Floor Statements

Mr. President, as I listen to all of the discussion about health care, I have come to several conclusions. No. 1, there is a 100-percent bipartisan agreement that something has to be done. But No. 2, there is a growing strong bipartisan agreement that this bill is not the something that should be done.

From the New York Times:

The first big fight over the Senate Finance Committee's

health care legislation erupted Tuesday night: a rollicking

brawl over a deal that the Obama administration cut with the

pharmaceutical industry to achieve $80 billion in saving on

drug costs over 10 years, money that would help pay for the

legislation. Top House Democrats have hated the deal from the

get-go. Senate Democrats are now bitterly divided. . . .

This resonates with the comment that the Republican leader made where he says the only truly bipartisan thing about this bill is the opposition to it. I think this demonstrates that we need to slow down, start over, and do it right.

We have heard many speeches saying we can't wait. We see people carrying signs: ``Health Care Reform Now.'' We have just heard from the Senator from Nebraska that this bill will give us health care reform not now--4 years from now. Four years is a long time to wait. We can do it faster than 4 years, but we can do it faster only if we slow down, start over, and do it right. We can do it in this Congress if we slow down, start over, and do it right.

What are the things on which we need to start over? The looming challenge in this whole debate is cost. The numbers that are being thrown around are astronomical, and we still don't know exactly what they are. These are still estimates. The Senate Finance Committee has not reduced their proposal to legislative language. The CBO says: We can't give it a score until we get legislative language, and by the time we get the language, it is at least

2 weeks before we can produce a score. Yet we are being told we must pass this bill next week? Slow down, start over, and do it right.

We are going to pay for it, we are being told, by taking $500 billion out of Medicare. And every study of Medicare says at least $500 billion is being wasted, so that is easy. Let's take $500 billion out, and we will solve the problem.

We can take $500 billion out of Medicare with a meat cleaver, and that means we are cutting the programs that are good in Medicare, the things about Medicare that work as well as the things that do not work. Maybe we should slow down, start over, and do it right by taking the $500 billion out of Medicare with a surgeon's scalpel rather than a meat cleaver and spend the time to find out where the money is being wasted, how it could be changed, where the incentives need to be altered so that the $500 billion comes out of the right part of Medicare instead of with a slash with a meat cleaver.

Medicare is not the only one where more careful examination could produce significant savings. We are told that Medicaid in 2007 spent $30 billion improperly. If we extrapolate that over the 10-year period that we use to make these projections, that is $300 billion that could come from Medicaid. Are we going to take a meat cleaver to Medicaid and say we are going to arbitrarily cut $300 billion out of Medicaid in the next 10 years because there is a study that says that much is being wasted or are we going to listen to the Governors, bipartisan, Democrat as well as Republican, who are telling us: What you are doing in this bill on Medicaid is going to bankrupt the States because they simply cannot sustain the kinds of increases that are built into it and nothing will be done about the $30 billion of waste and abuse that is there.

How are we going to get at it? How are we going to discover what that $30 billion is? How are we going to deal with it in a way that does not bankrupt the States? To answer that question, we need to slow down, start over, and get it right.

If I can be provincial and parochial for just a moment, my home State of Utah has done a great amount of work on health care. They have been very entrepreneurial and innovative. They have come up with ideas to deal with health care, ideas from which we at the Federal level could learn a great deal, but we cannot learn anything from the experimentation that is going on in the States if we continue this rush to an arbitrary deadline, to get this thing done within a couple of weeks.

The States have great experience with this. There is much the States can teach us. There is much the Governors need to tell us before we rush to spend this much money, which means we should slow down, start over, and do it right.

As I talk with the businesses, as I talk with my constituents in Utah, I come back to the same thing I said at the beginning. There is a 100-percent bipartisan agreement that something has to be done. Our long-term challenges with health care are absolutely unsustainable, to use a Washington word. That is another word for disastrous.

We have to deal with this, and we have to deal with it in an intelligent way. The numbers are very large, and we have to recognize the stakes are very high. But that is, again, the message that comes from those who will be most affected by what we do, either in their businesses or their personal lives or their tax returns. It is very important that we get it right; and if we are going to get it right, we have to start over. If we are going to start over, we have to slow down.

That is the wisdom this body should adopt as it deals with this challenge so that we can change the reality of where the bipartisan agreement is. Instead of the bipartisan agreement growing in opposition to the bill, we need a circumstance where a bipartisan agreement will grow in support of a bill that will solve our problem. The bill before the Finance Committee is not that bill, and a large number of Members of this body of both parties are increasingly coming to that conclusion.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am pleased to rise today to introduce this important legislation, The Fairness in Representation Act, with my colleagues Senators Enzi and Bunning. Next year's decennial census will be an enormous and expensive effort to complete the constitutionally mandated ``actual enumeration.'' I am proud of our Census department and the many people around the nation that will work together to produce what we hope and expect will be a fair and accurate census.

Unfortunately, current 2010 Census questionnaires lack a critical question: Are you a U.S citizen? How are we to accurately apportion representation in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College when no count of legal residents exists? Article 1 Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution mandates that a census be taken every 10 years expressly for the purpose of apportioning seats in the House of Representatives. However apportionment is based on each State's total population--including illegal aliens--relative to the rest of the country. Currently our census doesn't give us a count of the legal residents of this country. In the 1964 Supreme Court ruling, Wesberry v. Sanders the Court states that ``The House of Representatives, the [Constitutional] Convention agreed, was to represent the people as individuals and on a basis of complete equality for each voter.'' By counting citizens, legal residents and illegals alike, we are in effect eroding the power of the vote of those citizens who live in areas with fewer non-citizens. The large number of non-citizens in a district erases the principle of ``one man, one vote'' because it takes fewer votes to be elected to Congress.

The political costs of this broken system are great. I have drafted this legislation to require the decennial census to include a question regarding citizenship. The legislation will further direct the census to make such adjustments in the total population figures as may be necessary, in order that those who are not U.S. citizens or are not lawfully present in the U.S. are not counted in tabulating population for the purposes of apportionment. Apportionment of congressional seats and the Electoral College will be based on the legal population, rather than unfairly advantaging those communities with high illegal populations. I urge my colleagues to support this legislation that will correct an inexcusable error and return our representation system to its constitutional roots.

Mr. President, I rise today to recognize the Senate Employees' Child Care Center for 25 years of service.

The Senate Employees' Child Care Center opened its doors on February 27, 1984, as the first childcare center on Capitol Hill. Its successful opening is attributed to the dedication and hard work of Senate Members, employees, and their families.

The center has grown, much like the children and Senate families it has served. On opening day, the center had 27 children enrolled from the ages of 18 months to 5 years. By comparison, the center today has grown to a full enrollment of 68 children from the ages of 10 weeks to 5 years.

The center first opened in what was known as the Immigration Building and is now the Capitol Police headquarters. As it outgrew that space, a new facility was constructed nearby. Enrollment and growth continued, necessitating the construction of a new facility in December of 1999.

While many things have changed over the past 25 years, such as the location, number of children served, and the faces of teachers and families, one constant is this: the Senate Employees' Child Care Center remains a first-class facility. Families continue to appreciate the comfort of knowing their children are in a safe and enriching educational environment. In fact, many families refer to the Center as a ``school'' rather than a daycare facility.

We and our staffs strive for excellence. The Senate Employees' Child Care Center does the same. In 1989, it became the first center in Washington, DC, to achieve accreditation from the National Association for the Education of Young Children, NAEYC. This accreditation is the ``gold standard'' for early childhood education, and the center has maintained it continuously since 1989.

As in the early days, families with children enrolled in the center are encouraged to be involved in its daily operations. Many families spend their lunch hours doing ``nap duty,'' others

serve on the Board of Directors, and others assist with special classroom projects. Parental involvement fosters a cooperative environment and further contributes to the center's excellence.

The greatest asset of the Senate Employees' Child Care Center is its teachers. One of the original teachers, Phyllis Green, continues to provide lessons that will serve children well throughout their lives. She is one of many dedicated professionals who connect with both children and parents in very special ways.

I offer my congratulations to the Senate Employees' Child Care Center on achieving this milestone and best wishes for many more years of service.

Mr. Chairman, I worked to develop this initiative to incorporate a capability that the Department has failed to cultivate, yet offers tremendous potential to develop our domestic fossil energy potential. The University of Utah's Simulation and Computing Institute which has worked with both the Office of Science and NNSA computing programs is a leading computing program with tremendous potential to contribute to this effort. This outstanding computing capability is coupled with the vast oil and gas production capabilities at the 25 year-old Energy and Geoscience Institute. This organization operates on seven continents and shares research and technology with its 66 corporate members that all have energy production experience. The goal of this program will be to facilitate the development of unconventional fossil energy resources utilizing state of the art computing simulation and modeling capabilities.

Mr. President, I have listened with interest to my friend from Oregon outline his relentless determination to get a solution to this problem, and I pay tribute to him for his willingness to do that. I am happy to follow his leadership, as we do our best to support what has been known colloquially around the country as the Wyden-Bennett bill, although in Utah we refer to it as the Bennett- Wyden bill.

We have heard a lot of debate during the time when we should have been dealing with energy and water. Senator after Senator comes down and asks for permission to speak as in morning business, and they always speak about health care. Since we haven't anybody else to speak about the bill on the floor, Chairman Dorgan has indulged them in that bit of morning business.

The one thread that has run through much of the statements about health care has been that we must get rid of the present system, as if that were a debatable issue. Everybody recognizes we must get rid of the present system. The proposal Senator Wyden and I have been behind gets rid of the present system. And coming to the floor and giving example after example of how the present system has failed Americans is not the same as putting forward a legitimate proposal as to how to deal with the present system. We discussed that a little yesterday, so I will not go into it again.

I wish to make one slight addition to the comments Senator Wyden made with respect to choice. When I first got here, and the First Lady of the United States, Hillary Clinton, was proposing a health care program, one of the mantras we heard on the street from people who would demonstrate was: We want what Members of Congress have. We want the plan you have.

And I said--half facetiously but half seriously--I want the plan I had before I came here. Because the plan I had was better than the one we got as Members of Congress.

I point out the reason I wanted that plan is that I got to pick what that plan would be. How did I get to pick what that plan would be? I got to pick because I was the CEO of the company

that made the choice. I was the only person in that company who got to pick, because once I made the decision that this is what we will have in the company, everybody else in the company was dependent upon my wisdom.

Senator Wyden has pointed out we do have a wide range of choices in the plan that are available to us as Federal employees. I underscore, when I discuss this with people in Utah, that because I am a Senator, I have the same plan people at Hill Air Force Base have. This is the plan of all Federal employees. Yes, there are a number of choices and, yes, I am satisfied with it and I like it. But it is still true it is my employer--in this case the Federal Government--who designed the plan.

I am glad it is a good plan. I don't think I would want to change it. I think I would take advantage of the promises that have been made in this debate; that if you like what you have, you can keep it. But the point is that someone who is an employer, who has not made that available, is frozen out of the opportunity for choice by virtue of the decision that the CEO of his company made. The one sure-fire question I can ask and know the answer I will get at every town meeting I hold on this is to say: How many of you--in the group gathered--either know somebody or are somebody trapped in a job he or she hates because they are afraid to lose their health care benefits? Every time I ask that question, hands go up all over the room.

That is the kind of thing Senator Wyden and I are trying to change. These people are locked in a job they hate because they are afraid they will lose their health care. They are not allowed the choice of deciding what their health care dollars will be spent for. It is determined for them by their employer. If we go the direction in which Senator Wyden and I want to go, employers that continue to offer plans the employees like will find that their employees will exercise their right of choice to stay with that plan. But employers that say: No, we are going to cut corners a little and cut back on things, just because we think it would be better for our bottom line if we do this, will discover that if our legislation passes, their employees will be empowered to say we are taking our health care dollars and going someplace else and making another choice.

That is the fundamental reason why we have been scored as having the bill that will turn the cost curve down rather than up. We change the present system in a way that will allow market forces to get into the mix and allow people to exercise their free choice and start to save money as a consequence; whereas, all the other plans that are being scored as turning the cost curve up do so because they eliminate any power of individuals in the marketplace to exercise their choice.

I wish we were discussing energy and water. We seem to have turned this into a discussion of health care because the other folks will not come down. I won't intrude upon that any further. But having heard my colleague, I felt it appropriate for me to make these additional comments.

With that I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I would ask the chairman, since cloture has been filed, doesn't there arise a time at which there is a cutoff by which amendments can be offered?

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

Mr. President, I have just spoken with Senator Alexander. He is on his way over and is amenable to having a rapid vote. So he would come over and discuss with us the unanimous consent agreement with respect to time.

I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. President, I would associate myself with the chairman's remarks and simply add a few more figures. In the energy efficiency and renewable account, we reduced funding for program direction by $85 million, and program support funding was reduced by $48 million. In the Office of Science, we have cut funding for field offices by $13 million and cut headquarters funding by $6 million. And the President's request for the personnel and program direction account we cut by $160 million.

So these are a little more granular than the overall figure the chairman mentioned. But I mention them to point out that we have indeed looked at each one of these individual items very carefully and produced the result the chairman described.

Mr. President, I say to both the chairman and the Senator from Oklahoma, if there is going to be a meeting to try to write this in the proper way, I want to be a part of it, because I agree absolutely with the effort the Senator is making.

But the Senator from Oklahoma made one reference to efficiency. He said we want a bidding process that is efficient. I want to step out for a moment from the scientific debate into another circumstance that has to do with this bill, that has to do with my own State that I can give an exact example for.

We have a cleanup program in southern Utah dealing with the cleanup of an old uranium plant. The tailings from that plant are right next to the Colorado River, and the fear is that the leaching from the tailings of that plant is going into the Colorado River, not only threatening the fish but the population downstream, downstream States, and the country of Mexico, and significant problems. All right. A contractor was necessary to clean up the tailings pile and there was competitive bidding that went on and the contractor was chosen and is now involved in a very significant, multimillion-dollar cleanup program.

As I understand the language of the amendment of the Senator from Oklahoma, because we are appropriating more money for that cleanup program in this bill, we need another competitive bidding proceeding to see if that is the right contractor. This is a contractor who is looking at 10 years, 12 years for the contract, and every time a new appropriation is necessary in each bill. It would seem to me it makes sense that once we have picked the contractor through competitive bidding, there does not have to be a competitive bid every year to see whether another contractor can now move in, take over, and make this work. It is possible we could. It is possible that this first contractor might be running up costs in fashions he shouldn't be doing and there should be a review. But I agree with the Senator from North Dakota that this is too much of a broad brush in that kind of area.

I was involved as a freshman Senator with respect to concessions at national parks, and I angered the ranking member of that committee when I sided with some other Senators in the majority--the Democrats at the time--to change the rules with respect to concessions in national parks because I said this is a rigged bidding situation where the incumbent contractor is always going to be taken care of. We finally got that done.

I am completely in sympathy with what is trying to be done here, but I discovered in going through that process--the same general idea, different set of facts--that it is more difficult than it looks on the surface. That is why I am supporting the chairman in the amendment he is offering. But if there is going to be a discussion of how this gets more efficient in the pattern in which it is written, I want to be a part of that, because I am completely sympathetic to the effort of trying to see to it that we have open contracting wherever it makes sense.

Mr. President, I have no objection to that request.

Mr. President, I support the amendment and hope we will now vote.

Mr. President, I will confirm that the amendments have been cleared, and I appreciate the cooperative way in which the two staffs have been diligently doing this. We are glad, after the long period of wait, that we finally are hurrying up. The old army line ``hurry up and wait,'' we have turned it around: Wait, and now we have hurried up. So I am delighted we are moving.

Mr. President, I thank the chairman for his kind words and echo his comments about the staff and the hard work they have done. We are grateful to Doug Clapp and Barry Gaffney, Roger Cockrell, and Franz Wuerfmannsdobler, Brad Fuller, as well as Tyler Owens, Ben Hammond, the floor staff, and of course Scott O'Malia of the committee staff who has worked so hard with me.

This has been a challenge for Scott and others because this is my first experience as the ranking member of this subcommittee. I was far more comfortable working on agricultural matters. But to have moved from the Agriculture Subcommittee to the Energy and Water Subcommittee has been a significant challenge and I am grateful to the chairman and the others for their willingness to work with me as I have come through this maiden experience.

I agree with the chairman that this is a very important bill addressing one of the most significant challenges we face in this country, which is getting our energy policy right and getting the energy initiatives properly funded. I am grateful it has finally come to the point where we are in fact within moments of final passage.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I am in favor of the Voinovich amendment. To use the language of the cloakroom, it has not yet been hotlined. I do not know of any objection to it, and at least on this side, we will do what we can to get it hotlined, get it cleared, so it can be adopted, I would hope by voice vote, as quickly as possible. But because it has not been hotlined on our side, I would suspect the vote will probably take place this afternoon, if that is acceptable to the chairman.

There has been, as Senator Voinovich has pointed out, a significant increase in the NRC workload, and GSA has been in negotiations with NRC to construct additional building space next to the existing NRC headquarters. The negotiations may extend beyond the end of this fiscal year, with the lease award occurring in 2010. So in order to anticipate that, the NRC and GSA agreed that the language should be continued in the fiscal year 2010 appropriations for the NRC. That will facilitate the procurement process and protect the government from any protests after a contract is awarded. This would mean the NRC could continue the current procurement without interruption. For those reasons, I think we should facilitate this.

With that, Madam President, I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I will withhold the suggestion of an absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I know we are on the bill. As the manager on the Republican side, I want to stay on the bill, but, my colleague from Oregon having raised the issue with respect to the consumer choice and our proposal, I ask unanimous consent that I can proceed as in morning business in order to respond.

Mr. President, I am grateful to Senator Wyden for the leadership he showed here and the tenacity with which he has pursued all of these issues. As I have sat here and listened to the various interventions in morning business about health care, I found the common theme that I want to comment on with respect to it. I think Senator Wyden's comments helped me frame this theme.

The theme I have heard over and over again from speakers has been: We can't stay where we are. And then the argument has been framed: We either have to move ahead with the President's program or stay where we are. As Senator Wyden has indicated, there are other alternatives besides moving ahead with the President's program and staying where we are.

I would like to draw this analogy that I hope will help us understand at least this Republican's position. I won't try to speak for all members of my party, although I think many of them would be sympathetic with what I am about to say.

Let's assume your neighbor's house is on fire. This is a serious problem. Your neighbor comes to you and says: My house is on fire. Lend me your garden hose so I can put the fire out.

And you say: My garden hose isn't long enough to reach the fire.

You don't understand, your neighbor says, my house is on fire. There are children in the house. There are women in the house. They will die if you don't put out the fire. Lend me your garden hose.

I respond or you respond: I understand there are children in the house. I understand allowing the house to burn down is a tremendous mistake. But my garden hose won't reach. We need a different garden hose if we are going to put out the fire.

No, no, no, the fire is reaching now, it is down, it has destroyed the top stories, it is getting down to the bottom

stories; people are fleeing. Give me your garden hose or you are a terrible person.

And you respond: I will be happy to give you a garden hose that would work, but the garden hose I have right now will not solve your problem.

We need that kind of an understanding here.

I am not a Republican who says: I defend the present system. I listened to the speeches being made about how terrible the present system may be, and I say I agree with them absolutely. I listened to the letters being read from home States that say: I was denied coverage by an insurance company bureaucrat. I lost my job and I lost my coverage. These are tragic, and I agree they are tragic, and I agree something ought to be done about it. It is just that, in my opinion, the President's garden hose will not reach. In my opinion, the President's garden hose will not only not put out the fire but, to stretch the analogy beyond all credulity, will make it worse. We heard about people who are being denied coverage under the present system. People will be denied coverage under the President's system.

If we look at other countries that have adopted similar public plans of the kinds we are talking about, we are going to see people whose coverage is denied again and again. Indeed, the comment was made about Senator Kennedy and the brave battle he is putting on against his problem. If he lived under the single-payer coverage of other countries, he would be denied coverage because of his age. We don't want that in America. We don't want people like that to be denied opportunities.

Senator Wyden and I have worked as hard as we can--back to the analogy--to create a garden hose that will reach, to create a garden hose that will, in fact, put out the fire, solve the problems, and change the present system.

I thank the Senator from Oregon for making it clear that there are alternatives to the present system that are not necessarily the bills that are coming out of the two committees.

I am not going to embarrass my friend from Oregon by insisting that he take the same position I take with respect to the bills that are coming out of the two committees, but together we have formed a solution that we think will solve the problem, we think will put out the fire, we think will turn down the cost curve. And we have now a growing chorus of voices of people who are saying: You know, Wyden- Bennett looks as if it will work; why don't we try it.

The only question I am asking here is, Why don't we try it? So far, neither committee has been willing to look at the details of what we are talking about. All we are asking is that they do so because we are convinced that when they do, they will come to the conclusion that our garden hose will, in fact, put out the fire and it will do it more cheaply and more efficiently than the proposals that are before us.

Again, Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Oregon for his leadership and his tenacity in going forward with this proposal. I am honored to be associated with him in this effort. I agree with all of the speeches that have been made that the present system is not acceptable. I hope we can get together and solve the problem in a truly effective and bipartisan fashion.

I yield the floor.

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

Senator Dorgan is temporarily away.

I am sure there will be a sufficient second when Senator Dorgan has returned.

Mr. President, I listened with interest to the statement by Senator McCain. I rise with some responses to the comments he has made, which I hope will clarify the situation. Senator McCain, the ranking member on the Armed Services Committee, serves with great distinction and has helped manage that bill on the floor. In the Defense authorization bill, which he helped manage, there are specific authorizations for every defense program, and there is a Defense authorization bill that passes every year.

If, indeed, we had a similar situation with respect to those items under the jurisdiction of this appropriations bill, I would be more supportive of the position Senator McCain has taken with respect to the provisions of the bill. However, this is not a defense bill and not every department authorizes, each and every year, the same way the Department of Defense does.

Indeed, this is not the way Congress intended the Department of Energy to operate. When the Department of Energy was organized in 1977, making it one of the more recent departments, its organic statute provided broad authorities to support a diverse research and development mission with the goal of energy independence. This is not a project-based account and, therefore, it doesn't receive annual authorization.

Recently, there has been more attention on energy, which has resulted in two Energy bills in the past 4 years. But you need to go back 13 years, before the 2005 bill, to find another Energy bill passed by Congress. Obviously, the organic statute creating the Department anticipated that there would be an organic authorization for these items, and they would be handled in the appropriations bills. If we passed Senator McCain's amendment, it would eliminate any discretion of this subcommittee or of the Congress itself, for that matter, to make changes in the Department of Energy's budget priorities for spending plans. The Appropriations Committee would, therefore, become a rubberstamp for the administration's budget. Since we do not pass something like the Defense authorization bill, and there is no corresponding authorization bill for the Department of Energy, we would simply take the President's proposal and pass the money to support it, and I do not believe that is acceptable.

Senator McCain ran through a list of projects for which he had little or no patience because he said he did not understand them, and they struck him as being projects that possibly had questionable merit. I have a list of projects that were funded by the administration out of the blanket authority the Congress gave the Secretary in what we call the Stimulus Act. We passed the Stimulus Act without any specific earmarks. We simply said: Here is your money and you get to decide how it is spent. Congress will not intervene. I voted against the stimulus bill for a variety of reasons, but we now have the announcements from Secretary Chu as to the specifics of the wind program funding awards.

To quote Senator McCain in his comments about the earmarks in this bill: ``It may be that every one of these projects is legitimate and every one of them has merit.'' But this is the way the administration hands out money compared to the way the Congress hands out money. The Mountain Institute, Inc., in Morgantown, WV, overcoming barriers to wind development in Appalachian coal country, $99,000; the West Virginia Division of Energy, in Charleston, WV, overcoming the challenges in West Virginia, $100,000; in Austin, TX, $118,000 to fund solutions for wind developers and bats; for the board of trustees of the University of Illinois in Champaign, IL, studying ``are flying wildlife attracted to, or do they avoid wind turbines?''; Kansas City University in Manhattan, KS, the environmental impact of wind power development on population biology on greater prairie chickens; Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX, an assessment of lesser prairie chicken population distribution in relation to potential wind energy development; Western Ecosystems Technology, Inc., in Cheyenne, WY, $100,000 to study greater sage and sage grass telemetry for the Simpson Range Resource area; finally, in Kalamazoo, MI, the Western Michigan University receives $99,933 to study genetic approaches to understanding the population level impact of wind energy development on migratory bats.

These, as I say, may all be very worthwhile items. I don't think they are any more worthwhile items than the items we put in our bill. I say to those in support of the McCain amendment, if the McCain amendment passes, you take away from the Congress the right to determine how this money is spent and you turn it over to the President entirely and let him or his administration decide. It does not mean the money will be saved; it simply means the money will be spent in the way the administration wants it rather than in the way Members of Congress want it. The last time I read the Constitution, article I of the Constitution gives the power of the purse to the Congress and says Congress shall determine how much money shall be raised and how much money shall be spent, and that is what the Congress has done. It has given an organic statute to the Department of Energy, and then it allows the Congress, under that statute, to come up with the specifics of how the money is spent.

The Senator talked about report language not being binding in the bill. The bill, by legislative language, incorporates the specific projects in the report by reference. Therefore, it does become binding.

If we pass the amendment Senator McCain has proposed, it would have a devastating impact on the Department's environmental cleanup requirements. These are cleanup programs that receive annual authorization for cleaning up sites and projects under the Defense Authorization Act. But it also has similar authorization on sites that are outside the Defense Department.

Included in this nondefense category are ongoing cleanups in the following places--and I will repeat that again: ongoing cleanups. These are not new starts or projects that have come out of nowhere; these are items that are going forward, that have been authorized by past Congresses, under the organic statute of the Department of Energy: Paducah, KY; Portsmouth, OH; Moab, UT; Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee; Idaho National Laboratory, in Idaho; Brookhaven National Laboratory, in West Valley, NY; Santa Susana, in California; Hanford, WA; Argonne National Laboratory, in Illinois; Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico.

If I might focus on the one in Moab, UT, this is a cleanup of a uranium site, where there was a uranium plant during the boom times, when we were mining uranium as rapidly as we could, processing that, and we left behind tailings that have been judged as being damaging. These tailings are very close to the Colorado River. Indeed, the Senator's own State of Arizona is downstream from this tailing site.

By appropriating this money in this bill in a manner that would be outlawed by the Senator's amendment, we are accelerating the cleanup process in this time of economic difficulty, adding more jobs, more activity, and, quite frankly, lower prices, as contractors are anxious to gain work and will bid lower than they would otherwise; it is the logical thing to do. It would be dropped from the bill if we proceeded with the Senator's amendment.

For these reasons, I think the Senator's amendment would be a mistake. I urge my colleagues to vote it down.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays on the McCain amendment.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that T.J. Kim of Senator Voinovich's staff be granted floor privileges for the duration of the Senate's consideration of H.R. 3183.

Mr. President, I appreciate the remarks of my chairman, Senator Dorgan. Even more, I appreciate the hard work he has put in. The level of cooperation between the two of us and between our two staffs is as he has described it. This is a truly bipartisan effort, aimed at trying to solve the problems we face. One demonstration of the fact is that we have, in a bipartisan fashion, come in with a number significantly below that which the

President requested. If it had been a single partisan effort, I am assuming it would have been responsive entirely to the President's request.

As Senator Dorgan has indicated, we have a number of Member-directed items of spending. When people say: Well, where do you get the money for that? The answer is, we have canceled the President's directed orders of spending.

I agree with Senator Dorgan that Members in these areas are closer to the people, closer to the problems, and understand them a little better than the folks downtown.

I recommend passage of the bill to my colleagues. I am delighted with the prospect that it is highly likely this will be done prior to October 1, the start of the fiscal year. That is a goal that has not been achieved in decades and a further tribute to the leadership of Senator Dorgan that we are on that path.

As I have said, the bill provides $643 million below the President's request. This is the number Senator Dorgan cited, the $34.271 billion, but it is $476 million above current year levels. One of the things we did that helps us come in below the President's request was focus on the fact that the stimulus package that passed earlier this year put a great deal of money into these accounts. We did not want to ignore the fact that they had that money from the stimulus bill in coming up with our own figures.

The committee, as Senator Dorgan said, has said no new starts for the Corps of Engineers. I repeat that and reemphasize that because many of the complaints that I think we are going to get on the floor about Member-directed spending are for projects in the Corps of Engineers.

They will say: Well, you are calling for earmarks. You use the dread word for this project and that project. Because we have no new starts, every project we are calling for is an ongoing project. So that if we were to cancel it, it would undoubtedly end up costing more money rather than would be saved if the earmark were to be struck down.

For the Bureau of Reclamation, we are $55 million below fiscal 2009 levels. Pardon me. The request is $55 million below the fiscal 2009 level. The committee provides an additional $110 million to the Bureau. As Senator Dorgan has said, this is the tremendous backlog of underfunded projects. Let us take a sober lesson from what happens when we do not proceed with the proper maintenance in this area.

In my own State of Utah, a privately owned irrigation canal broke and flooded the community of Logan, UT, and tragically, in the process, took the lives of two young children and their mother who were overwhelmed as a result. This is a reminder to us that we have a responsibility to keep this fund going because the human cost can be significant.

These types of accidents are only avoidable if we are vigilant in maintaining the infrastructure and making the appropriate investments. With respect to the Department of Energy, the committee recommends $27.4 billion which is $1 billion below the President's request.

Again, this is a demonstration of the fact that we are attempting to be good stewards, that we are paying attention to the fact that the Department of Energy was already the beneficiary of over $45 billion in supplemental and stimulus funding in fiscal 2009.

Not all of that will be spent in this fiscal year, so that is a little bit of an overstatement of how much they will have to offset. But looking at the amount they had from the stimulus package, we felt we were appropriate in coming in $1 billion below the President's request.

We do recommend an additional $100 million for Nuclear Power 2010 in order to complete this project. The bill restores $50 million funding for the Integrated University Program and Research and Reactor Facilities account to support nuclear engineering and research and training.

That was eliminated in the budget request. I do that partly because I believe in it. I am joined with Senator Dorgan in doing it and also because, in my new assignment, I am taking the place of Senator Domenici, and he will come back and haunt us both if we are not appropriately supportive of nuclear power. His great work in that area is something I think we should carry on.

There are other issues the Senator from North Dakota has already mentioned that I will not touch on as we go along because I do not want to be redundant. We do provide an increase in funding for the Office of Science, $127 million over the current year levels. I think that is essential to a sustained investment in important scientific facilities that we have throughout the country.

Let's talk about cleanup. There are many Members of the Senate in States that support a strong environmental cleanup program, and the request reduced cleanup funding by over $200 million from current year levels. Well, we believe the faster we can move on cleanup, the cheaper it will be over the long term because contractors are out of work now. They are anxious to get back to work and they will make low bids and take advantage of that situation.

We recommend $350 million in additional funding for both defense and nondefense cleanups. Again, there is such an activity going on in my State, and I know that moving ahead and having the funding available now will save us significant amounts long term. So funding has been added for cleanup activities at DOE facilities located in South Carolina, Idaho, Washington, New York, Illinois, Kentucky, New Mexico, and California.

The committee has also restored critical funding in our national security sites, which was reduced in the President's budget request. An additional $83 million was added to the weapons account to invest in critical infrastructure and science facilities.

We are attempting to highlight what I consider to be the failure of this administration to address fully spent nuclear fuel and defense waste inventory in this country. Consistent with the President's request, a minimum level of funding has been provided to sustain the NRC license review process of the Yucca Mountain Project.

The Secretary of Energy has determined he will convene a blue ribbon panel of advisers to recommend other disposal options. But while the administration is considering these options, ratepayers across the country are required to pay $800 million annually to the nuclear waste fund to address spent fuel solutions.

CBO estimates that by the end of the year the unspent balance in this trust fund will be $23.8 billion. The committee has included language directing the Secretary to conduct an evaluation of the sufficiency of the fund and suspend the annual collection from ratepayers until he has a strategy to address the issue of spent fuel inventory.

Another problem that has arisen that we have dealt with has to do with the funding of pensions. We have provided the Secretary the authority to transfer funding within the Department to mitigate the impact to specific programs. The environmental cleanup mission has been hardest hit by pension shortfalls. The committee has not included any of the proposed budget gimmicks included in the request, and we have rejected a new tax on uranium fuel to pay for the cleanup.

With that, I think I have covered the highlights. I am sure there is more the chairman will talk about. I will listen to what he has to say. If there is any pet project I think needs to be highlighted, I will rise to my feet again. But I wish to summarize that the committee has not included funding for new starts for either Members of this body or for the President. The funding is dedicated to the completion of ongoing projects. We have reduced the amount of Member-directed spending by 8 percent from previous years as we hear the complaint some people have with respect to that process.

We have worked hard to rebalance the administration's request to ensure that investment in the water infrastructure is sufficient. We recognize that we could not accommodate all the needs across the country, so we focused our effort on ongoing projects and forgoing new starts.

I believe this budget strikes an appropriate balance and I recommend its adoption.

Madam President, I associate myself and those of all minority Members with the comments of the chairman about Proctor Jones. I didn't have the opportunity to work with him as closely as others have, but the legacy the chairman has described is genuine and real. All of us in the Senate, regardless of party, wish to acknowledge that.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I am happy to cosponsor the bill Senator Schumer has just discussed, the Military and Overseas Voters Empowerment Act or the MOVE Act. As the ranking member of the Rules Committee, I have served alongside Chairman Schumer and commend him for his decision to make this a priority and move it through the committee. Our military personnel make tremendous sacrifices for this country, and we need to make sure they are able to exercise their right to vote. I thank Senator Schumer's staff as well for the cooperative way in which we have moved this forward and for his willingness to deal with two other colleagues on the committee, Senator Chambliss and Senator Nelson.

When the legislation was introduced in its original form, I raised concerns with Senator Schumer about some of its provisions. He worked with me and my staff to address those concerns, and the amendment before us today effectively does so. That is why I am pleased to now be a cosponsor of the bill.

The difficulties our service personnel face in attempting to vote have been well documented. The Senator from New York has described them. I believe this amendment deals with them in a proper fashion.

I want to clarify several points for the record. We recognize that election administration is carried out at the local level, and we have no intention of transferring those functions to the State in this legislation. The amendment makes clear that States may comply with the obligations imposed on them hereunder by delegating their responsibilities to other jurisdictions in the States, just as they have for so many years in complying with the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. Also, the amendment requires States seeking Federal funds to meet the requirements imposed by this amendment to update their State plans which have been previously submitted pursuant to HAVA, the Help America Vote Act. The amendment clarifies that only States seeking the funds authorized by and appropriated pursuant to this amendment are obligated to update their State plans.

With that clarification, I thank Senator Schumer and my other colleagues who worked so hard on this legislation: the two I mentioned, Senators Chambliss and Nelson, as well as Senator Cornyn, who is not a member of the committee but who has worked on it. I appreciate their bringing the issue before the Senate. I am proud to support it and look forward to its unanimous passage.

Madam President, I am pleased to join with my colleagues in making some comments about our former colleague, Norm Coleman. I welcome Senator Franken to the Senate. I welcome him to his service here and congratulate him on his victory. But it would come as no surprise that Senator Coleman will be sadly missed.

I had the experience of serving with him on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee where he served as the chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation. This is a subcommittee that has an interesting history. It has the history of some demagoguery if you go back into the past. It also has a history of some accomplishment of the various Senators who have served there. I

think it unusual that a freshman Senator would serve in that capacity and serve as if he were not a freshman but a seasoned veteran. He took over that assignment and went after a number of areas of controversy, and with a persistence that served him and the Senate very well, pursued a number of difficulties.

So with all of the things we have heard about Norm Coleman--his intelligence, his grace, his willingness to work hard and at the same time do so with a sense of class about him--I add my tribute to his ability to take on a difficult assignment and follow it through.

I wish him and his wife and his family well in their activities now. I will not go through the resume the Republican leader has established for us. I simply add my voice of gratitude for the opportunity of serving with Norm Coleman and my best wishes for him in his future activities. He is a young and vigorous enough man that I think we will hear far more from him in the years ahead.

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

Mr. President, I rise today to honor Dr. Georg Schulze Zumkley and members of his team at the German Information Center USA for their dedication in promoting friendship between the United States and Germany. Dr. Zumkley's work to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Berlin Airlift is truly appreciated.

In the spring of 1948, Berlin was isolated within the Soviet occupation zone and had only 35 days' worth of food and 45 days' worth of coal remaining for the city. A massive American, British, and French airlift mounted to save the city and provide supplies necessary to sustain life in Berlin. Mr. President, 2008 marked the 60th anniversary of the Berlin Airlift, one of the largest and longest running humanitarian airlift operations in history.

Dr. Zumkley's group was given the mission to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Berlin Airlift, honor Airlift veterans, and tell the story of this great humanitarian effort. They planned and implemented the successful ``Friends-Always: 60 Years After the Berlin Airlift'' outreach program, and designed, produced and managed ``The Berlin Airlift--A Legacy of Friendship'' exhibit at more than 25 venues across the United States. It is estimated that more than 150,000 people will have visited the exhibit personally and learned about the legacy of the Berlin Airlift during its tour of the United States. Dr. Zumkley ensured that Airlift veterans personally received the German-American Friendship award as an expression of appreciation and gratitude from the German people. Additionally, Dr. Zumkley has worked far above and beyond his duties and displayed outstanding leadership qualities in the fulfillment of the team's mission.

I know my fellow Senators join me in thanking Dr. Zumkley and his team for their endeavors to promote U.S.-German friendship and to honor and celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Berlin Airlift.

Mr. President, I wish to speak for 10 minutes in morning business following Senator Graham, and I ask unanimous consent to proceed on that basis. I will be speaking as in morning business, as I assume the Senator will be.

Mr. President, when the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution and gave us our government, they did so out of a deep distrust of the power of government coming out of their experience with King George, and they created a government that limits the use of power, deliberately setting up a system of checks and balances, a doctrine of separation of powers and so on, with which we are all familiar.

Out of that, Americans have become used to the idea that there are limits on governmental power, and one of the concerns I hear when I visit with my constituents in Utah is that they are afraid there are now no limits on governmental power, or at least there is certainly not enough limits on governmental power. I am asked: Where does it stop? The government can take over insurance companies. The government can take over financial institutions. The government can take over an automobile company. The government can dictate who gets to be chief executive and how much he or she will be paid. Aren't there supposed to be limits on governmental power?

Today, we have a proposal brought forward by the administration with respect to how the regulatory pattern for our financial institutions should be changed. As I look at that proposal, I ask the same questions my constituents are asking: Shouldn't there be some limits on governmental power? Isn't this going a bit far? Indeed, I think it is a legitimate question, and I wanted to address it for a moment.

First, let's understand a fundamental truth about the economy. That is that all wealth comes from taking risks. Farmers take risks when they plant seeds, not knowing what the weather is going to do. Businessmen and women take risks when they open businesses, not knowing what the market is going to do. New wealth comes out when we have a bumper crop. New wealth comes out when a business started in a garage turns into Hewlett Packard, but in every instance you take risks.

The second element that has to be added to risk-taking is the access to accumulated wealth. Sometimes it comes by a wealth you have accumulated yourself. Sometimes it comes from loans from your brother- in-law. Sometimes it comes from running up your credit card. Sometimes it comes from venture capitalists. In many instances, it comes from banks. But you take a risk, and you have to have access to some kind of accumulated capital or you cannot create new wealth.

All right. Why do people take risks? Because they expect there will be a reward in the form of a return on the capital they have taken. Whether it comes from a bank loan that they can pay back or from investor capital that will then receive dividends, there will be a reward. The risk/reward relationship is at the base of the growth and power of the American economy.

In the present crisis, we have had people saying: Yes, but there are some entities that are simply too big to fail, we must not allow them to fail, and particularly in the financial services industry. So that is why we have this proposal today from the Obama administration. They want to deal with systemic risk, as they call it, or those tier 1 entities which they describe as what I have just said: They are too big to fail and we are not going to allow them to fail, and this is the regulatory regime we will set up.

If there are companies or entities that are too big to fail, this regime is too big to function. It is so focused on preventing failure that it is stacked in such a way that it will penalize the risk taker and prevent the risk taker from taking a risk and therefore not reap any kind of a reward.

There is a heavy emphasis on consumer protection. I am all for that. I think we should have all of the kinds of regulations that say you need labels on things that might not be safe. That protects the consumer. You need nutritional information on things that might make you too fat, which protects the consumer. But let's not protect the consumer to the point where they cannot buy anything or, in this case, protect the system from any possible failure to the point that there is no risk and therefore ultimately no reward. By giving the Federal Reserve the kinds of powers this proposal does, we are moving down that road, and once again we are raising the question: Are there no limits on the amount of power that government can have and accumulate?

I am convinced that if this massive, new expansion of power in the hands of the government goes forward unimpeded, we will see the shutting off of sources of credit and therefore the contraction of the economy and ultimately the need for more bailouts, more expenditures of Federal funds to try to keep entities alive. They can stay alive if they can attract capital from the private markets, but that is risky. So if we say: No, we are not going to allow the risks, we shut off the incentive of the private market to invest in some of these entities or to loan money to some of these entities. And then we say: But the entity is so important to our economy that we cannot allow it to fail. So we turn to the taxpayer and say: Let's put more taxpayer money into the entity because it is too big to fail.

That is what I see down the road for this proposal. I may be wrong. But I point out that we in the Congress have, by law, created a commission to study what caused the present mess we are in and report back to the Congress. We wrote into that law a specific date--December 15, 2010--to make sure the commission had enough time to examine all of the possibilities, to delve deeply enough into the issue to fully understand it, and then report back to us with their findings. Now we are being told: Forget the commission. Forget the analysis of what happened. We

think we know. Let's put this regulatory regime in place--one that is too big to function--now. Let's do it quickly. Let's have it done by the August recess. All right, we can't get it done by the August recess. We are going to have health care done by the August recess, so we will do it before Halloween, or whatever artificial date some may choose to put on it.

The reality is, the issue is huge, the issue needs to be examined carefully, and we need to do it within the parameters of the basic suspicion the Founding Fathers had about the government. We should do it with an understanding that there are limits to government power and that government power has the capacity to damage the economy every bit as much as it has the power to help it move forward.

Mr. President, I say let's not move with the speed and haste we are hearing about this proposal. Let's subject it to the most careful examination we possibly can throughout the processes of Congress, and let's make sure that when we do make regulatory changes with respect to the financial institutions, we do them in a way that will not fail and that can properly function.

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

Mr. President, we have just heard from the President of the United States with respect to an effort to get a bipartisan health care plan. I have been to the White House summit on health care. I have heard the President speak directly to this issue. I applaud him in his effort to make sure we deal with this problem intelligently, and I accept at face value his desire that it be done in a bipartisan manner.

But as we have this discussion about doing this in a bipartisan manner, it all ultimately comes down to one sticking point that seems to be firmly established in the President's position and firmly established in the position of those who sit on this side of the aisle. At the moment, that sticking point seems to be irreconcilable. I want to talk about it in direct terms so that we understand what it is we are talking about and those who listen will understand why those of us who are Republicans are determined to stand firm on this point.

This is the point: Shall there be a public plan, a government-run option in the choices that are available to people with respect to health care?

Along with Senator Wyden of Oregon, I have cosponsored the Healthy Americans Act, which is determined to create as many options as possible, to create a wide range of choices for Americans to make with respect to their health care.

We recognize we are going to have to change the tax laws in order to give people control over their own health care dollars. Right now, health care is the only part of the economy where the individual receiving the goods or services does not control the money that pays for the goods or services. So it is obvious that you will not have market forces available in that circumstance. If the individual who is receiving the goods or services controls the money that pays for the goods or services, he or she will make a different choice than if someone else is controlling the money. But in health care, somebody else makes the choice, and that is why the core function of the Healthy Americans Act, which Senator Wyden and I are cosponsoring, says individuals should be in control of their own money and we should have as many choices as possible so that individuals can go out in the market.

There will be competing forces. Competition brings prices down. Competition creates new opportunities. Competition fills niche markets. We believe all of that will happen if we have this degree of choice.

When we have had this conversation with officials of the administration, they don't disagree. As a matter of fact, many officials of the administration have said to me: We really like what you are doing with Senator Wyden, and we applaud you, Senator Bennett, for reaching out in a bipartisan way to try to solve this problem. But we just have one additional factor we would like to add to your bill. We would like to say that as a backup, as a final option, we want a government-run plan to be there as one of the available choices, just in case none of the others work. That is, as I say, the sticking point here.

I have said to members of the administration: If we end up with a government-run plan as one of the options in my bill, I will vote against my own bill.

The government-run option will change the playing field, will ultimately drive out all of the other choices because the government is in a position to subsidize it. The government is in a position to make it more

attractive than anything else and thereby gain the blessing of the voters because the voters will say: The government took care of those greedy companies that would otherwise make me pay this, that, or the other. Here, the government choice is cheaper; isn't it wonderful that the government is looking out for me? Ultimately, we would end up with a government plan, single payer for the whole country.

I know there are many of my friends on the other side of the aisle who want that, and they are very open about it and very direct about it. They say a number of things. They say the government plan is cheaper, the government plan provides health care for everybody, the government plan is fairer, and that is what we ought to have.

I wish to spend a little time talking about the experience of those countries that have adopted that attitude. If I may be personal and give my own example before I get into the statistics, I will tell you about a situation when I was living in Great Britain and had a medical problem. I won't bore you, Mr. President, with the details of the problem, simply that I went to a doctor in Scotland to see if anything should be done. The doctor first signed me up because under the British system a doctor--this shows how long ago it was, but the system has not changed--got a shilling a week for every patient he signed up on his list. So immediately he wanted to sign me up so he would get that shilling for having me there, which would be a decimal of a pound today rather than that old designation.

Once he had me signed up, as I say, he examined me. He said: Yes, you do need treatment. And he gave me a piece of paper that would allow me to go to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, where I was to see a surgeon. So I went to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and sat there for most of the day before a doctor could finally see me.

The doctor saw me and checked me out and said: Yes, indeed, you should be scheduled for surgery.

I said: Fine. I have a schedule. Can you give me some idea when the surgery will be so I can arrange my affairs to be available?

He said: My guess would be 9 months.

I said: I am going to be returning to the United States in less than 9 months, so I guess we can just forget this.

I communicated that to my father, who was in the United States, and he said: I don't think so. Can you get a surgeon who would operate on you right away?

So I inquired and I was told: Yes, you can get a private surgeon, but the private surgeon cannot take the health care system dollars or pounds. He is outside of it. If he stays in private practice, he cannot participate in the national health system at all.

I said: OK, that is fine.

My father said: I will pay it. Where can you go?

I went to the private surgeon and, yes, he had a practice where he took only patients who were outside of the health plan. He looked at it and said: Yes, you need surgery.

I said: All right. When?

He said: Will Wednesday be soon enough?

This was on a Monday.

I said: All right.

We went into a private hospital. It was separated from the national health service. He performed the surgery. I paid him cash, got the thing taken care of, and finished my time in Great Britain with that particular problem solved.

I would like to think that was only the case back when I was younger, but I find it is still the case, not only in Great Britain but in other countries that have this kind of problem.

Let me share a few statistics with you of what happens with respect to this single-payer system.

One of the things we are told by those who support single payers is that the outcomes in these other countries are really not any different than they are in America, that we are paying far more in America and the outcomes are basically the same. The statistic they usually use in order to prove that America is not any better is life expectancy and infant mortality. They say as a country, our life expectancy is not that much better than anybody else's and our infant mortality rate is as high or higher than other countries. Shame on us, we are not getting good health care that we are paying for.

Life expectancy is tied in very many cases to either ethnic or geographic locations. The life expectancy, for example, in Utah, where the behavior is a little different than it is in some other places, is substantially higher and has little or nothing to do with the health care. It has to do with the culture in Utah that causes people to behave in a healthier lifestyle.

Let's go beyond this broad-brush approach and look at some specifics.

The largest international study to date has found that the 5-year survival rate for all types of cancer among both men and women is higher in the United States than in Europe. Isn't that a statistic showing that we are getting a better result in America than in Europe? A cancer survival rate is not something that is due to the geography of where you are born. If you are born in the inner city, that has something to do with infant mortality rates, or if you live in a healthy environment, that has something to do with life expectancy. Cancer survival rate has to do with health care, and the health care in the United States is better than it is in Europe and has produced a higher survival rate for both men and women.

In Britain, there are one-fourth as many CT scanners per capita as there are in the United States and one-third as many MRIs. If we think the CT scanner and the MRI produce a better result in terms of health care, we want to be in the United States. We do not want to be in one of these single-payer, government plans of the kind President Obama wants as an option destroying the other options and choices there would be if we pass the Healthy Americans Act.

The rate for treating kidney failure--dialysis or transplants--is five times higher in the United States for patients between the ages of 45 and 84 and nine times higher for patients 85 years and older. Again, there is a personal interest here because members of my family have kidney disease. I want them in the United States with the kind of system we have where they do not have to wait and they do not have to worry about government regulations. I want them here where it is five times better than it is in Europe with respect to kidney disease.

Right now, nearly 1.8 million Britons are waiting for hospital or outpatient treatments at any given time--1.8 million waiting in the circumstance that I described in my own situation. In 2002 to 2004, dialysis patients waited an average of 16 days for permanent blood vessel access in the United States, or 20 days in Europe, and 62 days in Canada.

We often hear about the benefits of being in Canada. I have constituents who come from Canada, who have moved to Utah. Every time this comes up, they come to me and say: Senator, whatever you do, do not give us the Canadian system. Whatever you do, make sure that America doesn't go in the direction the Canadians have gone.

Let me give you some examples to demonstrate why that is good advice. This is one that broke out in the debate in the Canadian Parliament. A woman by the name of Emily Morely, in March of 2006, was informed by her doctor that her cancer had spread and she needed to see an oncologist, and then she was told: You will not be able to get an appointment for months. Well, if my cancer is spreading, I don't want to wait months for an appointment. Her family raised a ruckus, they called the local newspaper, a petition was signed by her neighbors demanding she get care, and then, in response to that, the government got her to a specialist. Once again, in the government, you respond to the voters. If you are getting bad publicity in the press, or the voters don't like what you are doing: Oh, let's take her to a specialist. So she got to a specialist and he told her she had only 3 months to live.

Well, she at least had time to put her affairs in order. Had she not had the intervention of her family and her neighbors, it is quite likely she would have died before even seeing an oncologist for the first time.

But let's go to another example that may be even closer to home to the legislators. A member of Parliament in Canada, Belinda Stronach, strongly supports the Canadian health care system, and she would object to this kind of argument that the Canadian health care system isn't very good. But where did she go when she was diagnosed with

cancer in 2007? She went to California and paid for the treatment out of pocket. Even a member of Parliament who supports the Canadian system recognized that the government plan didn't work for her. And with her own health at risk, she came to America and took advantage of what we offer here.

There is the case of the mother in Calgary, Alberta who was expecting quadruplets. I am the father of twins, and they came as a great surprise. Quadruplets is something I am not sure we could handle, and certainly they would require very good facilities to deal with a pregnancy that produces quadruplets. She is in Albert, Canada, and she is flown to Great Falls, MT, to deliver the quadruplets. Great Falls, MT, is not thought of as one of the great centers of health care excellence in the United States. Yet the facilities in this small town in Montana were better than any facility available anywhere in Alberta.

These are the examples of a government-run plan and because people who are getting the service don't control the money the government plan can end up focusing on overall cost control to the detriment of the people who are trying to access it. I don't think ultimately the American voters, having gotten used to the access that they currently have--being used to the idea that they do not have to wait--would ultimately tolerate a government plan.

My consult to President Obama and to my colleagues here in the Senate is to slow down a little. We are talking about restructuring 18 percent of the entire economy. We spend 18 percent of our GDP on health care. I agree absolutely that it is long past time that we addressed this issue; that we rationalize the challenge; and that we do things that make it far more effective.

As I have spent the last 3 or so years working with Senator Wyden to try to understand the problem and fashion the Healthy Americans Act in a way that will solve the problem, I have discovered a great truth that I didn't realize before, and that is this: The greatest cost control factor in health care is quality. The best health care is the cheapest health care. And it has been achieved in those places that have focused on quality first and the patient first, and it has not involved any government intervention.

Dartmouth has done a study and told us the three cities in the United States where you get the best health care. They are Seattle, WA; Rochester, MN; and Salt Lake City, UT. I take some pride in that fact. And then the Dartmouth study goes on to say that if every American got his or her health care in Salt Lake City, UT, it would not only be the best in the United States, it would be one-third cheaper than the national average.

Those are the kinds of examples we should be focusing on and learning from, and then doing our best to write legislation that would support that. Slow down. We are not going to understand this in time for any artificial deadline set for some political agenda. I understand the sense of urgency that the Obama administration feels on this issue, and I share the idea that now is the time to address it. This is the Congress in which we should pass it. But I don't think setting a deadline to say it must be done in July, when we are talking about 18 percent of GDP, is that persuasive.

We can examine these alternatives a little more carefully than the present deadline will allow us to do. We can say: All right, why is quality the best cost control, and does our bill create the kinds of incentives and rewards focused on quality that will produce that result, instead of saying: Whatever else you do, you have to have a government option in there. You have to have a government plan that can compete with all the rest of this, and thus set us up for the kind of situation where we would move as a nation to imitate Great Britain or Canada or the others that have produced the kinds of examples I have talked about here.

So I am more than willing and I am anxious to work with President Obama and his administration, to work with my friends across the aisle. I have worked with Senator Wyden for these past 3-plus years to try to fashion an intelligent solution. But I repeat what I said at the beginning: The sticking point in this entire debate is the demand on the part of the Obama administration that the final product have within it a government plan as one of the options. And if that happens, I vote against my own bill. If that happens, I do everything I can to say no. Because I am convinced if that happens, we end up with a situation where there is only one option that survives.

One of my colleagues has described this, I think, quite well. He says: Having a government plan as one of the options is a little like taking an elephant into a room full of mice and then saying: All right, this is a roomful of animals, let's let them compete. And as the elephant walks around the room, pretty soon there aren't any mice left. A government plan is the elephant in the room.

Those of us who want to solve this problem intelligently say: Let's learn from the examples of those people who have adopted a single-payer system. Let us realize that the American experiment in health care produces better outcomes in all of the areas I have outlined. And as politicians, let's realize that the American voter will never stand for the kind of rationing by delay that seems to have crept into every other system. Let's take our time to do it right. There is a bipartisan consensus to get it done. We can work together and make that accomplishment, if we are not quite so insistent that the government plan ultimately is the only way to go.

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

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

Madam President, I rise to thank the chairman of the full committee, along with the ranking member, for their wisdom with respect to the money allocated for Guantanamo Bay and the prison there. I want to make a few comments with respect to the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

I have visited the prison at Guantanamo Bay. I led a CODEL--for those watching on television, that means a congressional delegation--of myself, members of the House, and, on this occasion, I took some members of the European Parliament. That is interesting, because when we came back and held a press conference to report what we had found, members of the European Parliament on the CODEL said, ``We cannot participate in this press conference.'' I said, ``Why?'' They said, ``If we told the truth about what we saw at Guantanamo, we could not go home to Europe. The animosity toward Guantanamo in Europe is so strong that if we told the truth about how good things are down there, we would be attacked politically in Europe and we would lose our seat in the European Parliament.''

I said: Well, I don't want you to lose your seats in the European Parliament. I won't ask you to participate. But we did hold a press conference, and one of those who did participate said: I wish the prisons in my district back home were as good as the prison in Guantanamo.

Let me describe what we found in Guantanamo, not with respect to how well the prison was designed or how well the prison was administered but who the prisoners are, or, as they are appropriately called, the detainees.

If you talk to the detainees, every one of them is a goat herder picked up by accident by the American troops when they were in Afghanistan or in Iraq or wherever it was. None of them had any connection with al-Qaida at all. This was all a huge mistake.

I have been in the storeroom where they keep all of the items that were taken from these detainees when they were picked up. The question arises: What is a goat herder doing with hundreds of dollars of American money in $100 bills? What is a goat herder doing with sophisticated explosive equipment in his back sack? What is a goat herder doing with forged passports and other information and documentation? Maybe these people are not all goat herders. Maybe these people really are connected with al-Qaida, just based on what they found.

I have watched an interrogation take place at Guantanamo by closed- circuit television. The interrogation room is one which has stuffed furniture, pleasant surroundings. The detainee, to be sure, has irons on his legs so that he cannot leave his chair where he is sitting. They are not tying him directly to the chair, but he couldn't get up and walk out. But he is sitting on the chair, and the interrogator is sitting across the room in another chair, and they are having a pleasant conversation.

You say: What kind of an interrogation is this? The interrogation is a conversation, and it goes on for an hour, an hour and a half. Then next week there is another conversation that goes on for an hour, an hour and a half, 2 hours, whatever it might be. Out of those conversations, little items begin to slip from the mouth of the detainee. The interrogator is able to take those items and piece them together, and pretty soon, after a few weeks or maybe a month or two, the interrogator knows that goat herder A has just identified goat herder B as an explosives expert high in the level of al-Qaida. Then, based on that information, when goat herder B is in for his interrogation, there is a conversation, and another thing starts to slip. Over a period of months, a pattern of information emerges that makes it possible to identify who is what and where in the whole al- Qaida operation.

Understand, the interrogation is not Soviet style to try to beat a confession out of anybody. It is to find out information that can be used in the war against terror. This information is painstakingly put together over a period of time. Pretty soon, the pattern emerges, and the interrogators begin to understand who these people are, what their relationship to each other may be, and what their role was out on the battlefield.

One of the things I had not realized until I got there was that as a result of this process, the determination has been made with respect to hundreds of these detainees that they are no longer dangerous, they no longer have any information we need, they are no longer in a position to be dangerous to the United States. When that determination is made, they are released.

Hundreds of the detainees at Guantanamo have been released. Many of them have showed up again on the battlefield. Indeed, some of them have been killed by American troops on the battlefield as they have been fighting back, which means the interrogators who decided they were no longer dangerous made a mistake. It turns out they really were dangerous, they really were connected at a higher level than we were able to determine through the interrogator, and they had fooled the interrogator into believing they were innocent bystanders who somehow did not belong there, and they got released and found their way back to Afghanistan, back to the battlefield. Some of them whom we knew well enough from their time in Guantanamo identified on the battlefield were shot and killed by American forces in firefights where they were attacking Americans.

One of the things they do at Guantanamo--``they'' being the detainees--is to make every effort to communicate with each other and create conspiracies within the prison. Conspiracies to do what? Conspiracies to create incidents that will create international outrage against the United States.

Two weeks before we arrived there, there was one such incident. I had not seen it in the American newspapers. I was told that it was reported in the American newspapers but only in passing. When we got the details from the guards and the administrators of the prison describing the specifics of what had happened, I realized that the story in the American newspapers was very sketchy.

Over a period of months, the detainees conspired together to create an incident in the area that was part of the exercise facility. They planned it very carefully. They worked together. They complied with all of the rules in the prison that would allow them greater freedom because as the commandant of the prison said to us: I don't have very many sticks; I only have carrots.

To get people to cooperate, if they abide by the rules they lay down, we give them greater freedom, we give them greater opportunities. So these people would comply in every way until they could get to a circumstance where they could talk to each other, be on the exercise field, and hatch their plan.

Finally, this is what they did. They put up some screens in the form of clothing or some kind of cover so that the guards, for a short period of time, could not see what they were doing in this room. In that period of time, they pulled down the fluorescent tubes from the light fixtures in the ceiling so that they could use them as weapons. At the same time, they covered the floor with a variety of liquids, their purpose was to make the floor as slippery as possible. Then when the guard came in to see what was going on because the screens had gone up, as he walked in, suddenly he was standing on liquids that were slippery so that he couldn't

get his footing very well, and they were attacking him with the fluorescent tubes as weapons, trying to create a significant incident. Fortunately, he was able to keep his footing. He was able to pull out his weapon. He was able to gain control of the situation, and the rest of the guards were alerted fast enough to come in before it turned into serious injury. But the American guard came very close to serious injury.

Their hope was, as nearly as the interrogators could figure out, to provoke the Americans into killing one of them. Their hope was to create a circumstance where there would be a death in Guantanamo that would create a worldwide outcry of outrage against the brutal Americans in this prison and thereby make their political point.

There were many other examples which were given to us of attacks on the guards by the prisoners in circumstances, again, that are not appropriate to discuss in this setting but that are thoroughly disgusting and outrageous in terms of the violation of the person of the guards involved.

On one occasion where it was particularly outrageous, it was a young woman who had joined the Navy and was in her first assignment doing her best to patrol up and down an aisle between the cells. In this case, the cells had screens on them through which items could be thrown. They were thrown at her and in her face.

Their commanding officer said to her: Go take a shower and take the afternoon off, to recover from this horrendous kind of experience for her.

She said: I will take the shower, I will get a clean uniform, but I will come back. I will not let them intimidate me to say I can no longer walk my patrol.

That is the kind of valor and integrity we have from the Americans who are there policing these people.

I could go on about other things we discovered. The primary health care problem the detainees have in Guantanamo is obesity. They are fed so well and they have no control on how much they eat; they can use whatever they want from the food as they come into the commissary. The doctors and the nurses who are there to take care of them say we have a problem of overweight with every one of them. They have never had this much food available to them in their lives.

They are all looked after. Many of them came with significant health care problems off the battlefield, and it is the American medical corps that has made them well and whole.

Why do I dwell on all of this about the nature of the prisoners? Because I am sympathetic with those Americans who say: We don't want these people in our prisons. And indeed we don't--not because of a ``not in my backyard'' syndrome, but guards who are trained to deal with the kinds of prisoners who show up in American prisons now are not prepared to deal with people who are potential suicides to make a point, people who will deliberately provoke the guard in the hope that they will get killed or seriously injured in order to make an international incident. This is not your average automobile stealer. This is not even your average drug dealer. This is someone who has a political agenda and sees the prison in America as the stage on which that agenda can be acted out. To put that prisoner into an American prison where they are going to be rubbing shoulders with other convicts who have absolutely no idea what they are getting into and call upon guards to deal with them who have no idea what they are getting into is seriously not a good idea.

Where do you keep people like this? You keep them in a facility that is designed to deal with them. You keep them with guards who are trained to deal with them. And you use the facility to get the information they can give you to be helpful in the war on terror. That is what the prison at Guantanamo was built to become, and that is what it is.

If the President of the United States now decides that keeping Guantanamo open is a political embarrassment with other countries in the world and it becomes necessary for us in our diplomacy to close Guantanamo, I say that is his decision. The Constitution gives him the responsibility of foreign affairs, and I will respect that decision. But as a Member of the Congress, I don't want to fund that decision until I know what he has in mind as an alternative place to put them. The idea of breaking them up and scattering them around the United States and letting them go to ordinary prisons--be they Federal, State, or local--in the United States is to ignore who they are and ignore what they can do and ignore the challenge they represent to law enforcement and penitentiary personnel in America's existing prisons. So that is why I applaud the chairman in his decision to say we are going to put this off. We are going to delay the time when Guantanamo will be closed until we have a logical place to put them.

Because right now, if you want to describe the logical place to put these prisoners at this time, in this particular struggle with al-Qaida and the rest of the terrorists, the logical place is where they are right now. If it means keeping Guantanamo prison for an extra year or an extra 2 years or whatever it takes to get an intelligent alternative, I say, let's do that. Because the intelligent alternative does not exist at the moment.

I hear no plans being drawn to create it in the future. I think we owe it to those Americans who would otherwise have to deal with it if the U.S. Navy doesn't, to say we are not going to turn them over to you until you have a legitimate and well-thought-out plan as to the way to deal with it.

It is for that reason, again, that I congratulate the chairman and the committee on the decision to withhold this funding until such a plan has been made available to us.

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