Floor Statements

Mr. President, as a proud co-sponsor of S. Res. 140, I was delighted by the Senate's unanimous passage this week of legislation commemorating the dedication and sacrifice made by Federal, State and local law enforcement officers who have been killed or injured in the line of duty.

As our Nation celebrates National Police Week, I wish to honor five heroes who gave their lives in service to the people of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 2012. Like 120 other law enforcement officers across the U.S., they died in the line of duty, joining the ranks of the 21,465 officers who have similarly given their lives since 1791.

This week we honor Trooper First Class Blake T. Coble, Police Officer Bradley Michael Fox, Police Officer Moses Walker Jr., Police Officer Brian J. Lorenzo and Patrolman Avery Freeman. Additionally we honor their families who must bear the profound absence of their loved ones.

On behalf of all Pennsylvanians I extend my condolences to the families and friends of these heroes. We mourn the loss of these remarkable men and women who represented the best of their communities and whose memory will serve as an inspiration for future generations.

Madam President, reserving the right to object, I want to point out there is one amendment in this package that is very troubling to me. Under the current flood insurance law we passed just 10 months ago, we put in place a mechanism to diminish the subsidization that occurs now where homeowners in low-risk areas are made to subsidize homeowners in high-risk areas by the nature of the way premiums are set. The existing law is designed to diminish significantly that unfair subsidy that occurs, and I think that is why the chairman and the ranking member of the Banking Committee and many others of our colleagues oppose this amendment.

If this amendment goes through, the Landrieu amendment No. 888, then for 5 years this reform cannot take place and that means not only do people in low-risk areas continue subsidizing people in high-risk areas, but because people in high-risk areas are paying lower premiums than what they ought to pay to reflect the risk they are taking, it creates the moral hazard of a risk to continue building in high-risk areas with the expectation this will continue and therefore jeopardizes taxpayer funds.

This is already a program that is $24 billion in debt and that is the reason I object.

Madam President, my understanding is there is a unanimous consent request for a series of amendments on this bill, and I am objecting to that consent request because it contains the Landrieu amendment No. 888.

Madam President, as I said earlier, this is a matter that has been litigated and adjudicated in this body. We have had a vote on this. This has not come back through committee. This would cause considerable risk to taxpayers. If the Senator from Louisiana believes this is something that needs to be addressed yet again, despite the fact that 10 months ago we had a vote on this--and we did vote, then I would be happy to work with the Senator on how we might address that. But my objection still remains.

I think I answered the question.

Madam President, I wish to honor the remarkable service of a great Pennsylvanian to our Nation's defense and its veterans. Maj. Nathan Kline, U.S. Air Force, Retired, served for nearly half a century in our country's Armed Forces. After enlisting in the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1942, he served in highly hazardous positions as a bombardier and navigator on a B-26 Marauder. His 65 air combat missions included the D-day invasion and the Battle of the Bulge. Incredibly, he survived after his aircraft was shot down twice during the campaign in Europe. For his actions, he earned the Distinguished Flying Cross and 10 Air Medals. After the war, the French Ambassador welcomed Major Kline into the coveted Legion d'Honneur for his service in the liberation of France.

Major Kline did not seek a quiet postwar civilian life. He continued his military service in the Reserves while working in support of the veterans' community. His advocacy on behalf of veterans and their families became a lifelong endeavor. Major Kline was a founding member of the Lehigh Valley Military Affairs Council. In this capacity, he raised funds to provide scholarships to deployed servicemembers' children, managed assembly and shipment of care packages and helped veterans to find employment.

In honoring Major Kline, we recognize his commitment to service during times of war and peace.

As Congress confronts the dual challenges of ensuring our national security and putting our fiscal house in order, it must remember its profound responsibility to keep our Nation safe and care for its veterans. For well over 200 years, our servicemembers and veterans, like Maj. Nathan Kline, have steadfastly served our Nation and have set a stellar example for those who will follow in the generations to come.

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

Mr. President, I would like to begin by thanking my colleague Senator Brown for his leadership on this issue, and Senator Casey, my colleague from Pennsylvania, who is supportive of this effort as well.

This is not a complicated amendment. I do not think it is a controversial amendment either. The fact is in southwestern Pennsylvania, we have three iconic rivers. In northwestern Pennsylvania we have access to and a coastline along a beautiful and important national treasure, Lake Erie.

On all of these, the rivers and Lake Erie, the commerce and the recreation that occurs on these waterways are potentially at risk to an invasion of the Asian carp. This, as we all know, is a very aggressive, large, nonindigenous species that could be very disruptive to the ecosystem of the rivers, to the ecosystem of Lake Erie.

What we discovered is that there is no single entity in the entire Federal Government that is responsible for coordinating our response, a response that will help to minimize the risk that the Asian carp would be able to invade the waterways and ultimately make their way into the Great Lakes.

It would be potentially devastating if the Asian carp were to do so. We have introduced this amendment to this bill which would simply do two things. It would place the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in charge of coordinating the Federal multiagency effort. That would include the National Park Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the Army Corps of Engineers. It would require an annual report on what is being done at

the Federal and State level to minimize the risk of an invasion of the Asian carp.

As I say, I believe this is a very constructive, modest amendment. I trust it is not controversial. I urge my colleagues to support the amendment.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I want to thank the Senator from Oklahoma for his leadership and work, and say a few words, and then I am going to make a unanimous consent request in this regard--but first a little bit of context here.

This Federal Government has doubled in size in the last 12 years. Total spending is up 100 percent in a little over a decade. What the sequester amounts to is 2.5 percent of this gigantic bloated government. But it is actually less than that in a very meaningful way, because the 2.5 percent we referred to--the sequestration, this cut--

is a reduction in the permission to spend. We call it budget authority. What it is is permission for the government to spend money. It actually takes a while for the government to get around to spending the money that is authorized in any given year. So the actual reduction in spending, the real reduction in cash that will go out the door in this fiscal year if the sequester goes into effect is a little over 1 percent, about 1.25 percent. That is what we are talking about.

Our friends on the other side of the aisle say, This is impossible; you can't do it; it will be devastating. They predicted all kinds of calamity if a government that has grown by 100 percent has to find 1 percent to trim over the next 6 months.

Here is another point we ought to keep in mind. If the cuts and sequester hold, if we achieve the savings that were signed into law, that were voted on by both Chambers, and that the President of the United States agreed to by virtue of his signature--if we do, then total spending this year will still be greater than last year. And we are told that is somehow a Draconian austerity program.

What we are talking about is a modest reduction in the rate at which this Federal Government grows. That is all we are talking about here. And we are told that is not possible; there is no way you can do it.

That is simply not true. One of the things that is maddening to me is the administration--and the President is responsible for this. They are willfully choosing to make the cuts in the most disruptive way they can, because they have got so much invested in this idea that we can't cut any spending. Because they predicted such dire consequences and such disaster, they can't very well allow reasonable and manageable cuts to take place which would be easily attained. So we have this extremely irresponsible set of cuts that are completely unnecessary.

Let me zero in a little bit on the FAA budget itself. The sequester is in effect now. If it holds--if it is fully implemented--the FAA budget will, as a result, be larger than the President asked for in his budget submission.

Does anybody think when the President submitted his budget request he was intending to shut down air traffic control operations? I can assure you he didn't tell us that at the time.

The fact is there are plenty of places where we can achieve this savings. The administration knew this day was coming for over 1 year. There has been plenty of time to plan for this and to prioritize.

The Senator from Oklahoma points to the huge growth in the FAA's budget. That is wildly disproportionate to any growth in flights. There are plenty of opportunities to achieve the savings, as evidenced by the fact that the President never asked for all this money.

Let me give a few examples of places where the President, within the FAA budget, could be tightening belts so we don't have to furlough air traffic controllers.

For instance, the FAA spends $540 million a year on consultants. That is nice. I am not sure all of that is as important as keeping planes flying in the air. The FAA operates a fleet of 46 aircraft. That costs $143 million a year--very nice indeed. Probably not as important as making sure planes are coming and going from La Guardia and Kennedy and Newark and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and across the country. The FAA budget includes $1 billion more in grants for airport improvements. I am a pilot. I fly in and out of lots of airports and it is great when a nice little airport has a new taxiway, terrific, but is it truly as important as keeping our air traffic controllers there on the job? These are the kinds of tradeoffs we ought to be making.

My Republican colleagues and I have been offering a wide range of solutions. Senator Blunt had the idea that maybe we ought to treat Federal workers, in this context, the context of the sequestration, the same way we do in other emergencies and designate essential workers. That makes some sense to me. I think that would make a lot of sense. Jerry Moran has another idea for how we could address this.

Senator Inhofe and I introduced a bill before the sequester went into effect. What we said was let's give the President the maximum flexibility--right? The reason they say they have to lay off or furlough air traffic controllers is because they do not have any choice, the law requires it--except they did not want the change in the law which would have given them the choice. Senator Inhofe and I had a bill that would give the administration complete flexibility.

I say this because I pointed to a number of areas in the FAA's budget where I think they could find the savings, avoid furloughing air traffic controllers, but under the approach Senator Inhofe and I suggested, they would not be limited to finding the savings within the FAA budget; they could look anywhere in the government for the lowest priority spending, the most wasteful spending, the least necessary spending or perhaps redundancy and duplication.

I will give just another few examples. The GAO has discovered that throughout the Federal Government we have 47 different job training programs. Does anyone truly think we need 47 of these and that by consolidating them maybe we could save some overhead, some administrative costs? Maybe some of them don't work so well.

How about the fact that we have 94 different green building programs--94 programs--679 renewable energy programs. This is all over government because we have never bothered to scrub this and come up with the savings we could have achieved.

Senator Coburn from Oklahoma has offered all kinds of ideas, Senator Lee from Utah. There are all kinds of places we can save. The fact is, especially in a government that has grown this big, we absolutely can find the little, tiny savings that are required in the sequester so we do not have to do it in a disruptive way.

Unanimous Consent Request--S. 799

That is why I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 799. I ask unanimous consent the bill be read a third time and passed, the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I would like to explain what this amounts to. Let's be very clear. There is no money in the overseas contingency operation fund. This is barely an accounting device. Do you know what this really is? The proposal is that we do away with the sequester and we thereby spend more money and we just pretend it is offset. But the fact is, some time ago, this administration made a decision about the level of our involvement in Afghanistan that had nothing to do with this sequester. That has nothing to do with the sequester. The fact that we are no longer at war there does not allow us to spend money we do not have.

Let me give an analogy. I could come down to the Senate floor and suggest I think it should be the policy of the United States that we absolutely not invade Canada and we not have a war with Canada. Imagine the money we could save if we do not go to war with Canada.

So, with all that savings, let's go out and spend it because we have this terrific savings. This proposal is absolutely no more meaningful than if I were to make that suggestion, which obviously everyone understands is ridiculous.

So I object.

Mr. President, the ranking member of the Budget Committee, Senator Sessions, is not available because he has a conflict at the moment. On his behalf, I object.

Mr. President, I thank the majority leader.

I feel the need to respond to the comments from the leader about the sequester that has gone into effect. I wish to be very clear. The flight delays that are occurring, the furloughs among air traffic controllers, and the shutting down of air traffic towers are entirely, utterly unnecessary. This is a willful choice being made by this administration in order to inflict as disruptive a process as possible on the American public and on our economy, all to further a political agenda. The political agenda is to attempt to convince the American people there are no circumstances under which we can ever cut spending at all.

If you question why I say this is a willful decision on the part of this administration, I would refer you to legislation Senator Inhofe and I offered prior to the beginning of the sequestration. This legislation, as you may recall, would have granted to the administration complete flexibility in how they achieved the savings of the sequester.

What we hear from the administration, administration officials, and White House spokespeople is that this is terribly unfortunate, but they have no choice and no alternative; the law requires that they make these cuts. However, when Senator Inhofe and I introduced legislation to explicitly grant them all the flexibility they could ask for, complete flexibility to find the most wasteful, most redundant, most unnecessary programs, and to cut there instead of cutting essential services, what did the administration say? They said: If you send us the legislation, we will veto it. They put

out a Statement of Administration Policy insisting that this was a terrible idea, to give them the flexibility to avoid exactly what they are doing.

I don't know how one can come to any conclusion other than that this administration wishes to impose this inconvenience, this disruption, and this cost on the American people and our economy. They have it within their ability to accept the device we were offering, which would have allowed them to avoid this entirely.

I am extremely disappointed the administration would choose to inflict this kind of harm to our economy, this kind of inconvenience to our travelers, all for the purpose of furthering a political agenda. This is no way to run this government.

What I would suggest we do is we revisit the legislation Senator Inhofe and I offered which would have avoided all of this, allowed us to cut some of the waste, excess, duplication, and avoid all of this inconvenience. This is entirely unnecessary, and it is unacceptable.

One of the proper functions of any executive, including the President of the United States, is to look throughout the spending over which he or she has control to find the lowest priority, to find the least necessary and least disruptive way to achieve the savings we need. We are running unacceptably large deficits. We have a huge debt that is already costing this economy the kind of growth we ought to have.

The very modest savings of the sequester could be achieved in a way that wouldn't be disruptive at all. The size of the Federal budget has more than doubled in the last 12 years. To suggest that it is not possible to find 2.5 percent savings is simply ridiculous. It is not true.

I urge my colleagues, let's fix this. We know how to do it. We have the tools available. Senator Inhofe and I offered. There are other ways, and I would be open to any number of them. We need to achieve the savings of the sequester, and we need to do it in a way that is not disruptive and that can be done.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I rise to address this issue for 5 minutes.

Mr. President, first, let me mention I am a gun owner. I have an A rating with the NRA. The Second Amendment is extremely important to me, my constituents, Pennsylvanians generally, to Americans generally.

Let me be very clear about this too. The Second Amendment does not apply equally to every single American. That is not even a controversial notion. The Second Amendment was never meant to apply to young children. Nobody disputes that. The Second Amendment does not apply to people who forfeit their Second Amendment rights by committing crimes for which they are convicted. It cannot apply and does not apply to people who have been adjudicated as mentally dangerous. These are the three classes of Americans for whom the Second Amendment does not apply, as it does and should and must for everyone else.

So the goal Senator Manchin and Senator Schumer and Senator Kirk and I set out on when we began this process--I want to thank my friend from West Virginia. He has worked harder than anybody on this. Senator Schumer has worked very hard as well; Senator Kirk, who from the beginning provided very important leadership on this. The goal was to see if we could find a way to make it a little bit more difficult for the people who have no legal right to have a gun to obtain one. That was the goal. Along the way, we thought that if we can find some ways to better secure the opportunities for law-abiding citizens to exercise their Second Amendment rights, that would be terrific to work into this. We did that as well.

How do we attempt to make it a little bit more difficult for criminals and the dangerously mentally ill to purchase handguns? We do it actually in two ways. One is to strengthen the existing background check system. By strengthening, what I mean is encouraging States to provide the information they already have, and that some do provide but some do not. In other words, the States have records about people who have been adjudicated as dangerously mentally ill, for instance, those people who plead not guilty to a crime by reason of insanity, those people who are deemed to be mentally incompetent to stand trial. We have records at the States of people who have been adjudicated as mentally unfit to have a firearm.

Then, of course, it is States that have the criminal records. So all we are doing is encouraging these States to provide this information so that when a criminal attempts to buy a handgun or a long gun or when someone who is dangerously mentally ill attempts to do so, the background check system can capture them.

That is the first big piece. It does not create a new system. It does not expand in any way the existing system except to encourage States to provide the information they already have.

The second thing we do is we ask to have a background check at gun shows. We already have background checks if you buy from a licensed dealer. In my State of Pennsylvania, anyone who buys a handgun anywhere at any time has a background check. What this would do in Pennsylvania is it would extend background checks for commercial sales which are conducted at gun shows, and for advertised sales over the Internet.

I have got to tell you, there is absolutely no way that this can be construed as an infringement on Second Amendment rights. You do not have to take my word for this. But I would take Justice Scalia's word for this, in the Heller decision, where he quite rightly came to the conclusion, as did a majority of the Supreme Court, a conservative majority came to the correct conclusion in my view that the Second Amendment is an individual right. It is not contingent on membership in a militia, it is not a collective right of multiple people. The Founders did not acknowledge collective rights. It is an individual, personal right. They were correct.

But in that decision, Justice Scalia also observed there is nothing unconstitutional about legislation that would limit or restrict and try to prevent the purchase of firearms by people who do not enjoy this right. So that is what we do.

I know there has been a great deal of concern about a registry. No one would oppose a Federal registry of firearms more than I. There is no need for the government to have one. Only bad things could result. Fortunately, Senator Manchin and I are completely in agreement on this. So while it is already illegal, we further strengthen the prohibition against that by stating in our amendment that any Federal employee, not just those who are members of the ATF but any Federal employee who even begins the process of compiling the data that could lead to a registry would be committing a felony subject to 15 years imprisonment.

That is a pretty tough reality, that anyone thinking--even thinking about doing this, I think would weigh very seriously, and thereby, I believe strongly, we preclude the possibility, the danger of an inappropriate registry.

Finally, I mentioned we enhance the opportunity for law-abiding citizens to enjoy their Second Amendment rights. We do it in a variety of ways.

One is we clear up some risks people take, law-abiding citizens who are traveling across multiple States, such as a sportsman who packs a weapon quite properly but who is traveling into a State which has a different regime. We clarify that person is not committing any crimes or violating any laws.

We allow the purchase of handguns out of State. They are subject to background checks. Why not?

Current law prohibits Active-Duty military personnel from buying a weapon in their home States. We repeal that as well.

A similar measure to this--without the benefits to Second Amendment supporters and expansion of background checks--was on the House floor in 1999. That bill was endorsed by the NRA. I voted for it and a majority of Americans voted for it. We did so because it was common sense. This isn't gun control, this is common sense. This is a modest measure to increase the chances of keeping guns out of the hands of people who have no legal right to have a gun.

We are going to have a close vote today. I wish to thank all of my colleagues who considered this and have given us every opportunity to make our case. I wish to again thank Senators Manchin, Schumer, and Kirk for the very hard work they have done.

I urge my colleagues to support the Manchin-Toomey amendment.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I wish to begin by actually taking a moment to inform the Members of this body and people who may be listening, if you were not aware, it appears that a tragedy has struck at the Boston Marathon and bombs have gone off and there are injuries that we know of, casualties, the severity of which we do not yet know. We hope and pray there are no fatalities. Apparently, according to the news reports I have seen, it is too soon to know that with certainty.

I know my good friend from West Virginia joins me in having our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims and their families of the very disturbing news we have just learned this afternoon.

I cannot tell you how much I appreciate the Senator from West Virginia. The work we have done together has been challenging and constructive. I think we have come to a

very sensible legislative product--something I can be proud of. I want to thank Senator Kirk for the work he did on this from way back, and Senator Schumer's contribution to this process as well.

I wish to start, if I could, with some thoughts about the second amendment and what it means to me and why I think a proper understanding is so important in this discussion.

Sometimes it is useful to go to the source, and so, as a reminder-- not that we are not familiar with it--I am going to read from my pocket version of the Constitution the second amendment to the Constitution, which simply says:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security

of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear

Arms, shall not be infringed.

Today, we often think that the second amendment is about sportsmen, it is about hunting. That is an important part of it. But the second amendment is actually much more profound than a protection for hunters. It is more fundamental to our country and who we are as a people.

In my view, the Framers, in writing the second amendment, were recognizing our natural rights, our natural law rights of self-defense and self-preservation. In fact, those rights precede the Constitution. They were acknowledging and recognizing those rights in the Constitution. They did not create them.

I would also suggest that the second amendment is about sovereignty. Who is sovereign in this country? Is it the government? Is it the head of state or is it the people? I think, as we know, this whole great experiment of ours that is America is an exercise in recognizing the sovereignty of the individual people. And a sovereign people, it flows logically, ought to have the right to bear arms, to protect themselves.

Ultimately, our Founders intended the second amendment to be the means by which we would maintain our liberty and prevent tyranny. We often take things for granted in a democratic society in which we get to select our own government and our constitutionally protected rights are respected. But we all know that around the world and in the recent past there have been appalling cases where tyranny has destroyed the rights of relatively free peoples who in many ways have come from societies not terribly dissimilar to ours.

So these are some of the thoughts that occur to me when I think about the second amendment, why it is so important to me. I see it as a very important part of our very identity as a Nation and as a people. It is why it is very important to me personally.

In addition to being a gun owner and someone who has always respected these rights, it has a very important philosophical underpinning for me.

For years, of course, we had many contentious debates. One of the contentious debates we had about the second amendment for many years probably arose from the first phrase about the ``well regulated Militia.'' The debate centered around whether this right, this second amendment right--that, obviously, is enshrined in the Constitution--was a collective right that depended on one's membership in a militia or if it were an individual right belonging to individual people.

It was always clear to me this is an individual right. It is clear to me for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the Founders never recognized the idea of collective rights. For them, it was all about individual rights. But, fortunately, our judicial system put an end to that question when a conservative majority of U.S. Supreme Court Justices reached the Heller decision. In District of Columbia v. Heller they made it very clear this is not a collective right, this is not contingent upon membership in a militia. The second amendment is an individual right that applies to individual Americans. And I wholeheartedly agree.

Not too long after that, in the McDonald et al. v. City of Chicago decision, the Court went even further in a way in upholding the Heller decision and referencing that. It affirmed that decision, but it went farther and said this second amendment right is so important and so fundamental and so basic that it is binding on States and local governments as well. So not only can the Federal Government not infringe upon second amendment rights, but neither can a State or a local government. So that is a pretty impressive conclusion that our Court has come to in resolving a big part of this contentious debate.

I would pose a question the Court has also addressed, and that is, is this a right that is enjoyed by all of the people of America? In my opinion--and I think this is not controversial--the answer to that question is no. Young children are not expected to be afforded the same second amendment rights as adults. Criminals who have been convicted of crimes have foregone many of their rights, including second amendment rights, by virtue of their conviction of serious crimes. And dangerously mentally ill people are people whom we as a society have every right to protect ourselves from, and so they do not have the same second amendment rights everyone else has.

Now, I would argue, to our Founders this was a given. After all, this was a time when capital punishment was quite common and they fully accepted capital punishment. How perverse and absurd would the idea be that someone who was subject to capital punishment would somehow be able to enjoy second amendment rights? Of course not. It is obvious criminals forego that right.

The Heller decision, the recent Supreme Court decision I referred to, addresses this as well. Justice Scalia observed:

Nothing in our opinion--

That is the Heller opinion affirming the individual right of the second amendment--He says:

Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on

long-standing prohibitions on the possession of firearms by

felons and the mentally ill . . . or laws imposing conditions

and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

It seems to me that is a very explicit explanation that it is not an infringement on second amendment rights to attempt to keep firearms out of the hands of criminals and mentally ill people.

So if the Founders were in agreement on this, and the Supreme Court is in agreement, and we have laws in all 50 States that make it illegal for certain criminals and mentally ill people to have firearms, the question is: Are we willing to take modest measures to try to achieve this goal that I think we all share and that is clearly consistent with our Constitution?

That is what Senator Manchin and Senator Kirk and I are trying to do here today. What we are trying to do is make it a little bit more difficult for the people who are not supposed to have firearms in the first place to obtain them. I think Senator Manchin will agree with me there is no panacea here, there is no law anyone could write--certainly not this one--that is ever going to guarantee that a determined criminal will not be able to obtain a weapon one way or another or that maybe even a mentally ill person may not be able to obtain a weapon eventually if they are sufficiently determined. But can't we take a very modest step to make it more difficult, if we can do it in a way that does not infringe on the second amendment rights of law-abiding citizens whose rights we want to defend?

So I think of our bill as doing three broad things. And Senator Manchin and I will walk through some of the specifics of how we achieve this. But I would suggest one way to think about it is three categories.

One is, we simply encourage greater compliance with the background check system we have in place now. We are not inventing a new one. We are not inventing new criteria for it. But the fact is, the participation in the background check system by the various States--you see, we rely on the States to provide information about the people who have been adjudicated as mentally dangerous, the people who have been adjudicated as criminals. They have been convicted. The Federal government does not have that information. We rely on the States to provide it. What we do in this bill is create greater incentives for the States to, in fact, participate because the participation varies dramatically.

A second thing we do is expand background checks to gun sales at gun shows and over the Internet. Again, this is not a new system. We are just applying this background check to a category that has not been subject to it, but it is the existing system.

Then the third thing is--and we will talk about this at a little length, I hope--we have a number of measures in this bill that, frankly, I think are overdue and they enhance the opportunity for law- abiding citizens to simply exercise the second amendment rights they ought to be able to exercise.

I think Senator Manchin put this very well. If you are a law-abiding citizen who enjoys exercising second amendment rights, you are going to like this bill. It is going to enhance your ability to exercise those rights that you have. If you are a criminal, and you want to get a weapon illegally, you probably are not going to like this bill because it is going to make it a little harder for you to do that. It will also make it harder for someone who is mentally ill.

I am going to yield back for my friend, the Senator from West Virginia. But before I do that, I want to make one simple point about how tangible and how real and how important this can be. I am referring to enhancing compliance with the NICS background check system.

We all remember the Virginia Tech shootings. One of the aspects of this tragedy is that the shooter's ability to obtain a weapon might have been prevented. I say that because the young man, Seung-Hui Cho, had already been adjudicated to be mentally ill, dangerously so, by a Virginia judge. They had discovered this. They had figured this out. They knew this was a very unstable and very dangerous man. But the State of Virginia never passed that information on. So there was no information about this man in the national background check system when who knows whatever demons possessed him to go out and obtain guns so he could wreak the havoc he did. He went and submitted himself to a background check, and he passed with flying colors because the system did not have the data.

One of the things Senator Manchin and I are proposing in this legislation is, let's provide greater incentives; and there is a carrot and there is a stick and a cost to States so they will be more in compliance.

Now, I will be clear: If Virginia had provided this information to the system, then this shooter from Virginia Tech would have been denied that day and we do not know what would have happened after that. It is possible he would have found some other way to obtain weapons. But think of all the other things that might have happened. If he had been denied at that moment and he had walked out of that store, who knows what else might have intervened--whether he would have gotten help, whether he would have been stopped some other way. We will never know that. But it seems to me it is a good idea to try to put that block in place, and that is one of the things we would achieve. Our legislation, I think, would go a long way over time to encouraging and, in fact, realizing a greater compliance on the part of the various States.

Senator Manchin may want to elaborate a little bit on how we achieve that, and then I would continue in this discussion with him.

Mr. President, I think it might be useful to discuss some of the specific ways in which this legislation would enhance the compliance and the participation on the part of our 50 States with this existing background check system.

As Senator Manchin said--as we both said--we are not creating a new system. We are not creating a new set of rules by which the system operates. What we are simply asking is that since States already have information about people who are criminals and people who are dangerously mentally ill, we want them to put that in the database so we can discover when someone attempts to buy a firearm.

By the way----

I also wish to mention one of the very typical categories of mental illness we want to capture, and that is people who have been publicly adjudicated. So that would be people who have pleaded not guilty to a crime by reason of insanity. That strikes me as a pretty good definition of somebody who is mentally ill. And someone who is deemed not competent to stand trial by virtue of their mental deficiency would be another category.

But the idea is that we have a series of specific measures that would encourage greater compliance. There is a carrot-and-stick approach. We would authorize some funding. It would have to live within the spending caps we have already agreed to, the overall spending caps, but we authorize funding for grants that States can use to carry out, first of all, an assessment of the extent to which they are or are not currently in compliance. As I said, some States are probably doing virtually all they can and other States are doing almost nothing in terms of providing the information they have to this database system, and they can start with an assessment of that.

We would then ask them to submit a 4-year plan by which they would develop full compliance or as full as they can achieve in 4 years. They work this out with the Attorney General. There will be benchmarks along the way. They would have a series of steps they would take by which they would start to turn over this information they already have about people who are criminals and people who are mentally ill.

If a State refuses to develop such a plan or to achieve the benchmarks they set out in their own plan, then we propose they have a penalty and they would lose some funding. That is the mechanism by which we have an inducement, an incentive for these States. They could lose up to 15 percent of what is known as the Byrne/JAG funding, which is funding Congress annually makes available to States for fighting crime.

So I believe this is a sensible combination of measures to simply encourage States to participate as they should.

If the Senator from West Virginia has anything more to say about the NICS improvement piece of this, I will certainly yield. If not, I want to mention a reason why I feel strongly about expanding the background checks. But at this point I yield for the Senator from West Virginia.

Mr. President, the last point I wish to make is something about the NICS system that I should have mentioned; that is, currently there are States in which someone can be adjudicated as mentally ill, for instance, but that person is left with very few options to challenge that status. That is the current situation. We remedy that. One of the things we require in this bill, in the 4-year plan States have to develop, is that it has to include a program, a mechanism by which a person who feels they have been wrongly designated as someone who can't own a firearm by virtue of their criminal background or their mental health would have an opportunity to challenge that, as they should. There ought to be a process they can go through to challenge that finding so that nobody who doesn't belong on this list ends up on this list.

Let me move on to the background checks at gun shows. I am going to introduce this by reading a letter I received from a constituent yesterday. This happens to be a woman whom I know very well. I have known her for years. She is a conservative Republican, as it happens. She is a second amendment gun owner. Let me read what she wrote:

Hello, Pat. I just had to write after watching your

leadership with this very difficult issue. I very much

understand what you are doing with the gun show checks and

appreciate your dealing with this. This issue is very

personal to me and if you will indulge me, I will tell you.

She goes on to say:

I'm a very strong supporter of the second amendment. I'm

the gun owner in my house. I do shoot. My father very proudly

passed down his Remington 1100 to me several years before he

passed away. He presented it to me with great pride. I

accepted it as a very special moment between us. Meanwhile,

Pat, I

have an adopted daughter who has had emotional troubles her

entire life. Much of our journey with her has been difficult

and it continues to this day. My daughter has been

involuntarily committed twice, and I unfortunately believe

that it won't be the last time, as she refuses to get proper

treatment. I was the one who had to sign her paperwork the

first time. And it was made clear to me that I would be

taking away her right to own a gun. I knew that we had no

choice but to try and get her some help. But my hands shook

and I had to pause quite a long time over that document,

because I so strongly believe in our second amendment rights.

Nevertheless, I signed it and I would do it again today.

At various times, people have been concerned for our safety

with the volatile nature of my daughter's problems. The idea

that she would be able to purchase a weapon openly in a

public venue is not acceptable. I do not believe that she

actually would, but I don't find any comfort in the fact that

she could have an avenue if she so chose. Once again, I

cannot emphasize the importance of the second amendment to me

enough. Pat, I thank you for your efforts in D.C. and bless

you for all that you're doing. Be well and be strong.

I think that says a lot about what we are trying to accomplish. Here we have a passionate supporter of the second amendment, a gun owner, someone who has always been a believer in the second amendment. For reasons that she has explained very personally, very important reasons, she does not want her daughter to be able to go into a gun show and buy a firearm without so much as a background check.

Since the mom has the recognition of her daughter's problems, if the information is provided and if that State complies--in this case it is my State of Pennsylvania--with this background check system, then someone in the circumstances of her daughter attempting to buy a weapon at a gun show would be denied.

I think that is the outcome we all want. It is certainly the outcome her own mother wants, who loves her dearly and loves the second amendment.

I would yield back to the Senator from West Virginia.

The Senator makes a point which may seem basic. This bill has been available online since Thursday night. It is available now and in every detail. It is available in summary form and available in any way people choose to look at it.

The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, one of the pro second amendment rights groups which endorses this bill, states:

If you read the Manchin-Toomey substitute amendment, you

can see all the advances for our cause, that it contains.

This ``cause'' refers to defense of the second amendment, which it contains.

The bottom line is, as the Senator from Montana pointed out, our amendment isn't gun control. This is very clear, and I think it is an important contrast. There are other Members of this body who are not happy with this bill because they want active, aggressive gun control. For instance, they want to ban various categories of weapons. They wish to ban various categories of ammunition. They would like to ban various kinds of waiting periods and put other restrictions on law-abiding citizens. This is gun control. Restricting the freedom of law-abiding citizens who have never done anything to harm anyone and restricting their second amendment rights is gun control. I disagree with it. I oppose it. I will oppose every such amendment which comes before this body.

Trying to keep guns out of the hands of people who aren't legally entitled to have them--dangerous people, be they criminals or dangerously mentally ill people--that is not gun control; this is common sense.

As I started off my comments, there is no dispute this is not an infringement on the second amendment. Our Founders didn't think so. Our Supreme Court Justices didn't think so. The laws in 50 States don't maintain this. It is common sense.

I wish to point out another difference in the approach Senator Manchin and I have taken versus some others in this body have taken. Others have said let's make a universal background check, and then we will think about who to make an exception for. Then they carve out very narrow categories.

One of the problems with that, in my view, is we will not imagine every sort of set of circumstances we ought to carve out. We took a different approach. We said private transactions generally don't need to be subject to this. I am not going to try to imagine every conceivable private transaction. We said let's have background checks on commercial transactions. This is where the big volume of commercial transactions occur and where strangers are buying and selling guns from each other. This is why we require the background check at gun shows, and we require the background check on Internet sales.

The private transaction, whether it is with a family member, friends, neighbors or colleagues, if it doesn't happen at a gun show and doesn't happen over the Internet, it is not subject

to the background check. We thought that would be an unnecessary burden on people who know each other.

Let me just run through quickly some of the ways in which this legislation strengthens the ability of law-abiding citizens to exercise their second amendment rights. I will do this briefly. The Senator from Montana touched on some of these. I ought to start off underscoring something the Senator from West Virginia mentioned earlier.

Not only will this not in any way contribute to any kind of national registry, it is explicitly forbidden. Anybody in the Federal Government who did try to create a Federal registry would become a felon and subject to 15 years in prison. This is point No. 1.

One of the problems we have heard from our constituents who are gun enthusiasts, which we were able to address in this legislation, is clarifying and fixing interstate travel laws such as for sportsmen who are traveling long distances. Unfortunately, it happens too frequently when a sportsman is traveling from one State to another State, perhaps on a hunting trip or going home for Christmas and wishes to give a relative a gun for a present. He is perfectly, lawfully entitled to own this gun. He is following the rules and regulations in his State. He packs the gun appropriately in his vehicle. As he is traveling through another State, he discovers he is not in compliance with the other State.

People have gotten themselves into trouble. They have not done anything to harm anybody, they are just traveling into a State which has a whole different regime and doesn't respect the regime of the other State.

We fixed that by clarifying in the legislation if a person is transiting through a State and in compliance with the laws of their home State, they are OK. We permit interstate handgun sales from dealers. We provide--and this is very important; the Senator from Montana mentioned this--a legal process for restoring veterans second amendment rights.

We have a problem in this country right now for veterans. They come back after serving this country, risking their lives, often sustaining injuries, sustaining trauma. They can go to the VA and have a social worker decide they are not able to handle their personal financial matters. This alone puts them on the registry, disqualifies them from being able to own a firearm legally and be able to purchase one.

I think this is outrageous, frankly. This is currently happening every day to veterans. We deal with that. We change the system. Under our legislation, this couldn't happen. Before anybody at the VA could designate a veteran as somebody who can't own a firearm, first they would need to inform the veteran 30 days in advance to give the veteran an opportunity to challenge the status. This is only fair. We owe that to those men and women who have given so much to us. This is in our bill.

We also have a policy today where the law of the land forbids an Active-Duty military person from buying a gun in his home State. I don't know whose idea this was. It doesn't make any sense to me. This is the law. We repeal the policy in this bill to enable a man or woman serving in uniform in this country to buy a firearm in their home State. We also allow a person who has a concealed carry permit to use the permit as the mechanism by which they are approved for a gun sale. This stands to reason. The concealed carry permit process is itself a very cumbersome and onerous process. In many cases it is very thorough and very expensive. If someone passes that they should be fine. We have it in this bill as well.

I wish to underscore that these are the reasons two of the leading pro second amendment groups have endorsed this bill. It enhances the opportunity of law-abiding citizens to exercise their second amendment rights. If someone is a criminal or mentally unqualified to have a firearm, they are not going to like this bill.

As I said at the beginning, I feel very strongly about this. It is not gun control to try to keep guns out of the hands of people who are not qualified to have them.

I, again, wish to thank the Senator from West Virginia, my friend. I appreciate the hard work he has put into this. I appreciate the chance to share these thoughts and work with him. We will welcome any questions, comments, ideas or suggestions from our colleagues as we wrestle with this bill in the coming days and, hopefully, have a vote soon which will be successful on this amendment.

Mr. President, today I wish to recognize Pennsylvania State University as the school celebrates 150 years of history. April 1, 2013, marked this monumental anniversary when Pennsylvania designated the then-Agricultural College of Pennsylvania to be the sole land grant college in the Commonwealth. Of course the Agricultural College would eventually become Pennsylvania State College in 1874 and Pennsylvania State University in 1953.

While maintaining its agriculture base, Penn State expanded its focus shortly after opening its doors to students and began offering degrees in liberal arts and other fields. Notably, Penn State quickly became one of the Nation's largest engineering schools in the late 19th century.

Today, the Pennsylvania State University is the largest university in the Commonwealth and grants more baccalaureate degrees than any other school in Pennsylvania, and it has one of the largest graduate schools in the country. In all, Penn State offers students the opportunity to pursue studies in more than 150 different disciplines. Penn State graduates have gone on to great success in agriculture, engineering, business, law, medicine, academia, government, and sports. Enrollment at Penn State's 20 undergraduate campuses, the World Campus, the Graduate School, the Dickinson School of Law, the College of Medicine, and the College of Technology is approaching 100,000. Penn State can boast that 1 in every 117 Americans with a college degree is an alumni of Pennsylvania State University. That is quite an achievement. It has been a great success, and has served Pennsylvania, and the Nation, well.

Penn State has also created an environment that promotes the importance of public service and volunteer work. Most notably, Penn State students participate in an annual fundraiser known as THON, which benefits pediatric cancer care and research. THON culminates each year with a multiday dance marathon at the Bryce Jordan Center. Since its inception in 1977, THON has raised more than $100 million. In 2013 alone, THON raised nearly $12.5 million for pediatric cancer. These fundraising efforts are truly remarkable and Penn State students should be proud of all they have done to help children and families who are fighting pediatric cancer.

In addition to THON, Penn State University also hosts annual events such as Ag Progress Days, the Engineering Design Showcase, and the Arts Festival Weekend. All of these events bring together Penn State students, alumni, and other interested parties by providing a forum where relevant technological advances in the related fields, best business practices between interacting disciplines and creative innovation can be shared and displayed for the betterment of all involved.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I should recognize the outstanding faculty who make Penn State what it is. The faculty at Penn State are leaders in their respective fields and conduct cutting edge research in numerous disciplines. The success of the university is dependent on the high quality faculty who dedicated their lives to academia, and all of the Penn State faculty should be proud of their accomplishments. They are educating the next generation of leaders, and, through their research, are bettering the lives of people throughout the Commonwealth, Nation, and the world.

Again, I want to congratulate Pennsylvania State University on reaching this milestone. You make the Commonwealth a better place, and I am confident the next 150 years of accomplishments will be even greater than the last.

Mr. President, I am not rising in opposition to this amendment because I oppose it. We Republicans don't want to raise taxes on low- and middle-income families because we don't want to raise taxes on anybody. But the irony of this is that this budget is an exercise in raising taxes on middle-income families. It is necessarily the case.

By the way, that is above and beyond the huge tax increases my colleagues imposed when they voted for ObamaCare--$1.2 trillion of tax increases, much of which lands squarely on middle-income families.

The fact is the President showed how he wants to raise taxes on the wealthy, and he has a plan that does that. It raises $600 billion. My colleagues have reconciliation instructions for $1 trillion. The difference is going to inevitably come from the middle class. We don't want that to happen.

I would suggest we will accept this amendment. We could accept it on a voice vote. But it doesn't change the central fact that the Democratic budget is all about raising taxes on middle-income families.

Madam President, I call up amendment No. 535.

As we know, the ObamaCare bill raises taxes by $1.2 trillion. Much of that is on middle-income families. One in particular is a tax increase on people who incur and then deduct catastrophic medical expenses.

Imagine a woman slips and falls at home, is seriously injured, runs up huge medical costs which she pays for out her own pocket, and then on top of her personal and physical misery ObamaCare hits her with a double whammy by reducing the amount of medical expenses she is allowed to deduct. Who does this hurt? Disproportionately, middle-income taxpayers; 96 percent of these deductions are for people who earn less than $200,000. It adds up to $30 billion over 10 years. Madam President, 60 percent of these deductions are by senior citizens. The fact is the ObamaCare tax increase imposes this tax on people who can least afford it, the sick, elderly, middle-income folks.

My amendment repeals this ill-conceived tax on victims of catastrophic illness and repeals the reconciliation instructions in the budget.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Madam President, I yield such time as I may consume from the resolution.

Madam President, I wish to commend the Senator from Florida. I could not agree more with the importance of focusing on economic growth and developing policies that maximize economic growth.

I believe we could have a tremendous economic recovery underway right now, but we don't. The main reason we don't is because we have a dysfunctional government in Washington that has policies that are preventing economic growth.

Unfortunately, the budget resolution our Democratic friends have offered offers more of the same failed policies that would only result in extending this period of miserable economic growth or a lack thereof. I would like to talk about a few aspects of this. I will talk about what they want to do on taxes, but before we get into the substance of the Democratic budget proposal for taxes, I think a little historical context is important, and we don't have to go back to ancient history.

In the last few years, what our Democratic friends and this administration have done is repeatedly raise taxes on all Americans, including middle-income Americans, and they propose much more now. Let's go back, for instance, to the ObamaCare middle-income tax increases. I will run through a quick litany of some of the tax increases we have suffered through as a result of ObamaCare, which raises taxes on people with health savings accounts and flexibility spending accounts. It raises taxes on people with catastrophic medical expenses. It raises taxes on people who purchase medical devices. It raises taxes on people who buy health insurance. It raises taxes on people who don't buy health insurance. It raises taxes on employers who cannot afford to provide health insurance. It raises taxes on people who have family plans that Washington believes are excessive. Is there anyone in America who is not on one or more elements of this list? I very much doubt it. The fact is that ObamaCare was a huge tax increase that added up to $1.2 trillion over 10 years, and it very much included all kinds of taxes that will be carried by middle-income Americans.

More recently, on January 1 of this year, we had another huge tax increase. That was about $620 billion over the next 10 years. It was less than 3 months ago. This raises the top rate from 35 percent to 42.5 effectively when we include the phasing out of deductions. If we add in the Medicare increases and the total top Federal marginal tax rate, it is 44.8 percent.

By the way, this is the highest this rate has ever been. Right now, this is the highest this rate has been since Ronald Reagan inherited a disastrous tax code from Jimmy Carter. That was a long time ago. That doesn't include the State and local taxes, which put many Americans at a top marginal tax rate of over 50 percent. The government is taking over half of the income they are earning, and our friends who are introducing this budget are suggesting that all of this is not enough. They are suggesting that we need yet another big tax increase--in fact, we need a giant one, $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years in new additional taxes.

I have news for everyone. I don't see how this can possibly be done without significant tax increases on middle-income Americans. I know some folks in this Chamber like to suggest this can be done by soaking the rich again. We can just go back to soaking rich folks again. I don't see how that can work. I will give an example of why I don't think that can work.

The President laid out in his budget last year his plan for a whole new round of taxes for wealthy Americans on top of the tax increases that occurred weeks ago. He specified how he would propose doing it. The gist is that he wants to limit the value of deductions and apply taxes to income that is not otherwise taxed at the moment. He will limit the value of all kinds of deductions. He laid this out. It would be all itemized deductions--mortgage interest deductions, charitable contributions, State and local taxes. They want to tax health insurance exclusions and employee contributions to 401(k)s and IRA plans, section 199 manufacturing deductions, tax exempt interest, contributions to health savings accounts.

All of these things would be limited and would especially affect the wealthy taxpayers under the President's plan--the last budget we got from this President. He has chosen not to comply with the rules whereby he should have already produced one for this year. These tax increases were meant to be in that budget above and beyond the tax increase he got on January 1. Guess what. The President's plan for raising taxes on the wealthy is $584 billion. That is a lot of money, but it doesn't get us anywhere near the $1.5 trillion this budget resolution calls for. The President has laid out his plan for how he intends to soak the rich yet again--we know that much--but we don't know yet how he will raise the other $1 trillion. I can tell everyone where they are going to get that money. It will come from the middle class; that is where the money is.

What are all of these tax increases for? A lot of it is for increasing spending. The Democratic budget would spend more money than the current CBO budget. I know it doesn't look that way if we look just at the top lines. We have to dig deeper. What we discover is that the Democratic budget decides to make a totally different assumption about the American presence in Afghanistan than what CBO does. We are winding down our presence in Afghanistan, but the budget doesn't decide that. That is a separate matter altogether. If we want to compare apples to apples, we make the same assumptions about ongoing war expenses. When we do that, we discover that this proposal actually increases spending at a rate faster than what current law calls for. That is what this budget would do.

This budget raises taxes enormously, including very much on the middle-class because I don't see any other way we can get there. It also increases spending.

By the way, the only operative year of a budget is the first year. In the first year, the increase is $162 billion over what we are going to spend this year. That is a 4.6-percent increase in spending in the year in which inflation is running around 2 percent, and that is what this plan is.

Here is what is most objectionable to me about all of the spending and these huge tax increases. This is a big part of the reason we are suffering through the worst economic recovery since the Great Depression. There is no coincidence here. If we look in the post-war era, in the 3 years following a recession, the economy, on average, has grown by 14.4 percent. That is the average growth over a 3-year period after we have had a recession. What is the growth we have had this time? It is 6.7 percent. It is less than half. This is the worst recovery in our lifetime, and it is no coincidence.

We have had huge increases in spending, and what has that given us? It has given us this feeble economic growth, and it has given us an unemployment rate hovering around 8 percent. We all know that does not include the millions of Americans who left the workforce altogether. They have given up looking for work. It doesn't include the many folks who are underemployed. In fact, we have fewer people working in America today than we did in 2007. And it never takes this long for an economy to bounce back and create the jobs that were lost during a recession. However, it has this time, and it is partly because we are pursuing the wrong policies.

There is huge government spending, stimulus spending, all kinds of growth in government, and huge tax increases and the threat of big tax increases. This is a big contributing factor. Higher taxes reduces economic growth not only because of the money it takes directly out of the economy but because of the incentives. It reduces the incentive to work, to save, to invest. Whatever is being taxed, there is less of for the person to enjoy who actually created it. Sure enough, as a result, we get less of that activity. So the more we raise taxes on work, on savings and investment, the less of it we get. The other thing is that there are tax increases that are looming in the future--and that day will come--and people's behavior is affected by it.

Huge growth in government spending and the corresponding deficits we have seen have a chilling effect on economic growth itself. People understand that is eventually going to get paid with either higher taxes or we are going to monetize it and diminish the value of our currency and have inflation or some combination of those. So all of this government--of which this budget proposes still more--is part of the reason our economic growth is so meager.

I have one final point to make on this as it pertains to the budget. The irony is that growth is the best way to solve all of our problems. Strong economic growth has a direct benefit for the families who enjoy it, who benefit from the jobs that are created, the higher wages they earn, the elevated standard of living, the integrity that comes from providing for their families. All of those things are the direct benefits from a stronger economy. There is no better way to deal with our budget deficit than stronger economic growth.

In fact, the CBO tells us that just one-tenth of 1 percentage point of sustained increase in the rate of growth in 10 years results in $280 billion of new revenue. That is not completely linear. However, we are so far below the average that if we just add a full percent, we would be talking about literally trillions of dollars in additional revenue and smaller deficits. All of that would come from economic growth in the context of people who are back to work and an economy that is booming. That is what we ought to be heading for. Unfortunately, this budget doesn't take us there.

I know the Senator from Wisconsin wants to speak, and I will yield the floor in a minute.

I want to say a quick word before I do that about one particularly important amendment we are going to debate beginning around 2 p.m. today and vote on hopefully soon. This goes to a small subset of the tax problems ObamaCare and this budget would create. It is the medical device tax.

The medical device tax is one of the more egregious flaws in ObamaCare, in my view. Part of the reason is it is such a badly designed tax. This tax is badly designed, in my view, because it applies to total sales, so it is even worse than an income tax increase, which would have been a bad idea.

This applies a tax to sales, irrespective of whether a company is making income. So if you are a startup company, if you are a small growing company or if you are an established company and having hard times, this is a tax that disregards whether you are operating in the black and says, We are just going to apply this new tax on your total sales. That is a very badly designed tax, in my view.

It is a particularly bad idea in a sector that has so many young and growing and startup companies that have so much promise. They are making medical devices that are improving the quality of our lives, saving lives that without these inventions wouldn't be saved, and we are going to slap a new tax on the sales of some of these companies that are just trying to get started and not yet profitable. That is a terrible idea. I know in Pennsylvania, the tax has gone into effect. It went into effect on January 1 of this year. It is already costing us jobs, limiting growth, and preventing new factories from being built in Pennsylvania to manufacture medical devices. It is also making health care more expensive. We are all consumers of medical devices of various kinds. We are talking everything from surgical implements to prostheses, to hip replacement to ordinary health care devices.

Lastly, I would suggest that the existence of this tax makes it harder to raise the capital to launch new firms and, therefore, it is going to stifle innovation.

I know there is bipartisan support to repeal this tax. I am very pleased about that. I wish to thank Senator Hatch for his leadership for a long time on this. I know Senator Klobuchar has been a great leader on this issue as well. Several others, including Senator Casey and myself, feel very strongly about this. I am cautiously optimistic that this amendment could pass. I sure hope it does. It would be a big improvement.

At this time I am happy to yield to the Senator from Wisconsin.

Mr. President, I rise to discuss briefly an amendment I have that is going to be voted on later today, but I wish to begin by completely agreeing with the Senator from Kansas. It is extremely unfortunate, to say the very least, that the majority party is so afraid of casting votes, they are now disallowing the most ordinary, sensible, germane amendments that transfer modest sums of money from one account to another account. I am not suggesting that everybody needs to agree with it. I am not sure I agree with the amendment of the Senator from Kansas. But the idea that an amendment such as that shouldn't even have an opportunity to be debated on the Senate floor is amazing.

Let me address the amendment I have introduced. I will start by observing that the bill under consideration today significantly underfunds the Defense Department's operations and maintenance accounts. The Army's subset of this category of funding is underfunded by $2 billion. That is just the Army alone. This has implications for the safety and readiness of our troops. I am not suggesting that my amendment solves that whole problem--it doesn't, but it makes a modest step in the right direction.

Just quickly, some of the things the operations and maintenance account funds--it is a lot. It is maintenance of ships and tanks and aircrafts. It is avionics and engines and navigation systems. It is artillery. It is all kinds of things our service men and women use to fight and to win and to protect themselves. It gets funded through the operations and maintenance account, and it is not only maintenance of this important equipment, it is also training--training such as unit training when an Army battalion, for instance, trains in an exercise against an opposition force that is modeled after a real-world potential enemy. That kind of training is very important. It gets funded out of this account, the operations and maintenance account, and that account is underfunded. So I would suggest that this is a very important account, and I think there is almost universal acknowledgment that it is being underfunded.

Meanwhile, in the same bill, while we are underfunding our operations and maintenance account, we have a bill that would spend $60 million forcing the Defense Department to build

biofuels refineries. This forces our Defense Department to build these expensive refineries to make very expensive fuel. How do we know it will be very expensive fuel? How many of us fill up our gas tanks with biofuels? The component we are forced to buy--the ethanol--is part of what drives up the cost of gasoline. The fact is that conventional fuel is much cheaper than these biofuels, but we are going to force the Defense Department to spend a whole lot of money building a refinery, the purpose of which is to produce extremely expensive and inefficient fuel. I would suggest that is a waste of precious resources we can't afford to waste.

Now, the House Defense appropriations bill did not include this, and the Senate Armed Services Committee--these are our experts who analyze this--opposed wasting money this way when they reported the bill out of committee. Unfortunately, when it got to the floor, it got put in, and this is our opportunity to correct it.

Now, some have suggested these biofuel refineries are somehow a solution to the expensive cost of moving fuel to combat zones. The only problem is this item is going to fund the construction of refineries in the United States. They are not going to be in combat zones. So that is just not true.

I would suggest if anyone thinks this is a good idea--to force taxpayers to build expensive, inefficient refineries to produce very expensive fuel--shouldn't it at least happen through the Department of Energy or some other experimental research-oriented institution?

I will be happy to yield to the Senator from Oklahoma.

Well, reclaiming my time, I completely agree with the Senator from Oklahoma. We already force our Defense Department to waste enormous amounts of money purchasing fuel that is much more expensive than readily available alternatives. I think that is a very bad idea. And I think it is a bad idea to do even more of that in the form of building these biofuel refinery plants that would further propagate this ill-conceived process.

If you think it is somehow a good idea to do this then, as the Senator from Oklahoma suggests, wouldn't it make sense to at least do this in the Department of Energy rather than wasting precious Defense Department resources at a time when we know we are underfunding the operations and maintenance account? This is the reason for my amendment.

My amendment transfers $60 million out of the biofuel refinery account in the Defense Department appropriations bill and moves money-- the amount permissible under the budget rules--into the operations and maintenance account. This is not a complete solution, I understand that, but it is a modest step in the right direction of providing a little bit more resources to an area that is badly underfunded.

I urge my colleagues to support my amendment.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I rise to make the case for this amendment. I think we all know that this bill funds the Defense Operations and Maintenance Account to a very large degree. This is a very important account from which we fund the maintenance of all kinds of military equipment, from trains to tanks to avionics--you name it, it gets funded from this account. So too does a whole lot of training come from this account.

Meanwhile, we have $60 million going to build a biorefinery that would force the Defense Department to pay too much for fuel. This is about priorities, and it is my suggestion and my amendment to take $60 million out of this account that would force us to build an inefficient, expensive refinery to make too-expensive fuel and transfer it into this Operations and Maintenance Account that we need.

I appreciate the support of the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee for this amendment, Senator Inhofe, and I urge my colleagues to vote in its favor.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 115, which is at the desk.

Mr. President, let me just briefly describe my amendment. This will not take very long, but I think it is an important movement in the right direction. It has come to my attention that the CR, probably for a variety of reasons, underfunds the DOD's operations and maintenance account relative to what the Army staff certainly has requested--actually to the tune of $2 billion relative to what the Army staff would prefer. This affects salaries, vital maintenance, and combat training. It affects certainly skilled defense contractors, employees, at our military facilities.

Obviously, we have very significant maintenance requirements for the very sophisticated equipment on which our troops rely, and so this is a very important account. The operations and maintenance account also includes training exercises that help make sure our forces are the best in the world.

Unfortunately, at the same time that we are underfunding this account, we are also spending money on alternative energy at DOD that is of very dubious value, in my mind. We have much more affordable energy than the kinds of energy we require the DOD to use, in some instances. And what this amendment would do is provide a modest transfer of $60 million from the DOD's account from the Pentagon biofuels program and allow that money to go over to the operations and maintenance account.

Now, I know there are some people who are big fans of spending money to develop biofuels and build the plants and refineries that create these biofuels. I would point out this is a much more expensive source of fuel than alternatives already readily available, and so I would ask a more basic question: If we believe this is a good and appropriate activity, wouldn't it be better to handle this at the Department of Energy rather than take the precious resources from our Defense Department and have it spent on the construction of plants for biofuel capability?

I think it makes more sense to move this over to the operations and maintenance account, and that is what my amendment does.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I know there are people who are very passionately interested in developing any kind of alternative energy. I would just suggest there are research facilities where that is probably appropriate. I suppose the Department of Energy might be a candidate. But the kind of biofuels that are generated cost far more than conventional fuels. We have a tremendous volume of conventional fuels, and it is a savings to be able to use conventional fuels.

In this case, my suggestion is that this money goes to where it is vitally needed, in the operations and maintenance accounts. But I would like to discuss with the Senator from Illinois the concern he has about a budget point of order, so I will suggest the absence of a quorum.