congratulate him for that.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from New Mexico. I say to him, it is always nice to serve with him in the Senate but especially this week because this week the Senate, as anyone can see, is debating perhaps the two greatest issues facing our country. One is a way forward in Iraq, about which we have profound disagreements; two is, how do we keep our jobs in a competitive world, how do we keep our brainpower advantage so we can continue this remarkable situation we find ourselves in where our country produces about 30 percent of all the money in the world, gross domestic product, for about 5 percent of the people?

I believe the election last November was as much about the conduct of business in Washington, DC, as it was about the conduct of the war in Iraq. I think most people--and I have said this many times--most people want to see us acting like grownups dealing with big issues. They know that while we have our principles and we have our politics, there are some issues before us that are simply too big for one political party to solve. We have not reached the point on Iraq where we can do that. I am hopeful we can. We need a political settlement here as much as Iraq needs one there. But we have reached--or we are close to reaching--a political settlement on the other great issue we are debating this week; that is, competitiveness. This is a great big issue. This is of concern to Tennesseans in every county where I go. This is the feeling down deep in your gut or in your heart while sitting around the table at night: Am I going to have a job? As the Presiding Officer has spoken eloquently to this, we come at this from many different ways, but we see that our country now is in a very fortunate position that we can't take for granted.

I was trying to think of an appropriate analogy today, and I was thinking of the University of Tennessee women's basketball team. I heard some nice compliments paid to the Wisconsin teams today. I think Pat Summitt and the University of Tennessee women's basketball team have won seven national championships, including the one this year.

There was a time 20 years ago when the University of Tennessee women's basketball team coached by Pat Summitt played any team in the Southeastern Conference and it wasn't even close. Everybody knew the Lady Volunteers--the Lady Vols--were so good, so strong, so far ahead that they were going to win. Now they still win, but they really have to work to win because there are a lot of great teams in the Southeastern Conference. In fact, there are a lot of great teams around the country, and that is the way as we look in the world in which we live today.

We cannot take for granted 1 year longer that our children and our grandchildren will enjoy this remarkable standard of living we have. There are a number of steps we need to take to deal with that.

The step we are talking about this week with a reasonable degree of consensus is keeping our brainpower advantage. Why do we say brainpower advantage? Because that is one way we gained our wealth as a country. In fact, many of the studies show that at least half and maybe a good deal more of the growth in the wealth of families, the family incomes in America since World War II, has come from technological advances. That is going back a long ways. That is from Thomas Edison's inventions. That is from Henry Ford's inventions, Walter Chrysler's inventions, and more recently the Google invention. Wherever those inventions come, the jobs grow.

I learned a long time ago that as important as it is for Governors, for example, to recruit jobs, it is more important to grow jobs. We were feeling pretty good down in Tennessee 25 years ago when Saturn came from General Motors and Nissan came to Tennessee. I added it all up, and that was 10,000 or 12,000 jobs. Then the suppliers came, and that was a lot more jobs.

But in Tennessee, as in most places in America, we lose jobs every year. The numbers are a little elusive. But in a State such as Tennessee where 2.5 million people work, maybe we lose 10 percent of our jobs every year. They just disappear. Companies go out of business. But that must mean we must create about that many new jobs every year. So the strong economies, the economies that are growing--the United States being the prime example--are the economies which create the best environment for the growth of the largest number of good new jobs. That is what a progrowth policy is.

We Republicans, we on this side of the aisle, are saying progrowth-- yes, that means low taxes. I agree. I vote for low taxes. When I was Governor of Tennessee, we had low taxes. I believe we had the lowest taxes per capita in the country. That wasn't enough. We were the third poorest State, and we had low taxes. The problem was we had a lot of other rules and regulations and impediments and impairments that kept us from raising our family incomes. For example, we had a usury limit of 10 percent. We had very restrictive banking laws. On the good side, we had a right-to-work law. That helped us. There were a number of things that created a more competitive environment. On the negative side, we had a bad road system. Now we have one of the best four-lane highway systems in America.

As we worked through the goal of how do we in our State of Tennessee go

from being the third poorest State to what we became--the fastest growing State in family incomes--we went through all those other issues and finally centered on better schools, better colleges, better universities, more brainpower, because if you went to work at the Saturn plant, you had to know statistics, you had to know other forms of math, you had to speak English well and work as part of a team. There really weren't any blue-collar jobs left in the auto industry; they were high-tech jobs, and you had to be well trained to be there.

As we have said to each other--and we all believe this, almost every one of us--our children have to know more than we did. Standards are higher and higher and higher because as some jobs leave our country, if we want to create more good new jobs, we are going to have to be smart enough to create them, smart enough to work at them, and smart enough to keep them. That is what the brainpower advantage is.

We have had that advantage. We have had the greatest K-12 system in the world here for a long time. It has some problems now, but it has been a remarkable system for our country. There is no doubt we have the finest system of colleges and universities in the world. More than half a million students around the world come here.

The former President of Brazil, Cardoso, was visiting with a group of Senators a couple of years ago, and someone asked him: What will you take back to Brazil, Mr. President? He taught at the Library of Congress and in other places in the world. He is an academic. He said: The American university.

No one in the world has a system like the American universities. That is why we have people lining up in India and China and everywhere else to come to our schools.

Then we have these remarkable National Laboratories, such as the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Just in Knoxville, TN, the area where I grew up, with the Tennessee Valley Authority, the University of Tennessee research campus, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, we have more than 3,000 Ph.D.s. What a concentration of brain power. Out of that comes entrepreneurial hotspots, new jobs, and this high standard of living we talk about in our State, as well as for our country.

So what is the problem? You might even look at it, as the International Monetary Fund has said over the last several years, that we have been able to keep that high level of gross national product, but we all know anecdotally, and now from recommendations we have gotten from people who know what they are talking about, that we have a gathering storm. That is why simultaneously a number of us in the Senate, on both sides of the aisle, all began to come to about the same conclusion.

Senator Lieberman and Senator Ensign, for example, took legislation from a group called the Council on Competitiveness, which said if we don't stay competitive, we are not going to keep our jobs. So what do we need to do? They told us. Senator Bingaman and I, with Senator Domenici's encouragement, and Representatives Boehlert and Gordon in the House of Representatives joined in, asked the National Academy of Sciences: We said, OK, you are supposed to know this. The Senator from Ohio and the Senator from Tennessee, we might have an idea, we might have a friend with a math program, but you are supposed to know. Exactly what do we need to do to keep our high standard of living, to keep our jobs from going to China and India? Tell us in priority order. They did that. They gave us this report, ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm.''

They said if we want to keep our jobs, we better do these 20 things in priority order. These aren't the only 20 things. Each of us can think of more to do. We might not agree about some of those things. Some might be tort reform. Some might be to give poor kids vouchers to go to school. Those things aren't in here. Some overhaul of the tax system. There are a lot of barriers to innovation, but this group came up with 20 recommendations.

What happened to that? We have worked together with the administration--homework sessions we called them--and we took the best advice we could. These 20 recommendations weren't willy-nilly. These were three Nobel laureates, a former president of MIT, business leaders like Craig Barrett of Intel, Bob Gates, the head of Texas A&M, now the Defense Secretary. They gave their summer. They reviewed hundreds of proposals. They said of all the proposals, here is one that seems effective; that makes a difference. Let's try it. This is what we need to do to keep our advantage.

We usually don't have that kind of dispassionate, disinterested advice. I think that is why, after we got going, we were able to have a piece of legislation, Domenici-Bingaman, that had 70 cosponsors--35 on this side, 35 on that side. We had a Republican majority, and we worked together to produce that bill, and Senator Frist and Senator Reid introduced it last year as we were going out of session.

What has happened this year? We have a Democratic majority, and Senator Reid and Senator McConnell have taken the same bill, after it has made its way through all these committees--and it is a big bill, 208 pages. I reread it over the weekend. It is remarkably well organized, remarkably literate, remarkably easy to understand, and makes a lot of sense.

Is it perfect? No. We have 100 Senators. We have 62 cosponsors of this legislation by the majority leader and the minority leader. Yet there are several things, if I were writing it, that I would take out.

We have had a healthy debate today. We have had some good points made by Senator DeMint and Senator Sununu and Senator Gregg and some others who are critical of provisions of the bill. That is the way the Senate is supposed to work. We put it out there, we work hard to get our advice, we have debates, we have votes, and we go on to the next thing, which is what we are doing tomorrow.

I would like to say, if all of us insisted on every right each of us has, we would never get anything done. So I am very grateful to my colleagues for the work they have done to help bring this to a conclusion, which we hope we can reach tomorrow.

I would like to make just a couple of other comments in response to some of the criticisms of the legislation. I don't want to make too many because most of the comments have been favorable. I mean, it is very impressive when senior members, such as Senators Kennedy and Enzi from the HELP Committee, and Senators Inouye and Stevens from Commerce, and Senators Bingaman and Domenici from the Energy Committee bring this bill directly to the Senate floor and have a sense of urgency about its passage and step back and don't insist on all their prerogatives so we can actually come to a conclusion. They have produced a remarkably good bill.

In improving it, however, one thing that was done to improve it yesterday was an amendment that was adopted which Senator Bingaman offered. That took out any direct spending in the bill. So there is no mandatory spending in this legislation. This is an authorization bill. It doesn't spend one single penny. That is important for everyone to know.

There is also the question of its cost. Let me go to a Statement of Administration Policy that arrived last night. I used to work in the White House, in the Congressional Relations Office. I think if I had been doing it, and if the Senate had been working on this for 2 years, with maybe a dozen Senators, including some Republicans, I think I might have driven over here and given this to somebody. I would have appreciated that, and I think many other Senators would have. Nevertheless, I put this in the Record this morning as a courtesy to the White House because the President has spoken out forcefully for the competitiveness agenda in his State of the Union message for the last 2 years, and he put a large amount of funding in his budget for the next 4 years in support of it, and a number of the President's proposals, most of them in fact, are incorporated in this legislation.

So among the National Academy of Sciences, the Council on Competitiveness, and all the committees, we have the President of the United States, the most important voice in the country, saying this is what we need to do. I am grateful for that.

I am also grateful for this Statement of Administration Policy which has made some helpful suggestions, and we have been considering them. This

statement points out, for example, that the Senate bill in support of competitiveness objectives would cost $61 billion over the next 4 years. Most of it comes from doubling funding for the hard sciences in the Office of Science in the Department of Energy, doing that over 10 years, and authorizing--again, not spending, authorizing--doubling of the National Science Foundation over 5 years. Mr. President, $61 billion is what the Senate bill would do. That is $9 billion more than the President's proposal.

Let me point out that the President himself proposed $52 billion over the next 4 years. We have proposed $8 billion or $9 billion more--no direct spending, and fairly close to what the President had recommended. As Senator Bingaman said, the Budget Committee and the Senate, by a 97-to-1 vote, approved an amendment making about $1 billion of room in our budget for the first year of these proposals.

In terms of new programs, it has been said there may be $16 billion of new proposals over the next 4 years. Let me try to put that in perspective. I consider this progrowth legislation. Over on this side of the aisle, we get very excited about progrowth legislation. I do. I like it. I just talked about how I was a progrowth Governor. The first thing that comes to mind is taxes, the Bush 2001 tax cuts. I voted for them. I will vote for them again. They are progrowth. They cost $552 billion over 5 years--$552 billion over 5 years. That is a lot of money. We do that over here and don't think twice about it because it is progrowth.

This is $16 billion over 4 years. It is progrowth. To my way of thinking, it is just as progrowth as tax cuts. In fact, most of the research shows that our brain power advantage is the single most important reason that we grow the largest number of new jobs in our country. Our tax structure is important, but our brain power advantage is more important. So this is progrowth.

Another way of thinking about it, if we are $8 billion more than the President's proposals, $8 billion is about what we spend in a month in Iraq. We spend about $2 billion a week in Iraq. I vote for that, too. But if we don't have growth, if we don't invest in education and research and keep our competitive advantage, we will never be able to pay for the urgent needs we have--in Medicare, Medicaid, to clean up after hurricanes, and to have a strong national defense. So this is progrowth legislation.

As I look through the Statement of Administration Policy, I won't seek to discuss each of these items, but there are some differences of opinion between those in the administration and those of us who worked on the bill. In some cases, it boils down to the President liking his new programs and not liking our new programs, although most of his are in there. It is not quite fair for the White House to say it is wrong for the Senate to add a few new programs but not wrong for the President to add a few new programs. We are coequal branches of the Government.

He has a new Math Now Program. We think it is a good program, and it is in here, but it is a new educational program. We have new educational programs, too, that were recommended by the Augustine commission, such as the You Teach Program from the University of Texas and the Penn Science Program from the University of Pennsylvania, both of which were judged to be the most outstanding programs in the country to help train existing teachers or train new teachers. And who told us that? This committee of 21, including three Nobel laureates who spent the summer reviewing all the ideas. That is pretty good advice we are getting, Mr. President. So I think we should take it.

The administration doesn't like what we call ARPA-E. It is what has been called DARPA over in the Defense Department, which has been very successful as a research agency. Out of it came Stealth, which permits us to own the night in our military activities. Out of it came the Internet. There are some differences between using that to solve our energy problems, but we think we ought to try. That is just a difference of opinion.

There are a few other differences of opinion. One is that some people think--although I haven't heard it said much on the floor today--we should not be using our National Laboratories to have math and science programs for teachers and students. I do not agree with that. My experience is totally the reverse. Our biggest problem with math and science is inspiring kids to learn math and science. What would inspire you more than to go to the Oak Ridge Laboratory, Los Alamos, being near a Nobel Prize winner if you are 14 or 15 years old or if you are a teacher? If you want to be a musician in Nashville, you would rather go on the road with Vince Gill or Martina McBride than sit in the business office of the Grand Ole Opry. So if we have these great National Laboratories, let's use them to inspire our students.

That is new. That is true, it is new. But what is wrong with a new idea every now and then if it has promise and it looks as if will work and it is recommended by the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Engineering, and the National Academy of Medicine as something we ought to do? There are a variety of very good suggestions made by the administration's statement of policy. We are taking them all into account.

We have had a number of amendments today. One of the concerns of the administration was that we not duplicate educational programs. That is our concern as well. In the work that we did, we asked the National Academies to look at existing programs and help us not duplicate those. So as an example, the National Academies suggested that we create a special program of scholarships to train new teachers. We looked at the National Science Foundation and, in fact, asked the Director. He already had a program like that called the Robert Noyce Scholarship Program. We judged that to be an effective program. Instead of creating a new one, we expanded the existing one. So we have been very sensitive to that.

The legislation itself sets up a Cabinet council which will review existing math and science programs in kindergarten through the 12th grade to try to make sure we do not duplicate and that all of the money we spend is effective. The administration has its own academic competitiveness council. It has been at work for about 18 months, I think. It hasn't reached its conclusions yet. It is going to be a very useful council as well. And the President's own Math Now proposal, a new program, will also be helpful in helping us take the existing programs and focus them correctly.

So the new Cabinet council within the administration, set up by this bill, the existing Academic Competitiveness Council already ongoing in the administration, and our own oversight, should help us continue this very valid inquiry to make sure the programs weren't duplicated.

I told the visiting chief State school officers today, who were here from around the country, that there was a lot to take home from this bill, and there is. When the academies were asked to put this in priority order, they didn't put a research and development tax credit as the No. 1 thing to keep our jobs. They didn't put bringing in students from overseas as the No. 1 thing, although we think it is terrifically important. They didn't even put more research in the universities as the No. 1 thing.

They said improving kindergarten through the 12th grade. And they took a number of steps, some of which I have already mentioned: the summer institutes of the National Laboratories, the teacher institutes at the National Science Foundation--70,000 new teachers will be trained to teach advanced placement courses in math, science, and the critical foreign languages. Especially, this will mean low-income children who are just as smart but just haven't had the opportunity to have a teacher who knew how to teach it or the money to pay for the test, this will take care of that. This is from a Houston, TX, program that has been judged effective because it has worked for many years.

Then I think a very exciting program is the idea of supporting these specialty math and science schools in each State, a residential math and science school such as the one in North Carolina, the one in Georgia. The Governor of Tennessee has just begun to have one. It forms a nucleus of excellence in a subject matter, in this case math and science, that attracts and inspires the best students and teachers.

We found in our State over the last 20 years that summer academies, just 2 or 4 weeks, in different subjects, has made a remarkable difference in the quality of education. In Georgia, for example, their experience is that half the students who go to the Georgia math and science academy then go to Georgia Tech. That means they stay in Georgia instead of going somewhere else and then they are the source of the new jobs and higher standard of living for our future.

As I hope you can tell, I am excited about what has happened today. I know enough about the Senate to know we are not through. The Senate is not done until it is done. My hope is that Senator Bingaman is right and we can finish tomorrow.

I thank the majority leader and the Republican leader for creating an environment in which we can succeed. They have given us the time to do it and our colleagues have been diligent. I hope our colleagues will come to the floor tomorrow with their suggestions. But I want the American people to know what I said when I began. It is always a privilege to serve in the Senate, but especially it is a privilege this week because this is the Senate acting as grown-ups, not playing partisan, petty politics, not dealing with little kindergarten issues. We are dealing with the two foremost issues facing our country: How we go forward in Iraq--we have profound disagreements still--and how we keep our competitive advantage, our brain power advantage, so we can keep our jobs. We are coming to a consensus because of very hard work on both sides. I think the American people will be proud of the result, if we are able to succeed, which I very much hope we can.

I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

Mr. President, we have Senator Inouye here, who has played a major role in the development of this legislation, and I believe we will have a little later Senator Stevens, who is right behind me now, and Senator Domenici after that. So I am going to let the two distinguished chairs of the Commerce Committee speak.

Mr. President, before the Senator from Alaska speaks and while the Senator from Hawaii will be here for a while longer, I wanted to call attention to their leadership on this bill and their sense of urgency about the importance of it in the Commerce Committee.

I wanted to relate specifically an event a year ago, in August, in Beijing, China, which I related on the floor when the bill was introduced. I think it puts into perspective why so many Senators on both sides of the aisle have worked on that, why the bill is being introduced by both the Democratic and Republican leaders, and why it came directly to the floor and is ready for action.

Senator Stevens and Senator Inouye took a group of Senators to China. They were especially well received--this Congressional Medal of Honor winner and this Flying Tiger pilot who flew the first cargo plane into Beijing toward the end of World War II. As a result, we spent an hour with President Hu and another hour with the No. 2 man, Vice Premier Wu. We talked about all of the things one would expect in that discussion: North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. But the subject, I recall, about which both of those leaders of China were most animated was the subject we are discussing on the floor today: How is China going to increase its brainpower advantage so it can create more jobs?

President Hu told us that he had done what we are doing today but in the Chinese way. He had, a month earlier, gone to the Great Hall of the People in China and assembled their national academy of science and engineering of China and established a 15-year goal for innovation and declared they would spend a certain amount in research and investment. That was the way they were going to raise their standard of living to compete with the United States. We see that with the recruitment of Chinese-born scholars who were educated in the United States and are going back to China to create even better universities there. We saw, under the sponsorship of these two Senators, that the two top leaders of that country understand very well America's brainpower advantage, which has been the greatest source of this remarkably high standard of living we have, and the fact that we produce 30 percent of all of the money in the world for just 5 percent of the people. I wanted to acknowledge their leadership and put into perspective that visit just last year in China.

Mr. President, I wish to say to the Senator from Alaska that if he, who last year was President pro tempore of the Senate, and Senator Inouye, one of our leading Senators on the Democratic side, had not from the beginning placed such a priority on this legislation, it could never have made its way through the committees and reached this point. So I salute them for their willingness to look into our country's future and see the importance of this issue.

Mr. President, if the Senator from Hawaii doesn't have further comments at the moment, I might use the time for the next few moments to talk about a couple of items. One is how we got here with this legislation and, two, more about what it does.

First, let me say on behalf of the leadership, Senators Reid, McConnell, Bingaman, Inouye, and others, we hope that Senators will bring their amendments today, or early. Let us see them so that we can talk about them and, if necessary, vote on them.

The Democratic leader and the Republican leader have created an environment in which we can deal with this bill in the way the Senate ought to be

dealing with a piece of legislation that is at least on a subject as important as any other subject that will be before us. In other words, the bill is on the floor. We are ready to receive amendments. We are ready to vote on amendments, if necessary. I am sure the Democratic leader, who will announce his schedule, would like to finish the bill by Wednesday sometime because we have other important legislation to consider this week. So I hope we make the most of today, tomorrow, and Wednesday.

Just a word about how the Senate got here. I mentioned earlier that in China, President Hu could simply call a meeting in the Great Hall of the People and, with his national academies of science and engineering, declare that: This is where we are going for the next 15 years. In China, that works pretty well, and that is likely where they are going. They have very specific goals, for example, for the amount of gross domestic product they will be spending on research and development, what they will be doing with their universities, and how they hope to improve their schools.

In the United States, we have to work in a little different way. The result we have here today with this legislation, which is 2,008 pages long--and I know that because I reread it over the weekend. It came in a different way.

Senator Bingaman and I, with the encouragement and sponsorship of Senator Domenici, who was chairman of one of the affected committees here, literally asked the National Academy of Sciences this question a couple of years ago: What are the top 10 actions in priority order that Federal policymakers could take over the next 10 years to help the United States keep our advantage in science and technology?

We figured that Members of Congress were not necessarily the best ones to make those recommendations. I am sure the Presiding Officer has some idea of some math or science program he thinks might be best or at least he has two or three friends who have an idea. I know the Senator from Hawaii has one. I have five or six myself. We thought perhaps we should ask the people who are supposed to know.

We asked the National Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine exactly what should we in the Congress be doing. It is my view most ideas fail around here for the lack of an idea, so we asked them specifically for an idea.

The academies took us seriously. They assembled an all-star panel of business, Government, and university leaders headed by Norman Augustine, as the Senator from Alaska said, the former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, a member himself of the National Academy of Engineering. That panel included three Nobel Prize winners.

Those very busy people, including university president Bob Gates, now Secretary of Defense, and the Nobel Prize winners, gave up their summer, and they took our question seriously. Exactly what does the United States need to do to keep our brain power advantage, is really the question. We asked for 10 and they gave us 20 recommendations.

The recommendations are in this report, ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm,'' to which the two Senators have referred. To their credit, they put it in priority order. I will talk more in a minute about what the priorities are.

They started with kindergarten through 12th grade, 10,000 teachers, 10 million minds, K-12 science and math education: ``Sowing the Seeds through Science and Engineering Research,'' ``Best and Brightest in Science and Engineering Higher Education,'' ``Incentives for Innovation and the Investment Environment.'' They gave us 20 recommendations in priority order.

That was not the only idea before the Senate at that time, nor were those of us in the Senate the only ones involved. Representatives Sherwood Boehlert and Mark Gordon of the House Committee on Science had joined us in asking this question. I know Representative Gordon, who is now chairman of the House Science Committee, moved forward quickly to introduce in the House of Representatives similar legislation.

What did we do when we got these 20 recommendations? As I mentioned, they were not the only recommendations. Senator Bingaman and Senator Hutchison, for example, had been working for many years to increase the number of children, especially low-income children, who could take the advanced placement courses. Those are a ticket to college, and there are a lot of bright kids who don't have the money to pay for the tests or who go to schools where the teachers are not trained to teach the courses. They have been working on that for a long time. Senator Bond from Missouri and Senator Mikulski of Maryland have been speaking about this for a long time. Then there was an excellent piece of legislation by Senator Lieberman and Senator Ensign which had in it recommendations from the Council on Competitiveness. Many of those recommendations were then included in the Commerce Committee's hearings and deliberations.

So the question is how to take all this information in the Senate where people have lots of different ideas and get it all together into one bill and get it passed. Senator Stevens said: Let's form a joint committee. That is a little harder to do than before. Senator Inouye once served on a joint committee--well, it was a special committee in the Watergate days, but there are not that many around here because we have our own committees.

What happened was our senior Members of the Senate, such as Senator Stevens and Senator Inouye, Senator Enzi and Senator Kennedy, Senator Domenici and Senator Bingaman, just by the force of their own personalities worked together to create an environment with the help of a lot of staff members to say: Let's take all of these ideas and let's work in a genuinely bipartisan way.

We then had a Republican Congress last year. Senator Domenici, who will be here a little later this afternoon, was chairman of the Energy Committee. He went to the White House to talk with the President about this issue. He invited me to go with him, but he didn't just invite me, he invited Senator Bingaman, his ranking Democrat, to go with him. So all the way we have worked together on this legislation.

Then we sat down shortly after this report came out, which I suppose was in 2005 in the fall, and had a series of what we call homework sessions. We invited representatives from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Education, the President's science adviser, and a whole variety of other people within the administration who were already working on these subjects to get their advice about these ideas and other ideas as we formed legislation. That is the kind of input this legislation has had.

Finally, Senator Domenici and Senator Bingaman introduced what we call the PACE Act, Protect America's Competitive Edge Act. Symbolically, it had 70 cosponsors in the Senate--34 Republicans and 35 Democrats.

So we have gotten to the beginning of 2006. I will say a little bit more in a moment about exactly what was in that legislation, but let me continue with the process because it is fairly remarkable and helped to produce this legislation which I found in rereading it over the weekend is remarkably coherent. It is in plain English. It is organized by sections. I could understand virtually every section. I have been reading it as we went along. Maybe this is a model for other complex legislation we have in the Senate.

The President, in his State of the Union Address in 2006, and again this year, put the issue front and center with what he called his American competitiveness agenda. The President included $6 billion in his budget for just the first year. In March of last year, the Energy Committee reported eight provisions related to energy research and math and science education for students and teachers in association with the National Labs. So eight provisions of the Augustine report were reported out by the Energy Committee.

Then in May the Commerce Committee reported a bill that included ideas from the Augustine report, as well as the President's Council on Competitiveness. We had it from two committees.

Then the immigration bill passed the Senate. The immigration bill didn't finally become law, but it passed the Senate with pretty big numbers, and

included within it were three provisions that tackled some of the most archaic provisions in our immigration laws, those provisions which basically prevent our insourcing of brain power.

We have more than 500,000 foreign students who come here every year to study. They include some of the brightest people in the world, and we make them swear before they come that they will go home when, in fact, we should want most of them to stay here and create jobs for us so we can keep our standard of living.

So three provisions from the Augustine report were in that immigration bill that passed the Senate last year, and it is my hope that when the Senate takes up immigration legislation before Memorial Day, which the majority leader has said we are likely to do, that legislation will, again, have the provisions from the Augustine report and other recommendations that will make it easier to attract and keep in our country the brightest men and women from around the world. If they are going to create good jobs somewhere, let's create them in the United States for Americans to have.

The Defense authorization bill included a provision related to support for early career researchers funded by the Pentagon. There are so many good applications from so many talented people in the United States for basic research or even applied research that the investigators, as they are called, are sometimes in their forties before they win their first grant. That is discouraging to many of the brightest young minds in the United States. These recommendations have sought to include changes, and the Defense authorization bill last year took a step in that direction.

One of the major recommendations of both of the reports I just mentioned was making permanent the research and development tax credit so that our brightest manufacturing jobs can stay here rather than be created overseas.

In the so-called tax extender last year, the tax credit was temporarily extended, and so that was dealt with last year. Last year, just before Senators went home for the elections in October, the two leaders, Senator Frist then the majority leader, and Senator Reid then the Democratic leader, introduced a package--it was numbered S. 3936-- that included the work of the Energy and Commerce Committees and added an education component to improve our children's knowledge of math, science, and critical foreign languages.

That bipartisan product was the work of the chairman and ranking members of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee and the Commerce and Energy Committees.

We tried to be good stewards of the public money as we went through this process. That working group last year trimmed $3 billion from what the committees passed in order to make it more affordable. We did our best to stay close to the President's budget number, although we slightly exceeded that number.

This year, to bring us to where we are today, the majority leader, Senator Reid, and Senator McConnell, the Republican leader, took that bill, the one introduced last year by Senator Frist and Senator Reid, and reintroduced it by removing authorizations for 2007 since we have already finished work on 2007 and are looking ahead to 2008. That is the bill we are considering today, the America COMPETES Act.

That is a long train ride. To those who may be outside the Senate, they may think that is unnecessarily complex. We didn't really need to know all that. I think it is important for the American people to know all that. It is especially important for Senators and their staffs to know all that because virtually every Member of the Senate has had 2 years to get their say. I know on the Commerce Committee there have been long meetings of members of both sides. I know that is true with the staff meetings. Not all would write every provision of the bill the way it is, but that is the nature of work in the Senate. It is a very good piece of legislation. It may be improved on the Senate floor by amendment, but it has been a long and good process.

I yield.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator. His example with Senator Stevens is a good example for all of us. I hope he is right. The American people know we all have our principles, and we have our politics. They know that. But I believe they also know there are some issues that are simply too big for one party to solve, whether it is Iraq, whether it is immigration, whether it is energy independence, whether it is affordable health care. And one of those issues is how do we keep our brain power advantage so we can keep our jobs from going overseas to India and China.

It will take a comprehensive approach. We take for granted sometimes that we produce 30 percent of all the money in the world for 5 percent of the people. That is one of my favorite statistics. If I were a citizen of China or of India and I was looking at the United States and I saw that disproportionately our wealth comes from our brain power, I would be encouraged because many of the brightest people in the world are in China and in India, wonderful researchers, wonderful scientists. There is no reason in the world that they cannot use that great resource they have to improve their standard of living, and they are setting about to do it.

If the Senator from Hawaii has no objection, I thought I might talk a little about what is in the bill, just to go over it.

As I said, for those who like to read whole bills, it is 208 pages, but any contractor will tell you that it is cheaper to start from scratch in building a house sometimes than remodeling it. I think we may have found something here working together in a bipartisan way. In starting from scratch, we actually may have produced a better organized bill, more straightforward than trying to remodel a lot of existing laws. But here is what we sought to do.

Based upon these recommendations, this legislation doubles funding for the National Science Foundation over 5 years. Now, this is the work of Senator Inouye and Senator Stevens and their committee. This is merely an authorization bill--it doesn't appropriate a penny, but it has to be within the budget. Senator Bingaman offered an amendment, which I joined in with during our budget discussion, and it created room in the budget, nearly $1 billion of room in the budget, for the first year appropriations of the America COMPETES Act. So these dollars are within the budget, and I will talk a little more about the dollars a little later.

I might say one thing about the dollars. The dollars are an additional $16 billion in spending over the next 4 years. That is real money. But we might remember on what else we spend money. That is about 2 months of the war in Iraq. We spend about $8 billion a month on the war in Iraq. We spent $237 billion on debt last year, $378 billion on Medicare, $545 on Social Security, and $100 billion or so on hurricanes. These are all very important priorities, but somehow we have to put gas in the engine, and the gas in the engine is our brain power advantage.

We have to invest in research, education--K-12--in order to keep the advantage that creates the dollars that pay these bills for our most important programs. But we have worked hard. We have worked hard to have fiscal discipline. The $16 billion over the next 4 years that this bill would authorize to spend, and which is within the budget for this year, is a significant savings over the original legislation last year. More than $3 billion over the 4 years in authorized funding has been cut from last year's competitiveness bills passed by the Energy and Commerce Committees.

We also worked hard to avoid duplicative undergraduate scholarship programs that were proposed in earlier legislation, and it reduced the cost of a number of other proposed and existing programs. For example, the Robert Noyse scholarship program of the National Science Foundation was very

similar to a recommendation of the Augustine report. So after discussions with the National Science Foundation in our homework sessions, we thought, well, why create a new duplicative program when we already have a good one. So we simply sought to expand it.

With regard to the education and energy portions of the bill, the total cost closely tracks the President's proposed American Competitive Initiative. Remember, he put in $6 billion in his budget last year. The President has proposed over 10 years doubling research funding at the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Department of Energy's Office of Science. The cost of the commerce portion of this legislation is a bit higher, but that is because Chairman Inouye and Cochairman Stevens agreed last year that they wanted to double the National Science Foundation's funding at a faster rate, of about 5 years rather than 10. So I would argue that this is progrowth legislation and a small price to pay for that growth in our standard of living.

Mr. President, I would say to the Senator from Hawaii that any time he would like to interrupt my presentation, I hope he will.

Some of the specific provisions are the doubling of funding for the National Science Foundation, I just mentioned, from $5.6 billion in the current year to $11.2 billion in 2011. Before I arrived, the Congress doubled funding for the National Institutes of Health with a great payoff, most people felt, in terms of our health and research for cures for diseases. But we did not do as good a job during that period of time on the physical sciences, which are also important to the health sciences. This, hopefully, will begin to change that.

Second, setting the Department of Energy's Office of Science on track to double in funding over 10 years, and increasing from $3.6 billion in the current year to $5.2 billion in fiscal year 2011; establishing the innovation acceleration research program, which will direct Federal agencies funding research and science and technology to set as a goal dedicating approximately 8 percent of their research and development budgets toward high-risk frontier research. This was a recommendation of both of the major organizations, the Augustine committee and the Council on Competitiveness.

What this means is that there are so many good proposals before the peer review and merit review groups that give out basic research grants that they obviously tend to be a little more conservative when presented with so many good ideas. The disadvantage of that is that it reduces the impulse to take a few risks, to roll the dice, or to try some idea that has less of a chance of succeeding but might be the next Google or the next hybrid or the next Internet or the next stealth invention. So this legislation encourages all through the America COMPETES Act in virtually every section that we fund, the idea of setting as a goal--not a mandate but as a goal--8 percent of the research and development budget toward this high-risk frontier research.

Next, it authorizes bringing the National Institute of Standards and Technology up from $703 million next year to $937 million in fiscal year 2011. It would direct NASA to increase funding for basic research. It will authorize coordinating ocean and atmospheric research and education at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies to promote U.S. leadership in these important fields. This has been a major priority of Senator Inouye, as well as others.

The Augustine committee, at our request, was asked to give us some priorities and not just give us a random list. And I might say, when they gave us 20 recommendations instead of 10, and they gave them in priority, they didn't just go out and get the first 20 they heard about. Over the summer, the working group of 21 members--and I am sure the Council on Competitiveness did the same--considered hundreds of ideas. So our leading scientists and the people we asked to give us their best advice on science and their best advice on medicine and their best advice on engineering, they waded through dozens and dozens of operating programs and other ideas and gave us just a handful of the best ideas.

This has been a tremendously important screening process. I believe one reason this has been so broadly accepted in the Senate and by those outside the Senate is that it is not just one Senator's idea of what is a great math program or another's best friend's idea of a good research program. This is, in effect, a merit-based, peer-reviewed set of recommendations and an answer to the question as to what are the most important things we can do to keep our brain power advantage.

So, No. 1, authorizing competitive grants to States to better align elementary and secondary education with knowledge and skills needed for success in colleges and universities and the Armed Forces.

Now, what that means in plain English is to make sure our elementary, middle, and high schools are teaching what students need in order to go to college, to go to work, and to go to the Armed Forces. That is the key.

Next, strengthen the skills of thousands of math and science teachers by establishing training and educational programs at summer institutes hosted by the National Laboratories, and increasing support for the teacher institutes at the National Science Foundation's institutes.

One Senator said to me the other day: This is new, isn't it, the idea of giving the National Laboratories such a specific role in training outstanding math and science teachers and inspiring math and science students to learn and achieve more in math and science? The answer is, yes, it is new. But the feeling of the Augustine commission and others is that we have a crisis in math and science. And that is not too strong a word.

The former Governor of North Carolina, Jim Hunt, told me the University of North Carolina only graduated three physics teachers in a recent year from its college of education. So we are not going to learn much physics if we don't have anybody teaching much physics. So why not take advantage of these remarkable National Laboratories we have around the country. I guess there are about two dozen or so of them, like the Oak Ridge Laboratory in the State of Tennessee, but there is also Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore. They are all around the country. If you are going to inspire a student or inspire a teacher to be active in math and science, why not place them in an environment for 4 weeks in the summer with some of the finest math and science researchers and individuals in the United States?

It would be a choice for a young musician--give them a choice whether to be on the road with Johnny Cash or be in the business office at the Grand Ole Opry, and they will go on the road every time because that is how a singer learns to be a singer. And that is how a student learns what they can do with math and the joy of mathematics.

When I was Governor of Tennessee we created summer academies--we called them the Governor's schools--for outstanding students and teachers of various subjects. About 20 States have done the same thing. We have found it is the best money we ever spent to offer 4 weeks at the University of Tennessee connected to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for 200 of the most outstanding high school juniors interested in science and math. The teachers love to teach them, the students love to come. Instead of becoming a nerd in their rural school, suddenly they are with 200 peers, and they are all celebrated for their academic achievements. Why not use these National Laboratories to our advantage?

No other country in the world has the National Laboratories that we have. One thing they can do is to help inspire the next generation of math and science students and improve this generation and the next generation of math and science teachers.

So expanding the Robert Noyse teaching scholarship program at the National Science Foundation--this is a very fine program at the National Science Foundation which has had for a long time a role in education as well as research. This program trains individuals to become math and science teachers in high-need local education agencies.

Assisting States in establishing or expanding statewide specialty schools in math and science. Now, I don't know whether the State of Virginia or the State of Hawaii has a full-time residential school in science and math. I know

the State of North Carolina does, and I went to see it. Governor Jim Hunt set it up. I went to see it when I was Governor. We didn't believe we had enough money to create one in Tennessee, so we created those summer academies about which I just spoke. But Governor Bredesen, our current Democratic Governor of Tennessee, wants to start, and has made a very small start, of what we call in the legislation a specialty school in math and science, and several other States have followed North Carolina's example. This would help States up to about a 50- percent level. All the rest of the money would have to be private, State, or local.

Establish schools like the North Carolina residential high school for math and science. Not only will it give gifted students a greater knowledge, but it helps us compete with the world. North Carolina has felt as though over the last 20 years it has helped keep many of those bright students in North Carolina because if they go there to school, they may go there to college, or at least they may come back if they go somewhere else, and then they create more jobs and build up that economy.

Facilitating the expansion of advanced placement in international baccalaureate programs by increasing the number of teachers prepared to teach those courses and foreign language courses. The AP courses, advanced placement courses, are a ticket to success. College entrance examiners read them carefully. If you get a 4 or a 5--those are the highest grades in math or science--or if you take several of them, your chances of being admitted to a variety of institutions are increased. But they are offered to a very limited number of the students--not limited by their brains but limited by their money. They either do not have the money to pay for the tests or they do not go to the schools where there are enough teachers who are trained to teach in the preparation for their tests.

This builds on a program in Houston, TX, which has been very successful in the last 10 years, of expanding the opportunities for low-income students to take more advanced placement courses to prepare for college and also to train teachers to meet that demand.

Senator Hutchison and Senator Bingaman have been two of the leaders in this for 10 years in the Senate.

There are a variety of other proposals. Adopting another program from Texas, the You Teach program--this wasn't sent over from the White House although this is two straight Texas programs; this is from the National Academy of Sciences, because they have a terrific program at the University of Texas at Austin, where they take students who are enrolled in chemistry and recruit them into the College of Education with an attractive scholarship and then the idea was to pay them $10,000 a year to teach at a high-needs school for 5 years after they leave. In other words, they get the people into teaching and they will put them in the schools where they are needed the most. That is called the You Teach program. It would expand that.

There was a program from the University of Pennsylvania which would take teachers who are now teaching and give them intensive summer training and improve their ability to teach math and science, all toward the same objectives.

Then the President proposed Math Now grants, improving the teaching of mathematics in the elementary and middle schools. That is in here as well, after it went through the process. Then we expand the programs to increase the number of students who study critical foreign languages and become proficient. That was recognized here for a variety of reasons as a part of keeping our brain power advantage.

Finally, there are a number of proposals that would identify continuing organizations within the White House and Cabinet councils and other studies to try to keep a spotlight on this subject.

This is not the whole answer to the book ``The World Is Flat.'' It is on the same subject. It is part of the answer. It is a good start. In fact, it is a very good beginning. But we need to continue this attention to our position in competitiveness.

What I have tried to review here is how this legislation came to the floor, why it has attracted this unusual leadership from the majority leader and Republican leader, why it has had such a sense of urgency from senior leaders such as Senator Inouye, Senator Stevens, and others, why today it has 56 sponsors, why the House of Representatives is considering legislation on a parallel track, and why I believe there is no more important piece of legislation that will come before us in this session of Congress.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I wish to speak to the amendment, the managers' package the Senator from Hawaii has proposed. I wish to make two points about it.

The first is it reduces the cost of the bill by $280 million over 4 years. That is important to all of us and it is especially important to some of us. We are trying to spend money wisely.

At the same time, there are significant increases in the National Science Foundation education programs--about $300 million, in fact, over the President's requested level. But it is important that we know what these are. They are directly in line with the recommendations of the Augustine report and the Council on Competitiveness. Remember, we asked them to put these recommendations in priority order. The first thing is not the R&D tax credit, it is not bringing in more foreign students--it is not. The first thing was kindergarten through 12th grade math and science education. That is where our academies believed we had the biggest problem. So this new money for education programs in the National Science Foundation goes to graduate research fellows, to graduate education, research traineeships for a program called Professional Science Masters. This is a program where colleges are helping students earn master's degrees, not necessarily with the goal of going on to a Ph.D., but a master's degree that might take you on into a highly technical field in business; in other words, making us more competitive. It includes the Robert Noyce scholarships, which were expanded to help train more math and science teachers, and the teachers institutes in the summer.

These programs are education programs of the National Science Foundation, but we save $280 million over 4 years, and we have directed those toward nonduplicative programs that are consistent with the commission reports.

I wonder if, before Senator Domenici speaks, I could say a word. Senator Domenici is here. He is going to speak now. I am going to step to the side while he does. But I wish to say a word about Senator Domenici's crucial role.

I have already spoken to the fact that without the sense of urgency of Senators Inouye and Stevens, we would never have gotten to this point. But Senator Domenici was there at the beginning of this work. Even though, in our caucus, only one Senator is more senior, he stepped back and created an environment so Senator Bingaman and I and many other Senators could work on this. He watched it very carefully, he supervised it, he chaired it, but he left room for us, many of us, to work on this.

When it came time to go to the White House, it was Senator Domenici who asked the President if we could come see him. It was Senator Domenici who, rather than go down by himself as a Senator might have done, invited his junior colleague, me, to go with him. But more important than that, he invited his senior colleague, the Democratic Senator from New Mexico, Senator Bingaman, to go. It was Senator Domenici who insisted in the Energy and Commerce Committee he chaired that all this work be done in a bipartisan way. So because of that and the way Senators Stevens and Inouye work, we were able to do this.

It was a Domenici-Bingaman piece of legislation called the Protect America's Competitiveness Act that was introduced last year with 70 sponsors, 35 Democrats and 35 Republicans.

So before, Senator Domenici came, I thanked and saluted other Senators whose leadership has made a difference. But no one has been more responsible for this piece of legislation coming through.

Now that the assistant Democratic leader is here, I want to use this occasion to say how much I, and many of us, appreciate the way he and the majority leader have handled this piece of legislation; created an environment in which we have it on the floor in a way it can succeed. Senator Durbin, the Presiding Officer, has been a strong supporter of this legislation and a cosponsor of it from the beginning. I also wanted to recognize that.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Georgia for his comments but, more importantly, for his leadership. We usually think of Senator Chambliss in terms of leadership on intelligence matters, Armed Services matters, on agricultural matters, where he is the ranking member. But from the very beginning on this legislation, he has been out front.

I can remember when Norm Augustine, chairman of the Augustine committee, came to the Senate and had a dinner with us right around the corner. Senator Chambliss was one of the first

Senators there. He has been one of the major leaders in this endeavor for the last 2 years. His comments about the Georgia residential high school for math and science illustrates a good way to help take this legislation from the abstract and put it in concrete terms. Section 3171 of this legislation, specialty schools for math and science, will assist States in establishing or expanding such residential high schools for math and science.

I spoke a little earlier on the floor about North Carolina's math and science program which they have had for 25 years. Tennessee is a little behind. We haven't had one yet; we have summer governor schools for math and science. This legislation would authorize the Congress to appropriate funds which could pay for up to 50 percent of the cost of operating that school in Georgia which would permit Georgia, if it wished, to expand that school. The Senator cited in his remarks one good reason to do it in addition to the Nation's competitiveness. I think I heard him say 48 percent of the students went to Georgia Tech. So if our goal is to keep bright students at home to create jobs for us in the United States, a more specific goal is to keep bright Georgia students at home so they can create jobs for Georgians.

Certainly.

I thank the Senator.

Mr. President, our former colleague Zell Miller was Lieutenant Governor of Georgia when I was a Governor. He was a professor by profession and he was always interested in education and very skillful in education policy. Every Governor I know spends a lot of time trying to think of how we are going to recruit jobs. Well, if you study it, you learn after a while you don't recruit nearly as many as you grow. The way you grow them is with brain power. So the single best thing any State can do to create the largest number of good new jobs in that State is to keep the brightest kids at home. Governor Miller, when he was there, initiated the HOPE scholarship, which played a major role in attracting many of the brightest Georgia students, and I would say many of the brightest Tennessee students to come across the border to go to the University of Georgia, and then the residential school for math and science did the same. This legislation would permit every other State to do the same, and it is just one of the things it would do.

If I may, if the Senator from Georgia is finished with his remarks, he has highlighted an area I wish to enlarge on. Sometimes our legislation, particularly when we talk about big phrases such as competitiveness and globalization, takes us off into the stratosphere and one might say: Well, what does that have to do with me? We have just talked about one example. If you are the Governor of Georgia or Tennessee or Illinois and you are thinking: What can I do over the next 10 years to grow the largest number of good new jobs, a residential school for math and science is a very good start.

I remember as Governor, after we recruited the Nissan plant and the Saturn plant, I was feeling pretty good. Then I counted up the number of jobs, and it was 10,000 or 12,000 jobs in a State that employs 2.5 million people. We were losing 200,000 or 250,000 jobs per year, so we had to be creating that many more. In our country, in the United States of America, we are losing jobs all the time. We don't want that to happen, but that is happening. So the real test of our society is: Can we create a lot more good new jobs than we are losing, a constant supply of good new jobs. Most of that comes from the subject of this legislation: from brain power, better schools, better colleges, better universities, more research, and especially technological innovation.

Illinois, I am told, already has such an academy: the Illinois Math and Science Academy, a residential high school. I am sure the Presiding Officer is very familiar with it. He may have helped start it, given his long tenure in the Congress. This legislation would give it an opportunity as well to expand.

On the subject of creating new jobs, the chief State school officers are in town. That means the superintendent of education of Illinois and Tennessee's commissioner of education are here in town. I am meeting with them tomorrow at about noon for a while, and what I can tell them--even though they probably heard all about math and science they want to hear through No Child Left Behind--is we are doing a number of things to help them at least authorize funding to help them succeed. For example, we are authorizing grants to States to promote alignment of elementary and secondary education with knowledge and skills. That means in plain English helping States line up the math and science they are teaching with what you need to know to go into the Armed Forces, what you need to know to go to college, what you need to know to go to work. Sometimes there is not a good fit there. This would help schools and education systems, those chief State school officers, do that.

The second thing we would be doing is strengthening the skills of thousands of math and science teachers by using our national laboratories in Illinois, New Mexico, Tennessee, and around our country, and a host of summer institutions and academies for outstanding teachers of math and science, as well as for students, but especially for teachers.

I found in my experience as Governor, one of the most successful and productive things we did were Governors' schools, where we would take the Governors' schools for teachers of mathematics or teachers of reading, or students of international affairs, and the students would come for 2 to 4 weeks--sometimes it would only be teachers, but the students would come, you would bring in a core of faculty members from around the State, too. It would inspire those students so much, and what could be more inspiring for math and science teachers than to have a chance to be at the National Labs with Nobel Prize winners and some of the outstanding scientists in the world. It would refresh them, excite them, improve their skills, and help them carry a sense of mission back to their classrooms to inspire a new generation of math students and hopefully math and science teachers.

I can say to the chief State school officers of our various States, we are expanding the Robert Noyce teacher scholarship program at the National Science Foundation to recruit and train individuals to become math and science teachers in high-need, local education agencies. We are finding as we review No Child Left Behind in elementary and secondary education that 80 percent of our schools are, we can say, achieving, or even high achieving. In other words, their students, by category, are meeting what we call adequate yearly progress, so let's catch them doing something right. About 5 percent of those schools--I have missed it in one category--I would say they are still achieving pretty well. Only about 15 percent of the schools are high need, and usually what we find is they are children of low income, children whose parents haven't been able to help them, children whose parents have neglected them, children who have not yet learned English, children who have just arrived in this country and may not be in the same school in January they were in October, children who are hard to teach, and children who need more than even good teachers are usually able to give them. I am coming to

the conclusion that we need to train teachers especially to help these children. About 10 or 15 percent of all the children in our public schools across the country are these children, and these are the ones we are leaving behind.

Well, we are expanding teacher scholarship programs at the National Science Foundation to recruit and train individuals to become math and science teachers in high-need educational agencies. We are assisting, we have just said, teachers in establishing statewide specialty schools in math and science, and we will use the National Laboratories' staff to help with that. For example, if Tennessee wants to expand the new math and science academy Governor Bredesen has established--I salute him for doing it; he has wanted to do it for a while, but it is expensive and he only has a few students in it. This legislation makes it possible to use the National Laboratory staff to help Governor Bredesen in Tennessee expand and enlarge and make better the summer residential school for math and science.

I can say to the chief State school officers tomorrow, and they can take it back to their States across the country, that if the Congress enacts this legislation sponsored by the majority leader and the Republican leader, with 56 Senators on both sides of the aisle, its goal is to train 70,000 more teachers so they can teach advanced placement courses in math, sciences, and foreign language, so we can bring to the number of 700,000 the number of students who can take advanced placement courses in math, sciences, and critical foreign language.

As we have said before in the debate on this bill, students who don't get to take those AP courses now don't take them because they are not smart enough or because their brains don't work well enough; they don't take it often because they can't afford it or because the teachers aren't available to teach them in the schools they attend, so this will help to remedy that.

I can say to the chief State school officers, Governor Jim Hunt of North Carolina, one of our leading educators in America, a former Governor for 16 years in that State, who testified before the President's Commission on Higher Education that the University of North Carolina only graduated three physics teachers in 1 year at its College of Education. As I mentioned earlier, if we are not teaching physics, nobody is going to be learning it. So what are we going to do about that?

What this suggests is that after reviewing programs from all over the country, the Augustine commission recommends that we expand the You Teach program at the University of Texas. So there will be money that may be appropriated under this law that would permit universities to do as they do in Texas, in Austin, to go into the chemistry and biology programs and recruit students who are majoring in those science subjects, or a student who is majoring in math, and give them a scholarship to go to the College of Education and become a teacher of chemistry or biology or math.

Now, the Augustine report recommended that we then pay $10,000 a year in fellowships for those students so they can go into teaching in high- need areas, rather than for IBM or Google or Dell or some other high- paying job. That part of our provision is not in this legislation, the $10,000 fellowship. I would like to see it in there.

Senator Reid, the majority leader, the principal sponsor of this legislation, suggested when he introduced the bill the other day, that he had a very good experience--he and Paul Simon, the former distinguished Senator from Illinois--with finding ways to give stipends to teachers of math and science so they would stay in teaching. Well, this You Teach program at the University of Texas is now going to be available in Michigan, Tennessee, and other States around the country so we can recruit outstanding students into teaching.

In addition, the Augustine commission, after reviewing dozens and dozens and dozens of programs, found an especially good program at the University of Pennsylvania in science called Penn Science, and instead of recruiting students into teaching, it takes existing teachers and puts them through continuous training during the summer and during the year so they can be even better teachers of science.

I can say to the chief State school officers who are meeting in Washington, DC today that this legislation will permit you in Wyoming and in Tennessee and in New York and in Michigan and wherever to create a partnership between our National Laboratories and local high-need schools to establish centers of excellence in math and science education. So suddenly you match up a high-needs school with one of the greatest National Laboratories in the world. What can be more exciting for the teachers in that school or the students? It might go from being a high-needs school to one with a line around the block of students waiting to get in the door.

This legislation also has significant authorization for funding for a program called Math Now. This is the President's proposal, from his American Competitiveness Act which has been included in this legislation, and it would provide grants to improve math instruction in the elementary and middle grades and provide targeted help to struggling students so all students can master grade level math standards.

Finally, I can say to the chief State school officers who are meeting in Washington--and I will say it to them directly tomorrow at lunch-- that the bill also authorizes expanding programs to increase the number of students from elementary school through postsecondary education who study critical foreign languages. We find this not just in our military needs in Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world, but we increasingly live in a worldwide economy, and our students, our citizens will be better citizens, more effective citizens, if more of us speak more than one language. There is a long list.

There are 10 or 11 programs that either expand or create efforts to, as the Augustine commission says, ``increase America's talent pool by vastly improving K through 12 science and mathematics education.''

Senator Bingaman, I, Senator Domenici, and the House Members asked our national academies: Please tell us exactly what we need to do to keep our brain power advantage so we can keep our jobs. We understand that since World War II, more than half of this remarkably high standard of living we have has come through innovation and technology. We understand that and we have an idea or two and we have friends with an idea or two about what to do, but tell us exactly what to do about it. Tell us in priority order. They put down K-12--vastly improving K- 12 science and mathematics education.

I see the Senator from New Mexico is present. We have had a good discussion this afternoon. Some of the principal advocates have been here, and I especially appreciate Senators Stevens and Inouye who have given a great sense of urgency to this legislation. The Presiding Officer, Senator Stabenow, has as well. Michigan has a tremendous number of research institutes and great universities that add fuel to the economic resurgence of that State and every other State.

Really, we are all interested in this legislation. The key is, How do we put it together in a way that we can get it through this interesting process we call the Senate? I think we are reasonably close to doing that, thanks to the senior leadership of this body and Senator Bingaman and Senator Domenici on the Energy Committee.

Madam President, I will conclude my remarks now and yield he floor to Senator Bingaman.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from New Mexico. No one in the Senate on either side of the aisle has been more consistent or more effective in advancing our Nation's position in science and technology. He is also a delight to work with. It is rare to have a chance to work across the aisle in the way we have the last couple of years, not only on this legislation, but Senator Bingaman, for example, noticed that we were losing our edge in world-class computing. He saw that because of a visit to Japan. He came to me, and we worked together to try to restore that edge. He constantly is doing that in a quiet and effective way. It is a pleasure to work with him.

I also thank the majority leader, Senator Reid, and the Republican leader, Senator McConnell. Senator Bingaman and I went to see the majority leader 2 years ago when he was the minority leader. We asked him to do exactly what he has done. He and Senator Frist did. They created an environment in which this bill had a chance to succeed. Then Senator McConnell stepped right up, following Senator Frist's tremendous help and leadership in this effort, and it is fairly remarkable that we worked so evenly together in the last Republican Senate on this bill that the legislation was introduced in the Democratic Senate in the same way because we worked together on it and, hopefully, that has produced a better result.

I begin my remarks with a story. Last August, a group of Senators went to China. We were led by two of our most distinguished Members, Senator Stevens and Senator Inouye, the two leaders of the Commerce Committee and two of the major contributors to this legislation. Those two Senators were very well received in China. Senator Inouye, of course, is a Congressional Medal of Honor winner from World War II, and Senator Stevens was a Flying Tiger. He flew the first cargo plane into Beijing toward the end of World War II. So he was very well received in China.

As a result, we had a chance to meet with the senior leaders of China in a way most Americans had not to that time. We spent an hour with President Hu. We spent another hour with the No. 2 leader in China, Mr. Wu, who is chairman of the National People's Congress.

We talked about the issues one would expect an American delegation of a dozen Senators would talk about with the leaders of China. We talked about their military posture. We talked about North Korea. We talked about Iraq. We talked about Iran. But, Mr. President--I can still see this--in both of the meetings we had, one with Mr. Hu, the second with Mr. Wu, there was one subject about which those two leaders of China were most animated, and that was the subject we are discussing today: how to develop China's brain power advantage so they can create more good, new jobs in China. That was the subject they really wanted to talk about.

President Hu had gone to the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering just a month earlier in July. He assembled them in the Great Hall of the people. He outlined a new 15- year plan to make China a technology leader in the world.

In his speech, President Hu said China must ``promote a huge leap forward in science and technology. We shall put strengthening independent innovation capability at the core of economic structure adjustment.''

Anyone who follows China knows that when their leaders talk about leaps forward, it is a pretty big deal. President Hu's new plan appears more likely to succeed and includes reforming China's universities and massively investing in new research.

We regularly see stories of how Chinese-born academicians, some of our most distinguished faculty members at our major universities, are now accepting invitations to go back to China, their homeland, and create great universities there. There are a lot of people here--one- half of the Nobel Prize winners in physics who are American are immigrants or the sons and daughters of immigrants.

So China is serious about this plan. Mr. Hu said:

We all bear the time-honored mission to provide strong

scientific support for the construction of a well-off society

by improving our independent innovation capability and

building an innovative country. I hope that our scientists

and technicians will strive hard to make our brilliant

achievements and constantly contribute to our country and our

people.

Those are the leaders of China. They know what to do.

The United States has a remarkable position. As Senator Bingaman said, Senator Reid said, and Senator McConnell said, we don't want to take it for granted because we can't. But let's stop and think about where we are. This huge brain power advantage we have in the United States of America has given us a situation in which we produce about 30 percent of the gross national product in the world in for about 5 percent of the people. About 30 percent of all the dollars, volume in the world this year is being produced in this country, a country that only includes 5 percent of the people. How does that happen? The United States has a number of advantages: its location, its resources, the great diversity we have here, the fact we have turned all that diversity into one country. But when we look at all of our advantages-- and I should quickly put the great entrepreneurial engine we have here, the fact that if you want to come to a big country and start from scratch and create a company--and I have had the privilege to help do that in the private sector--this is the place to do it. But when you look at our major advantage, it is our brainpower.

No other country has had the broad system of education we have had. No other country has the large number of great research universities the United States of America has. No other country has the great National Laboratories we have. As a result, over the last century, especially since World War II, no other country has come close to turning its brainpower advantage into jobs, into dollars, into a high standard of living for a large number of people, and the rest of the world sees that. They see it on television. They see it on the Internet. They see it because more than half a million students from around the world, many of the brightest men and women in the world, come here to our universities, and they see what we have been able to do, and they say: Why can't we do this at home in China? Why can't we do this at home in India? Why can't we do this in Ireland? And they are doing it. We are glad they are doing it. We want them to have a high standard of living, too. The more money they make, the more goods they can buy from the United States of America. So we encourage that activity.

It also spreads our democracy, our ideals. We go to Thailand or some other country, and we find the Minister of Agriculture is a graduate of the University of Tennessee. He has learned here. He goes there and teaches about agriculture, and he promotes our ideas. Our higher education system has probably been the most effective foreign aid we have ever invested in, just those half million students who go there.

However, we are at risk of losing our brainpower advantage. If we lose our brainpower advantage, we lose our advantage and our standard of living. In other words, in plain English, we don't have as much money in our pockets, we don't have as many good jobs, and our families don't have the kind of prosperity many have come to take for granted. That is what this piece of legislation is about.

We talk a lot about outsourcing jobs, about growing new jobs. Well, this is the way to keep good new jobs in the United States and to grow them. When a graduate of a university, such as the student at the University of Maryland--I think he dropped out, actually--a foreign student--creates Google, that creates thousands and thousands of new jobs in the United States, as Thomas Edison did years ago, as Bill Gates did more recently, and as thousands of entrepreneurs do every day. It takes the brainpower advantage to create the job and it takes the brainpower advantage to work at the facility or the plant that has the jobs.

That is why, toward the end of a long Budget Committee hearing 2 years ago, I was getting a little depressed listening to what I heard about the numbers. According to the budget 2 years ago, and the budget last year, and the budget this year, we are on an unsustainable course in terms of being able to pay for Medicare and Medicaid. So the question came to me: Well, if we are going to squeeze out everything else in order to pay for Medicare and Medicaid and other programs, the war in Iraq, then how are we going to invest in this great engine of brainpower that creates the money that pays all the bills? I struggled with this as the Governor of Tennessee. I was trying to raise our standard of living in Tennessee. We were the third poorest State 25 years ago when I became Governor, based on family incomes. We already had low taxes. We had a right-to-work law. We needed to change some rules about the usury limit in banking. We needed to add a new four- lane highway system. All those were progrowth. But the most progrowth action I discovered we could take was to improve our colleges and our universities and our research facilities. That is progrowth.

As a result of better schools, better colleges, and better universities, combined with our other advantages, we moved ahead in our State. Better schools meant better jobs. Better colleges and universities mean better jobs. More research means better jobs. So we are talking today about better jobs--progrowth.

We better realize as well that we have some pretty big bills to pay. Last year, we spent $237 billion on debt, $378 billion on Medicare, $545 billion on Social Security, $70 billion or more on hurricanes, and we are spending about $4 billion a week on Iraq. What this legislation does is authorizes $4 billion a year over the next 4 years. As Senator Bingaman said, we made room for it in the budget this year to create and encourage and continue to push ahead this brainpower engine that creates the money to pay for all these necessary and urgent needs we have, these priorities we have. This is a progrowth piece of legislation.

I would say this may be the most important piece of legislation the Congress considers in this 2-year session. If it is not the most important piece of legislation, there is certainly no more important subject to most American families than: How do I keep money in my pocket to pay my bills? How do we keep our jobs from going to India and China? How do we keep our economic advantage? How do we come close to continuing to be the country that produces 30 percent of all the money in the world for only 5 percent of the people? That is why, at the end of that Budget Committee hearing I mentioned a little earlier, I literally walked down the street to the National Academy of Sciences and asked them, on behalf of Senator Bingaman and myself, with the approval of Senator Domenici, the chairman of our committee, and with the endorsement of Representatives Boehlert and Gordon in the House of Representatives--I said: Most ideas in Washington fail for lack of the idea. You are here at the end of a long day in the National Academies. You are supposed to be our advisers. So let me ask you a question: Why don't you tell us the 10 most important things we can do, in priority order, to keep our brainpower advantage? I said to them: I am merely one Senator, but I will bet if you do that, we will do it. We will take your advice.

The National Academy of Sciences and of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine formed an immediate group. They asked Norm Augustine, the former chief executive officer of Lockheed Martin and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, to chair the group. He turned to 21 distinguished Americans who know a lot about the world and our country, Craig Barrett, chairman of the board of Intel; Steven Chu, cowinner of the Nobel prize in physics and Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Robert Gates, who was then head of Texas A&M and now is the Secretary of Defense, and a number of others; the former head of MIT, Peter O'Donnell, a Texas businessman who has worked on AP courses, and they did this report: ``Rising Above The Gathering Storm.'' They didn't make 10 recommendations, they made 20, and they made them in priority order. Their priorities began with K-12 education. They went next to engineering and research. They went next to higher education. They went next to incentives for innovation.

At that point, we formed a bipartisan group of Senators and began to have what we called ``homework sessions'' with the various agencies of the Federal Government that had jurisdiction over these programs and the areas where the programs would fit. We also recognized that Senator Lieberman, Senator Ensign, and others had been working hard with the Council on Competitiveness, and they had similar recommendations. We also acknowledged that Senators Hutchison, Bond, and Mikulski had for many years been advocating various aspects of these programs, so we tried to integrate all of this into a whole. That produced a long piece of legislation that had to make its way through five different committees, but it attracted 70 sponsors last year--35 Democrats, 35 Republicans. The Republican leader, Senator Frist, and the Democratic leader, Senator Reid, were the principal sponsors of the bill.

Senator Bingaman has done a good job of outlining most of the provisions of the bill, so I will, in a few minutes, put those into the record, but there is no other piece of legislation during the past 2 years that was so broadly recommended by disinterested groups outside of the Senate and the House, that has been worked on by so many Senators here, and that has moved forward in the way this has. Making this even more remarkable is not only was it introduced by the Democratic and Republican leaders, it has been brought directly to the floor for debate. So what we hope is our colleagues will carefully read the bill, bring their amendments to the floor, and maybe we can operate in an old-fashioned way here. Maybe we can consider the amendments, or the improvements, debate them, vote on them, go to the next amendment, and then after we have finished with that, have a vote on whether to pass the bill, which I believe we will. I think we have a good chance of doing that.

Mr. President, I wish to now insert into the Record a few items that are important for our colleagues and those who are following this debate, so I ask unanimous consent that following my remarks a ``Dear Colleague'' letter of April 10, written by Senator Reid and Senator McConnell to all of our colleagues, signed by the chairmen and Democratic and Republican leaders of the three major committees which contributed to this, and which produced 50 cosponsors--we hope there will be more by next week--be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a two-page summary of the America COMPETES Act be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a list of the cosponsors of the America COMPETES Act, the 50 cosponsors, as it stands today, be printed in the Record.

Finally, Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a section-by-section analysis of the America COMPETES Act be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, we will have plenty of time to debate this next week, so I will reserve most of my comments until then, but let me reiterate some of the major provisions that are here. As Senator Bingaman said, this is only an authorization bill. It is permission to establish programs, but it is backed up by an amendment to the Budget Act which creates room in the appropriations bill to pay for these programs.

Here is what we intend to do: Double funding for the National Science Foundation; set the Department of Energy's Office of Science on track to double its funding; strengthen the skills of thousands of math and science teachers by establishing training and education programs at summer institutes hosted by the national laboratories; and by increasing support for teacher institutes for programs at the National Science Foundation.

These are the kinds of programs that Senator Reid, the majority leader, was talking about.

Expand the teacher scholarship programs at NSF; help establish academies for math and science in the various States.

North Carolina has had one for a long time, and 20 years ago, when I was Governor, I went to see if Tennessee could create one. We decided we didn't have the money to do it, so we created a summer Governor's school, which turned out to be a good idea, where outstanding students from math and science could go to the University of Tennessee for 4 weeks in the summer. The faculty loves it, the students love it, and they participate in the Oak Ridge Laboratory. They go back fired up into their classrooms, and the teachers are fired up as well. Our Governor Bredesen wants to create a summer school for math and science, and he has started on a modest basis, but this will help him expand that.

We will expand advanced placement in international baccalaureate programs by increasing the number of teachers who are trained to teach math, science, and foreign languages. This would allow thousands of new students to take these courses. The AP courses, as we call them, are a good track to college, and college is a good track to success. Those students are the ones who will help create the jobs to keep our high standard of living. But we have a lot of students, many of them lower income, who don't take these courses and who easily could. So we will help pay for their tests, and we will train more teachers so they can be taught, and we will see that three or four times more students will be able to do this.

These programs weren't picked out of thin air. This group of distinguished Nobel laureates, university presidents, and business leaders spent their summer 2 years ago reviewing many programs. For example, the AP program comes from a Texas program which has been successful for 10 years. They picked the 20 best ideas in priority order from among hundreds of ideas. This is not merely a group of Senators and Congressmen picking our best friend's favorite program. We all have one of those. This is the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering and the Institute of Medicine reviewing hundreds of programs with a distinguished panel in answering our question exactly what do we need to do to keep our brainpower advantage, and they say here are the first 20 things you ought to do.

Not in this legislation are other provisions that were part of this report and that were acted on in the last Congress. One was the temporary extension of the research and development tax credit. It should be made permanent. Another are several provisions for attracting and keeping in this country talented professionals from overseas. These 500,000 foreign students who are here include some of the brightest students from China, some of the brightest students from India, some of the brightest from around the world. They are going to create jobs somewhere. We would like for them to stay and create jobs here, yet our archaic immigration laws prevent that. They require these students to swear they are going home before they come. They make it hard for them to stay once they get here.

So the Senate, last year, in debating the immigration bill, adopted three of the provisions from this report. One, for example, pins a green card on any foreign student who gets a graduate degree in math, science, engineering and technology so that person can stay here and create jobs for us here.

I am hopeful when we get to the immigration legislation within a few weeks that we will do at least that much to change our archaic immigration laws and allow those students to stay here and create jobs for us. We talk a lot about outsourcing jobs. This would be insourcing brain power, and we would be smart to do it.

I particularly thank our staffs, and we will do this specifically by name next week. This is a complex bill with many different parts, as the section-by-section analysis shows. They have worked evenly to try to make this a well-crafted bill. We have more work to do.

I conclude by again thanking the Democratic and Republican leaders, Senator Bingaman, Senator Domenici, especially, who was chairman of our committee last year, Stevens and Inouye, Enzi and Kennedy, Ensign and Lieberman, Bond, Hutchison, Chambliss, Murkowski, and Mikulski--all of these Senators made major contributions. I am sure they will be on the Senate floor next week to address this legislation and to support it.

We are talking about keeping our brain power advantage so we keep our jobs. We are talking about a country that has grown accustomed to 30 percent of all of the money in the world being produced each year with just 5 percent of the people, and we are saying, unless we take at least these steps, that won't continue.

Exhibit 1

U.S. Senate,

Washington, DC, April 10, 2007.

Dear Colleague: We are writing to invite you to cosponsor

the America COMPETES Act; a bipartisan bill to help America

maintain its edge in science, technology, engineering, and

mathematics in an increasingly competitive global economy. An

earlier version of this bill was introduced in the final days

of the 109th Congress as S. 3936.

The America COMPETES Act is based upon recommendations from

both the national Academies' ``Rising Above the Gathering

Storm'' report and the Council on Competitiveness' ``Innovate

America'' report. It contains revised versions of the

legislation approved by both the Senate Energy and Commerce

Committees [from the 109th Congress] in response to those

recommendations: S. 2197, the PACE-Energy bill, and S. 2802

the American Innovation and Competitiveness bill, which were

reported without opposition to the Senate floor. The bill

also includes provisions developed by the bipartisan

leadership of the HELP Committee to improve science,

technology, engineering, mathematics, and critical foreign

language skills.

The competitiveness package would significantly increase

the federal investment in basic research, foster and

innovative infrastructure, improve the teaching of math,

science, engineering and technology to our children, and

encourage the brightest minds to pursue careers in these

fields. Among other provisions, the bill would: Double the

investment in basic research at the national Science

Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Standards and

Technology (NIST), and the Department of Energy's Office of

Science (DOE-SC) over five to ten years; Improve teacher

training in math and science, through summer institutes

hosted by the NSF and the DOE-SC and grants to increase

university degree programs that combine math and science

study with concurrent teacher certification; and Increase

support for Advanced Placement programs to expand access for

low income students to take and succeed in college

preparatory courses.

This bill alone will not secure American leadership in the

decades to come. But it is a critical first step toward

protecting our competitive position in the world. We hope you

will join us in this effort and cosponsor this bipartisan

legislation.

Sincerely,

Harry Reid, Majority Leader; Jeff Bingaman, Chairman,

Committee on Energy and Natural Resources; Daniel K.

Inouy, Chairman, Committee on Commerce, Science, and

Transportation; Edward M. Kennedy, Chairman, Committee

on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions; Joseph I.

Lieberman, U.S. Senator; Barbara A. Mikulski, U.S.

Senator; Bill Nelson, U.S. Senator; Mitch McConnell,

Republican Leader; Pete V. Domenici, Ranking Member,

Committee on Energy and Natural Resources; Ted Stevens,

Vice-Chairman, Committee on Commerce, Science, and

Transportation; Michael B. Enzi, Ranking Member,

Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions;

John Ensign, U.S. Senator; Lamar Alexander, U.S.

Senator; Kay Bailey Hutchison, U.S. Senator.

Mr. President, I see no other Senator on the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I have one other short comment I would like to make, and then I will yield the floor or note the absence of a quorum.

The Governor of Virginia has asked our country to take a moment of silence to remember the tragedy this week at Virginia Tech at noon today. It is also a good time for us to think about our responsibilities in the U.S. Congress. There is hardly any way we can express our grief to these families and to that university for what they have been through this week. It is of such a scale that it is hard to imagine. We want them to know we have been thinking about them, and we would like to do whatever we can to help them and to help make sure nothing like this happens again.

So while Virginia Tech and the Commonwealth of Virginia are reviewing their responsibilities in light of the tragedy this week at Virginia Tech, we in the Federal Government ought to be reviewing our responsibilities too. Our focus should be on whether Federal laws or regulations unwisely restrict or limit how universities are able to deal with students who have mental health problems or who otherwise exhibit behavior about which parents, authorities, or other third parties should know.

Generally, and many Americans do not know this, under Federal law universities cannot tell parents about

their child's problems or their grades without their student's consent. At least one professor at Virginia Tech who was tutoring the shooter has been quoted as saying that she felt that Federal laws prevented her from going to his parents or to others about her concerns. Therefore, I am sending a letter today to Senator Kennedy and to Senator Enzi, the chairman and the ranking member of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on which I serve. I am writing them to request that our committee ask the Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, to conduct a review of Federal laws, regulations, and relevant State laws that limit the ability of universities to tell parents or other third parties about a student's problem without the student's consent.

I would hope that Secretary Spellings could review not only the laws and the rules, but also the implementation of these rules on campus. I am a former president of a university. I understand it may very well be that faculty members, and perhaps even some administrators, are unaware of the rules, or at least uncertain about how to apply them.

My hope would be that Secretary Spellings could complete her review within 120 days, and after that our committee might hold a hearing or roundtable to determine whether there is action we need to take.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record at this point a copy of my letters to Senator Kennedy and Senator Enzi and an article from the New York Times dated April 19 entitled, ``Laws Limit Options When a Student Is Mentally Ill,'' which describes very well the situation in which many university faculty members find themselves.