Floor Statements

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 5 minutes.

Mr. President, last year, I was pleased to provide the President with the names of three superbly qualified Delawareans for him to consider for the one open seat on the U.S. District Court in Delaware. Any one of them would have made an excellent addition to the court, and all of them uphold the high regard in which this court is held, not only in Delaware but across the country.

The President has made a particularly strong choice in nominating Richard G. Andrews for this judicial appointment this past May. The Senate Judiciary Committee used sound judgment in approving his nomination unanimously in September. We are grateful for the expeditious handling and approval of this nomination--unanimously.

When I travel across Delaware, I often hear from people who are convinced that the Senate is overwhelmed by partisan tensions. I am sure that my colleagues--both Republicans and Democrats here today-- have heard similar concerns. Confirming Rich Andrews will help to win back confidence that we can work together to do the right thing, not just for the people of Delaware but the people of America.

Throughout his career, Rich Andrews has been supported by members of both parties. He was appointed to U.S. Attorney under Attorney General Janet Reno and Attorney General John Ashcroft. Most recently, the Senate Judiciary Committee supported his nomination without one single dissent.

Our country is fortunate that someone with his outstanding credentials has stepped forward to do this critical work. Mr. Andrews' education, background, and legal experience make him superbly qualified for this position.

As a student at Haverford College, Rich Andrews graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in political science, after which he earned his law degree at the University of California at Berkley--where he served as Note and Comment Editor for the California Law Review. After law school, Rich Andrews launched his career as a Clerk for the Honorable Collins J. Seitz, legendary chief judge of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

Following his clerkship, for 23 years Rich served as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Wilmington--serving in a number of high- profile positions and eventually rising to the position of assistant U.S. attorney. When duty called, he stepped up to serve as acting U.S. attorney on three separate occasions. I kidded him and said he served as acting U.S. attorney longer than other people have served as U.S. attorney in other States. During his time with the United States Attorney's office, Rich prepared and prosecuted countless Federal cases, and in so doing, gained wide-ranging trial experience that he will draw upon heavily while serving as District Court Judge, if confirmed today.

Currently, Rich serves as the State prosecutor for the Delaware Department of Justice, where he manages the Criminal Division, oversees more than 70 deputy attorneys general, and makes critical decisions about how to proceed in high-level criminal cases.

Finally, in addition to his professional experience, Rich is a family man and a person of great character. His wife, Cathy Lanctot is the associate dean and a professor of law at Villanova University. Their son Peter is a sophomore at Columbia University, and their daughter Amy is a senior--and student council president--at Mount Pleasant High School, not far from where my family and I live.

In his ``free time,'' Rich has coached for the Concord Soccer Association of Delaware for more than a decade--and I understand that Rich also has spent the last 4 years grading answers for the Delaware bar exam.

In every facet of his life, Richard Andrews has performed with distinction. Let me conclude by saying that I am proud to support someone who has provided, and who will continue to provide, exemplary service for the people of our State and Nation.

His sound legal judgment, his tireless work ethic, and his experience as a Federal prosecutor have prepared Richard Andrews well to fill this seat on the U.S. District Court in Delaware. I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting his confirmation.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, just a few minutes ago, Senators Lieberman, Collins, Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts, and I gathered in the press gallery upstairs to unveil a proposed compromise that is designed to help ensure we have a viable, strong U.S. Postal Service in this country for the next 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years and longer.

There has been a lot of time spent in debate over jobs: How are we going to save jobs? How are we going to create jobs in this rough economy we are moving through? As it turns out, there are about 7 million jobs that flow from the Postal Service. There are only about 500,000 people who actually work for the Postal Service these days. There are roughly another 7 million who are associated with the Postal Service in one way or the other.

If we do nothing, the Postal Service--which lost $10 billion last year, is on track to lose a couple hundred billion dollars over the next 10 years--will literally go out of business next year--not in 10 years, not in 5 years but next year. That is a consequence none of us can look forward to and we need to provide predictability and certainty and part of that is to make sure we have a Postal Service that meets the needs of our businesses and the interests of our citizens.

The situation is dire, but it is not hopeless. This is one we can fix and the four of us believe this legislation will fix this problem not in 5 years, not in 10 years from now but literally provide the fix that is needed this year.

I mentioned in our press conference that a couple years ago my sister and I went to the home of my parents. My parents are now both deceased. We went to their home and we rooted through all kinds of nooks and crannies and boxes in the attic. We came across a treasure trove of letters they exchanged during World War II. They wrote to one another when my dad was overseas. They wrote several times a week. They saved the letters.

When I was in Southeast Asia back during the Vietnam War, the happiest day of the week for us was the day the mail came. The letters, the postcards, the birthday cards, the packages we received, magazines, the newspapers, made that the best day of the week.

When our Presiding Officer and I go on a CODEL to Afghanistan or to Iraq to visit our troops and see how they are doing and what we need to be doing, they still get the mail over there, but it is not like it was when I was serving or when my dad or my uncles were all serving. Troops today communicate with their families back home with Skype. They have the ability to use the cell phones. They have the Internet, Facebook, Twitter. You name it, it is a different game today. As the way we communicate in this country and in this world has changed, the Postal Service needs to change the way they do business and they are ready and anxious to do just that.

I think there is a good analogy in trying to figure out what the Postal Service needs to do to right size its enterprise. There is a good analogy we can draw from by looking back just 3 or 4 years ago at the situation the U.S. auto industry was in. Think about this: In 1970, my first trip to Southeast Asia, the market share of Ford, Chrysler, and GM was just about 85 percent. In 2009, their market share dropped to less than 50 percent.

When the auto industry reported to us and to the rest of the country in 2009 that given their market share, they had more employees than they needed, they had more auto plants than they needed, and there was a mismatch in terms of the wage-benefit structure they were paying their own employees versus the wage benefits that were being paid to their competition selling cars, trucks, and vans in this country, they asked us for a bailout--not exactly a bailout. They asked for a cash transfusion. They promised to pay it back with interest. Lo and behold, they have, and 3 years later Ford, Chrysler, and GM are still in business. They have fewer employees than they had 3 years ago. They have fewer auto plants than they had, but they have changed the wage- benefit structure and made some changes in their health care costs and the way they administer health care costs which are now overseen by the United Auto Workers. As I said earlier, the moneys we invested in those two companies, Chrysler and GM, was money that has been repaid, largely, with interest.

The Postal Service, in 2011, is in a situation not unlike where our auto industry was a couple years ago. Given their market share, the Postal Service has more employees than they need. The Postal Service has more post offices than they need. They have more processing centers around the country than they need. What they would like to be able to do is not to fire employees, not to abrogate labor contracts. What they have asked to do is to do what the auto industry did in working with their workers; that is, to incentivize people at the Postal Service who are eligible to retire to go ahead and retire. There are about 125,000 of them. We have seen the Postal Service head count drop from 800,000 employees a decade ago to a little under 600,000 today. The Postal Service needs to reduce the head count by another 100,000 or so over the next couple years by incentivizing people eligible to retire to go ahead and retire. The Postal Service thinks they can do that for about $2 billion. By doing that, 100,000 Postal Service employees will be eligible to retire. That will save the Postal Service $8 billion a year going forward.

Last year, the Postal Service lost $10 billion, and in the years to come they are projected to lose about $20 billion. We could literally address about half of that financial challenge with one fell swoop, incentivize employees eligible to retire.

The Postal Service is interested in being able to close some post offices. They would like to be able to consolidate some post offices-- where they have two, make one. In some cases, they would like to be able to take the services they provide at a post office and offer them at maybe a retail outlet that is open more than 6 days a week or maybe a retail outlet open 24/7, potentially put postal services in some supermarkets in communities across the country, put them in some convenience stores or maybe in pharmacies. The idea would not be to provide worse service; the idea would be to provide better service in a lot of instances.

There are 33,000 post offices in the country. The Postal Service is looking today at 3,700 of them to decide whether they are viable. Under current law, the Postal Service can close a post office. They cannot do it solely on economic grounds, but they can close a post office pretty much at their volition and maybe have a cursory conversation with the community but not much.

The legislation we have proposed would say that the post office, as they look at these 3,700 post offices that are under review--and perhaps others in the future--that before they go about closing any of them, the Postal Regulatory Commission--which is responsible for setting service standards for the post office--would have to be part of that decisionmaking process in these communities across America. They would make sure the service standards the Regulatory Commission--the regulators, if you will, for the post office--has established are going to be met in the future if a post office is closed or post offices are consolidated or the services are colocated. This has to be a transparent process, where the folks who live and work in those communities have the opportunity to be full participants in that decisionmaking.

With respect to the closure of mail processing centers, there are over 500 of them across the country. The Postal Service would like to close as many as 300 of them. Under the legislation we have proposed, there would be the opportunity for communities, businesses, small and large, postal customers, residential customers, and others to have the opportunity to make clear whether the close of a mail processing center in their town or community would somehow be inopportune and a real detriment to that community in ways that are not fair.

Those are three things that the postal service wants to be able to do: address their head count needs, take a close look at how many post offices we have and whether those services can be provided in a more cost-effective way, and the third is to look at the 500-plus mail processing centers we have and try to figure out how many of those can be closed.

The Postal Service delivers mail from my State to the Presiding Officer's State in Minnesota--I can mail a letter today and probably it would get out there on Friday or maybe Saturday. The standard service today is, in some cases, next-day service; in some cases, service can be as much as 3 days. What the Postal Service has asked is, they will still be able to do 1-day service, but they would like for the standard to be officially 2 to 3 days. That is one of the things they are asking for the opportunity to do, and our bill let's them do that.

The other thing the Postal Service has asked for is some relief, if you will--not a bailout, not taxpayer dollars--with the health care costs. Currently, the Postal Service pays into Medicare for its employees. They are the second largest payer into Medicare of all the employers in the country. They also pay into something called the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. We have the Postal Service sort of paying twice for health care service for its retirees. People 65 and over, 85 percent of them are eligible for Medicare. If they are not, they are still eligible for the Federal employees health benefits as retirees. The Postal Service has asked to do what a lot of other companies do. What a lot of other companies have asked is that Medicare would be their primary source of health care coverage. In addition to that, the Postal Service would provide a Medigap plan to fill the gaps that Medicaid and Medicare do not cover. We think that is a reasonable request. We have also given the Postal Service the opportunity to negotiate with the labor unions to see if it might make sense for the Postal Service to withdraw from the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program and establish their own plan for roughly 1 million people. They will have a chance to study that and decide whether that makes sense.

I will mention three other things we believe the Postal Service can do to reduce costs. One of those is the way they deliver the mail. For a lot of folks in my home, the mail is delivered to our front door. There is a mailbox by our front door. What we are suggesting in our legislation is that in some cases the Postal Service looks at whether that is an efficient way to deliver the mail or maybe is curbside delivery fine. If someone has a mailbox, the letter carrier puts the mail in the mailbox and doesn't have to get out, park the vehicle, walk up to the house and put it in the mailbox and walk back to the vehicle. A fair amount of money can be saved there.

There is money that can be saved in the way workers' comp is handled for Postal Service employees--and we also believe for Federal employees and the President agrees--and we have that legislation in this bill too.

In addition, in finding ways to save money, I would hasten to add it is important for the Postal Service to find new ways to make money. We have seen the TV ads about flat-rate boxes. If it fits, it ships. The price is pretty good, and the service is pretty good too. That is the kind of idea we need more of from the Postal Service. The Postal Service has a partnership with FedEx and UPS. Most people think of them as competitors, but actually the Postal Service has partnered with FedEx and UPS. FedEx and UPS don't want to deliver to every door in America every day for 6 days a week. They don't want to do that. They simply ask the Postal Service to deliver to those doors that FedEx and UPS don't want to deliver to on a particular day, and the Postal Service makes money doing this. They make a lot of money doing this. When the holiday season comes upon us, we will find there is a need for--a lot of people don't just go to brick-and-mortar stores to buy holiday gifts, they want to order online, and the Postal Service can participate broadly in that business too.

The last thing I wish to mention is this: In addition to making money, we have to come up with new ideas. Those are a couple ideas that work. There are others. We are looking for ways to save money in State and local government. Why not consolidate some of the operations in post office buildings. We have a couple more tenants and we can provide service there for other purposes. We do that for passports. Why not do it for other things? We will hear a lot about virtual mailboxes in the days to come and whether that might be a new piece of business for the post office to be involved in as well.

Let me close by saying this: I think as we go forward in this process, we need to be mindful of the Golden Rule, to treat people the way we want to be treated. That includes customers of the Postal Service, be they businesses or residential customers, employees of the Postal Service, the taxpayers. We need to treat everybody the way we want to be treated.

The last thing I would say, my friend from Tennessee, who is standing, and I are two people here who believe we ought to be serious about solving the big problems, as is the Presiding Officer. There are a lot of people who think we are incapable of dealing with big challenges these days.

This is a big challenge. The Postal Service is one of the two largest employers in this country. The consequences of the Postal Service going down next year are not what we want to see visited on this country. Seven million jobs would be in jeopardy. If we simply try to put them on autopilot and let the taxpayers pay for it, it would be over $200 billion more of a hit on the Treasury.

This is a big challenge. This is one we can fix. To the extent we can pull together in the Senate, as we have done in our committee on this issue, I think we will set a good example for our Nation to say: Yes, we can still take on a tough problem, and we can fix it--not in a year or two or three from now but this year.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I would like to set aside a moment to reflect on the life of artist and educator Edward L. Loper, Sr. From the time he started painting at age three until his death at age 95, the Wilmington, DE native known as Ed inspired many to see the world differently through his art. He was a truly gifted man who dedicated his life to his craft and educating the next generation of painters.

Ed Loper was born on April 7, 1916, in Wilmington, DE. As a child, his creativity came out when he picked up a brush and painted the objects and pictures around him. As a young adult, he honed his craft by going to the Philadelphia Art Museum every Saturday to study the paintings housed there, examining the brush strokes and techniques of the great painters that came before him.

He graduated in 1934 from Howard High School where he had been an All-State football and basketball player. Later, it was a chance encounter with Albert Barnes, an entrepreneur and art collector from Philadelphia, that helped him develop his painting style. Barnes invited him to join classes at his museum, but Loper could not afford to do so at the time. Years later, Loper took advantage of this opportunity, attending classes there for 10 years.

He made his love for painting into his profession and worked at the Works Progress Administration as a painter. In the beginning of his career, Ed faced discrimination because he was a black artist in a segregated society, but his work ultimately prevailed beyond society's prejudices. In 1937, he was the first black artist to have a painting accepted to a juried show at the Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts, now the Delaware Art Museum.

His paintings focused on landscapes, still life, and portraits, and he is known for his use of vibrant and rich colors to create complex scenes. He gave visual meaning to the world he knew: city streets, tenements, railroad trestles, marshes, coal yards and pool rooms.

Ed turned to a career in art education and first shared his passion for painting with his students at Delaware's Ferris School. Then, in 1942, he began to teach at the Allied Kid Company. He also taught at the Jewish Community Center, the Delaware Art Museum, Lincoln University, the Delaware College of Art and Design, and at his own studio in his later years. Some of his students studied with him for decades.

He was married to Janet Neville-Loper who resides in Wilmington. His son, Edward Loper Jr., is also a painter. He was also the father to Kenneth Loper, Tina Sturgis and the late Jean Washington and Mary Brower. One of the last things Ed painted was the door to their kitchen, where he illustrated some of their travels to China and Europe.

Ed's talent for color broke the mold of his time, and his passion for teaching others to see through color was unsurpassed. He changed the landscape for black artists and paved the way for others who came after him. He leaves us with the lasting legacy of his work, which currently can be seen in the major permanent collections of the Philadelphia Art Museum; the Delaware Art Museum; the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC; Howard University; the Museum of African American Art in Tampa, FL; among others. Today I commemorate Edward L. Loper, Sr., his life and his outstanding artistic legacy. It was truly a privilege to know him, to have been one of his neighbors for a time, and to be the proud owner of one of his extraordinary paintings.

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

Madam President, I was on the phone earlier this week with a friend in Delaware. We were talking about these free-trade agreements negotiated by the Bush administration and fine-tuned by the Obama administration. My friend said: Why do we have free-trade agreements anyway? I said: Let's go back a little bit in time. At the end of World War II, when the baby boomers and my sister and I came along, the United States was on top of the world. Our industrial infrastructure was strong. We were a vibrant economy. We had come out of the Great Depression with all guns blazing, while a lot of the rest of the world lay in ruin. Some of the nations that would go on to become our greatest competitors, including China, Korea, and some others as well, were in the midst of wars of their own, and eventually they would be governed--at least in part in Korea--by a Communist form of government. So the competition wasn't that great.

Then things started to change. The competition got a whole lot stronger. I remember when I was a kid growing up, at Christmas time we were opening presents around the Christmas tree. I grew up in Danville, VA. We received a knickknack or something from friends of our family, and my father turned it over and it said ``Made in Japan.'' He and my mom kind of sneered at that, as if it were unworthy of us--anything being made in Japan.

Things have changed--in some ways for the better and in other ways maybe not. For a long time, we were the 800-pound gorilla in the room. In terms of auto sales, I think we had about 90 percent of the market share in the United States--maybe more than that--well into the latter part of the last century. Now we don't. Our market share in cars is less than 50 percent. The quality is good, but the market share is less. If we look at the amount of cars that come to us from Korea, they will roughly export 500,000 vehicles to the United States this year, as they did last year and will next year. We will export barely 5,000 cars to them. Think about that. Roughly, for every 1 American car we sell them, they sell us about 100. That is not free trade. As it turns out, it is not fair trade either. They don't put tariffs on their cars. They have nontariff barriers--a very clever way to keep our vehicles out. It could have to do with the environmental equipment on the car, the fuel system, transmissions, you name it. They find all kinds of ways to keep our vehicles out. We don't do that or play that game. They take advantage of that.

We wish to sell in a place such as Panama. In this country, a lot of people like the white meat of the chicken. Overseas, a lot of people eat the dark meat. It is an opportunity to export the dark meat for us. If we want to export leg quarters, drumsticks, and thighs in Panama, normally, a package of leg quarters costs $10 here, and there is a 260- percent tariff for those leg quarters going into Panama. They have to pay $36. I don't know what that translates into pesos, but they pay $36 for $10 worth of chicken.

We allow other countries, whether it is Korea, Panama, Colombia or many other nations, to sell their goods and products at will into our country, without much at all in the way of barriers, without impediment, without tariff barriers or nontarrif barriers. But they impose barriers against us. The reason why flows from the situation we were in at the end of World War II, when we were such an economic juggernaut. Other countries wanted to protect their markets a little bit from the 800-pound gorilla in the world, which was us.

While we are still a strong and vibrant nation, we no longer dominate world markets. We want to make sure we have access to other markets in ways we have not had in recent years in some countries.

I would like to think of one of the roles of government, and one of the major roles of government, is to provide a nurturing environment for job creation and job preservation. That includes a lot of things. That includes

making sure businesses, large and small, have access to the credit; it means that when folks come up with an idea, we have an innovative economy and a lot of technology; when people come up with new technology and new ideas, they go to the Patent Office to file it and they end up getting the patent and they don't end up in years of litigation.

Businesses like predictability, and that is part of the environment we need to provide. We need to provide a workforce where the people can come out of our schools and can read, write, think, do math, and have a good work ethic. We have to have common sense in regulations. Obviously, we need regulations, and we need to consider cost-benefit relations. As we do those regulations, we can get input from all sides.

We need predictable tax policies--tax policies that are progrowth. We also need access to foreign markets. Folks who build products in this country need access to foreign markets. In too many cases, we don't have that. These trade agreements are attempting to change that. Very soon, for that family in Panama who has to pay $36 for the same amount of drumsticks and thighs that now cost $10 here, that is going to change. We are going to start exporting and selling cars in Korea. They will still be able to sell theirs here, but we will sell tens of thousands of cars in Korea in a year or two.

In my State, we used to make a lot of cars. We had a GM plant and a Chrysler plant. They are now gone. But starting next year, a new plant will start up, and they will make some of the most beautiful cars in the world. Some are already being made, called the Karma. It gets about 70 miles per gallon. It is a drop-dead beautiful vehicle. Starting late next year, they will be making it a less-expensive car. We want to make sure they use our Port of Wilmington to ship those cars around the world. It would be nice to sell some of those in Korea or in Latin America and South America, as well as in Europe.

For my State, 80 percent of our agricultural industry, believe it or not, is chickens. I don't know what it is like in Iowa or in Florida or New York, but 80 percent of ours is chickens. Agriculture is one of the top three sectors of our State's economy--80 percent chickens. One out of every five chickens we raise in the Delmarva Peninsula is exported to another country. This is not chickenfeed; this is a big deal for us in Delaware.

This is important for our ability to export vehicles, our ability to export chemicals, plastics, poultry, and the ability for us to export some of our services--the work we do in financial services with banking or insurance. A lot of those companies would like to be able to do business in Korea or Latin America. This legislation will enable them to do that.

I think a lot of people will vote for the agreements today with Panama and with South Korea. Even some of the labor unions--the UAW and others--support the South Korea agreement. There is still skepticism and concern, understandably, regarding the agreement with Colombia. As everybody in the Chamber knows, and a lot of people in this country know, for years, labor leaders, organizers have been the target of assassinations in Colombia. According to the Colombians, in 2001, I believe there were about 205 assassinations in that 1 year alone in Colombia. The numbers are a little bit confusing because that includes folks who are not necessarily labor organizers but who are educators and maybe members of labor unions--205 people in 1 year. Can you imagine in this country if 205 labor leaders, organizers, and teachers were murdered in a year? That is a much smaller country than ours. The numbers have come down.

In one of our conversations yesterday with some labor unions in Delaware, one shared the latest number reported by the Colombian Government; I think it was 22 in the early part of this month. That is 22 too many. About half those folks killed were teachers who have been targeted by criminal elements and drug folks, drug gangs, because of the threat that teachers and educators pose to the ability of the drug folks to destabilize that country. So they are targets as well.

The Colombian Government has provided almost like a witness protection service down there, but it is somewhat different. They don't take people and change their identities and move them and hide them. They actually provide extra protection for folks who are believed to be at risk. That caused a reduction of almost 90 percent in the assassinations over the last decade. Even if it is just one or two, we know that is too many.

The question for us is, Do we ignore the progress or do we say, no, we are not going to ratify a free-trade agreement with Colombia until there are no assassinations? We have a saying: Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. That may trivialize this particular argument, and I would not suggest that is the standard we should use. But substantial progress has been made. We have embedded in that trade agreement environmental provisions, labor provisions, that are now part of the agreement. We have done the same with Panama and Korea. There is an implementation schedule that the government is expected to follow and has been followed. It has been certified by the President. They are taking the steps they are supposed to be taking in order to further reduce the level of violence. Overall, rather extraordinary progress has been made in Colombia.

A friend of mine who works there in the Embassy described to me the difference is between night and day.

It wasn't all that long ago when gunmen rounded up 11 supreme court justices in Colombia and took them into a room and shot them all dead. We know it is not just teachers or labor leaders who are being targeted for assassination and have been targeted but people at the highest levels of that country's government--government leaders, people who run for office, officeholders, law enforcement officers, judges, all kinds of people.

For the most part, it has changed. It is a lot better. The question is, Do we reward the improvement made or do we say, no, that is not enough, come back when you are pristine clean, pristine pure? For me, it is one I wrestled with and others have as well. I think, in this case, we can vote with our hopes, and our hope and expectation is that this progress has been realized and will continue.

There is one last thing I wish to mention before I finish.

Any number of folks have said to me: You know, NAFTA didn't help us all that much--Mexico and Canada--and so how do we know these trade agreements will help us? We learned some things from NAFTA. One of the things we learned is if we have environmental concerns, we ought to embed in the agreement the rest of those environmental concerns-- actually addressing them in the treaty. We have done that with all these nations. We have done the same thing with respect to labor provisions. They are actually embedded in the agreement.

The other thing I have said to folks who are concerned this isn't in our best interest and it will not help us economically, I don't agree with that. But think about this. To say this is not going to help us is counterintuitive. Think about it. We allow these countries to sell their goods and services in our country without impediment. We don't keep them out. We don't impose, for the most part, tariff or nontariff barriers. But if we want to sell our goods and services there, they impose these barriers--tariff or nontariff barriers. Under a free-trade agreement, the barriers that others put up to keep our goods and services out pretty much go away and in some cases pretty fast.

It is hard for me to say: Well, if we are going to let them ship their goods and services to us--continue to--and they are going to eliminate their tariff and nontariff barriers, why shouldn't we do better? We will do better. We make great chicken, we build great cars, have great chemical products, and excellent financial services. Those products will sell and we will be able to grow our economy.

The last problem is this. For us to come out of this recession--and we have come out of the recession officially, but there is still a lot of hurt and pain all over the place, including in my own State, but for us to come out of it, we need to grow the economy--we need to grow the economy--and we need to grow it across the world. We make any number of products in this country. Some are products--cars, chickens, chemicals, plastics--and others are services. They are

as good as any in the world. We want to make sure we have access to sell them anywhere in the world, including these three countries. Their consumers will be better off and our producers and our businesses will be better off. That is why I am happy to support these agreements.

The last thing I want to do is to acknowledge the excellent leadership Senator Baucus has provided for us. Senator Grassley is on the floor, and I know these are issues he cares a lot about. The partnership he and Senator Baucus have had over the years is a model for the Senate.

They are not on the floor now, but I also want to mention Senator Blunt and Senator Portman, two of our Republican colleagues, who joined with me to make sure at the end of the day we didn't just vote for three free-trade agreements but we also had the opportunity to vote and put in place trade adjustment assistance to ensure those workers in this country who might be negatively affected or displaced would have the opportunity to get unemployment compensation and have the opportunity to get job training so they will be treated fairly as well. It is the personification of the Golden Rule: Treat other people the way we want to be treated.

So we have succeeded in not just passing three free-trade agreements, which I think will help our economy overall, but we will also look out for the people who might be adversely affected. So I want to thank Senator Grassley and the other Republicans who provided the support to make that happen too. And again to Senator Baucus: A job well done.

Madam President, I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor to anyone else who is here and wants to speak at this time.

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

Mr. President, on behalf of Senator Chris Coons, Congressman John Carney, and myself, we remember today the lives and lasting gifts of late Delawareans, the Honorable Roxana Cannon Arsht and her husband S. Samuel Arsht, and we recognize as well the extraordinary philanthropy of their daughter, Ms. Adrienne Arsht. As role models of integrity and giving, the Arsht family has served and enriched the lives of Delawareans for decades.

Like many American families, Roxana Cannon's and Samuel Arsht's parents immigrated to the United States from Russia a century ago, seeking survival and a better life. In this land of opportunity, they worked hard, they valued education, and set high standards for themselves--standards which they met and ultimately exceeded.

Samuel Arsht was a 1931 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School and a 1934 graduate of the University's law school. Upon graduation, Sam joined the firm that later became Morris, Nichols, Arsht & Tunnell in Wilmington, DE. Over time he became well known in corporate law circles as one of the architects of the modern Delaware general corporation law and was described as the master of Delaware's influential corporate statutes. In 1953, he led efforts to update the entire body of statutory law, making Delaware the Nation's most favorable place for businesses to incorporate. His work helped to transform the State's economy by later opening the door to national banks and to credit card operations, along with other financial services.

His wife, a Delaware native, Judge Roxana Cannon Arsht, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania's law school as well, where she met her future husband Sam. In 1931, Roxana became the fifth woman to pass the Delaware bar. She made history again when she was appointed by then-Governor Russell W. Peterson as a judge of the family court in 1971, becoming the first female judge in the State of Delaware.

She retired from the bench in 1983, and began a second career in philanthropy. She was a founding member of the Cancer Care Connection and supported numerous community interests, including Planned Parenthood, the Visiting Nurse Association, the First Stage at Tower Hill School, the Winterthur Museum exhibition hall, and the Christiana Care Health System. Roxana was inducted into the Hall of Fame of Delaware Women in 1986.

Roxana and Sam Arsht shared their love of lifelong learning by providing the first and last gifts to the construction of Arsht Hall for the Academy of Lifelong Learning at the Wilmington campus of the University of Delaware. In 2003, Roxana created the Arsht-Cannon Fund at the Delaware Community Foundation to carry out her and Sam's

commitment to the greater Wilmington community: to preserve, support, protect, and defend the best interests of a civil society. To date, this fund has provided over $4.5 million in grants to Delawareans, and is now directed by her daughter Adrienne.

Adrienne Arsht was born in 1942 in Wilmington, DE, and upon graduation from Villanova Law School, Adrienne was the 11th woman admitted to the Delaware bar. Again, her mom had been the fifth. In 1966, she launched a successful law career at the Delaware firm of Morris, Nichols, Arsht & Tunnell. Later, Adrienne's interests shifted to banking, culminating in a move to Miami in 1966 to join the leadership of a bank called TotalBank, where she served as chair of the board until 2007. Under her leadership, TotalBank grew from 4 locations to 14, with over $1.4 billion in assets. In 2007, TotalBank was sold to Banco Popular Espanol; and in 2008, Adrienne was named the chairman emerita of TotalBank.

In addition to her leadership in the legal profession and in the business world, Adrienne has also taken a leading role in promoting artistic, business, and civic growth in the three cities she now calls home: Washington, DC, New York, and Miami. Following her parents' examples, she has also continued to maintain a strong philanthropic presence in her home State of Delaware, for which we are grateful.

In one of her many contributions to the First State, Adrienne carries on her parents' commitment to the mission of the Arsht-Cannon Fund at the Delaware Community Foundation. With her family background and experiences working with the Hispanic community as a businesswoman in Miami and the release of research findings from the 2008 Delaware Hispanic Community Needs Assessment, Adrienne set the funding focus of the Arsht-Cannon Fund to support many nonprofits with a focus on addressing the unmet needs of Hispanic Delawareans. This fund has helped thousands of Hispanic Delawareans learn to speak, read, and write in English, continue their education, find employment, access health services, and learn conflict resolution skills. It has made, and continues to make, an essential difference in the lives of Delawareans and will do so for decades to come.

Furthermore, under Adrienne's direction, the Arsht-Cannon Fund established the Cancer Care Connection and Best Buddies in Delaware, brought the Nemours' BrightStart! Dyslexia Initiative to Delaware, and supported the new Delaware Community Foundation's Strategic Fund.

I am honored today to rise to honor and commend a very good friend, Adrienne Arsht, and her late parents, whom I was privileged to know, Roxana and Sam Arsht, for their extraordinary service and continuing contributions to the State of Delaware and to its people. On behalf of Senator Coons, Congressman Carney, and myself, we recognize their work to help the many individuals and families who have been touched by their generosity.

We add our congratulations to Adrienne and the Arsht family as they receive the Delaware Community Foundation's First Family Philanthropy Award. Adrienne is truly an extraordinary woman who continues to carry on her parents' legacy of working to improve the lives of others. I consider it a privilege to have known Sam and Roxana, to know their daughter Adrienne, and to be able to stand here today to speak on their behalf in the Senate.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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

Madam President, it is quiet in here. Tomorrow night, down at the other end of the Capitol, hopefully it won't be this quiet. The President is going to give a speech that is to be focused on the next steps of getting our economy moving and getting people back to work. That is something which is on all of our minds.

As a guy who used to make my living as Governor of my State, I focused a lot on the economy. These are issues of great interest to me and certainly to the people I represent. The thought that occurs to me as we anticipate the President's speech is that I don't know that there is any one particular jobs bill that will do the trick. I would like to think there is a silver bullet, but I don't know that there is.

I have always focused on and what we try to focus on in our State is how to create a nurturing environment for job creation and job preservation. How do we do that? We try to make sure we invest wisely in infrastructure--roads, highways, bridges, ports, trains, water, sewer, broadband. We try to invest in the workforce and make sure we have people who are coming out of our schools who can read, write, do math, and who have the skills that will enable them to fill the kinds of jobs that will exist in the 21st century. The other part of what we focus on is trying to help promote research and development, and not just any kind but R&D that can be used to create products that can be commercialized and sold not only in this country but in other places as well.

Hopefully, the President will talk about some of those things tomorrow night. I look forward to whatever he talks about. I hope he talks about that kind of nurturing environment and what we can do to allow them to plow the fields so that companies, large and small, can actually grow some jobs here.

Part of the nurturing environment for job creation is infrastructure. We have been trying for many months since the beginning of this year to work on the airport infrastructure in our country, to try to bring the FAA and air traffic control system into the 21st century because it is not and it needs to be. We need resources to modernize our airports across the country, and it is important that we actually pay for it and not add to the deficit.

Legislation was passed earlier this year that does that--modernizes the FAA and brings the air traffic control system into the 21st century, provides some agreement between the airlines and the general aviation community on how to come up with the resources we need to modernize our airports. It is a good approach, but it has been hung up in the House since then. We need to get that done.

Today and this week, another part of that infrastructure needs to be worked on. This is the infrastructure that allows companies that have a good idea--and inventors--to get a patent on their idea and the patent doesn't end up being litigated on and on, maybe for years, in the courts. Too often, it takes years when somebody comes up with a good idea. They submit it to the Patent Office, and it takes a long time to get to the top of the list and for somebody to pay attention to the application. Somebody may come in and say: I had the same idea before he did, and then it ends up in litigation. We need to stop that. We worked out a compromise that provides that whoever files first is essentially the winner. It is not necessarily the one who came up with the idea sooner. We need to get that legislation done and deal with that one aspect of uncertainty and unpredictability that businesses face. It would be great if we could make progress on that front this week.

Another part of the infrastructure for job creation and preservation is the Postal Service. Not a lot of people pay much attention to the Postal Service until they get into trouble. The Postal Service is in trouble. I describe the situation as dire, but it is not hopeless. The Postal Service finds itself in a situation not unlike that of the auto industry a couple of years ago. The auto industry was losing market share, and their products weren't especially good. They were losing market share, and they essentially concluded that we have more people than we need for the size of the market to which we now sell. We need to reduce our head count. They said: We have to make our wage-benefit structure more competitive for the people we are hiring in the future in order to be competitive. Third, they said: We have too many plants, and the wage-benefit structure was out of whack.

In the Postal Service today, we are seeing an enormous diversion of people using traditional mail, first-class mail, and a diversion into electronic media. As a naval flight officer in the Vietnam war, I remember how excited I was--and we have been joined by Senator McCain, who went for a long time

without getting much mail at all when he was a POW. Those of us who were more fortunate, while deployed it was exciting to get mail-- postcards, letters, cards, packages, magazines, newspapers. It was some connection from home.

Senator Klobuchar has been over to Afghanistan, as have Senator McCain and I. Our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines Skype. They communicate through different social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Internet, and cell phones. We never had that stuff, even 30, 35 years ago, in Southeast Asia or around the world. But people don't use the mail too much, especially first-class mail.

The situation the Postal Service is in today--and they lost last year--is they are on track to lose about $10 billion. They can only borrow $15 billion on a line of credit with the Federal Government. That is it. They are looking to lose more money. If we don't let them do something, they are going to lose more next year. At the end of this year--they can default by the end of the month if we do nothing. If they don't do something, by the end of next September, they could be out of business. That is not good for them, for us, or for the 7 or 8 million jobs that depend on the Postal Service.

The situation with the Postal Service is similar to that of the auto industry a couple of years ago, but it is different too. The U.S. auto industry--not Ford but Chrysler and GM--was looking for, if you will, a taxpayer bailout. They got that and have repaid most of that to the Treasury.

The Postal Service is not asking for a bailout. They want to be allowed to be treated like a real business, run like a real business. They say, like the auto industry, we have too many people--more than they need. They need to continue to reduce the headcount through attrition and to incentivize the 120,000-or-so people who are eligible to retire, to retire by giving them early payments--maybe $10,000 or $20,000--and allowing them to maybe get credit for a couple extra years, but get the people who are eligible to retire and encourage them to do so, incentivize them to retire--not to be fired or laid off but to retire. So there are too many people.

Two, there are too many post offices. There are 33,000 post offices around the country. The post office doesn't want to close them all. They are saying: Let's look at 3,000 of them, and let's have a conversation with the communities there. Do all of these 3,000 post offices in those communities need to stay open? Are there some that could locate services elsewhere? Say, if you go to a convenience store that is open 24/7 or a pharmacy that is open maybe 7 days a week or if you go into a supermarket that is open 7 days a week, you can get your postal services there. They could locate those post offices there, and all those services in one place adds more convenience to consumers. That is what the Postal Service wants to do.

The last thing the Postal Service has too much of is mail processing centers. They have over 500 of them around the country, which is probably twice the number they need. They need to be able to reduce those.

The Postal Service needs to be treated fairly, and they have been paying into the Civil Service Retirement System for many years for some of the older employees and more recently the Federal Employees Retirement System for the newer employees. Two separate audits done by the Segal Company and by a consulting company called the Hay Group have concluded that the Postal Service has overpaid its obligation into the Civil Service Retirement System by $50 billion or more. They have estimated they have overpaid their obligation to the Federal Employees Retirement System by about $7 billion more. The Postal Service has asked to be reimbursed for those overpayments. They would like to use those overpayments, on the one hand, to help meet their obligation to pay the heavy health care cost for folks who are retiring from the Postal Service or about to retire. They want to prefund that. It is an obligation they have under the 2006 law, and they would like to use some of the $7 billion overpayment into the Federal Employees Retirement System to actually incent people who are eligible to retire from the Postal Service to go ahead and retire.

Eighty percent of the cost of the Postal Service is people--80 percent. The Postal Service has reduced its head count from about 800,000 people to, say, 600,000 people over the last 7 or 8 years. They need to be able to continue to reduce that in the years to come-- roughly 100,000 over the next 2 or 3 years through attrition and maybe another 120,000 by incentivizing people to retire.

The Senator from Minnesota is still standing here waiting for me to stop, and I have a lot more I wish to say, but I am going to stop and come back maybe later today to finish my comments, but let me conclude with this.

We need to act so the Postal Service can save itself. We don't need to bail them out. We need to let them act as a real company. The situation is dire, but it is not hopeless. They need to be able to address, as the auto industry did, too many people. They need to be able to close and consolidate some post offices and colocate those services in places that make more sense and are more convenient to consumers, they need to be able to close some of their mail processing centers, and they need to be treated fairly with respect to their overpayments into both the Civil Service Retirement System and the Federal Employees Retirement System. We can do this, and we don't need to do it next year; we need to do it this year.

I yield the floor to our friend from Minnesota.

Mr. President, today I wish to congratulate the world champion Laurel Senior League Softball team, led by manager Brad Lee, and by coaches Bo Collins and Kevin Green. By winning the Senior League Softball World Series, the young women on the team demonstrated that success comes from hard work, perseverance, and teamwork, with the help of dedicated coaching and the support of community, parents, and fans.

This spring when the softball season opened, more than 2.5 million girls around the world dreamed of winning the Senior League Softball World Series. Among them were 14 girls from the town of Laurel in Sussex County, DE, who--after suffering a heartbreaking loss in the 2010 championship game--vowed that 2011 would be their year. And that is exactly what happened.

The players are Alison Pusey, Alexis Hudson, Logan Green, Sara Jo Whaley, Whitney Toadvine, Emily Pusey, Regan Green, Erin Johnson, Kortney Lee, Kristen Collins, Nicole Ullman, Alyssa Givens, Bethany Wheatley, and Bree Venables. Led by manager Brad Lee and coaches Bo Collins and Kevin Green, these young women worked hard all season to improve their hitting, fielding, pitching, and base running.

In its 38th year, the Senior League Softball Little League division for girls ages 14 to 16 is a worldwide tournament with teams traveling to compete from as far away as Italy and the Philippines. The Senior League Softball World Series has been held for 8 years in Sussex County, DE. As the host, Delaware's top team gets a berth in the tournament, and Laurel has captured that spot 7 of the past 8 years.

While the Laurel girls have served as excellent hosts and ambassadors for Delaware and for the United States of America during those 7 years, they fell just short of the championship year after year.

The championship title almost slipped again from Laurel's grasp--not once, but twice--during the 2011 tournament. In two of the playoff games, the team came from behind in the bottom of the final inning to win. While the championship game proved to be a pitching match, clearly the many hours of practice at the plate paid off.

On August 13, under the threat of rain, 16-year-old Logan Green took the

mound against the Latin America team and pitched a three-inning no- hitter. Laurel scored in the first inning when first-baseman Bree Venables was hit by a pitch with the bases loaded. Logan's sister, 14- year-old Regan Green, took over the mound in the fourth inning and gave up four hits--but no runs--over the last four innings to secure the final win and the championship.

Regan Green recalled her nervousness during that final game but said that her fellow players' teamwork gave her the confidence she needed on the mound. ``It's always good knowing they have my back,'' she said.

Alyssa Givens set the stage for the ``safety run'' with a well-hit double in the sixth inning and then stole home from third base. Regan Green and the fielders took care of five batters in the seventh inning.

Finally, after years of coming close, the Laurel Senior League Softball team claimed the World Championship title.

Team Manager Brad Lee credited the victory to players' hard work and expressed the pride of his hometown. ``There's nothing like playing for your hometown. This is something that these young ladies will remember forever, and to bring the trophy home to Laurel for the first time is an unbelievable feeling.''

The State of Delaware--and especially the town of Laurel--share Manager Lee's sentiment.

Today, we congratulate the Laurel Senior League Softball team, manager Lee, and coaches Collins and Green. Through their commitment to excellence, perseverance, hard work and team work, they made their dreams come true and accomplished something that no other Delaware team, male or female, has ever done. In doing so, they have not only made the town of Laurel and its citizens proud; they have made all Delawareans proud.

Madam President, you have only been in the chair for a couple of minutes. I was going to ask you what is going on today, but I think I have a pretty good idea. You and I have spent a fair amount of time discussing and thinking through what we ought to do in light of these big deficits. We had the privilege of serving together as Governors for a number of years. We had a requirement to submit balanced budgets and to balance the outflows and revenues in an ongoing basis. In some cases we had pretty good fiscal controls in place to help us. The rules were in place to help us, whether constitutional or statutory. In some cases not.

Your State and, I think, my State have a reputation for being fiscally sound operations. I was elected State treasurer and became State treasurer. In 1976 to 1977--as the Presiding Officer has heard me say before--we had the worst credit rating in the country, and we managed to climb from there until the time when I finished my last term as Governor to have a AAA credit rating. I am very proud of that.

I am relieved, if you will, that today it looks as though we have in place a course that will enable us to preserve the AAA credit rating for our country and, hopefully, for our States around the United States. One of our members of our caucus said something the other day that really struck a chord with me with respect to deficits and the debt ceiling. He said: We need a solution, not a deal. That is what he said. He said: We need a solution, not a deal.

I could not agree more. I could not agree more. While I am going to vote for what has been represented to us probably tomorrow, I do not regard this as a solution in the true sense. It is closer to a deal. Some may argue whether it is a good deal or a not-so-good deal, but I see it as a deal, not a solution.

What is difficult for me is there is a solution out there. There is a solution that a lot of people worked on very hard, including the guy who helped craft the last bipartisan deficit-reduction plan in the Congress in 1997, Erskine Bowles, then-President Clinton's

Chief of Staff. He worked with a lot of folks--a Republican-controlled House, a Republican-controlled Senate. One of the people he worked with was a guy named Alan Simpson, a Republican from Wyoming. He was a pretty good deficit hawk in his day and still is.

The two of them and others came up with the deficit-reduction plan that led to several balanced budgets at the end of the Clinton administration. A lot of people forget we actually balanced our budget a dozen years ago--not just once, not just twice, but several times. We can do this sort of thing.

The deficit-reduction plan they came up with then was not just revenues, it was not just spending. I don't think it was just domestic discretionary spending or defense spending. As I recall, pretty much everything was on the table, and they came up with a deficit-reduction package--50 percent revenues and 50 percent spending--and as I said earlier managed to balance the budget several times in a row.

I like to say there are four ways to balance the budget. The first of those is to cut spending. The second way is to raise revenues. A third way is to grow the heck out of the economy. The fourth way is to look in every nook and cranny of the Federal Government, including every kind of program--defense programs, domestic programs, entitlement programs--and ask this question: Is there a way to get better results for less money or better results for the same amount of money?

If we pass this agreement and what is being presented to us that is before the House this evening, and we actually pass it in the Senate and the President signs it into law, we are going to see not the promise of the deficit commission's recommendations, which was cochaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. We are not going to see the opportunity to reform or overhaul entitlements, to reform the Tax Code, to raise some revenues--not by raising taxes but by broadening the base, limiting some of those $15 trillion of tax expenditures. It is what it is.

One of the things we are going to have the opportunity to do and probably a greater need to do is this: We are going to need to redouble our efforts to look at programs--domestic, defense entitlements--and ask that question: How do we get better results for less money?

We have one former Governor, the Presiding Officer, Senator Shaheen leaving, replaced by another former Governor, Senator Manchin, now the Presiding Officer, who knows what it is like to make these tough decisions. He has had to do them for 8 years.

Just as an aside, I would like to say this: There are two Senators born in West Virginia. That is the two of us, two Senators who were former Governors and former chairs of the National Governors Association. So we share a very special bond.

Madam President, I am talking about what could have been and what I think still should have been; that is, the deficit commission's recommendations, which is broad-based and a real solution and not just a deal. That is not going to happen. Whether we like it or not, it is not going to happen.

The question is, What do we do? The suggestion is that we do at least more of what we are already doing; that is, trying to get better results for less money out of the Federal programs, all kinds of Federal programs, the kind of thing you and I did as Governors of our States, the kind of thing we are trying to do in the Federal Financial Management Subcommittee which I chair, formerly chaired by Tom Coburn. We work across party lines. It is a pretty good example of how we ought to work on how to get things done. Democrats and Republicans on the subcommittee work together. We work on the OMB, we work with the General Accountability Office, we work with the inspector generals and all of the departments of the Federal Government across the landscape. We also work with nonprofits such as Citizens Against Government Waste.

What are we working on? We are working on how to get better results for less money. How do we not just identify fraud, but how do we get rid it? How do we put a spotlight on agencies and departments and Federal folks who are doing a good job with good results for the money they are spending, and how do we put a spotlight on those who are not and make sure we get more good behavior and less bad behavior.

Almost everything I do I know I can do better. I think the same is true of all of us. The same is true with our Federal programs. We have to go for it. I like to try to find an opportunity in adversity. Albert Einstein used to say in adversity lies opportunity. I have been looking at this deal and trying to see where is the opportunity. The opportunity is to just do a better job in evaluating performance, demanding high performance, and working hard to get that performance and working with the administration and those Democrats and Republicans in the Senate.

One of the reasons I like the deficit commission's proposal is because it addresses some of the uncertainty that currently faces the business communities in our Nation, whether they happen to be large or small. I have heard--and I am sure the Presiding Officer has heard-- from all kinds of businesses that one of the things they need from us is some certainty, some predictability. Businesses need certainty and predictability.

I have had any number of CEOs and businesses, large and small, who say to me that the reason we are sitting on a pile of cash and not investing our money is because we don't know what we are going to do with the budget. We don't know if we will have a default. We don't know what will happen with the Tax Code. We don't know if we are going to have an energy policy. We don't know if the Supreme Court or if the Federal courts are going to overturn the health care reform. We don't know if we are going to do something about our infrastructure, transportation or otherwise. Businesses are reluctant to spend money until we address those uncertainties.

One of the things I loved about the deficit commission's recommendation, refined by the Gang of 6, is they would have addressed uncertainty with respect to the spending plan and getting us on the right track for deficit reduction. It would have been bipartisan, and it would have been comprehensive. It would take a big step toward providing expectations and predictability and certainty with respect to our Tax Code, and we could use both of those.

I was talking today and listening a little bit to the news, and they were talking about who is winning because of this debate and who is losing. I would like to think that Democrats are not big winners or Republicans are big winners. I hope the American people, the people we represent, are at least modest side winners.

One of the things the President didn't want to do was have us go into default. He was willing to bargain long and hard in order to avoid default, and I commend him for that. The President doesn't want to have another debate over the debt ceiling until we get past the next election, and for him that was important. He wants to be able to run the administration.

As a Governor, I remember how hard it was for us in Delaware to work in the Governor's Office on more than two or three big things at a time. It is hard to do. This administration had their hands full on this issue for months and were unable to work on some of the other things they needed to be doing to help run our country and move us forward.

The other thing I think is important to the President is he wanted to get started or continue on the deficit-reduction side and finding more savings in reduction. He didn't want to slam on the brakes right now. If I could use a car analogy of driving down the road, we have been driving down the road for the last couple of years to try to come out of this recession with both feet on the accelerator. What the President didn't want, and what I don't want, is to go from both feet on the accelerator to both feet on the brakes.

One of the values of the plan that is being presented is that we don't make that transition. We do start tapping on the brake and eventually we do put the brakes on, but it is not just like that. So there are some things important to the President.

On the Republican side, they wanted deficit reduction; they wanted it to be real, they did not want it to be illusory--neither do we--and they are unwilling to raise any revenues, even by reducing some of those $15 trillion worth of tax expenditures--tax breaks, tax loopholes, tax credits, and so forth.

So we get, I think for the Republicans who are focused on spending and who didn't want to do any kind of revenues, even revenues that were being provided by dividing the base and lowering the rates, they weren't willing to go there. I think, for them, they can maybe declare victory.

The question is, How about the rest of us? How about the people who don't work here, the people who don't focus that much on partisan politics, how did they make out? For them, it is sort of a mixed bag. It is a mixed bag. If I were a teacher giving a grade in a class, I think I would assign it incomplete because we have plenty of work to do.

This idea of creating this bipartisan committee, joint committee, of 10 people, 6 Senators, 6 House Members--the total would be 12, 6 Democrats and 6 Republicans, I hope that works. I think--my preference would have been taking the Gang of 6, the people who worked for 1 year on a deficit reduction plan, which I think is a whole lot better, and just make them--if we are going to have a special committee--make them the folks on the committee. That isn't going to happen, unfortunately. They would have been my nominees, my appointees, but it is not my decision to make.

But, anyway, we are going to create this joint committee. Sometimes I think if we can't come to consensus on good public policy, what we are inclined to do around here is just to do more process. I hope and pray this isn't more process. I hope, at the end of the day, the men and women who serve on this joint committee will be open to our input and certainly open to the input of some of the Senators, including the Democrats and Republicans who served on the deficit commission and who went on to be a part of this Gang of 6.

The last thing I think I want to say is this: A lot of times in government--I hope we weren't quite as guilty of this in State government as here--but a lot of times in government we focus on symptoms of problems. We don't focus on the underlying disease or the cause of the problem. I like to use the patient analogy. The patient is exhibiting certain symptoms and sometimes we can look at those symptoms and figure what the cause of the problem is and try to cure the patient. Here the symptom has been all along the debt ceiling, but that is the symptom the patient is exhibiting or is facing. The underlying cause of the disease is the way we spend money and raise money. I think we have been treating the symptom--avoiding the default on the debt ceiling--but I am not entirely pleased that we are curing the patient, taking the steps to cure the patient.

That is sort of where I see us. I will close with these words. I see Senator DeMint waiting to speak, so I will wrap up. A guy who never served in the Senate, served over in the House, Rahm Emanuel from Illinois, Congressman and later Chief of Staff to President Obama for his first couple years, Rahm Emanuel, now the mayor of Chicago, has a saying, and I think it is his original saying. He likes to say: ``Never waste a good crisis.'' Sometimes it takes a crisis around here to get something done. He likes to say: ``Never waste a good crisis.'' We have wasted this crisis, and we should not have done that. We should have taken the bull by the horns. I wish the President had embraced his own deficit commission sooner, more robustly. I wish our own leaders, Democratic and Republican, here and over in the House, had said: That is a pretty good idea. Let's give that a shot. Unfortunately, they chose not to do that. It was bipartisan. It was bicameral. It is unfortunate.

But it is what it is. We need to move forward. I just hope colleagues will be given the opportunity to offer a lot of input to this bipartisan joint committee that is being created, and maybe, in their wisdom, reporting back to us at the beginning of December, there will be some of the elements in deficit reduction that were captured by that deficit commission that are missing in this deal that is before us today. If that happens, this will have been a better outcome than I might have otherwise hoped for.

With that, I yield the floor and yield to my friend from South Carolina.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the privilege of the floor be granted to the following member of my staff: Robin Dutta.

Madam President, thank you very much for this time to speak.

Before Dr. Coburn leaves the floor, I thank him for the kind things he just said. As to Tom Coburn and I--a lot of people say: Well, that is an unlikely duo who would end up working together as much as we have and actually having the sense of trust and friendship. There are things people certainly find in me not to like, and the same is true of all of us. But I would say, there is nobody in the Senate who cares more about getting our deficits under control. He and Dick Durbin have shown terrific courage and leadership, along with others in this so-called Gang of 6, and also as members of the deficit commission, in trying to get us to a comprehensive, bipartisan solution as to how we rein in the budget deficit without destroying our economy, making sure we do not pierce the debt ceiling and have our financial world begin to crumble around us. So I very much appreciate what he said today. I heard most of it, not all of it. I have had a chance to work with him in a number of areas.

What we try to do, and Senator McCaskill--who is presiding at this moment--what she tries to do, along with others of us who serve on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, is we try to look in every nook and cranny of the Federal Government. Whether it is defense spending, entitlement spending, domestic spending, we look at the so-called tax expenditures, tax breaks, and so forth, and we look at all of them and ask this question: How can we get a better result? Whether it is health care, education, transportation, defense, how can we get a better result for less money or how can we get a better result for not much more money?

We need to do that across our government. We need to change, if you will, the culture in the Federal Government from sort of a culture of spendthrift--which a lot of people think we operate under--we have to change it to a culture of thrift and not just for a couple

weeks or a couple months or a couple years; I mean for as far as the eye can see, until these pages who are sitting in front of me--who are rising juniors in high school--until they are rising juniors in college and out of school and off into the world and well beyond that. That is what we need to do. That is part of our obligation.

One of the recommendations--I am going to go back to over 1 year ago when we voted on whether to create a deficit commission that would have a number of members who would be responsible--some elected, some not-- they would have a responsibility to look across the Federal Government and to come back to us at a date certain with ways to rein in the Federal deficit to get us back on a more fiscally sustainable and responsible track.

We voted in the Senate. Our Presiding Officer will recall not all the folks who were cosponsors of the legislation that created the deficit commission actually ended up voting for it. In fact, seven of them who were cosponsors--as I recall, I do not believe any of them were on this side of the aisle; I think they were on the other side of the aisle-- ended up voting against it, and we did not actually have the votes to create the deficit commission.

With that happening, a number of us encouraged the President to use his Executive powers to create one by Executive order. He did that. Last year, the deficit commission was created, and there were 18 people named to it. Madam President, 12 were elected, 6 were not, and he named 2 cochairs. One was Erskine Bowles.

Erskine Bowles, who is he? He used to be, in the second term of President Clinton's administration, Chief of Staff for President Clinton. Erskine was asked by President Clinton to negotiate the deficit reduction package with the Republican House and Senate. At that time, during those years, Republicans were in the majority in the House and Senate. President Clinton said: Erskine, go out and negotiate a deficit reduction deal, where some of the deficit reduction comes on the revenue side and some comes on the spending side, so we can follow up on, actually, an earlier deficit reduction package adopted in 1993 with only Democratic votes. But he said: Let's see if we can't actually balance our budget. We had not done that since 1968.

God bless Erskine Bowles and the folks he negotiated with too. He went to work in 1997 and came up with a deficit reduction package with 50 percent revenues, 50 percent spending that had everything on the table. A long story short, we ended up with a balanced budget--not 1, not 2, I think at least 3 years in a row at the end of the Clinton administration and handed off to a new administration balanced budget surpluses as for as the eye could see.

I remember Alan Greenspan testifying, I think, before the Banking Committee, when Alan Greenspan was the Federal Reserve Chairman. He said he was concerned at the time we were going to pay down our debt too soon, too fast. I mentioned to him later that concern was misplaced because we certainly did not pay down our deficit too fast. About starting 10 years ago, we turned black ink surpluses as far as the eye could see to red ink, to deficits as far as the eye could see.

A lot of people like to reinvent history. They say we did not do much to reduce deficits in the years from, say, 1993 to 2000. Actually, we had two big votes, one in 1993, with all Democrats--and I am not saying this in a partisan way--and one in 1997, where the Republicans in the House and the Senate actually negotiated in good faith with a Democratic President. With those two packages together, with a strong, robust economy, we balanced the budget not once, not twice, three times, created something like 21 million new jobs, and ended up for the decade ending in the year 2000 among the nations with a balanced budget and the most productive workforce on the face of the Earth. Those were halcyon days for our country. We need to get back to that.

So President Obama, naming the cochairs of the deficit commission, goes back to an earlier President and taps the same guy, Erskine Bowles, to be a coleader of the deficit commission.

On the Republican side, the President asked a guy a lot of people remember, Alan Simpson, a Republican Senator from Wyoming, here for a number of years, as maybe the funniest person who ever served in the Senate. He is also one of the most insightful, commonsense deficit hawks, and a great guy to be a partner with Erskine. They went together.

We had 12 Members of the House and Senate--6 Democrats, 6 Republicans--and some other folks from civilian life. Dave Cote, who is chairman and CEO of Honeywell, was among the private sector participants. But they worked for months and gathered input from all kinds of sources and came up with a broad-based plan that was recommended, adopted, endorsed by, if you will, 11 out of the 18 Commissioners. That was not the magic threshold of 14 before it actually would be the official recommendation of the Commission, but it was a majority, and it included 3 Republican Senators: Judd Gregg, who was then a Senator from New Hampshire, Tom Coburn, and Mike Crapo. I thought they were courageous, those Republican Senators.

On our side, among them included Kent Conrad and Dick Durbin, and I want to say Mark Warner, but I may be mistaken. Mark has been all over this stuff. I think he has been a real leader, but I am not sure if he was the third Democrat. Yes, the third Democrat was John Spratt, Democrat from South Carolina, chairman of the House Budget Committee. But anyway, those three Democrats and three Republicans basically agreed to a package and said: Let's reduce the deficit over the next 10 years by $4 trillion. Let's do it mostly on the spending side--two- thirds to three-quarters on the spending side--but let's have revenues as well.

They did not propose raising the rates. What they actually proposed was to reduce the rates for business, put us more in line with other advanced countries, bring us down from about 35 percent to somewhere roughly between 25 percent and 29 percent on the corporate income side, to reduce personal income tax rates for middle- to low-income families to as low as 8 percent, and to actually reduce the upper income rate from somewhere in the mid thirties to the high twenties. But at the same time we would bring down the rates. We would eliminate not all but a lot of the so-called tax expenditures.

The tax expenditures--what are tax expenditures? They are tax breaks. Some folks call them loopholes. Actually, a lot of them are meritorious: the mortgage deduction, deductions that will encourage people to make charitable donations, stuff that a lot of us will say: We don't want to change that. We don't want to get rid of that. But if you add all those tax expenditures over the next 10 years, do you know what that adds up to? Madam President, $15 trillion. Think about that. Add all the tax expenditures for the next 10 years, and it is $15 trillion. If we only were able to somehow reduce that by 8 or 9 percent, we would come up with the revenues that were called for in the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission to be part of a $4 trillion package.

In order to be able to bring the rates down, to lower the rates, broaden the base--in order to do that--we are going to have to take more than 8 or 9 percent out of tax expenditures. They may have to be reduced by as much as 50 percent.

I would argue, at the end of the day, we should preserve the deduction for interest we pay on mortgages, especially for our primary home. Also, to encourage charitable donations, I think we ought to preserve the deduction for charitable donations. There are others as well. But those are a couple of the good ones. But that was sort of the sum and substance they came up with.

Among the things the Bowles-Simpson commission also said we ought to have on the table for deficit reduction is entitlement programs.

What are entitlement programs? Things that we are entitled to by virtue of our age, our station in life. If we are 65 years of age and we have paid into Social Security and Medicare, we may be eligible--we will be eligible, in all likelihood, for Medicare. If we are disabled and totally unable to work, we will be eligible for Medicare even before age 65.

If we paid into Social Security for a number of years, we would be eligible for early retirement for Social Security at age 62. If we want to take it later, we can take it at age 67 for full

retirement benefits, which I think are roughly about $2,000 per month max, something like that.

Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security are entitlement programs. They said they should all be on the table. They did not propose using Social Security to balance the budget. But they did say: We have a long-term problem in Social Security with an imbalance between now, the amount of money that is coming into Social Security, and the amount of money that is going out.

As the baby boomers are starting to retire--my generation--we are paying out now, for the first time in a long time, more in Social Security benefits than we are raising. The reason is, for today it is roughly, for every one person receiving Social Security benefits there are about 2\1/2\ people working. Before long it will be for every one person receiving Social Security benefits, it will be two people working and paying into Social Security. The mismatch of inflow into the Social Security trust fund versus the outflow is going to get worse not better.

Sometime, a couple of decades down the road, we are going to start running out of money to pay 100 percent of Social Security benefits. We will not have to stop them all together, but we will have to get them a pretty serious haircut. I was a freshman Congressman, sworn in on January 3, 1983. The day I was sworn in at the other end of the Capitol, they told all of my freshman class: We are going to run out of money in Social Security. That is what they said.

We said: Well, when? In a couple of decades or when?

They said: No. This year. This year.

We said: Are we going to provide a haircut, reduce Social Security payments?

They said: No, we are going to stop making them because we are running out of money in the Social Security trust fund.

That was where we were on January 3, 1983. Thanks to the good work of the commission led by Alan Greenspan and others, but the good work they did then, they handed off to us not just a problem but a solution. Their solution was a combination of new sources of revenue for Social Security and some reductions in benefits, gradually raising the full retirement age over a period of 25 years from 65 to 67; requiring what people pay into Social Security, State and local employees, among others. A balanced plan.

Ronald Reagan, then President, provided political cover to Democrats to vote for that. Tip O'Neill, then Democratic Speaker of the House, provided cover for the Republicans to vote for that. Almost everybody, House and Senate, Democrat and Republican, drank the Kool-Aid and voted to preserve Social Security. It preserved it for another 25 years. We did not have to stop paying Social Security benefits that year or the next year or the next year after that. We had a significant surplus that has gone up in the Social Security trust fund.

But now it is beginning to be paid down. But the fund is going to be going in the wrong direction in the years to come. Over time the outflow will increase as my generation retires. The question is, Do we wait until the 2020s or 2030s to do something about it? I do not think we should. I swore, 28 years ago, I did not want to hand off to the next generation the problems we should solve today.

We have an opportunity not to use Social Security to balance the budget, but actually under the plan that has been now sort of reworked from the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission, the opportunity to secure Social Security for the next 75 years, and to do it in a way that involves a number of, I think, relatively modest changes, some new revenues, and to gradually increasing the full retirement age from 67 to 68 by 2050, and from 68 to 69 by 2075.

Remember, when Social Security was first introduced, signed into law by FDR back in the 1930s, a person had to be 65 years of age in order to receive Social Security benefits. The average life expectancy then was just over age 60. Think about that. Back then a person had to live to 65 to draw benefits. The life expectancy for most people under 65 was between 60 and 65.

We are talking today about a life expectancy closer to 80. People still get early benefits for early retirement benefits under Social Security at age 62, but to gradually increase the full retirement age and make a couple of other changes as well that on the surface do not seem to be major changes--in fact, I think they are relatively modest. But when we put them all together over many years, it is a lot of dollars and a lot of people.

We can put Social Security on a safe footing for another 75 years. The idea is to actually kind of wall that off from the rest of the problems so we are basically preserving Social Security for a lot longer, for my lifespan and the lifespan of these young pages who are about 16 years of age, throughout their lifetimes as well.

On Medicare--let me talk about Medicare, health care for people 65 and over, people who are totally disabled under the age of 65 and are unable to work. We will spend this year about $550 billion in Medicare--about $550 billion. The amount of fraud in Medicare--Eric Holder, our Attorney General, tells us that fraud each year from Medicare is about $60 billion. That is roughly 10 percent of the amount of money we spend in Medicare--$60 billion. Roughly 10 percent.

GAO keeps track of something else that is called improper payments. One of the things GAO does is tell us every year how much we are making in improper payments in our Federal Government across the board. They said last year improper payments were about $125 billion. That is different from fraud. That is just overpayments, accounting mistakes, that sort of thing--$48 billion in improper payments for Medicare, and another $60 billion, according to Eric Holder, just from fraud.

If those numbers are true, $60 billion out of $550 billion in Medicare payments, that is actually more than 10 percent. Well, let's just say it is only 10 percent or close to 10 percent.

How are they doing over in the private sector? How are they doing in the private sector in terms of controlling their fraud? Well, their fraud costs are not 10 percent of their costs. That is probably not a surprise. They are not 9 percent. They are not 8 percent. They are not 7 percent. On balance, they are probably closer to 5 percent, and in some cases less than 5 percent. Roughly half, their fraud cost, over Medicare. Maybe they are doing something over in the private sector to control fraud in ways that we can learn from in the Federal Government. If we can learn those lessons, maybe we can provide better rules for less money in Medicare.

Let me give you a couple of examples. Improper payments. Last year Medicare had $48 billion in overpayments, mistakes, that kind of thing--$48 billion--separate from fraud. The President said we are going to cut it in half by the end of next year, from roughly $50 to $25 billion. If we do that for 10 years, 10 years times $25 billion, what does that add up to? $250 billion. That is real money around here, one-quarter of a trillion dollars.

If Eric Holder, our Attorney General, is right on the fraud side, we actually have $60 billion in fraud losses for Medicare in a year, if we could cut that in half--and we put in the health care law, the new health care law, all kinds of tools to do that kind of thing. If we can cut that in half, that would be a savings of $30 billion a year. Over 10 years that is $300 billion--$300 billion in potential fraud savings, $250 billion in potential savings by cutting in half improper payments for Medicare. That is $550 billion. That is over $\1/2\ trillion.

For those who say we have to savage Medicare and Medicaid in order to reduce outlays in them and achieve savings in Medicare and Medicaid, that is not correct. That is not true. Let me give you a sense for where some of the money is being lost in fraud.

I have learned a new term this last week called the ``death master file.'' Maybe you have heard that term before but did not remember it.

But we are trying to keep track of the folks who are dying so that we--when people die who are getting Social Security, we do not continue to send out Social Security checks forever for people who are dead. The same thing with folks who are eligible for other benefits, whether they are benefits for--whether they happen to be educational benefits or health benefits. We do not want to pay benefits for folks who, frankly, are not with us anymore.

By the same token, we want to make sure that when doctors die, we do not face the possibility that someone steals their provider ID number, their Medicare provider ID number, or their Medicaid provider ID number, if they have one, and write prescriptions for, among other things, controlled substances. What we have today are crooks, criminals, stealing provider ID numbers from dead doctors and using those to write prescriptions for controlled substances, which then feed the drug trade and provide profits to criminal groups.

The inspector general tells us in the most recent report in terms of buying advanced wheelchairs, we spent almost $200 million a few years ago. Over half of the payments did not meet the Medicare reimbursement rules for the wheelchairs.

We have to be smarter than that. Over in Japan--I have my friend from Florida sitting here waiting for me. He is cooling his jets, but he will not do it for long, so I will close with this: As he knows, we served together on the Finance Committee, and we used to serve together in the House. He is an old friend and a good one. But as we wrestled with health care reform legislation a year or two ago, one of the things we heard in our hearings was, over in Japan--we compete against Japan, friendly competition, but they are our competitor in a lot of ways: electronics, cars, any number of products, we compete against them. They spend about 8 percent of GDP for health care. We spend 16 percent. They get better results: longer life, longevity, less infant mortality. They get better results. They spend half as much, they get better results. They cover everybody. They cover everybody.

I would like to say, they cannot be that smart. As smart as they are in Japan, they cannot be that smart, and we cannot be that dumb. There are any number of ways that we can actually save money that does not reduce benefits in Medicare or Medicaid. We can learn from some of the things they are doing to uncover fraud and reduce improper payments in the private sector and just navigate some of those ideas over to the public sector, and find out what works.

I like to say--this was Alan Blinder's. Alan Blinder testified before us a couple of months ago, a month or two ago, as the Senator will remember.

Alan Blinder said: In terms of reducing the deficit, especially on health care costs, he said: I am not an expert on this thing, but here is my advice to you. Find out what works. Do more of that.

Think of that. Find out what works, do more of that. The converse of that would be, find out what does not work, do less of that. If we do that sort of thing, if we do it not just once or twice or for a couple of weeks or a couple of years, but we just make that a cultural change going forward, we will get us back on the right track. That is our challenge.

It is not just Democrats, it is not just Republicans, it is not just the Congress, we are in this with the President. We are all in this together.

In closing, that is a good thing for us to remember. We are all in this together. We do not have all of the smart ideas on this side, neither do the Republicans. It has to be a combination of spending and revenue. If we are smart about it, we will come out of this at the end of the day just fine.

I yield the floor to my friend from Florida.

Mr. President, today I wish to recognize a respected member of Delaware's business community and a valued leader in our community, Glenn M. Engelmann, as he embarks upon his retirement following a long and distinguished career.

A native of Brooklyn, NY, Glenn earned a bachelor of arts degree in political science from the State University of New York at Binghamton and later went on to receive his juris doctor from the prestigious University of Chicago Law School.

In 1986, Glenn joined the law department of ICI Americas Inc, later known as Zeneca Group PLC. In that role, he provided legal advice principally for ICI Americas' pharmaceuticals business. Glenn then served as counsel to the advanced materials business and, in 1991, was appointed as group counsel for ICI Pharmaceuticals. A few years later, in 1993, Glenn was appointed vice president, general counsel and secretary for Zeneca. He remained as the leader of Zeneca's, and later AstraZeneca U.S.'s, legal affairs and promotional regulatory review until today. This month, Glenn will leave his post as vice president and general counsel for AstraZeneca U.S. and commence his retirement.

Outside of AstraZeneca U.S., Glenn is no stranger to his community. In addition to helping to lead one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, Glenn is the president of the board of directors for the Jewish Federation of Delaware and honorary board member of Children & Families First, an organization that provides services, training and support to thousands of people across the State of Delaware each year. He has also served on the board of Jewish Family Services of Delaware, where he was president from 2000 to 2002.

When he is not working or serving our community, one could probably find Glenn at Citizens Bank Park watching the Philadelphia Phillies or at the Wells Fargo Center cheering for the Philadelphia 76ers. Or perhaps he might be reliving his ``glory days,'' listening to The Boss Bruce Springsteen--the Rolling Stones or the Beatles. And while I have heard nothing but jokes regarding Glenn's golf game, I assume he is trying to get better. Maybe he can improve during retirement.

A devoted family man, Glenn and his wife Michelle have three children: Harris, Jason and Rachel, as well as a dog

named Cleo. He has no doubt had a profound influence on his children's academic and career paths. Harris is going to be a junior at Washington University in St. Louis this fall. Jason is embarking on his second year at Duke Law, and Rachel recently earned a master's in Public Health from the University of Michigan and now works for Abbott Pharmaceutical. Upon his retirement, Glenn will leave behind a legacy of commitment to his work and public service both for his children and for the generations that will follow them.

I join Glenn's family and colleagues in congratulating him--a leader in his field and in our community--as he celebrates the completion of a successful career and begins a new chapter in his life. I wish him and his family only the very best in all that lies ahead for each of them.

Mr. President, I would like to take a few minutes, if I could, just to speak on----

I would be happy to yield.

Mr. President, I would like to begin my remarks this afternoon by congratulating several of our colleagues who have worked long and hard on this legislation, and their staffs who have worked equally long and hard: Senator Schumer and Senator Alexander; I see Senator Collins is on the floor; Senator Lieberman; our leaders, Democrat and Republican leaders, Senator Reid and Senator McConnell.

Anyone watching this debate from across America on C-SPAN might be wondering why is this important? Why are they doing this? Why are we spending several days, literally, in session in the Senate to focus on a nominations bill? Why? For those folks who might be wondering why, let me just offer these thoughts.

This administration has been in office for roughly 2\1/2\ years now. If we look throughout the Federal Government, the executive branch of the government, most of the positions that require Presidential nominations and Senate confirmation have now been filled. But a number, including a number that are in highly important, highly critical positions, have not been. Until fairly recently this administration looked like what I describe as ``executive branch Swiss cheese.''

People sometimes wonder why the Federal Government in Washington does not work better and maybe why does it not work as well as our States. I want to take a moment, if I can, to compare the approach we used in Delaware. I know Senator Alexander is a former Governor. It is probably the approach they use in Tennessee, to fill key leadership positions in the executive branch of those State governments.

In my State, for example, the Governor nominates people to serve as cabinet secretaries in a dozen or so different departments. Those nominations have to be confirmed before the senate. They hold hearings and generally report those nominations favorably. In fact, in my 8 years as Governor, we never had the senate fail to report and to vote for one of our nominees for an executive branch department--for example, secretary of transportation, secretary of education, those kinds of appointments. Within those various departments of State government, the division directors are appointed by the Governor without confirmation by the senate. The rest of our line departments within State government in Delaware are not appointed by the Governor; they are literally chosen through the merit system and report up the chain of command through the director of the division to the secretary of the department. That is the way it works.

I remember when I was about to be sworn in as Governor. I met with the senate--it was a Democrat majority at the time--and they were interested in knowing who I was going to nominate to different positions. I explained who we had in mind. They said: We do not know some of those people. Some of them are from other States. We are not sure that we ought to be confirming them.

I asked them: Look, why don't we make a deal. Give me the team I feel that as Governor I am entitled to have, make sure they are honorable people, smart people, that sort of thing. But at the end of the day, let me have my team and go forward and try to govern in partnership with the legislative branch, and judge us in the end on how we perform.

To their credit, that is what the State senate decided to do. That is the way we operated for 8 years. They were 9 very good years. I was fortunate to be Governor at the same time that Bill Clinton was President, and we managed

to balance our budget for 8 years in a row. We actually cut taxes 7 years in a row. We got ourselves a AAA credit rating for the first time in State history and still have it. That is the way we operated.

It does not look that way or operate that way here, and there are a number of reasons this administration, the last administration, and I suspect the one before that, a year or 2 years even into those administrations, the executive branch--if we look through the senior ranks of the leadership of the various departments--looked too much like executive branch Swiss cheese.

Senator Alexander and Senator Schumer, to their credit, are trying to change that. I commend them for their efforts. I think it is enormously important.

If you are trying to be the President and lead this country, you need your team. It is important that they be capable people, honorable people. But at the end of the day, a President of either party needs a good team, a strong team, filled sooner rather than later.

There are a number of reasons it is so difficult to get many of these vacancies filled. One of them is a reluctance on the part of some people to go through the process, the confirmation process. It takes forever in some cases. These nominees are asked to bare, not their souls but largely bare their lives to go through a process where they can be maybe not crucified but certainly exposed to anything they have ever done wrong in their lives. None of us is perfect.

I think that in itself deters people from wanting to go through this process. I was once nominated when I was Governor to serve on the Amtrak board by President Clinton. I remember how long it took just to fill out the paperwork--one set of paperwork for the executive branch, a totally different set of paperwork for the legislative branch.

I remember saying to my wife, after spending a weekend just to fill out the paperwork: I am not sure it is really worth doing all of this. I am really not sure it is worth it. I am sure for other folks who go through this process they probably reach the same conclusion at least once during the time they go through the paperwork.

We need to have not separate questionnaires, we need to synchronize, homogenize at least the paperwork, and hopefully put it in an electronic form so we can do it electronically--those nominees can do it electronically one time and be done with it and send it off to the right folks to look at.

One of the reasons we go slowly is--I will share with you--I was riding in Afghanistan or Pakistan, one of those countries a couple of months ago, riding around with a codel on a bus going from place to place. One of the folks on the bus said they were looking for somebody to put a hold on a nomination in order to get some leverage on something that Senator was trying to get from the administration--that is with a Democratic President and a Republican Senator. But I want to tell you, that conversation could have happened 4 years ago with a Democratic Senator and a Republican President. A lot of folks have used for years the ability to put a hold, to stop a nomination from moving forward, in order to gain some kind of political advantage, which has nothing to do maybe with the nominee or the nominee's ability to serve.

The other point I want to make--I shared this with some of our colleagues in our caucus, the Senate Democratic caucus, the other day. I talked to my colleagues about the work of the Government Accountability Office, GAO. Every year they publish, as most of us know, something called a High Risk List. And a high risk is just a whole lot of initiatives or problems that exist throughout the Federal Government that either are costing us a lot of money or are going to cost us a lot of money unless we do something different.

One of the top items on the GAO's High Risk List for years now has been major weapons systems cost overruns. In 2000, GAO determined that major weapons systems cost overruns--Department of Defense--was $42 billion. That is a lot of money.

They update that list every year. They updated it for 2010 not long ago, and they concluded that major weapons systems cost overruns in 2010 had gone from $42 billion--10 years ago--to $402 billion in 2010.

I chair a subcommittee called Federal Financial Management, part of Homeland Security Government Affairs. We have held a number of hearings in recent years to try to figure out how we can get better results for less money--how we get better results for taxpayers for less money or better results for maybe not much more money.

As we drilled down on major weapons systems cost overruns, here is one of the things we found out. Through testimony offered by a fellow from--one of the top three people in acquisition in the Department of Defense, a fellow named Jim Finley, who reported to John Young, the top acquisition guy in the last administration, who reported to Bob Gates, the Secretary.

We brought in Jim Finley for testimony on major weapons systems cost overruns. Again, this is Secretary Gates, John Young, top acquisition guy at the Pentagon, and then Jim Finley. We asked Mr. Finley--I asked him a question: How long have you been in your job?

He told me how many months he had served in his job.

I asked him what kind of turnover he got from his predecessor.

He said: My predecessor left 18 months before I was confirmed for this position.

So I said: You mean, for like 18 months, there was no confirmed person in your position for acquisition to oversee the major weapons systems?

I said: How many direct reports did you have once you got into your job--how many folks were directly reporting to you?

He said: There are six direct reports to me in that job but only two of them were filled.

Just think about that. Here we are, the Department of Defense, hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons systems to oversee in acquisitions, and arguably the No. 2 person in acquisitions in the Department of Defense, that position was vacant for 18 months--18 months.

When he finally got confirmed, of the six direct reports, only two were filled. No wonder we have these huge weapons systems cost overruns--and it is not just an isolated incident. We brought in Jim Finley's counterpart today in this administration, a fellow named Frank Kendall. Good man. He testified earlier this year. Again, it is Bob Gates, the Secretary. Now it is Ashton Carter who is the top acquisition person in DOD. Then we have Frank Kendall.

I said to Mr. Kendall: How long have you been in the job?

He told me how many months.

I said: What kind of turnover did you get from your predecessor?

He said: My predecessor left 15 months before I got here.

My friends, I do not know how good we all are at connecting the dots, but when we have one of the top two people at the Department of Defense responsible for riding herd on the defense industry, all our contractors, and these contracts are for very expensive weapons systems--when we have a vacancy for 18 months in one administration, the next administration, pretty much like a vacancy for 15 months--that is no good. That is an invitation for disaster.

When we see the major weapons systems cost overruns go from $42 billion in 2000 to $400 billion 10 years later, I would suggest one of the reasons is because of this confirmation process, the vetting process. Really, the biggest problem of all is the administration. The administration takes forever to identify people to go in these positions, to vet these positions and actually give us a name.

There are no silver bullets in terms of solving this problem. We need a lot of silver BBs. One of the good things about the legislation before us is it provides a number of very helpful tools to expedite the consideration of nominees, to better ensure that the next administration, or even this administration a year or two from now if the President is reelected, that we do not end up with more and more executive branch Swiss cheese, which really translates to the taxpayers an enormous cost, costs we cannot afford with the budget deficit of over $1 trillion.

The last thing I want to say, if I may, I know people are offering amendments. I am going to call up an amendment to this bill in just a moment. It

is an amendment that involves again our friends at GAO, the Government Accountability Office. Our amendment is pretty straightforward. It would require GAO to investigate and conduct a survey on the number of Presidentially appointed positions that are not Senate confirmed in each agency, a category of jobs that also routinely go unfilled for extended periods of time.

The study would provide recommendations as to whether eliminating or converting certain appointees to career positions would be more efficient. In addition, the survey should evaluate whether it is beneficial to reduce and convert specialized categories of appointees, such as inspector generals, chief financial officers, or acquisition officers to career status, not as politically appointed.

The purpose of the amendment is that the proposal, we believe, would provide an analysis of what is an efficient amount of Presidentially appointed positions governmentwide. It also would provide recommendations on how to further reduce or convert these positions.

As far as I can tell, it is not a controversial proposal. GAO does a lot of good work for us to help figure out how to operate more efficiently, also to use some common sense. My hope is that my colleagues will see fit to support it.

That having been said, I ask unanimous consent to call up amendment No. 517, which I filed earlier today.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, good to be with you again. I spent most of the morning with you and now part of the afternoon.

This is a difficult issue for a number of us in the Senate because we have friends on both sides of this issue. It is also a difficult issue for a lot of people because we do not want to be unmindful of the concerns raised legitimately by merchants for a number of years about debit charges they have had to pay, and we don't want to be unmindful of the concerns raised by banks, whether they be big or little, or by credit unions.

I was talking to one of my colleagues who said: I don't want to vote on this again. We had to vote on this once. I don't want to vote on this again. As one guy said: I certainly don't want to have to vote on it twice.

Another colleague said to me: I don't like the idea of just kicking the can down the road, having a 24-month pause and then maybe a new Congress and new administration and maybe it will all go away. That is not what I am interested in doing.

Another of my colleagues said to me: Why don't we fix this problem? Rather than kick the can down the road for 24 months, why don't we say: Let's fix this problem. As it turns out, four of our colleagues who voted with the Senator from Illinois, the author of the Durbin amendment, voted with Durbin originally when the amendment was first offered. They actually sat down, two Democrats and two Republicans, they and their staffs, hammered it out, worked with Senator Tester and they worked with Senator Corker as well and that is who wrote the bill. Did they get input from the merchants? I am sure they did. Did they get input from the banks? I am sure they did. I would hope so. That is the way this place ought to work, where Democrats and Republicans actually work together on legislation, and we seek input from not just banks, not just credit unions, not just merchants, but consumers as well.

I think back on the life I have been privileged to lead. I spent a lot of years in the Navy and had the privilege to serve my State as Governor and now in the Senate with my colleagues. I know any number of times in my life I have done things I was sure were the right thing to do but had an unintended consequence. I was sure I did the right thing, but as things turned out, there were consequences I didn't anticipate, and what I had to do was go back and help be part of the solution in addressing those unintended consequences.

Senator Durbin put his finger on a big problem, and the problem he put his finger on is--actually, more than 1 year ago but a number of years ago--we have a situation with the use of debit cards where merchants are disadvantaged. They don't have a lot of options, and they end up having to pay large fees to banks--sometimes big banks but sometimes small banks--and they don't have that much choice. They don't like that. They would like to see us do something about it. So what Senator Durbin proposed is a way to deal with that.

He intended in his legislation not only to try to help consumers and merchants, but he also tried to protect small banks, those with under $10 billion in assets, and to protect credit unions and their members.

I wish to see if we have a quote here. These banks have different regulators, credit unions have different regulators. I don't have quotes from all of them, but here is a quote Senator Tester shared with us. Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, when he was talking about the unintended consequences. Here is what Sheila Bair of the FDIC said. She is talking about institutions, community banks, smaller ones, under $10 billion of assets.

We are concerned that these institutions may not actually

receive the benefit of the interchange fee limit exemption

explicitly provided by Congress, resulting in a loss of

income for community banks and ultimately higher banking

costs for their consumers.

She said that in her testimony before the House.

John Walsh is the Comptroller of the Currency. He said:

We believe the proposal takes an unnecessarily narrow

approach to recovery of costs that would be allowable under

the law and that are recognized and indisputably part of

conducting a debit card business. This has long-term safety

and soundness consequences--for banks of all sizes.

That is what they said. They think we have a problem. Their job is not to be the lapdog for financial institutions. Their job is to regulate financial institutions.

I tried to think about some times where we have abuses to clean up and how we go about doing it. This sounds strange for a guy from Delaware to say this. We had big abuses in credit cards. It was pretty much impossible for most people to get a credit card application in their mailbox, look at that application--maybe they got six of them that same week--and decide which of those four, five or six were actually in their best interest to fill out and submit. We had credit card banks taking advantage of people in ways that were untoward, I think unethical. What we did in the Banking Committee, where I served, is we held not just a hearing, we held extensive hearings for months-- for months. We did the same thing in the House, and we asked the Government Accountability Office to help us with an in-depth study of the credit card industry to try to decide what changes were needed. There are watchdog agencies. They came back and said these are our recommendations. Out of all those hearings came a lot of ideas too.

The Senate passed legislation. They passed legislation in the House. The banking industry didn't like it much. They complained about it. We went to conference with the House and the Senate and worked out a compromise. The banking industry didn't like it much. The regulators of the banks were required to help us implement the legislation and they had to write regulations. They had to write regulations that were true and consistent with the underlying law and they did and the banks didn't like it much. They were promulgated, some immediately, some over several months, and eventually they got the job done. I think consumers are better off. Did banks make as much as they did on credit cards? No. We know that personally in our State. But are consumers treated fairly? Yes; they are. Part of what happened was extensive hearings involving GAO, getting input from a lot of folks with different views on this, and then acting in light of the process.

I think what is different in this case, I don't believe the Banking Committee--I can't speak for other committees in the last Congress, but I don't believe the Banking Committee or other committees in the House or Senate actually had the opportunity to hold hearings and bring people in, in the last Congress, and say this is what is good about the amendment proposed by our friend from Illinois and this is what is bad. I don't think we had GAO--GAO did not have the opportunity to come in and say we were never invited to come in. We never invited them to come in on the debit card side and, therefore, their voices were not available to us, and that is unfortunate.

Here is what happened. Legislation was passed. Senator Durbin offered it with the best of intentions. He said: We have a problem. We should fix it. Here is my suggestion. He essentially said we should regulate the marketplace. We should regulate the marketplace for debit cards. The free marketers said: No; we ought to let market solutions work, harness market forces--something I generally agree with--but in this case they were not working so he came up with an alternative and said let's see if there is another way to do this. Unfortunately, with the best of intentions, we have these unintended consequences. The question is, What do we do about it?

We have a situation where I am not sure consumers are going to be advantaged by the current law as it reads. Big banks, they will be OK. They can take care of themselves. But a lot of smaller banks, the people squawking the loudest, the folks from the community banks, they have been beating on my doors and other doors, and the folks from the credit unions, they are less able, frankly, to look out for themselves, and that is despite the intent, the explicit effort by the author of the amendment, to provide them exemption. The regulators say, frankly: Sorry. It does not work.

That suggests to me that we hit a pause button, we hit a pause button not for 2 years but at least for the next as much as 6 months and say to the regulators: OK. Do now what we should have done a year or two ago. Complete an in-depth study, look at the concerns of the merchants, look at the concerns

of the consumers, look at the concerns of big banks, middle-size banks, small banks and credit unions, and come back to us with what you think to be a fair approach. You have 6 months to do it. If you can do it in less time, let's do that.

If they come back to us and say: Look, the legislation as written, current law, is fine for consumers, it is fine for institutions of all sizes and is fair to the merchants--if they come back and say this, basically, the Durbin language in the law prevails. If they say that is it, the regulators have spoken and we are done.

If they come back and say we have a problem here, these outfits, the regulators, have a period--I think it is up to 6 months--to figure out regulations that can then be implemented after the 6 months to fix the problem. Some will say how do we know they will do anything for consumers? They just did it for credit cards 2 years ago, and the bankers did not like it. They still do not like it. We have the pain in my State in the employment numbers to reflect that they didn't like it. We still live with that pain and discomfort, but who is better off? Consumers are better off. They are better off because Congress did its job. We were deliberate about it. We sought input from all sides. The regulators did their job, and it has been implemented in a prompt way.

I wish to close maybe with this thought.

There is an outfit called Michaels. We have a Michaels store not far, actually, from where my family and I live in Wilmington. They sell art supplies. It is a national chain and a pretty successful company. They were in the news big time recently--not because of a good story but because of a data breach story. A lot of folks who had accounts with them, their customer information was disclosed. There was great concern on the part of the consumers, the customers, that there had been this data breach and some of their sensitive information was going to be at risk. It involved hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of customers.

To whom did they turn to fix this problem? Did they turn to Michaels and say: You fix this problem. No, as it turns out, they didn't. Some probably did, but most probably didn't. Do you know to whom they turned? They turned to their banks. They turned to the issuers of the credit cards and said: You fix this problem. You issue a new credit card for us, and you cover this for us. And the banks did that. They were beholden to do that.

Finally, I am not here to carry the water for the banks. I think we are all here to do what we think is right. To my colleagues who are undecided on how to vote--I know some are. They don't want to choose between their two favorite children, whether it is the merchants on the one hand or the financial institutions, credit unions on the other hand. They don't have to choose between two children. They can ask themselves: What is the right thing to do? Try to understand what is in this amendment, a bipartisan amendment prepared by some of the people I most respect here in this body, and drill down on that. Listen to guys like Barney Frank who don't have a dog in this fight but have a lot of knowledge, and try to make the decision they think is the right decision.

Thank you very much.

Mr. President, on behalf of Senator Chris Coons, Congressman John Carney and myself, I pay

tribute to the Honorable Reuben Salters, retired member of the Dover City Council, educator, officer and humanitarian statesman.

Reuben Salters has been a true friend to the city of Dover and the State of Delaware. Born in Spartanburg, SC, to Reuben and Lillian Salters, Reuben was educated in public schools and graduated from the George Washington Carver High School before matriculating at Livingstone College in Salisbury, MD. A man of extraordinary service, Reuben joined the U.S. Air Force and served tours in France, Germany, Southeast Asia, England and Dover, DE. Reuben was commissioned as a 2d lieutenant at the Dover Air Force Base in 1957 and rose to the rank of major before honorably retiring in 1971.

Reuben's first civilian job was at the former Kent County Vocational and Technical School, now known as the Polytech School District, and in 1974 he earned his master of science degree in counselor education. After serving 3 years as the director of Neighborhood Youth Corps and Administrator of the Adult ABE/GED Program for Kent and Sussex counties, Reuben accepted a position as an academic counselor for the engineering technology and business curriculum at the Delaware Technical and Community College, Terry Campus. There, he also worked as a veteran's counselor, activities coordinator and as the Terry Campus representative at the Dover Air Force Base.

A man of extraordinary service, Reuben has served as president of the central Delaware branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, president of the local chapter of the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc., a faithful member of the Mt. Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church and a member of the Dover City Council serving from 1989 until his retirement earlier this year. While a member of Dover City Council, Reuben held a number of leadership positions including the chair of the Legislative and Finance Committee, the chair of the Civilian Pension Committee and a member of the Downtown Dover Partnership Committee.

Seeing the need for a greater understanding and appreciation of the arts and culture among Dover's inner city citizens, Reuben founded the Inner City Cultural League, Inc. in 1971. The league provides scores of inner city youth with the opportunity to participate in cultural and community activities. It also provides a crime and drug-free environment where they can prepare to live productive and happy lives. The program has flourished and has been enhanced by the addition of the annual African American Festival--now in its 21st year and attended by thousands of people last year--and by adding the Sankofa African Dance and Drum Company to the activities of the League.

A frequent traveler to Africa and South America to name only a few, Reuben always returns to his favorite city of Dover, DE, where his love and passion for equal opportunity and quality of life for all prevail. I am truly honored to have worked with Reuben Salters for many years and am privileged to pay tribute to Dover's favorite son.