Floor Statements

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Jack Wells, a fellow on my staff, be granted floor privileges for the duration of the debate on S. 761, the America COMPETES Act.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that I may speak as in morning business for as much time as I may require.

I thank the Chair.

(The remarks of Mr. Alexander pertaining to the introduction of S. 1168 are located in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')

Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, today I introduce legislation to reduce air pollution and the threat of global warming by enacting strict standards on the four major pollutants from powerplants. I send the legislation to the desk and ask it be introduced.

Mr. President, I am pleased that Senator Joe Lieberman, of Connecticut, who chairs a key environmental subcommittee, will be the bill's lead cosponsor, so it will be known as the Alexander-Lieberman Clean Air Climate Change Act of 2007. It will establish an aggressive but practical and achievable set of limits on four key pollutants. This is a little different sort of clean air and climate change bill, and I would like to talk for a few minutes about exactly what it does and why we are doing it this way.

Most of us in the Senate can be measured by where we come from. I come from the Great Smoky Mountains. When I go home tomorrow afternoon, after we hopefully start the competitiveness legislation debate, I will go to my home about 2 miles from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. When the Cherokees named the Great Smoky Mountains, which today have become our most visited national park, they were not talking about smog and soot. Unfortunately, today they probably would be. There has been a lot of recent progress, but air pollution is still a serious health problem, causing illnesses from asthma to premature death, and making it harder to attract new jobs.

To be specific about that, recently, over the last 20 years, the auto industry has become important to Tennessee.

Tennessee was in competition recently for a Toyota plant that nearly came to Chattanooga but went to Mississippi. In the last 25 years, one- third of our manufacturing jobs have become auto jobs. I can remember when there were not any, and I was Governor, and the Nissan plant decided to come to Tennessee in 1980. The first thing I had to do as Governor was to help them go down to the air quality board and get a permit to paint 500,000 cars and trucks a year. That is a lot of paint, and produces a lot of emissions in the area. If Tennessee had not had clean air at that time, that Nissan plant would have been in Georgia. So clean air is not only about our health, although the more we learn about the effects of nitrogen pollutants and sulfur pollutants, the more that we learn that it and mercury are about our health, clean air is also about our ability to attract jobs. So we want to make sure that when Nissan or Toyota or any of the suppliers of any automobile company--General Motors with a Saturn plant in Tennessee--when they want to look at our State for expansion--they are not limited by our inability to meet clean air standards.

We also have jobs that come from another direction. In Tennessee, tourism is big business. Many people know about Yellowstone in the West, but the Great Smoky Mountains have three times as many visitors as any Western park, nearly 10 million visitors a year, and they come to see the Great Smokies, not to see smog, not to see soot. They want to enjoy it.

When I go into Sevierville, Dolly Parton's hometown, and ask the Chamber of Commerce right there next to Maryville where I grew up, what is your No. 1 issue, these conservative Republicans in Sevier County say to me: Clean air. That is what the Chamber of Commerce there says, clean air. So we Tennesseans think clean air is important for our health, because we love to look at our mountains and because of our jobs.

I am the chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority Congressional Caucus. I sit on the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee. I am especially delighted that Senator Lieberman, who is the cosponsor of this legislation, not only is on that committee, but he chairs one of the major subcommittees on the Environment and Public Works Committee that has to do with global warming.

What we are hoping is that this legislation, which I am about to describe, along with legislation Senator Carper of Delaware is introducing today or tomorrow, will help move along the debate about how we deal with global warming in our country.

In the legislation I have presented, the Alexander-Lieberman legislation, we seek to preserve our jobs while we clean the air and preserve the planet. We have a number of concerns in our country, and global warming is only one of those. So I would argue that the provisions we have set out are aggressive, but they are practical and they are achievable. They set schedules for powerplants to reduce emissions for sulfur dioxide, for nitrogen oxide, for mercury, and for carbon dioxide. Doing so will relieve some of the worst air-related health environmental problems such as ozone, acid rain, mercury contamination, and global warming.

I think it is important to note that one of the differences with this Alexander-Lieberman bill is it proposes carbon caps only on powerplants that produce electricity; it does not propose carbon caps on the economy as a whole.

Now, why would we only do that? Well, here are the reasons for that: No. 1, when we talk about global warming and carbon, we are dealing with a huge, complex economy. This country of ours produces and uses about 25 percent of all of the energy in the world. We have businesses that range from the shoe shop to Google to chemical plants.

I think we have to be very careful in Washington about coming up with great schemes and great ideas that sound good here but that might not apply to everyone across the country, because everyone across the country has a natural conservatism about the wisdom of those who are in Washington. We could scare them to death with some talk of an economywide global warming bill. So I am more comfortable thinking sector by sector. I want our steps to be practical and cost effective.

I do believe a market-based cap and trade system for powerplants makes a lot of sense. Powerplants are the logical place to start with carbon regulation. Powerplants produce about 40 percent of all the carbon in our economy. Powerplants are increasing emissions of carbon at a rate faster than any other large segment in our economy. We have selected in our legislation what we call a market-based cap and trade system to regulate the amount of carbon that is produced. This is not a new idea. The market-based cap and trade system was actually introduced by a Republican administration in which I served in the Cabinet, the first George Bush. It was a part of the Clean Air Act amendments in 1990. It was introduced because we were concerned about the amount of sulfur coming out of powerplants. Basically it created a lot of flexibility for those powerplants. It used a market system. We have now had 15 years experience with it. It has worked very well. It has significantly reduced the amount of sulfur in the air. It has done it in a way that most everyone concedes is the lowest possible cost of regulation.

It is a minimal amount of rules from here, a maximum amount of market decisions and individual decisions by individual utilities. So we have had that system in effect since 1990. There has been a similar system in effect for nitrogen. There has been a similar cap and trade system in Europe. We have a lot of experience with cap and trade. So we have elected to use a similar cap and trade market-based system to regulate the carbon coming out of the same smokestacks that sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury come out of. We can already measure the amount of carbon coming out, so we do not have to guess about that. We do not have to invent a new system.

We do have to be careful about what the standards are, what the dates are. We want to know what the costs will be to the ratepayers. We want to keep electric rates as low as we possibly can, as well as making the energy clean.

But if we are concerned about global warming in this generation, because I think we should be, then powerplants are a good place to start. It is time to finish the job of cleaning the air of sulfur, of too much sulfur, too much nitrogen, and too much mercury. It is time to take the right first step with controlling carbon emissions. It is time to acknowledge that climate change is real, that human activity is a big part of the problem, and that it is up to us to act.

Now not only am I glad to be working with Senator Lieberman, who will be the lead cosponsor of this legislation, he, of course, is already a leader in this area and he has an economywide piece of legislation which he introduced. Senator McCain in the last session--I am not about to try to speak for another Senator, but I think Senator Lieberman is taking the position he would like to see several good trains moving down the track toward the same station in hopes that one of them eventually gets there, and that we can learn from each other.

That is the attitude I take with the legislation Senator Carper has described today and that he is introducing today or tomorrow. Senator Carper and I have worked together through two Congresses on four pollutant legislation. A lot has happened since we started working. For example, the Administration, to its credit, through the Environmental Protection Agency, has stiffened requirements for sulfur and nitrogen. I applaud President Bush for that. They are very good requirements. They have also proposed the regulation of mercury for the first time in our country's history. I applaud the EPA for that. So a lot has changed since Senator Carper and I first started.

Also we have learned a lot. Senators who do not always have their mouths open learn a lot. We have discovered one of the most difficult areas in fashioning a market-based cap and trade system for sulfur or for nitrogen or for carbon is who pays for it. We called that the allocation system.

Senator Carper and I started out with what we called an output system. We thought that sounded pretty good. It would be based upon the amount of electricity you would be putting out. But the more we studied it, he came to a different conclusion and I came to a different conclusion. I came to the conclusion that we should use historical emissions. In other words, we are saying to a utility in the United States: We are about to impose upon you some requirements for cleaning up more sulfur, cleaning up more nitrogen, cleaning up mercury--for the first time--and regulating the emissions of carbon for the first time, and I understand that is a significant cost.

That capital cost will have to be borne in the end by ratepayers. So, in my view, it seems to me that the fairest way to impose that cost would be through what we call the historical allocation system. That is the way we have done it with allowances for sulfur and nitrogen for the last 15 years.

In fact, the input or the historical allowance system as the way to pay the bill has been the way it is done almost everywhere, I believe.

But there is another way to allocate that is called the output. Senator Carper selected that. There is still a third way to allocate the costs of doing whatever regulation we do, and that is called the auction. A market-based cap and trade system sounds complicated, but it is not so complicated. It basically says to each emitter of one of the pollutants: You have an allowance to emit one ton of that sulfur or of that carbon, and as long as you emit that much, you are okay. If you emit more than that, you are going to have to buy allowances to emit that much more from someone else. So it costs you more. Or if you emit less, you can sell your allowance. Then as the law goes along over the years, 2009 or 2010 to 2015, the amount of pollutants that come down, your allowance total drops down as well.

One of the favored proposals mostly--and especially by many environmental groups--is an auction of those allowances. Well, I have resisted. I have been careful about the auctions. I have been to a lot of auctions. I know they must have them in Minnesota as well as Tennessee. I have yet to see one where the purpose of the auction was not to get the highest possible price.

Well, if I am paying my electric bill down in Memphis, or if I am at Eastman Chemical in east Tennessee or ALCOA trying to keep my electric costs in line, I am not interested in my Senator coming to Washington and having an auction to raise my electric rates to the highest possible price.

So also there is the temptation that if you auction off these allowances, and there are a lot of them when we are talking about carbon allowances, many more than when we are talking about sulfur allowances over the last 15 years. They will bring in a lot of money. And whenever you bring in a lot of money, and 100 different Senators and lots of Congressmen know there is a pot of money, they will come up with a lot of ways to spend that money. And where will that money come from? Well, it has got to come from the man or women or family paying the electric bill in Nashville, or Knoxville. So I have been conservative about the use of auctions.

Senator Lieberman and I, in this bill, say 75 percent of the allowance comes from historical emissions and 25 percent are sold in an auction. This gets way down in the weeds, as we say. But one of the things that I think may be beneficial from Senator Carper going ahead with his bill, which relies on an output system that becomes a 100- percent auction, and way we go ahead in the Alexander-Lieberman bill with 75-percent input and 25-percent auction, may be that our colleagues will do as we have been doing over the last few months, and spend a little more time understanding allowances and auctions, and we can come to a better conclusion about this.

I value greatly my relationship with Senator Carper and respect his leadership in this area. He chairs one of the principal subcommittees on the Environment Committee upon which I serve

and the Presiding Officer serves. What I hope is he and I are moving into a new stage of our working relationship on clean air and climate change, and the result of that will be that all of our ideas will be out in front of our colleagues and that it will move the debate along.

I would emphasize, we agree, he and I, on a lot more than we disagree on. In fact, I believe on all of the standards and deadlines for meeting those standards for nitrogen, sulfur, and mercury, we agree. We agree there should not be a cap and trade system for mercury because mercury is a neurotoxin, and down in east Tennessee where I live, we do not want TVA buying a lot of allowances so they can emit a lot more mercury, because it doesn't go up in the air and blow into North Carolina, it goes up in the air and comes right down on top of us, for the most part. We don't want that.

We don't want that. The more we learn about mercury, the less we want it. We don't have cap and trade for mercury, although we do suggest that for carbon.

Climate change has become the issue of the moment. Everybody is talking about it. There are movies about it. The Vice President was here testifying about it. It is not the only issue that faces us that has to do with air pollution. I am more concerned in Tennessee about sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury than I am about carbon. That is why this is a four-pollutant bill. We ought to address all of these at once.

I was in this body 40 years ago as a staff assistant working for Howard Baker. I remember very well when Senator Baker, a Republican, and Senator Muskie of Maine, a Democrat, worked together on the committee on which the Presiding Officer and I now serve. They passed the first Clean Water Act and the first Clean Air Act. The Clean Water Act, some people have said, is the most important piece of urban renewal legislation ever enacted because the rivers of America had gotten so dirty, nobody wanted to live on them. The rivers of America are where most of our great cities are. As soon as they were cleaned up, people moved back to the cities and around the rivers. That was 1970 and 1971.

It is appropriate to think about that now because Earth Day is coming up this weekend. I can remember Earth Day, which began in 1970. Suddenly the environment, which had been an issue that was reserved for only a few people, became a national craze. It was almost like a hula hoop. Everybody was interested in the environment and recycling. Former Senator Gaylord Nelson was a leader in creating Earth Day. I can remember sitting in a meeting of President Nixon and the Republican leadership in 1970 when I was on the White House staff, and President Nixon was trying to explain to the Republican leaders the importance of environmental issues. It was 8 o'clock in the morning, and they weren't listening very well. It was a new subject. But Gaylord Nelson was doing it. The kids were doing it. People were recycling. The Republican President was talking to the Republican leadership, and Senator Baker, Senator Muskie, and the Congress passed the first Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.

Many of us who have lived a while can remember things are better today in many ways. When I was a student at Vanderbilt in Nashville, it was so smoggy in the mornings, you couldn't see downtown. Your clothes got dirty during the day. Things got gradually better. In 1990, when the first President Bush was in office, we passed important Clean Air Act amendments, and the first cap and trade system for sulfur began. What also happened was that we learned more about how damaging these pollutants are to our health.

As a result, the standards which we once thought were high seemed low. Knoxville, the biggest city near where I grew up, near the Smoky Mountains, is the 14th most polluted city for ozone. Ozone irritates lung tissue, increases the risk of dying prematurely, increases the swelling of lung tissue. It increases the risk of being hospitalized with worsened lung diseases and triggering asthma attacks. At risk in Knoxville County alone are 176,000 children, 112,000 seniors, 15,000 children with asthma, and 50,000 adults with asthma. Ozone is not emitted directly from tailpipes and smokestacks. The raw ingredients come from coal-fired powerplants and cars.

Sulfur is in many ways our biggest problem. It is the primary contributor to haze. It causes difficulty in breathing. It causes damage to lung tissue and respiratory disease and premature death.

We know that mercury is also a problem. Monitoring by the National Park Service in the Great Smoky Mountains has found high levels of mercury deposits from air pollution. Mercury pollution of rivers and streams contaminates the fish we eat and poses a serious threat to children and pregnant women.

This bill is a clean air and a climate change bill. I hope our committee, as we take advantage of this resurgence of interest in the quality of air and our health and what we need to do about it, we won't just do part of the job. I would like to look at the whole picture. What we do in this bill is take the standards that the EPA has created for nitrogen and sulfur and put them into law. We make them a little stricter, but basically we put them into law. We take the mercury rule of the EPA, and we put it into law. We make it even stricter. The EPA says get rid of 70 percent of it. We say get rid of 90 percent. Then for the first time we put into law carbon caps on electric powerplants which produce 40 percent of all the carbon produced in the United States and are the fastest growing sector producing carbon in America.

I hope my colleagues will carefully consider this sector-by-sector approach to climate change. Carbon caps might be the best way--I believe they are--for dealing with electric powerplants. When it comes to fuel, there may be another strategy that makes sense. We could deal with that sector in a different way. For example, when we were dealing with sulfur, we didn't put a cap and trade on diesel fuel. We did on powerplants. But when we got to diesel fuel, we just said that you have to have ultra low sulfur diesel for big trucks, which just now went into effect.

There is also the large segment of building energy use. If we took the sector of building energy use, the fuel segment, and the electric powerplants, if we added that to a few stationery sources in America and developed strategies that were aggressive but practical and cost- effective for each of those segments, we would be up in the 85 to 90 percent of all the carbon we produce in America. That makes a lot more sense to me than trying to devise some one-size-fits-all system that affects every little shop, store, or farm in America. If we can get most of it this way, maybe we can learn something so that someday we can get the rest of it.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks a section-by-section description of the Alexander-Lieberman bill, a one-page summary of the Alexander-Lieberman Clean Air/Climate Change Act of 2007, as well as a short memorandum which we describe as discussion points and with which I will conclude my remarks by going over in just a moment, and a letter from the National Parks Conservation Association endorsing the bill.

Senator Lieberman and I don't have all the answers with this legislation. I feel much more comfortable with this legislation today than I did with any I helped introduce last year or the year before because I have learned a lot more. But I will guarantee my colleagues that there are several areas in which I would welcome advice. Over the last several weeks, I have met with a dozen, two dozen environmental groups, utilities, Tennessee citizens, others who had suggestions. For example, the discussion points that I have put into the record contain five points that are arguable. I have come to a tentative conclusion on them. That is in the bill. But there is another side to the point. I am looking for advice.

For example, should we cap only carbon or all greenhouse gases emitted from electricity plants? I chose to cap CO2 only. That is because this is a four-pollutant bill--sulfur, nitrogen, mercury, and carbon. It is not primarily a climate change bill.

Another consideration is that it seems Europe's experience is that it may be better to cap just carbon and

not all greenhouse gases. That is a question we can debate.

What should the size of an auction be in terms of the allowances? I discussed that earlier. Senator Lieberman and I have chosen 25 percent of the total number of allowances. Senator Carper, in his bill, eventually goes to 100 percent. There are arguments on both sides.

What influenced my decision was, I wanted to keep the costs down as much as possible. I was afraid that if we used some different kind of allowance allocation, we might literally take money away from the emitters that they ought to be using to put scrubbers on to reduce sulfur, nitrogen, mercury, or carbon and pay it to other utilities.

What rules should govern the use of offset allowances by electric plants? Offsets are an ingenious idea. The idea would be that an emitter of carbon might be able to pay somebody else to reduce their output of carbon and, therefore, we would end up with the same amount of carbon. There are many advantages to that. For example, the Tennessee Valley Authority might pay a Tennessee farmer to manage his livestock crop in a way as to not produce as much methane, might pay a Tennessee farmer to plant a lot of trees. Both of those things would reduce greenhouse gases, and the farmer would have more money in his pocket. That is a good idea.

The downside of offsets is that if they are unregulated entirely, it seems to me they could become a gimmick or a fad or worse. What we have done in this bill is adopt a system of offsets from a consortium of States ranging from Maryland to Maine--that includes Senator Lieberman's State of Connecticut--and used those model rules on offsets. That tends to limit the way offsets may be used. It is a good place to at least begin. In other words, a utility might produce more carbon, but it might pay someone else who is reducing carbon by using biomass or by sequestering carbon in some other way.

There is a question about how should new coal-fired electric plants be treated. There are probably 160 new coal plants on the drawing boards. Some of them hope to escape the rules Congress is considering about capping the output of carbon. I don't think they should. This bill would apply to all coal-fired powerplants, including those on the drawing boards. It also would give an incentive to the first 30 of those plants to meet a high standard of clean coal technology. We don't want to encourage the use of natural gas in this bill. That is the last thing we want to do. We don't want to discourage the use of coal. We have a lot of coal. It would help make us energy independent. We want to encourage the creation of the kind of technology that will permit us to use coal in a clean way that either recaptures the carbon and stores it or finds some other way to deal with it.

Finally, what should the CO2 cap levels be? We can debate that, and I am sure we will. But the cap level we pick in this legislation is to say, let's freeze at the level of last year, starting with 2011, and go down step by step into 2025 to 1.5 billion metric tons. This is our contribution to the debate.

We have learned enough about our health, about our ability to attract jobs, to know we need to finish the job of cleaning up the air of nitrogen, of sulfur, and of mercury; and we need to take the right first step to begin to control the emission of carbon to deal with global warming. I believe the right first step is a market-based cap and trade system of electricity plants which is described here.

May I also say this: Some people say: Well, let's wait until China does it. Let's wait until India does it. The great danger is that we will not unleash the technological genius of the United States of America to clean our air and to deal efficiently and inexpensively with the emissions of carbon. If we do not figure that out, India and China are going to build so many dirty coal powerplants that it will not make any difference what we do because the wind will blow the dirty air around here, and we will suffer and the planet will suffer whatever the consequences are of global warming and of the other pollutants that come from coal.

So we have an obligation not just to the world to do this, we have to do this for ourselves because 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 new coal-fired powerplants in India and China will obliterate any of the good work we might do here. I believe if we take the aggressive but practical cost- effective steps in this Clean Air/Climate Change Act, we will unleash the great entrepreneurial spirit of our country. We will be able to create an inexpensive way to deal with carbon on a segment-by-segment basis, deal with the other pollutants, and India and China will have to follow. The rest of the world will follow, and we will be better off.

I cannot imagine more interesting and exciting work to be doing. This is the kind of subject on which we should be working together on a bipartisan basis.

I thank Senator Lieberman for joining me in cosponsoring this legislation. I salute Senator Carper for his continued leadership. I look forward to working with him.

Exhibit 1

Clean Air/Climate Change Act of 2007, Section by Section Description,

April 19, 2007

Mr. President, today I introduce legislation to reduce air pollution and the threat of global warming by enacting strict standards on the four major pollutants from powerplants. I send the legislation to the desk and ask it be introduced.

Mr. President, I am pleased that Senator Joe Lieberman, of Connecticut, who chairs a key environmental subcommittee, will be the bill's lead cosponsor, so it will be known as the Alexander-Lieberman Clean Air Climate Change Act of 2007. It will establish an aggressive but practical and achievable set of limits on four key pollutants. This is a little different sort of clean air and climate change bill, and I would like to talk for a few minutes about exactly what it does and why we are doing it this way.

Most of us in the Senate can be measured by where we come from. I come from the Great Smoky Mountains. When I go home tomorrow afternoon, after we hopefully start the competitiveness legislation debate, I will go to my home about 2 miles from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. When the Cherokees named the Great Smoky Mountains, which today have become our most visited national park, they were not talking about smog and soot. Unfortunately, today they probably would be. There has been a lot of recent progress, but air pollution is still a serious health problem, causing illnesses from asthma to premature death, and making it harder to attract new jobs.

To be specific about that, recently, over the last 20 years, the auto industry has become important to Tennessee.

Tennessee was in competition recently for a Toyota plant that nearly came to Chattanooga but went to Mississippi. In the last 25 years, one- third of our manufacturing jobs have become auto jobs. I can remember when there were not any, and I was Governor, and the Nissan plant decided to come to Tennessee in 1980. The first thing I had to do as Governor was to help them go down to the air quality board and get a permit to paint 500,000 cars and trucks a year. That is a lot of paint, and produces a lot of emissions in the area. If Tennessee had not had clean air at that time, that Nissan plant would have been in Georgia. So clean air is not only about our health, although the more we learn about the effects of nitrogen pollutants and sulfur pollutants, the more that we learn that it and mercury are about our health, clean air is also about our ability to attract jobs. So we want to make sure that when Nissan or Toyota or any of the suppliers of any automobile company--General Motors with a Saturn plant in Tennessee--when they want to look at our State for expansion--they are not limited by our inability to meet clean air standards.

We also have jobs that come from another direction. In Tennessee, tourism is big business. Many people know about Yellowstone in the West, but the Great Smoky Mountains have three times as many visitors as any Western park, nearly 10 million visitors a year, and they come to see the Great Smokies, not to see smog, not to see soot. They want to enjoy it.

When I go into Sevierville, Dolly Parton's hometown, and ask the Chamber of Commerce right there next to Maryville where I grew up, what is your No. 1 issue, these conservative Republicans in Sevier County say to me: Clean air. That is what the Chamber of Commerce there says, clean air. So we Tennesseans think clean air is important for our health, because we love to look at our mountains and because of our jobs.

I am the chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority Congressional Caucus. I sit on the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee. I am especially delighted that Senator Lieberman, who is the cosponsor of this legislation, not only is on that committee, but he chairs one of the major subcommittees on the Environment and Public Works Committee that has to do with global warming.

What we are hoping is that this legislation, which I am about to describe, along with legislation Senator Carper of Delaware is introducing today or tomorrow, will help move along the debate about how we deal with global warming in our country.

In the legislation I have presented, the Alexander-Lieberman legislation, we seek to preserve our jobs while we clean the air and preserve the planet. We have a number of concerns in our country, and global warming is only one of those. So I would argue that the provisions we have set out are aggressive, but they are practical and they are achievable. They set schedules for powerplants to reduce emissions for sulfur dioxide, for nitrogen oxide, for mercury, and for carbon dioxide. Doing so will relieve some of the worst air-related health environmental problems such as ozone, acid rain, mercury contamination, and global warming.

I think it is important to note that one of the differences with this Alexander-Lieberman bill is it proposes carbon caps only on powerplants that produce electricity; it does not propose carbon caps on the economy as a whole.

Now, why would we only do that? Well, here are the reasons for that: No. 1, when we talk about global warming and carbon, we are dealing with a huge, complex economy. This country of ours produces and uses about 25 percent of all of the energy in the world. We have businesses that range from the shoe shop to Google to chemical plants.

I think we have to be very careful in Washington about coming up with great schemes and great ideas that sound good here but that might not apply to everyone across the country, because everyone across the country has a natural conservatism about the wisdom of those who are in Washington. We could scare them to death with some talk of an economywide global warming bill. So I am more comfortable thinking sector by sector. I want our steps to be practical and cost effective.

I do believe a market-based cap and trade system for powerplants makes a lot of sense. Powerplants are the logical place to start with carbon regulation. Powerplants produce about 40 percent of all the carbon in our economy. Powerplants are increasing emissions of carbon at a rate faster than any other large segment in our economy. We have selected in our legislation what we call a market-based cap and trade system to regulate the amount of carbon that is produced. This is not a new idea. The market-based cap and trade system was actually introduced by a Republican administration in which I served in the Cabinet, the first George Bush. It was a part of the Clean Air Act amendments in 1990. It was introduced because we were concerned about the amount of sulfur coming out of powerplants. Basically it created a lot of flexibility for those powerplants. It used a market system. We have now had 15 years experience with it. It has worked very well. It has significantly reduced the amount of sulfur in the air. It has done it in a way that most everyone concedes is the lowest possible cost of regulation.

It is a minimal amount of rules from here, a maximum amount of market decisions and individual decisions by individual utilities. So we have had that system in effect since 1990. There has been a similar system in effect for nitrogen. There has been a similar cap and trade system in Europe. We have a lot of experience with cap and trade. So we have elected to use a similar cap and trade market-based system to regulate the carbon coming out of the same smokestacks that sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury come out of. We can already measure the amount of carbon coming out, so we do not have to guess about that. We do not have to invent a new system.

We do have to be careful about what the standards are, what the dates are. We want to know what the costs will be to the ratepayers. We want to keep electric rates as low as we possibly can, as well as making the energy clean.

But if we are concerned about global warming in this generation, because I think we should be, then powerplants are a good place to start. It is time to finish the job of cleaning the air of sulfur, of too much sulfur, too much nitrogen, and too much mercury. It is time to take the right first step with controlling carbon emissions. It is time to acknowledge that climate change is real, that human activity is a big part of the problem, and that it is up to us to act.

Now not only am I glad to be working with Senator Lieberman, who will be the lead cosponsor of this legislation, he, of course, is already a leader in this area and he has an economywide piece of legislation which he introduced. Senator McCain in the last session--I am not about to try to speak for another Senator, but I think Senator Lieberman is taking the position he would like to see several good trains moving down the track toward the same station in hopes that one of them eventually gets there, and that we can learn from each other.

That is the attitude I take with the legislation Senator Carper has described today and that he is introducing today or tomorrow. Senator Carper and I have worked together through two Congresses on four pollutant legislation. A lot has happened since we started working. For example, the Administration, to its credit, through the Environmental Protection Agency, has stiffened requirements for sulfur and nitrogen. I applaud President Bush for that. They are very good requirements. They have also proposed the regulation of mercury for the first time in our country's history. I applaud the EPA for that. So a lot has changed since Senator Carper and I first started.

Also we have learned a lot. Senators who do not always have their mouths open learn a lot. We have discovered one of the most difficult areas in fashioning a market-based cap and trade system for sulfur or for nitrogen or for carbon is who pays for it. We called that the allocation system.

Senator Carper and I started out with what we called an output system. We thought that sounded pretty good. It would be based upon the amount of electricity you would be putting out. But the more we studied it, he came to a different conclusion and I came to a different conclusion. I came to the conclusion that we should use historical emissions. In other words, we are saying to a utility in the United States: We are about to impose upon you some requirements for cleaning up more sulfur, cleaning up more nitrogen, cleaning up mercury--for the first time--and regulating the emissions of carbon for the first time, and I understand that is a significant cost.

That capital cost will have to be borne in the end by ratepayers. So, in my view, it seems to me that the fairest way to impose that cost would be through what we call the historical allocation system. That is the way we have done it with allowances for sulfur and nitrogen for the last 15 years.

In fact, the input or the historical allowance system as the way to pay the bill has been the way it is done almost everywhere, I believe.

But there is another way to allocate that is called the output. Senator Carper selected that. There is still a third way to allocate the costs of doing whatever regulation we do, and that is called the auction. A market-based cap and trade system sounds complicated, but it is not so complicated. It basically says to each emitter of one of the pollutants: You have an allowance to emit one ton of that sulfur or of that carbon, and as long as you emit that much, you are okay. If you emit more than that, you are going to have to buy allowances to emit that much more from someone else. So it costs you more. Or if you emit less, you can sell your allowance. Then as the law goes along over the years, 2009 or 2010 to 2015, the amount of pollutants that come down, your allowance total drops down as well.

One of the favored proposals mostly--and especially by many environmental groups--is an auction of those allowances. Well, I have resisted. I have been careful about the auctions. I have been to a lot of auctions. I know they must have them in Minnesota as well as Tennessee. I have yet to see one where the purpose of the auction was not to get the highest possible price.

Well, if I am paying my electric bill down in Memphis, or if I am at Eastman Chemical in east Tennessee or ALCOA trying to keep my electric costs in line, I am not interested in my Senator coming to Washington and having an auction to raise my electric rates to the highest possible price.

So also there is the temptation that if you auction off these allowances, and there are a lot of them when we are talking about carbon allowances, many more than when we are talking about sulfur allowances over the last 15 years. They will bring in a lot of money. And whenever you bring in a lot of money, and 100 different Senators and lots of Congressmen know there is a pot of money, they will come up with a lot of ways to spend that money. And where will that money come from? Well, it has got to come from the man or women or family paying the electric bill in Nashville, or Knoxville. So I have been conservative about the use of auctions.

Senator Lieberman and I, in this bill, say 75 percent of the allowance comes from historical emissions and 25 percent are sold in an auction. This gets way down in the weeds, as we say. But one of the things that I think may be beneficial from Senator Carper going ahead with his bill, which relies on an output system that becomes a 100- percent auction, and way we go ahead in the Alexander-Lieberman bill with 75-percent input and 25-percent auction, may be that our colleagues will do as we have been doing over the last few months, and spend a little more time understanding allowances and auctions, and we can come to a better conclusion about this.

I value greatly my relationship with Senator Carper and respect his leadership in this area. He chairs one of the principal subcommittees on the Environment Committee upon which I serve

and the Presiding Officer serves. What I hope is he and I are moving into a new stage of our working relationship on clean air and climate change, and the result of that will be that all of our ideas will be out in front of our colleagues and that it will move the debate along.

I would emphasize, we agree, he and I, on a lot more than we disagree on. In fact, I believe on all of the standards and deadlines for meeting those standards for nitrogen, sulfur, and mercury, we agree. We agree there should not be a cap and trade system for mercury because mercury is a neurotoxin, and down in east Tennessee where I live, we do not want TVA buying a lot of allowances so they can emit a lot more mercury, because it doesn't go up in the air and blow into North Carolina, it goes up in the air and comes right down on top of us, for the most part. We don't want that.

We don't want that. The more we learn about mercury, the less we want it. We don't have cap and trade for mercury, although we do suggest that for carbon.

Climate change has become the issue of the moment. Everybody is talking about it. There are movies about it. The Vice President was here testifying about it. It is not the only issue that faces us that has to do with air pollution. I am more concerned in Tennessee about sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury than I am about carbon. That is why this is a four-pollutant bill. We ought to address all of these at once.

I was in this body 40 years ago as a staff assistant working for Howard Baker. I remember very well when Senator Baker, a Republican, and Senator Muskie of Maine, a Democrat, worked together on the committee on which the Presiding Officer and I now serve. They passed the first Clean Water Act and the first Clean Air Act. The Clean Water Act, some people have said, is the most important piece of urban renewal legislation ever enacted because the rivers of America had gotten so dirty, nobody wanted to live on them. The rivers of America are where most of our great cities are. As soon as they were cleaned up, people moved back to the cities and around the rivers. That was 1970 and 1971.

It is appropriate to think about that now because Earth Day is coming up this weekend. I can remember Earth Day, which began in 1970. Suddenly the environment, which had been an issue that was reserved for only a few people, became a national craze. It was almost like a hula hoop. Everybody was interested in the environment and recycling. Former Senator Gaylord Nelson was a leader in creating Earth Day. I can remember sitting in a meeting of President Nixon and the Republican leadership in 1970 when I was on the White House staff, and President Nixon was trying to explain to the Republican leaders the importance of environmental issues. It was 8 o'clock in the morning, and they weren't listening very well. It was a new subject. But Gaylord Nelson was doing it. The kids were doing it. People were recycling. The Republican President was talking to the Republican leadership, and Senator Baker, Senator Muskie, and the Congress passed the first Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.

Many of us who have lived a while can remember things are better today in many ways. When I was a student at Vanderbilt in Nashville, it was so smoggy in the mornings, you couldn't see downtown. Your clothes got dirty during the day. Things got gradually better. In 1990, when the first President Bush was in office, we passed important Clean Air Act amendments, and the first cap and trade system for sulfur began. What also happened was that we learned more about how damaging these pollutants are to our health.

As a result, the standards which we once thought were high seemed low. Knoxville, the biggest city near where I grew up, near the Smoky Mountains, is the 14th most polluted city for ozone. Ozone irritates lung tissue, increases the risk of dying prematurely, increases the swelling of lung tissue. It increases the risk of being hospitalized with worsened lung diseases and triggering asthma attacks. At risk in Knoxville County alone are 176,000 children, 112,000 seniors, 15,000 children with asthma, and 50,000 adults with asthma. Ozone is not emitted directly from tailpipes and smokestacks. The raw ingredients come from coal-fired powerplants and cars.

Sulfur is in many ways our biggest problem. It is the primary contributor to haze. It causes difficulty in breathing. It causes damage to lung tissue and respiratory disease and premature death.

We know that mercury is also a problem. Monitoring by the National Park Service in the Great Smoky Mountains has found high levels of mercury deposits from air pollution. Mercury pollution of rivers and streams contaminates the fish we eat and poses a serious threat to children and pregnant women.

This bill is a clean air and a climate change bill. I hope our committee, as we take advantage of this resurgence of interest in the quality of air and our health and what we need to do about it, we won't just do part of the job. I would like to look at the whole picture. What we do in this bill is take the standards that the EPA has created for nitrogen and sulfur and put them into law. We make them a little stricter, but basically we put them into law. We take the mercury rule of the EPA, and we put it into law. We make it even stricter. The EPA says get rid of 70 percent of it. We say get rid of 90 percent. Then for the first time we put into law carbon caps on electric powerplants which produce 40 percent of all the carbon produced in the United States and are the fastest growing sector producing carbon in America.

I hope my colleagues will carefully consider this sector-by-sector approach to climate change. Carbon caps might be the best way--I believe they are--for dealing with electric powerplants. When it comes to fuel, there may be another strategy that makes sense. We could deal with that sector in a different way. For example, when we were dealing with sulfur, we didn't put a cap and trade on diesel fuel. We did on powerplants. But when we got to diesel fuel, we just said that you have to have ultra low sulfur diesel for big trucks, which just now went into effect.

There is also the large segment of building energy use. If we took the sector of building energy use, the fuel segment, and the electric powerplants, if we added that to a few stationery sources in America and developed strategies that were aggressive but practical and cost- effective for each of those segments, we would be up in the 85 to 90 percent of all the carbon we produce in America. That makes a lot more sense to me than trying to devise some one-size-fits-all system that affects every little shop, store, or farm in America. If we can get most of it this way, maybe we can learn something so that someday we can get the rest of it.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks a section-by-section description of the Alexander-Lieberman bill, a one-page summary of the Alexander-Lieberman Clean Air/Climate Change Act of 2007, as well as a short memorandum which we describe as discussion points and with which I will conclude my remarks by going over in just a moment, and a letter from the National Parks Conservation Association endorsing the bill.

Senator Lieberman and I don't have all the answers with this legislation. I feel much more comfortable with this legislation today than I did with any I helped introduce last year or the year before because I have learned a lot more. But I will guarantee my colleagues that there are several areas in which I would welcome advice. Over the last several weeks, I have met with a dozen, two dozen environmental groups, utilities, Tennessee citizens, others who had suggestions. For example, the discussion points that I have put into the record contain five points that are arguable. I have come to a tentative conclusion on them. That is in the bill. But there is another side to the point. I am looking for advice.

For example, should we cap only carbon or all greenhouse gases emitted from electricity plants? I chose to cap CO2 only. That is because this is a four-pollutant bill--sulfur, nitrogen, mercury, and carbon. It is not primarily a climate change bill.

Another consideration is that it seems Europe's experience is that it may be better to cap just carbon and

not all greenhouse gases. That is a question we can debate.

What should the size of an auction be in terms of the allowances? I discussed that earlier. Senator Lieberman and I have chosen 25 percent of the total number of allowances. Senator Carper, in his bill, eventually goes to 100 percent. There are arguments on both sides.

What influenced my decision was, I wanted to keep the costs down as much as possible. I was afraid that if we used some different kind of allowance allocation, we might literally take money away from the emitters that they ought to be using to put scrubbers on to reduce sulfur, nitrogen, mercury, or carbon and pay it to other utilities.

What rules should govern the use of offset allowances by electric plants? Offsets are an ingenious idea. The idea would be that an emitter of carbon might be able to pay somebody else to reduce their output of carbon and, therefore, we would end up with the same amount of carbon. There are many advantages to that. For example, the Tennessee Valley Authority might pay a Tennessee farmer to manage his livestock crop in a way as to not produce as much methane, might pay a Tennessee farmer to plant a lot of trees. Both of those things would reduce greenhouse gases, and the farmer would have more money in his pocket. That is a good idea.

The downside of offsets is that if they are unregulated entirely, it seems to me they could become a gimmick or a fad or worse. What we have done in this bill is adopt a system of offsets from a consortium of States ranging from Maryland to Maine--that includes Senator Lieberman's State of Connecticut--and used those model rules on offsets. That tends to limit the way offsets may be used. It is a good place to at least begin. In other words, a utility might produce more carbon, but it might pay someone else who is reducing carbon by using biomass or by sequestering carbon in some other way.

There is a question about how should new coal-fired electric plants be treated. There are probably 160 new coal plants on the drawing boards. Some of them hope to escape the rules Congress is considering about capping the output of carbon. I don't think they should. This bill would apply to all coal-fired powerplants, including those on the drawing boards. It also would give an incentive to the first 30 of those plants to meet a high standard of clean coal technology. We don't want to encourage the use of natural gas in this bill. That is the last thing we want to do. We don't want to discourage the use of coal. We have a lot of coal. It would help make us energy independent. We want to encourage the creation of the kind of technology that will permit us to use coal in a clean way that either recaptures the carbon and stores it or finds some other way to deal with it.

Finally, what should the CO2 cap levels be? We can debate that, and I am sure we will. But the cap level we pick in this legislation is to say, let's freeze at the level of last year, starting with 2011, and go down step by step into 2025 to 1.5 billion metric tons. This is our contribution to the debate.

We have learned enough about our health, about our ability to attract jobs, to know we need to finish the job of cleaning up the air of nitrogen, of sulfur, and of mercury; and we need to take the right first step to begin to control the emission of carbon to deal with global warming. I believe the right first step is a market-based cap and trade system of electricity plants which is described here.

May I also say this: Some people say: Well, let's wait until China does it. Let's wait until India does it. The great danger is that we will not unleash the technological genius of the United States of America to clean our air and to deal efficiently and inexpensively with the emissions of carbon. If we do not figure that out, India and China are going to build so many dirty coal powerplants that it will not make any difference what we do because the wind will blow the dirty air around here, and we will suffer and the planet will suffer whatever the consequences are of global warming and of the other pollutants that come from coal.

So we have an obligation not just to the world to do this, we have to do this for ourselves because 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 new coal-fired powerplants in India and China will obliterate any of the good work we might do here. I believe if we take the aggressive but practical cost- effective steps in this Clean Air/Climate Change Act, we will unleash the great entrepreneurial spirit of our country. We will be able to create an inexpensive way to deal with carbon on a segment-by-segment basis, deal with the other pollutants, and India and China will have to follow. The rest of the world will follow, and we will be better off.

I cannot imagine more interesting and exciting work to be doing. This is the kind of subject on which we should be working together on a bipartisan basis.

I thank Senator Lieberman for joining me in cosponsoring this legislation. I salute Senator Carper for his continued leadership. I look forward to working with him.

Exhibit 1

Clean Air/Climate Change Act of 2007, Section by Section Description,

April 19, 2007

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for 5 minutes.

Yes.

Mr. President, I thank my colleagues for giving me 5 minutes.

As my late friend Alex Haley, the author of ``Roots,'' said, ``Find the good and praise it.'' We talk an awful lot about illegal immigration here in the Senate. The majority and minority leaders have both said that before Memorial Day, we will bring up immigration reform in a comprehensive manner. I hope very much that we do that. That is our responsibility. It is too big a problem for one party to solve, and we should work on it in a bipartisan way.

Today, I want to talk about legal immigration as opposed to illegal immigration. About 650,000 individuals become U.S. citizens every year. Each of us has attended ceremonies where this happens. This is at the very heart of our Nation. This is why we call the United States of America the Nation of immigrants. What is so important about them is that no one becomes an American based upon his or her race or where their grandparents came from. In fact, that is constitutionally impermissible. One becomes an American by a remarkable oath of allegiance to this country as opposed to some other country, and then demonstrating good character, being here for 5 years, and showing that you know our common language, English, and an understanding of the U.S. history.

The importance of that was brought home to me last week when I was visiting in Nashville. About 30 percent of all of the students in Tennessee who have limited English proficiency happen to be in the Nashville School District, and Pedro Garcia, the superintendent of schools, was telling me that many of those students who are not now American citizens want to make sure they learn enough U.S. history in middle school and high school so they can pass the citizenship test and become Americans when they graduate.

Today, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, USCIS, is formally releasing the Citizen's Almanac. I call it to the attention of our colleagues. It is a collection of American symbols of freedom and liberty to be given to every newly sworn citizen, and that would be 650,000 this year. It is built upon action that was taken earlier this year by the USCIS to create a new and better citizenship test.

At the conclusion of my remarks, I ask unanimous consent that a fact sheet about the naturalization test redesign be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, the purpose of that test is to simply give new meaning to what it means to be an American. That oath of allegiance which these 650,000 new citizens will take is basically the same oath that George Washington and his officers took at Valley Forge in 1778. It has a great deal of meaning. Other countries in the world have not had the experience we have had helping people from around the world become Americans. The English, the French, the Japanese, and the Germans are struggling with that right now, as people move in who are not Japanese, German, English, or French. It is hard for them to become part of that national identity. We have not had that problem. We welcome everyone based upon their understanding of the symbols and documents represented in the Citizen's Almanac. So if we don't teach about these things in our schools or immigrants don't learn it in the naturalization process, then we are not a united country.

As I have said many times on this floor, diversity is a great strength of the United States of America, but it is not our greatest strength. Our greatest strength is that we have been able to take all of this diversity and mold it into one country, not because of race or ethnicity but because of a belief in a few principles and our common language. We are able to say we are proud of where we came from, but we are prouder to be Americans.

I salute the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for this document, and the National Endowment for the Humanities for its hard work on it. The Citizen's Almanac includes the patriotic anthems and symbols of the United States, Presidential and historical speeches from Presidents Lincoln, Washington, Roosevelt, Kennedy and Reagan, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and landmark decisions of the Supreme Court. It ought to be in every Senate office. It will be in every home of every new citizen. It will be a good document to be in every school in America.

I yield the floor.

Exhibit 1

[From the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Citizenship and

Immigration Services, Jan. 22, 2007]

USCIS Naturalization Test Redesign

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is

revising the naturalization test to create a test and testing

process that is standardized, fair and meaningful. A

standardized and fair naturalization test will include

uniform testing protocols and procedures nationwide to ensure

that there is no variation between offices. A meaningful test

will encourage civic learning and patriotism among

prospective citizens. A revised test, with an emphasis on the

fundamental concepts of American democracy and the rights and

responsibilities of citizenship, will help to encourage

citizenship applicants to learn and identify with the basic

values that we all share as Americans.

Mr. President, on behalf of a Republican Senator, I object.

Mr. President, I raise a point of order that section 3001 constitutes general legislation and is not in order to a general appropriations bill under rule XVI.

I thank the Chair.

Mr. President, I believe I am to be recognized for 20 minutes.

Mr. President, I wish to make remarks about three matters of importance to the great American outdoors, all of which have been happening this week and which are important for our country.

First, I wish to comment on a provision the Senate struck from the Iraq supplemental appropriations bill this morning when we were considering it. We struck it in a procedural move based upon a point of order I raised. The provision was a billboard amnesty proposal that was inserted into the middle of legislation that was supposed to be in support of our troops.

I called it a billboard amnesty proposal because it suddenly would have treated as legal billboard sites that have been illegal for 40 years and effectively would have gutted the Highway Beautification Act of 1965, which is one of the legacies of a former First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson.

I think this deserves a little attention and a little explanation before we leave it because it was a full-scale assault on one of the most important pieces of legislation that helps keep our country beautiful at a time when we are growing and struggling to preserve open spaces.

There are three problems with this billboard amnesty proposal, as I saw it. First, the proposal would have done for the billboard industry something the law doesn't allow for churches, doesn't allow for schools, doesn't allow for businesses, doesn't allow for any other structures that since 1965 have been on illegal or nonconforming sites.

This is what was happening. In 1965, at the urging of President Johnson and Mrs. Johnson, the Nation decided it would restrict billboards, both in terms of their location and their size. As we often do with legislation, we looked ahead and said the billboards could not be located in some places and had to be within a certain size. As the interstate system grew across the country, much of it is relatively free of large billboards or has a limited number of billboards.

The question then arose about what do we do about the billboards and signs that were already up prior to 1965. The decision was made by the Congress at that time to say we will leave those signs up, we will grandfather them in. As long as they stay up, they are fine, but when they fall down, they will be gone. In other words, we have been waiting for 40 years for those sites to die a natural death. That was the compromise in 1965. Many of these billboards are large billboards and are in places we don't want--rural areas, scenic areas across the country--but that was the decision we made.

The problem with this legislation, as it came into the supplemental appropriations bill for troops, is it said suddenly all the billboards in 13 States that are on sites where it would be illegal to put a new billboard were suddenly legal. In other words, it was instant amnesty, overnight amnesty for illegal billboards.

There are a lot of billboards like this. For example, in the State of Tennessee, there are nearly 3,000 billboards on sites where they would not be permitted under current law, but when those billboards fall down, they can't ever put them back up. We have known that for 40 years. In North Carolina, there are probably 2,600 illegal sites, in the sense that when the billboards wear out, fall down, act of God knocks them out, they can't be put back up. In South Carolina, there are 2,200; in Florida, 6,000; in Oklahoma, 1,400; and in Alabama, 912. In a moment, I will put in the list of those in each State.

What the provision that we struck from the bill said was, because there were some hurricanes down South, in all these places where billboards on illegal sites were knocked down by a hurricane, they could be put back up. That raises a lot of questions. What is the difference between a billboard being destroyed by a hurricane and being destroyed by lightning, or it becoming water damaged, or it falling down because it is rotting, or some other act of God?

The whole idea in 1965 was when the billboards wore out, or an act of God destroyed them, they were gone. They were gone. We have been waiting for 40 years for that to happen. So in comes the billboard lobby and, suddenly, we have first a proposal to exempt all these billboards across the country--instant billboard amnesty for all the billboards in every State--even though the hurricanes were in the South.

Finally, that original proposal from the billboard industry got narrowed down to 13 States, which included Tennessee--we don't have a lot of hurricanes in Tennessee--and Kentucky. Hurricanes in Kentucky?

I think what is happening here is the billboard lobby is doing its best to reclaim all those billboards that have been illegal for 40 years by saying because of this hurricane or that drought or that lightning strike, suddenly we want them rebuilt in every State. That is a pretty good thing for all the billboard companies, because by and large they have bought them up from all the small farmers. They weren't worth very much because the owners knew when they fell down, the billboards could never be replaced. So what could be better for the big billboard lobby than to suddenly get instant amnesty for all these sites and instant riches overnight for those companies?

I don't blame them for trying, but I think the Senate was exactly right to say, wait a minute, we can't do this. Not only is it an affront to the troops to be cavalierly talking about a wet kiss to the billboard lobby in the middle a debate when we are supposed to be helping the troops in Iraq, I think it is an affront to Lady Bird Johnson and all those across America who, for 40 years, have tried to keep our country, about which we sing, beautiful. One of our greatest values is we sing and believe in America the beautiful.

This motion was put into the legislation by the Democratic leader. I want to make very clear I don't question his motives, and I respect what he does. I appreciate the courteous way in which he treated the discussion he and I had on this. I told him if there were some injustices that have to do with States in the South that have been somehow unevenly treated by the law or impacted by the hurricanes in a way nobody anticipated, I would be glad to work with him and other members of the Environment and Public Works Committee, on which I serve, to correct those injustices. But the Senator from Florida, Mr. Martinez, was a cosponsor of my amendment to get rid of this provision. The Senator from Alabama, Mr. Shelby, was a cosponsor of my amendment to stop this billboard amnesty. So who is the billboard lobby trying to protect here, when the Senators from those States--Tennessee,

Alabama, and Florida--say we don't need that sort of protection? But I am happy and willing to work on that legislation.

I also wish to make it clear to my colleagues this is not a new subject for me. In the 1980s, when I was Governor of Tennessee, the legislature and I--and the legislature was Democratic at the time--made 10,000 of our State roads scenic highways. We put little mockingbirds up, and we said no new billboards and no new junkyards. Tennessee is a beautiful State, and we wanted people to enjoy it as they drove across the country. The only regret I have is we didn't think of cell towers being invented. We all use them, for our cell phones and our BlackBerries. In Tennessee, they seem to be having a contest to see who can invent the biggest and the ugliest cell tower and stick it in the most scenic place. But we created those scenic highways in a bipartisan way.

In the mid-1980s, I was chairman of the President's Commission on Americans Outdoors, with Gilbert Grosvenor, the head of National Geographic, and Pat Noonan, president of The Conservation Fund, and one of our major recommendations was a system of scenic byways, which the Congress has now created across our country.

Our people want to see our beautiful country and they want reasonable limits on what we are doing. They certainly don't want to see us, in the middle of legislation to support our troops, to have suddenly attached to the appropriations bill an instant billboard amnesty proposal. I am glad that is out of the bill, and I congratulate the Senate for doing what we did this morning. It will come up through the regular committee, if we ever need to do that. The proposal was a big wet kiss to the billboard lobby, and a kissing line in which I don't care to stand, and I appreciate the Senate action.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter from several organizations--Scenic America, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the National League of Cities, the American Planning Association, and other groups--expressing their deep concern about the provision we knocked out of the supplemental appropriations bill that would have gutted the Highway Beautification Act.

Following that, I wish to include a chart from Scenic America that has a list of the number of nonconforming billboards in every State. There are 63,000 of those sites where it would be illegal to put up new billboards. The whole thrust of this billboard amnesty proposal would have been to turn those illegal sites into legal sites overnight, beginning with these 13 States and perhaps expanding to other States in the future.

Also, I wish to include two newspaper articles, one from the Washington Post and one from USA Today, which alerted the Senate this week to this provision in the appropriations bill, which slipped in very quietly under the heading of ``highway signs.''

Mr. President, I wish to, in the remaining time, mention two other proposals that have to do with the great American outdoors.

Yesterday, a group of 17 Senators and Congressmen from North Carolina and Tennessee took a historic step by writing a letter to Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne about the so-called ``Road to Nowhere'' through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

The point of the letter was to suggest to the Secretary three things:

No. 1, Mr. Secretary, bring to a conclusion within 30 days the environmental impact statement that has been going on for several years about whether to build this road--the $600 million ``road to nowhere'' through the park--and recommend, Mr. Secretary, that no road should be built. That is the first step.

The second step is one we can take ourselves in the Congress once the Department of the Interior has said that no proposal for road construction would be appropriate environmentally. The 17 of us believe we should reprogram the remaining money from the environmental impact statement, which we judge to be $5 million, $6 million or $7 million, and give it to the citizens of Swain County, NC, who have waited since 1943 for just compensation for the promise the Government made to them at that time to compensate them for the road that was flooded when Fontana Dam was built.

The third thing we asked the Secretary to do was in the next administration budget for fiscal year 2009, recommend to us what the rest of the cash settlement should be to Swain County, and include the next installment of that settlement in the budget, but without taking the money from the National Park budget.

What is historic about this is it was not just the number of Senators and Congressmen, it was the fact it was Senator Dole from North Carolina as well as Senator Corker from Tennessee. It was Congressman Shuler, a Democrat from North Carolina, as well as David Davis, a Republican from Tennessee. We also have support from the Governors of both Tennessee and North Carolina for the proposed cash settlement to Swain County in lieu of the road.

The road is a bad idea. It has been a bad idea for a long time. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the largest, most visited national park in the United States by a factor of three, with 10 million visitors a year. It is managed as if it were a wilderness area. This road, costing more than $600 million, would go straight through the most pristine part of the largest wilderness area in the eastern United States. And $600 million I believe is an understatement of what it might cost. There would be very difficult places to go through. It is hard to think it could be built without spending a lot more money.

I congratulate the Congressman from North Carolina, Mr. Shuler. He grew up on one side of the Great Smoky Mountains in Swain County, and I grew up on the other side in Blount County. Fifteen years ago, I was president of the University of Tennessee and he was its quarterback. Today, he is now the Democratic Congressman from Swain County and that area, and I am the Republican Senator from east Tennessee. We agree on what to do, and we believe it is time for the Secretary of the Interior to accept our suggestion, say there will be no road, and let us get busy giving the people of Swain County $6 million or $7 million this year, and in future years compensate them properly.

Also Congressman Shuler and I and others say that in this process we must do a better job of helping the descendants of those who once lived in what is today the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to be able to get across Fontana Lake to the gravesites. That may seem a small matter to those who have not heard of this before, but that

park was taken, by land condemnation oftentimes, from those people and their families and their ancestors. It was then given to the Federal Government. There is a great sense of ownership of that park by the people of North Carolina and Tennessee, and it is only right that as a part of this settlement we make it easier for Swain County to help descendants of those who once lived within the park to get to their historic gravesites.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed at this point in my remarks a copy of the letter from the 17 Members of Congress from North Carolina and Tennessee to the Secretary of the Interior.

Finally, Mr. President, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. President, last night I attended the annual meeting of the National Parks Conservation Association, and I spoke to them, and I wish to repeat a suggestion and a proposal I made there.

I said to these leading conservationists from across the country that 22 years ago, in 1985, President Reagan asked me to head up what we called the President's Commission on Americans Outdoors. It was to be a successor to Laurance Rockefeller's Commission on Outdoors a generation earlier. The Rockefeller Commission was one that was remembered for advocating a lot of Federal action, such as the Land and Water Conservation Act and the Wild and Scenic Rivers legislation.

Our commission in the mid-1980s looked around the country and called for a prairie fire of concern and investment community by community to keep our outdoors great. We identified threats to the outdoors at that time: exotic pollutants, loss of space through urban growth, and the disappearance of wetlands. We recommended some strategies for dealing with the future, which have become fixtures in the outdoor movement, such as conservation easements, scenic byways and greenways, and we recommended $1 billion a year from the sale of renewable assets, such as oil, to succeed the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

Mr. President, since I see no one here, may I ask unanimous consent for an additional 5 minutes to complete my remarks?

Mr. President, another generation has passed. There are new challenges and new opportunities. My proposal to the conservationists last night was it is now time for a third President's Commission on Americans Outdoors to follow the Rockefeller Commission in the 1960s and our commission in the 1980s. It would be an opportunity to look ahead for another generation and tell our country what we need to do to create places for us to enjoy the outdoors in appropriate ways, an opportunity to create a new conservation agenda.

There is some unfinished business that is obvious. Special Federal support for conservation easements expires this year. The conservation royalty, which we enacted in the last Congress, giving one-eighth of the money we acquire from drilling in the Gulf of Mexico to the Land and Water Conservation Fund, is only a beginning to fully funding land and water conservation. We need to codify the Environmental Protection Agency's new clean air rules about sulfur and nitrogen, which are so important to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, as an example. Urban growth is still swallowing up open space.

There are new challenges and opportunities that were barely on the agenda 25 years ago: Climate change, the 100th birthday of the National Park System in 2016, invasive species, and new technology which offers both promise and challenge.

For example, in terms of promise, carbon recapture from electricity plants fueled by coal--that could help make us energy independent, clean the air, and deal with global warming all at once; or at the John Smith National Water Trail in Virginia, Verizon has a wireless system so you can learn about 400 years of history as you go along the water trail, using your cell phone.

On the other hand, technology threatens America's landscape, the landscape of which we sing. I mentioned earlier that 25 years ago the Tennessee Legislature and I created 10,000 miles of scenic parkways with no new junkyards or billboards, and I didn't think of cell towers at the time. We now have 190,000 cell tower sites nationwide, many of them in scenic places, many of them ugly. That is unnecessary. If we had thought about it, cell towers could be camouflaged, colocated on a single structure, or located below the ridge tops. We should have thought about it and made more of a policy about it.

At the same time, while it gives many in the conservation movement a stomach ache to think about it, we are about to add to the American landscape tens of thousands of giant wind turbines that are twice as tall as the Neyland Football Stadium at the University of Tennessee, with turbines that stretch from 10-yard line to 10-yard line. Obviously, there is a place for wind power in our energy future, but isn't it right that we should stop and say: Do we want them on our seashores and the foothills of the Great Smokies and along the rim of the Grand Canyon? I don't think we would. It would be a chance for us to have a consensus about the blessings of technology and a consensus about view sheds and landscape conservation; in short, a new strategy and consensus for America, the beautiful.

I think this is our greatest opportunity to get around the table and take advantage of different ideas, put them together, and go ahead. We did that 20 years ago. We had private property advocates and open space enthusiasts and conservationists and outdoor recreation people. We were all around the

same table. We had a pretty good rapport. I think we made a difference over the last two decades.

The other day, Tennessee's unusually Democratic newspaper, the Tennessean, in Nashville, praised President Bush's centennial initiative for national parks--$100 million a year, $3 billion over 10 years--to help celebrate the 100th birthday of our park system, which some have called the best idea America ever had. The Tennessean said in its editorial, and cautioned its readers:

Just because George Bush said it, doesn't mean it's wrong.

Sometimes I think I need to say the same thing to my Republican friends about climate change. Just because Al Gore said it, doesn't mean it is wrong. I think we ought to work together to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the parks, to figure out what we want to do about climate change, scenic byways, open space, protecting private property rights, and providing more outdoor recreation opportunities. We can do that and now is a good time to do it. Why not have a Third President's Commission on Americans Outdoors? I believe the next President should appoint that commission and that we who care about those issues should take time to help him or her be ready with an agenda.

For me, the great American outdoors is not about policy and politics. I grew up hiking on the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains, camping there on a regular basis. I still live there. I breathe the air I try to keep clean and hike in the park I want to maintain. I want to protect the views of the foothills because I look at them when I am home, where I am going tomorrow morning. I enjoy riding on the scenic parkways and walking on the greenways, and every summer for 25 years, our family has gone to the Boundary Waters canoe area in Minnesota because it is quiet and clean and we like to catch and eat walleyes.

I believe there is a huge conservation majority in our country, and I believe the next President can capture that majority and help us create a new conservation agenda. It is time to create a Third President's Commission on Americans Outdoors.

I yield the floor.

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

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

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for up to 8 minutes.

Madam President, my late friend Alex Haley, the author of Roots, lived his life by 6 words: ``Find the Good and Praise It.'' I thought of those 6 words in connection with the current discussion about the firing of 8 United States Attorneys.

The Democrats are making political hay out of these firings at a time when the Senate should be focused on Iraq, terrorism, health care costs, excessive federal spending, energy independence and keeping our brainpower advantage so we can keep our good jobs here instead of seeing them move overseas.

U.S. Attorneys have always been political appointees serving at the pleasure of the president. President Clinton fired them all on his first day in office. Such partisanship is nothing new. Former Attorney General Griffin Bell recently said that the custom once was for U.S. attorneys simply to vacate their offices on the day a new president was inaugurated, knowing that new political appointees would soon arrive to take their desks.

In the summer of 1963, in between my first and second year at New York University Law School, I worked in Attorney General Robert Kennedy's office as an intern. I was so impressed that, after graduation, I drove to Chattanooga to apply for a job as an Assistant U.S. Attorney. The interview went fine until the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee asked about my politics.

``I'm a Republican,'' I said.

``Sorry,'' he said, ``We only hire Democrats.''

``But the Attorney General said the administration of justice was non-partisan,'' I replied.

``That word hasn't gotten down here,'' the U.S. Attorney said.

Yet the historic political nature of these appointments is no excuse for the excessive partisanship, amateurishness and bumbling exhibited by the firing of these eight U.S. Attorneys in the middle of the President's term. The best way to put in relief what is wrong with these firings is to remember Alex Haley's admonition, ``Find the Good and Praise It,'' and point to an example of how political appointees can by their courageous action earn respect for the administration of justice.

I have a personal interest in the example I offer. Nearly 30 years ago--on January 17, 1979--I was sworn into office 3 days early as Governor of Tennessee in order to prevent the incumbent Governor from issuing 52 pardons and commutations to prisoners the FBI believed had paid cash for their release.

The U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, Hal Hardin--a Democrat appointed by President Carter--telephoned to ask me to take office early. Hardin was working with the State attorney general, William Leech, another Democrat, to arrange the unprecedented early swearing-in. Because Hardin and Leech were able to rise above partisanship, the Speakers of the Senate and House and Chief Justice as well as the Secretary of State--also all Democrats--participated in my early swearing-in and the ouster of a Democratic incumbent Governor.

As it turned out, I was the only Republican in the group.

As then-Speaker of the House and later Governor Ned McWherter said, ``We are Tennesseans first.''

The story of January 17, 1979 was recently retold by Judge William C. Koch, Jr., a member of the Tennessee Court of Appeals, in the March 2007 issue of the Nashville Bar Journal. Judge Koch was on the staff of the State attorney general at that time and later was counsel when I was Governor.

In the spirit of ``Find the Good and Praise It,'' I offer for the Record Judge Koch's article as an example of how our system of political appointment of U.S. Attorneys can and should operate, in contrast to the example of the 8 firings and the response to those firings that we are discussing today.

I thank the Senator from Washington. I yield the floor.

Up to 15 minutes, please.

Mr. President, I congratulate the Senator from New Mexico. He has been working at this a long time. He helped originate the report by the National Academy of Sciences to which he referred, ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm.'' He has also performed a service to the Senate and the country by doing some of the hard, less glamourous work, because he has worked his way through the budget process and, in his words, we are making sure with this amendment that we have room in the budget to appropriate funds to support what I believe is the single most important legislation before the Congress this year; that is the America COMPETES Act which has been introduced by the Democratic leader, Senator Reid, and by the Republican leader, Senator McConnell.

At one stage in its development over the last 2 years it had 70 Senators, an equal number of both parties, supporting it and has been vetted and worked on by at least a half dozen of our committees. I thank Senator Bingaman for his long-time leadership on this effort, especially for making sure there is room in the budget for it.

On this side of the aisle, we talk a lot about progrowth policies and progrowth investments. We usually mean tax cuts when we talk about that. I learned a long time ago that while low taxes and balanced budgets are one important part of a progrowth strategy, they are not the only important part.

When I was Governor of my State, the Senator from New Hampshire was Governor of his State. That is a low-tax State. It was nearly as low a tax State as Tennessee when we were both Governors. That was important. But we also found out in Tennessee that if we wanted an auto industry, we had to have good four-lane highways. If we wanted to grow new jobs, we wanted to have a good banking. That was part of a progrowth strategy.

But more than anything else, the most important part of a progrowth strategy in my State was schools, colleges, and universities. We learned that better schools, colleges, and universities meant better jobs.

So this legislation we are talking about is about America's brainpower advantage. It is the reason why we produce a third of all the money for

about 5 percent of all the people in the world. It is because of the big ideas that have come out of our country. From the automobile, to the electric light bulb, to Google--they have been created here. The jobs are here and the standard of living is higher here.

But the rest of the world has figured that out. They have the same brains we do, and suddenly China is recruiting the most distinguished Chinese professors from great American universities to come back to China to build up China. You heard what Senator Bingaman said about what is happening in India.

We are talking about a little money for progrowth investments here. We would make room for $1 billion the President requested--that the President requested--to restore funding for basic scientific research in math and science education so we can keep our brainpower advantage. This is the real way to keep our good jobs from going to China and India and other countries in the world.

It is important to keep that $1 billion over the next year in perspective. That is half what we spend in the war in Iraq in a week. We spent $237 billion on debt last year, $378 billion on Medicare, $545 billion on Social Security, at least $70 billion on hurricanes. We are going to be asked to pass a $100 billion supplemental request for the war in Iraq.

We will not have enough money to pay all these important bills unless we keep enough money in the budget for the investments that keep our brainpower advantage so we can keep our jobs. That is where we get all that money.

The Bingaman-Alexander amendment would help make room for the $1 billion requested by the President to fund basic research in math and science education.

Specifically, one, it would restore $398 million for the National Science Foundation, bringing the total to $6.429 billion, as requested by the President.

Two, it restores $610 million for the Department of Energy's Office of Science, bringing the total to $4.481 billion, which meets the President's request, and then adds $70 million extra for three programs that are part of the Reid-McConnell America COMPETES Act: Discovery institutes, PACE Graduate Fellows, and Distinguished Scientists.

It adds $11 million for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, as authorized for next year by the Reid-McConnell legislation.

The majority leader and the minority leader, in the midst of some contentious discussions in the Senate--which we have regularly--are rising above that and putting this piece of legislation into play. I know of no other piece of legislation that has that kind of bipartisan support that is that important to the future of our country. It is based on work Senator Bingaman, Senator Domenici, Senator Mikulski, Senator Ensign, Senator Lieberman, Senator Hutchison, and many others have been a part of. Senator Frist and Senator Reid put the bill in, in the first place, toward the end of last year.

It began because Senator Bingaman and I and others walked down the street to the National Academy of Sciences and said: Please tell us exactly what we ought to do, in priority order, to keep our brainpower advantage. Give us 10 specific things to do. They gave us 20, in priority order. That was put together with other important work done by the Council on Competitiveness. Then here we are today with the ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm'' report and with the Council on Competitiveness' report.

The bill, the America COMPETES Act, to which this amendment relates, authorizes $16 billion in new spending over 4 years. But this is a significant savings over the original legislation, the one that was sponsored by 70 Senators and reported by the committees. We took out $3 billion from the bills passed by Energy and Commerce. We avoided a number of duplicative undergraduate scholarship programs. We wanted progrowth investment, but we wanted to do it wisely and prudently.

I wish to conclude my remarks with some of the provisions of the America COMPETES Act. I know the Senator from South Carolina is waiting to speak, and others will be speaking, too, so I will conclude my remarks quickly. But it includes such matters as doubling funding for the National Science Foundation. It will set the Department of Energy's Office of Science on track to double in funding over 10 years. It will strengthen the skills of thousands of math and science teachers, and others.

As I said, provisions of the America COMPETES Act include double funding for the National Science Foundation, or NSF, from $5.6 billion in fiscal year 2006 to $11.2 billion in fiscal year 2011; setting the Department of Energy's Office of Science on track to double in funding over 10 years, increasing from $3.6 billion in fiscal year 2006 to over $5.2 billion in fiscal year 2011.

Another provision is to strengthen the skills of thousands of math and science teachers by establishing training and education programs at summer institutes hosted at the National Laboratories and by increasing support for the Teacher Institutes for the 21st Century program at NSF.

Another provision is to expand the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program at NSF to recruit and train individuals to become math and science teachers in high-need schools.

Another provision is to assist States in establishing or expanding statewide specialty schools in math and science that students from across the State would be eligible to attend--as they do now in North Carolina and other States.

Another provision is to expand Advanced Placement, AP, and International Baccalaureate, IB, programs by increasing the number of teachers prepared to teach these math, science, and foreign language courses in high schools. This would allow thousands of new students to take these outstanding college preparatory classes.

Another provision is to provide grants to universities to establish programs modeled on the successful UTeach program at the University of Texas--where students getting a bachelor's degree in math or science can concurrently earn teaching credentials and become the new generation of math and science teachers.

Another provision is to create partnerships between National Laboratories and local high-need high schools to establish centers of excellence in math and science education.

The challenge America faces today is really about brainpower and jobs.

We Americans--who constitute just 5 percent of the world's population--produced about 30 percent of the world's wealth last year. Yet we worry that America may be losing its brainpower advantage. We see what is happening in China and India and other countries, too, such as Finland, Singapore, and Ireland. We face a new ``flat'' world where more and more countries can compete with us, and we must rise to the challenge. That is why we must fund this progrowth investment in our economy and create the best new jobs here instead of shipping them overseas. That is why I hope all my colleagues will join in supporting this amendment.

One more point. We asked our National Academies what to do to keep our brainpower advantage. We worked 2 years through various committees and many changes to bring our legislation to this point. We still have some way to go, although a parallel path is being pursued in a bipartisan way in the House.

I believe we will get there, and get there soon, with this kind of leadership. But we should realize President Hu of China walked over to the National Academy of Sciences in China last July, and they do things in a little different way. He announced to his joint academy meeting in the Great Hall of the People exactly what China's innovation effort would be over the next 10 years, how they are going to increase their percentage investment in the gross domestic product, how they are going to improve their universities and elementary and secondary schools, and exactly what they would do to recruit distinguished Chinese leaders to come back, because they know their brainpower advantage, to the extent they can develop and improve on it, is the most important aspect of creating good jobs and a higher standard of living here.

So this legislation is a step in that direction for us. We have much more to do. We have the research and development tax credit to make permanent. We have provisions in the immigration legislation which have passed once,

which I hope pass again, to in-source brainpower, to give a preference to people with high skills in science, technology, engineering, and math. Let them stay here, create jobs here instead of in other countries. We are going to continue to work on that.

But Senator Bingaman has, by his leadership and persistence, come up with an amendment, which I join him in cosponsoring, which will make room for funding. We need to properly support the America COMPETES Act that Senator Reid and Senator McConnell have cosponsored, along with 40 of us right now. Hopefully, we will be keeping that brainpower advantage and, therefore, keeping our good jobs.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Madam President, I thank the Senator from New Mexico. He is precisely correct. This is an amendment to help America keep its brain power managed so we can keep our good jobs. It is necessary to make room in the budget for the amount of money President Bush recommended in connection with legislation that Senator Reid and Senator McConnell have introduced.

I urge a ``yes'' vote.

Will the Chair let me know when 2 minutes remain, please.

Mr. President, my purpose today is to say I believe 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. But first let me say something about the resolution that we are about to consider.

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 the Commander in Chief and gave to Congress the power to declare war and pay for it. That is why I will vote against this resolution and any of the resolutions that seek to micromanage the war. Once a war is authorized, as this one was by a bipartisan vote of 77 to 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 the war, consider this: Since last January, the new Democratic majority has offered 17 different bills and resolutions outlining what we ought to do in Iraq, and there will be more coming in the next few weeks, I am sure.

I am not about to cut off funds for General Petraeus's troops in the middle of the current military exercise, which clearly Congress has the power to do but should not do.

I have--and each of us has--the responsibility as a 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 on those recommendations and to ask Americans to accept that strategy as the right way forward in Iraq.

I believe the President would have been wise to do that 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 9 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 United States out of Iraq immediately dismissed the report as more of the same. So the report was put on the shelf. 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. The timetable and strategy for reducing our combat strength in Iraq contained in the new Democratic Senate resolution sounds very much like the Iraq Study Group, calling for combat troops to be largely withdrawn from Iraq by next March. 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 the United States work closely with Iraq's leaders to support the achievement of certain ``milestones.'' 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 report of the Iraq Study Group.

The membership and process of the Iraq Study Group is as important as the substance of what it said. It included some of America's most distinguished citizens from the Reagan and Carter and the first Bush administrations, from the Congress, and the Supreme Court. One of its former members is today's Secretary of Defense. It was ideologically and politically diverse. The group spent 9 months, met 9 times, including a trip to Baghdad, interviewed 171 individuals, and made 79 specific recommendations.

Its assessment of the ``dire'' current conditions in Iraq was honest and sober. It didn't shy away from bad news--that 79 percent of Iraqis have a mostly negative view of United States influence in their country; that 2,900 Americans at that time had been killed, with another 21,000 wounded; that we had spent roughly $400 billion, and that estimates run as high as $2 trillion on this war. The group acknowledged its recommendations weren't perfect, but were 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. The President could say, I accept it, and for the good of our country and the Armed Forces fighting for it, I ask you to accept it.

Such a statement would not exhibit Presidential weakness. That 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. I respectfully suggest he would be wise to exercise it today, this week. Come back to Congress, report on the progress of the last few weeks in Iraq, invite the Iraq Study Group members to sit in the gallery, compliment their work, accept their recommendations, and ask the Congress and the country to also accept their recommendations.

Now, this course won't satisfy those who want another 100,000 or 200,000 more troops to win the war in Iraq. Neither will it satisfy those who want all troops out on a specific timetable. But it will get United States 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-Qaida and the troops to help guard the borders, because there would still be a limited United States 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 recognize, or at least begin to recognize, that America has done most of what it can do to help Iraq. As Prime Minister Tony Blair has said, it is time for the next chapters in Iraq's history to largely 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 while the United States does have the mightiest military force in the world, 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 to adopt our way of life.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the privilege of the floor be granted to a fellow in my office, Jonathan Burke, for the

duration of the debate on S.J. Res. 9, the Iraq resolution.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for up to 5 minutes.

I thank the Chair.

(The remarks of Mr. Alexander pertaining to the introduction of S. 835 are printed in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from North Dakota for his courtesy. I yield the floor.

Mr. President, today I rise to introduce a bill to rename the Federal building in Memphis as the Clifford Davis and Odell Horton Federal Building. My colleague Senator Corker is a cosponsor. It is the same legislation that was introduced in the House of Representatives by our new Representative Steve Cohen, and it is cosponsored by the rest of the House delegation, both Republicans and Democrats.

Representative Cohen's bill, H.R. 753, was approved by the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure on March 1 and awaits further action by the full House.

Judge Horton has a remarkable legacy. He was the first African- American federal district court judge appointed in Tennessee since Reconstruction. He was recommended by former Senator Jim Sasser and appointed by President Carter on May 12, 1980.

I remember those days of transition very well. It was in that same year that I was Governor of Tennessee. I appointed the first African- American supreme court justice in Tennessee, Judge George Brown, who served with distinction.

At that time, there had not been an African-American chancellor, which is one of our lower court's State judges. I appointed Irwin Kilcrease to that position, and he served with a distinguished record and retired only within the last couple of years.

Judge Horton was a real pioneer who came at a time of transition in Memphis, where he lived, and in our State's history. He served as chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee from January 1, 1987, until December 31, 1993.

Odell Horton was born in Bolivar, TN, just outside of Memphis, on May 13, 1929. He said he grew up in a ``typically rural Southern and typically segregated [environment], with all of the attendant consequences of that''.

At about the same time, growing up maybe 40 miles away was a young man named Alex Haley who would sit on the front porch of his grandparents' home and listen to his great-aunt tell stories of Kunta Kinte, which ultimately became the story of ``Roots.''

Odell Horton's father was a laborer. His mother took in laundry. His first job at the age of 6 was delivering laundry for his mom. He and his three siblings also picked cotton, stacked lumber, and took other odd jobs.

After high school, he enlisted in the Marine Corps. He enrolled in Morehouse College using the GI bill. He served with the Marines during the Korean war. He graduated from the U.S. Navy School of Journalism.

After the Marines, he earned a law degree from Howard University, and after graduating from Howard Law School in 1956, he moved to Memphis and rented a one-room office on Beale Street--the music street of Memphis--and opened his own law practice.

He did that for 5 years. He served as an assistant U.S. attorney after that.

In 1968, he was director of the city's hospitals, making him the only Black division director at city hall at that time.

He served as judge on the Shelby County Criminal Court. He was a commentator on a local television station. He ran for district attorney general in 1974, narrowly losing the primary, at that time considered a very strong showing by an African-American candidate in a county that today has an African-American mayor of Memphis and an African-American mayor of Shelby County.

He was a U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge before being appointed as a U.S. district judge by President Carter.

He was married to his wife Evie for 50 years, with two sons, Odell, Jr., and Christopher. He died on February 22, 2006.

I commend Representative Cohen for his bill to rename the Clifford Davis Federal Building to the Clifford Davis and Odell Horton Federal Building. Representative Davis was a Congressman who served in the House of Representatives from 1940 to 1965. He was one of those five Congressmen in the U.S. Capitol when four Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire from the visitors' balcony in the Chamber. He was shot in the leg at the time.

Keeping both names on the Federal building is symbolic of the transition that took place in Memphis and across the South during Odell's lifetime and my lifetime and reminds us that our country is committed to equal opportunity, but it has been and is and will be for a long time a work in progress.

Odell Horton is one of the finest examples of that work in progress. Having his name on a Federal building will remind all of us of that.