Floor Statements

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, in the Constitution, we see laid out before us a framework of how our government is supposed to work, with three branches--legislative, executive, judicial. We also find in the Constitution what our relative responsibilities are, not with great detail but with some definitiveness.

Ironically, one of the requirements the Constitution provides for us in this country is that every 10 years we try to count everybody. We have a census. Most nations do that. We have been doing that really for over 200 years. It does not get any easier. In fact, every 10 years it gets harder, and it also gets to be more expensive.

The Director of the Census does not serve a finite period of time. The Director of the Census really serves at the pleasure of the President, and we have had Census Directors who have served as little as 1 year and some Directors who have served maybe 4 or even 5 years.

This is particularly appropriate to speak about today because we do not have a Director of the Census. We had a Dr. Murdock, from down in Texas, who served for about the last year of the Bush administration as our Census Director. He did a very nice job. But at the beginning of this year, Dr. Murdock resigned. We do not have a Census Director. What we do have coming down the railroad tracks is the requirement to do the census.

Next April 1--I call it a little bit like D-day. At Normandy, we sent all of our troops ashore, and they scrambled off of those landing vessels. They stormed the beaches. That took place after literally months of planning, months of preparation, and finally the day of execution came.

In a way, the census is like preparing for the Normandy invasion. The efforts are underway now. They have been underway for months and will continue up to April 1 and beyond that day, as we try to count everybody. Yet, at this critical time, as we approach the need to conduct our census, to do it in an accurate, cost-effective way, we do not have a leader there. We have some good people, but they lack a Director.

Last month, I held a hearing of our Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee, and we invited people who had been high-level officials in, I think, every census since 1970--the 1970 census, the 1980 census, the 1990 census, and the 2000 census. We asked them to come in and talk to us about how they thought we were doing in terms of the preparation for the 2010 census. At the end of their testimony, I asked each of them to give to us on our committee two names of people who they thought would be excellent Census Directors, and they were good enough to do that. I think every one of them included in their recommendations the name of a fellow from Michigan--I am an Ohio State guy, but they recommended a fellow from Ann Arbor whose name is Dr. Robert Groves.

Dr. Groves is an expert in survey methodology. He has spent decades working to strengthen the Federal statistical system, to improve its staffing through training programs, and to keep the system committed to the highest scientific principles of accuracy and efficiency. Having once served as Associate Director of the Census Bureau a number of years ago, Dr. Groves knows how the agency operates and what its employees need to successfully implement the decennial census and other programs. He knows because he has been there. He is not just an academician--one of the most respected people in his field in the country--he actually helped run the Census Bureau at an earlier time. The combination of those experiences has prepared him well to lead the Bureau at a time when rapid developments and changes are occurring.

As a manager, he elevated the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research to a premier survey research organization, respected throughout the country--actually, respected around the globe. Numerous Federal and State agencies and policymakers have sought his expertise in survey design and response. His work has received professional recognition through awards from various professional associations, including the 2001 American Association for Public Opinion Research Innovator Award and more recently the 2008 American Statistical Association Julius Shiskin Award for original and important contributions in the development of economic statistics. Ultimately, his deep expertise in survey response will help the Census Bureau focus on the most important goal of the 2010 census, which is to encourage all people to respond to the census.

Dr. Groves will undoubtedly face a host of operational and management challenges as we move closer to the 2010 census. However, I remain confident he is well equipped--remarkably well equipped--to understand the agency's inner workings, to lead his staff--he has led a large organization already; he served at a senior level at the Census Bureau before--and to also be a national spokesperson for the 2010 census and the agency's other equally important ongoing survey programs. It is for these reasons that I hope the full Senate will support his nomination and move it quickly.

Let me just reiterate, we are now about 8 months away from when the first forms go out as part of the start of the 2010 census. The Bureau has already completed something we call address canvassing--an operation in which 140,000 people on the ground nationwide were making sure the address lists we have to do the census are accurate.

Since the 2000 count, the population in this country is estimated to have increased by over 40 million people, with increased numbers of minorities and an increase in the number of languages spoken. Further complicating the 2010 decennial operations is the mismanagement and lack of preparation that occurred in past years, most notably in the failure of the field data collection automation contract, resulting in a last-minute decision to return to paper-based questionnaires, ultimately adding billions of dollars to the census budget. And it is only going to get harder the longer the Senate delays the confirmation process.

The reason we do not have a Census Bureau Director is not because we do not have a qualified candidate. It is not because our Subcommittee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs has not endorsed his candidacy. We have done so unanimously, and actually we have endorsed him with acclaim. We are just lucky, very fortunate in this country to have--at a time when we are about to try to meet our constitutional responsibility to count everybody accurately and in a cost-effective way--to actually have somebody with his gifts and his talents to bring to the job. What we do not have is the permission to bring his name up for a vote in the Senate. If we leave here today without having had the opportunity to vote up or down on the nomination of Dr. Groves, we will have made a very grave mistake.

I understand our Republican friends are uncomfortable, unhappy with the pace for the confirmation process for Judge Sotomayor, who has been nominated, as we know, to be an Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. I voted for Chief Justice John Roberts a couple of years ago. The timetable for approving his confirmation was almost the very same from the day he was nominated by former President Bush to the day we voted for him here, it was almost the same number of days we are

talking about with respect to the Sotomayor nomination. The timetable on Justice Alito: almost the same from the day he was nominated by President Bush until the day we voted here in the Senate--at least a majority of our colleagues did--to confirm him. It was almost the same number of days. I realize some of our colleagues are unhappy that we are providing the same kind of timetable for Judge Sotomayor that we provided for Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts. I, for the life of me, do not see what the beef is.

Just as I believe we are fortunate to have someone with Dr. Groves' credentials to serve as our Census Director, I think we are lucky to have somebody with Judge Sotomayor's credentials to serve on the Supreme Court. I have had the opportunity to meet with her. I know a number of my colleagues have too. I must say, among the things I most like and respect about her: She is up from nothing. She was a kid born in the Bronx, raised in the Bronx, and very humble, from a humble setting, a humble beginning. She worked hard, won herself a scholarship to Princeton, went there, excelled, and later went off to law school at Yale--two of the finest institutions we have in our country.

After that, she was a prosecutor for a number of years; beyond that, a corporate litigator; and finally nominated by a Republican President--George Herbert Walker Bush--to serve as a district court judge. By all observers, she did a superb job. She was not just so-so. She was an exceptional judge--so good, in fact, that a few years later, when there was a vacancy on the circuit court of appeals in her district, a Democratic President, Bill Clinton, said: I think she ought to get the nod. He nominated her for that position, and she was confirmed by a wide margin. So she has actually been through this process not once but twice. I think she has gone on to serve longer as a Federal judge--when you add together the district court time and the circuit court of appeals time, I think she has served longer as a Federal judge than anybody in the last 100 years who has been nominated to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

I have read the comments some of her colleagues have to say about her, including colleagues who were also nominated by Republican Presidents. They have been uniformly complimentary, very gracious in their remarks, very laudatory as well.

So I would say to my Republican colleagues, while you struggle to get over the fact that we are going to set the same timeline or try to set the same timeline for the confirmation of Judge Sotomayor that we set for the nominations of Judges Alito and John Roberts--I just don't understand the angst you feel.

I do know this: Apparently, the nomination of Dr. Groves is being held up along with 25 to 30 other names, all of whom have cleared committees, I think, by wide margins. We can't move forward on those nominations. Some of them maybe are not of grave consequence. The nomination of Dr. Groves is of grave consequence. If we have the opportunity later today in the course of business to actually consider a number of nominations that are before the Senate, that are awaiting our consideration, I would urge my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to allow the nomination of Dr. Groves to come here for a vote and to give us the opportunity to vote him up or down. I am sure we will vote him up, and I am equally sure he will make us proud with the service he will provide as the Director of the Census Bureau for our country in the years ahead.

With that having been said, I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.

Would the Senator restate her request.

I have been waiting for a while.

Madam President, thank you very much.

Madam President, I take the floor for a few minutes to draw the attention of my colleagues to the fact that there is a birthday this year, a 75th birthday--not the birthday of a Member of the Senate, not a birthday of a Member of the House, but actually it is the 75th birthday of the National Archives and Records Administration. It is 75 years old this year.

My colleague who is presiding today may recall the reception that was held at the National Archives during our orientation for new Senators and their spouses back in November. As it turns out, it was a small group of people who were able to witness and to visually see and read some of the most famous short documents in our Nation's history.

But as it turns out, millions of Americans come every year and visitors from all over the world come each year to visit the National Archives. The National Archives serves as the custodian of some of our county's most precious and historic records and documents, and they have been doing this for something like three-quarters of a century.

I wish to take a moment on behalf of all of my colleagues, Democratic and Republican, and an Independent or two, to thank the men and women who work at the National Archives now--and who have done that for the last three-quarters of a century--who work diligently to preserve our Nation's history, not just for us but for future generations of Americans and others who will come to our shores to visit here.

Established by Congress to be our Nation's record keeper, the National Archives has the critical mission of storing and protecting our most valuable and our most important documents. In fact, the main Archives facility, which is located not far from where we are gathered here today, is the permanent home of--get this--the Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

Thomas Jefferson once said that an educated citizenry will ensure a free society. He was right then. That is right now. Unhindered access to information about our government and leaders is truly critical to the continued health and vibrancy of our democracy.

That is why I am pleased to hear that more than 1 million visitors travel to the National Archives each year to see thousands of documents--the ones I mentioned and others as well--records, and special exhibits. It is no stretch to say the National Archives is one of the most popular agencies in the U.S. Government. That probably comes as a surprise to a lot of us.

But the Archives is not just a tourist attraction. Over the years, the Archives has become an international leader in developing an electrical records archiving system that will preserve digital information in any format--not just for a few years but forever.

Information technology has forever altered our ability to create, access, and search information from any location in the world. Every year, billions--not millions, billions--of documents that shape and inform government decisions are never written down with pen and paper. Instead, these records are ``born digital.'' That means they are created electronically and stored not in a filing cabinet but on computers and on the Internet.

Each year, the Archives preserves more and more information that is essential to understanding our democracy, our history, and our culture. To put it into some kind of perspective, it took eight C-5 military cargo planes to transport all of the paper materials created by the Clinton administration. Imagine that: eight C-5 military cargo aircraft. Following the most recent Presidential transition, it took 20 tractor trailers, 2 Boeing 747s, and a DC-8 aircraft to transport all of President George W. Bush's records. At the same time, the National Archives continues to maintain records from 1775, including the military record of every single veteran in the 20th and 21st centuries. That is no small task.

So I stand here today to give my thanks--really, to give our thanks-- to the hard-working folks who work and volunteer their time at our National Archives.

Winston Churchill once said:

A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it.

I think that quote truly sums up the important role of the Archives, not just for our history but for our future.

Madam President, tomorrow I will submit, with a number of my colleagues, a resolution to commend the National Archives and its employees for excellent service over the past 75 years and to wish them many years of additional service.

Madam President, I know my colleague from Wisconsin is standing to speak, so I will be very brief. I just want to take a moment.

While Senator Shaheen and Senator Boxer were speaking, I went over and chatted a little bit with one of our colleagues from Texas who was on the floor. We talked a little bit about the debate on health care. As we approach, in a week or two, marking up a health care reform bill in the Finance Committee, he mentioned to me something I very much agree with, the 80-20 rule.

Mike Enzi, the Senator from Wyoming, likes to talk about the 80-20 rule and why he has been so productive over the years with Senator Ted Kennedy. Senator Kennedy, obviously, is a liberal Member of the Senate. Senator Enzi is a very conservative Member of the Senate. They get a lot done in the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. It is because they follow what Senator Enzi calls the 80-20 rule. They focus on the 80 percent of the stuff they agree on. They set aside the 20 percent they do not agree on, and they really focus on where the most agreement is.

We need to do a similar kind of approach as we prepare to mark up in the Finance Committee the health reform bill, to go along with the areas of work going on in the HELP Committee.

I strongly agree with Senator Baucus and Senator Grassley. We need a bipartisan bill. I know many Democrats and Republicans feel we need a bipartisan bill. My fear is, if we do not have a bipartisan bill, we will not be successful ultimately.

While most of the media coverage of the health care debate focuses on the conflict--should we have a public plan or not; tax exclusions; what portion of our benefits should be excluded from taxation; should there be an employer mandate or individual mandate or should there not be-- setting all of those things aside, not that they are unimportant, there is huge agreement on a bunch of things that are important that are going to save money, save lives, reduce costs, and provide better health care for people. Part of it is in information technology; make it possible for businesses--large and small but especially small businesses--to get into a purchasing pool to be able to take advantage of much lower rates and have better choices of benefits for their folks; moving toward chronic care to make sure for people who have diabetes that we do not just wait until they get really sick and they have to have arms and legs and feet amputated, but make sure we take care of them early on as we go along.

As to these purchasing pools we are going to create under health care reform, if people have a preexisting condition, they do not get excluded. They can participate as well. We are going to be covering more people for pharmaceuticals. We are going to do a much better job of making sure people who will benefit from a particular pharmaceutical--whether it is a large molecule or a small molecule-- will have access to something that is going to help them. We will be smart enough to figure out the pharmaceuticals out there that will not help somebody, so then they will not be taking those.

We are going to be focusing more on primary care, less on fee for service, which drives up the cost of health care.

We are going to do a better job of coordinating care and providing medical homes for people as we go forward.

We are going to take examples like that in the neighboring State represented by Senator Feingold. Over in Minnesota, they have this Mayo Clinic, and they figured out how to make the Mayo Clinic provide better health care, with better outcomes, at lower cost than most other places in this country. They took their model and they went down to Florida, where costs were very high for health care. They took the Mayo model to Florida, and they ended up with better outcomes and lower costs in Florida compared to other folks who had been doing business in Florida providing health care for years.

But it is not just the Mayos, it is the Intermountain folks, a nonprofit out in Utah, the Geisinger operation in Pennsylvania. There are a number of good examples out there. Part of what we are going to do through this debate, as we move toward health care reform, is to learn from those examples, go to school on those examples, and be able to put them to work for all of us.

With that having been said, my friend said some people say we are not going to get health care reform done. We have to get it done. We spend more money for health care in this country than any other developed nation on Earth. We do not get better results. If we spend more money, we don't get better results. We can do better than this. Democrats working together with Republicans, we can get there, and let's just not give up.

Thank you, Madam President. I thank my colleague for his patience.

Mr. President, do I understand that the time for morning business expires at 3 o'clock?

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to extend that for an extra 10 minutes.

Mr. President, while my colleague from Alaska is still in the Chamber, let me bring her some good news, as one on our side who is a strong advocate for nuclear power and who believes it is incredibly important that we do it safely. I chair the Senate Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety, and, as she mentioned, we have now, I think, 17 applications to build 26 new nuclear powerplants. I think we have $18 billion in loan guarantees.

One of the things we have done this year is we have taken off the time restriction on the loan guarantees so they can go beyond the next couple of years, if needed. Hopefully, they won't be needed, but at least the amount of money will be there and available for a number of years.

Another piece we had put in the stimulus package was a provision that says that not only can renewables--solar, wind, geothermal, and all the rest--be able to participate in the manufacturing tax credits to create--if you will, manufacture--the components of solar, wind, geothermal, but also nuclear. If we are going to build 26, 27 new nuclear powerplants in the next decade or two, I sure don't want to be getting the components from China, South Korea, Japan, or someplace in Europe. We should get the components from manufacturers that are here, and part of the stimulus package has been designed to do that.

The other thing I would mention regarding cap and trade on climate change, if we actually take that approach--and my hope is we will--just by its very nature, being a producer of electricity but not one that creates carbon dioxide, money will flow in the cap-and-trade approach to utilities which use nuclear energy, which will develop more nuclear energy.

So I appreciate the concerns the Senator from Alaska raises.

I might add that just 3 weeks ago, I hosted a roundtable at MIT, near Boston, and we brought to the table some of the smartest people around--from MIT and from Harvard--who focused a lot on spent nuclear fuel and what to do with it. As you know, a lot of the fuel rods, I am told, still have 80 or 90 percent of the energy in the spent fuel rods. One of the questions I asked was, What should we do about it? Yucca Mountain is on hold for now. And I was pleasantly surprised to hear a unanimous opinion from everybody there who said, for now, maybe for the next 30, 40, 50, 60 years, even longer, the spent fuel rods, which are stored on site with our nuclear powerplants in dry cask storage, are perfectly adequate in terms of providing security and safekeeping for the spent fuel.

In the meantime--and I would hope the Senator would join those of us who are advocates of nuclear power, would also understand we need to address the spent fuel issue, and would work with us to help fund technology for reprocessing and recycling to make sure we don't wait 50 or 60 years to do that but we get started a lot sooner.

So it is not all gloom and doom, but I appreciate the concerns the Senator from Alaska has raised and very much look forward to working with her on these issues, as we do on so many others, hopefully to good effect, and I thank her.

Mr. President, I missed you in Afghanistan/Pakistan. I understand you and another CODEL were there at the same time we were, and I think we missed you by a day or so in both countries. I don't presume to speak for you or for those in your CODEL. We had five in ours. Senator Mark Udall, Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Senator Kay Hagan, Senator Mark Begich of Alaska, and I was privileged to be a part of that delegation.

We had 2 days in Afghanistan and 2 days in Pakistan. We left Lahore, a large city in the eastern part of the country, about 2 days before they had the assault that killed 30 or so people, a terrorist assault.

I wish to take a couple of minutes, if I could, today. We could almost take turns here. I understand you can't speak from the podium about your congressional delegation, but if we could, we could probably have quite a good conversation.

There is a reason they call Afghanistan the graveyard for empires, because for a long time empires have been going there and trying to subdue the Afghans--the Brits among them, the Soviet Union among them-- and not with great success. When the Afghans sort of thrust the Soviet Union out from their country, with our support, we promptly left. As we left, we left a vacuum in Afghanistan, and we left a vacuum which was filled all too readily by the Taliban, and providing a sanctuary for al-Qaida.

On the heels of 9/11, we decided to go back and clean the place out, drove the Taliban out of there, and a bunch of them took refuge over in the mountainous areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Once we had done that, we took our eye off the ball. We decided to go into Iraq and made that country take down their regime--Saddam Hussein's regime--and we transferred a lot of our troops and treasure and attention to Iraq and took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan. Into that vacuum we left came--not surprisingly--the Taliban to resume their ways of before. They are especially plentiful in the southern part of the state.

As we were preparing to leave Afghanistan and head for Pakistan, we did a series of press interviews, radio and print interviews, from that country. Among the questions that were asked of our congressional delegation were: What is the exit strategy? What is your exit strategy from Afghanistan? I responded that I think the exit strategy is our new strategy.

The reporters said: Why is that?

I said: Well, let me take a minute to talk about that new strategy. It is not just about sending 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan, a little more than half of which are marines, and some of those are being redeployed from Iraq, and some are to be brought in fresh from the United States. But, I said, if all we did was put another 17,000 or 27,000 troops in Afghanistan, that is not going to be the answer to success. It is not going to be what we need to do.

In addition to the 17,000 troops who are being committed in a buildup that will occur over the next 3 months or so, we are bringing in about 150 additional helicopters to move around where the Taliban is and track them down and hopefully eliminate their presence in that country. But even that is not enough force at this juncture.

The other thing that is called for in our strategy is to bring in about 4,000 trainers. These trainers are to go along with the men and women, the American troops who are embedded and mentoring Afghan units already--4,000 new trainers. Their job really is twofold: one, to help not just to stand up the Afghan army--and the Afghan army is a good fighting force. They are not big enough, given the size of their country and all the people who live there.

I don't know if this is the experience of the Presiding Officer, but we met with a number of American troops who had been in Iraq and were now in Afghanistan, and I said: What is the difference in terms of the fighting force--what you saw in Iraq and what you are seeing in Afghanistan?

They said: Well, there were times when we almost had to coax the Iraqis out of their barracks and try to cajole them into taking the lead on operations. We don't have to do that with the Afghans. These guys are ferocious fighters.

That is why they are known as the graveyard for empires and drove out the Brits and the Soviets with our help.

We want to help the Afghans double the size of their army and improve the quality. We want to help them double the size of their police force and improve dramatically the quality.

The Afghans have a whole lot of respect for their army. They do not have the same level of respect for the police force. As the Presiding Officer knows, the country is rampant with corruption. The corruption includes the police. It is not uncommon for police to take bribes, to almost solicit or command money from others in their country. As a result, it is maybe less effective as a force, certainly less respected as a force.

One of the smartest things done this year is the salaries of the police officers have been raised by a factor of four--quadrupled-- putting them pretty much on parity with the salaries paid to the army, taking away the need for those police officers who feel they need to supplement their income by bribing or accepting bribes from folks.

One of the questions that was asked as I did that press interview was: What surprised you about what you saw in Afghanistan?

I said: Well, a number of things. I didn't realize this was a country that as recently as the 1970s was able to feed itself, and not just feed itself but to feed a number of other nations in that part of the world.

This is a country that is able to raise fruits, has vegetables and orchards, they can raise wheat, they can raise cotton and saffron, and they can raise chickens--some of the same things we raise in each of our States, as the Presiding Officer knows. Currently, though, for the most part, what they raise is poppies. They raise the poppies to feed the opium trade, and they use the opium to make heroin. Most of the heroin in the world, literally and figuratively, has its root in Afghanistan.

The production of poppies peaked in 2007. It began coming down in 2008. We want to continue to drive it down in 2009, again in 2010 and 2011, until we get to the point where there are no poppies being grown in Afghanistan and where the farmers are able to feed themselves and to make a good living raising and selling fruits and vegetables in their country and for neighboring countries, and to be able to do the same kind of thing with the wheat they raise and the other commodities they raise too. It is not unrealistic. Our troops cannot go in and tell them how to do that, but it turns out there is a component of our strategy that calls for a significant civilian component. What we are going to see is people going into Afghanistan--our folks in many cases, sometimes our NATO allies--who are specialists in agriculture, helping the Afghan farmers diversify away from poppies and toward other commodities which will enable them to feed themselves and to feed their country. It is a smart strategy.

That isn't all, though. Going back to the question of what surprised me, I was surprised to learn about those big mountains, big snow-capped mountains--they are quite beautiful--in that there are a lot of minerals and there is a potential for a very successful mining and mineral industry in Afghanistan. They need a little help figuring out how to get it going and figuring out how to transport the minerals they mine, but there is money to be made there for that country.

Also, I didn't realize they have oil and gas deposits in Afghanistan. I certainly didn't realize they found, about a year ago, they have three times more oil and gas holdings beneath the surface of the Earth and in those mountains more than was originally believed to be the case. We have all seen pictures of Afghanistan. I was a naval flight officer, going through my training earlier in my career in Corpus Christi, the area of south Texas toward Brownsville. Afghanistan reminds me of that except it has these huge mountains that pop up all over the place. But the mountains give them a great opportunity for producing wind power. Just as we have windmills on the tops of mountains in this country, the wind blows a whole lot in Afghanistan. They can do themselves well by harnessing that wind and turning it into electricity. They have vast expanses of lands that would lend themselves to solar energy panels, and they also have rivers that could be harnessed and used to create energy as well, hydroelectric energy.

There are a number of sources--oil, gas, wind power, solar, hydroelectric power--that could help this country meet its needs and maybe even export some of that electricity to the other countries in the region. Those are things that surprised me that I did not fully expect to see.

What also surprised me was the level of corruption, the extent of the corruption. It is endemic in that country.

They have not much experience or time governing themselves, 5 years or so experience with democracy. Here in the United States we have been working on democracy for how long? Over 220 years. We still struggle with it. We should not be surprised that a country that has had maybe 5 years of experience with democracy is struggling with it as well. They need help figuring out how to govern at the national level; they need help figuring out how to govern at the provincial level; and they need help figuring out how to govern at the local level. Part of what our civilian component will do there is to help, really, like Self- Government 101, them figure out how to govern more effectively, govern more honestly, and ferret out corruption where it exists.

One of the most encouraging conversations I had was at Ambassador Eikenberry's residence. Right across from me at the table was a fellow I called the Secretary of Finance. He was really the Minister of Finance, like our Treasury Secretary in this country. We talked about corruption. It was a very frank discussion.

He said, basically I am ashamed of what goes on in this country. He said, in my ministry, the Ministry of Finance, we basically set, last month--in April at the time--zero tolerance. We are not going to put up with it anymore. The idea that people skim revenues coming in to the government, we don't even have enough to make ends meet, even to come close. He said, on my watch, in my ministry, in my department, we are going to get rid of that. If people want to do that, they are not going to work with me.

That is the kind of leader we need in every ministry. That is the kind of leader we need in the whole country. As they go to the polls, I think in August, to elect a President, they have a number of people who are running. I hope whatever flows from that will include a leader who will provide the right kind of personal example, calling on the government that he leads to lead by example and to ferret out corruption where it exists.

Let me take a minute or two on Pakistan, if I could. I had not been to Pakistan either. In the weeks before we arrived there, in fact the months before we arrived, the Taliban, who were already pretty well entrenched in the territories up along the border of Afghanistan, began reaching out tentacles and spreading their influence to other parts of the country that in ways I found alarming. I know many people in this country saw the expansion of Taliban influence in Pakistan as something to be concerned about. Here is a country with about 100 nuclear warheads with the Taliban less than 100 miles from their capital of Islamabad. That got my attention and caused me a fair amount of concern; not just me but others in our delegation, in our Senate and Congress and in the administration.

Something happened a couple of weeks before we got there that helped turn that situation around. The Government of Pakistan was following what I will call almost a policy of appeasement with the Taliban, trying to get the Taliban to play nice, stay in their place, if you will, and leave the rest of the country alone, a policy of appeasement that allowed the Taliban to begin to exert its influence in places where it had previously not done so. As they extended their influence and presence, the Taliban sought to replace the regular law and order of the country, the laws of the provinces and the National Government with Islamic law. One incident occurred a month or so ago which has done maybe more to change this picture than anything I can think of. It was rather remarkable.

In one of the areas where Islamic law had replaced the traditional law of the community, the father of a young woman insisted that she marry a man she didn't want to marry. Apparently under Islamic law--I don't pretend to be an expert, but under Islamic law apparently that is what fathers can do with their daughters, tell them who to marry. She didn't want to have any part of that, and made it clear to him and to others. She ended up being publicly flogged in the streets of her community by the Taliban, in a flogging that was not just witnessed by a number of people but it was videotaped. That videotape ended up being played hundreds of times on every television station in Pakistan and on the Internet. Anybody who wanted to watch it or didn't want to watch it had the opportunity to do so.

About the same time one of the Taliban leaders gave a major address in Pakistan and showed their true colors, what they were about if they gained the upper hand in Pakistan.

The people of that country, including the military, the political leadership, multiparty--the rank and file and the military basically stood up as one and said that is not where we want to go as a country. That is not the Pakistan that we want. We don't want to have any part of seeing that kind of change occur to our country, and they turned on the Taliban.

In the days the Presiding Officer and I were there, our CODELs were there, we met with the military and political leadership of the country--I am sure his delegation did--and I was very much heartened by the forcefulness with which they are going after the very people they appeared to be almost appeasing in the months before. They are determined to wipe them out, to crush them, and to be able to live their lives and govern their country in a way that I think more of us would want any country to be able to govern itself.

I came back and, I say to my colleagues--I came back not wearing rose-colored glasses. I did not change my name to Pollyanna. I realize the fighting that lies ahead, especially in Afghanistan as we stand up our 17,000 troops, roughly 10,000 marines, and bring in all those helicopters and trainers. We are going to take up the Taliban in the southern part of the country, in Kandahar, in Helmand Province. That is where they raise all the poppies for the drug trade. That puts money in the pockets of farmers. It also puts money in the pockets of the Taliban and other terrorists, not only in that country but other countries as well. We do not need that. The people in Afghanistan and Pakistan don't need that either. One of the advantages of getting rid of the poppy trade and replacing it with fruits and vegetables and chickens and wheat, and so forth, is we stop supporting in a financial way the terrorists wreaking such havoc over there.

But there is going to be a lot of tough fighting in the weeks that lie ahead as we raise our profile, as we raise our ability to deliver a punch. We are going to be there training our Afghan colleagues, both at the military level, the army, and at the police level. Ultimately, while we help them to stand up and strengthen themselves in the next 3 to 5 years, we have sown the seeds of an exit strategy that will enable us to draw down and eventually pull most of the fighting forces out of there--perhaps leave behind a residual to help lead the training effort as many of our NATO allies are helping with the training effort.

Let me close with this. One of the other things I learned when I was over there, I was surprised to find out how many other countries are involved. We have the major part of the fighting force. There are a lot of other nations involved. I am sure my colleague, who is presiding, saw that too. One of the things that surprised me was the Japanese, who have no trainers there, no fighting forces there--I don't know that they have a civilian component there--but they are paying the salary of the police force for the whole country for the next 6 months. It is about $100 million, a substantial contribution. It is an example of what others can do to help. We hope those who are helping will do more of the same and those who are not will find ways to be supportive.

The operations today and in the months ahead will be military led with a civilian component. Eventually it will transform and we will have a force led by the civilians, and the military will be a smaller part of what we do in Afghanistan.

That is about it. I look forward to coming back and maybe presiding when the Presiding Officer shares what he saw and learned as well. But I look forward to working with him and those who accompanied him on his delegation trip, and those who went with us, as we help the Afghans and Pakistanis take on a tough enemy in a fight that can be won and should be won.

With that, I see no one seeking to speak so I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Madam President, I rise to speak for several minutes on the

legislation that is before us today dealing with credit cards, something that most of us have a personal experience with--we use them; we have had good experiences and bad experiences. In some respects, those experiences guide our views with respect to how we should legislate. That is understandable. It is true with me too.

Earlier today, I had a chance to participate in a number of call-in radio shows, some specific to Delaware, one to the Delmarva Peninsula, and one a national call-in show. People raised a variety of different issues about the legislation we are debating. What I did with some of the listeners, I took them back to the beginning and said: The reason why this legislation is before us actually grew out of the work of the Federal Reserve, which was begun over 2 years ago. The Federal Reserve sought to use their authority under the--I think it was the Federal Trade Commission law that says they have a responsibility to protect consumers. That includes protecting consumers as they use credit cards.

For roughly 2 years the Federal Reserve held hearings, received input from consumer groups, from individuals, from the industry, from other regulators, as to how we might better protect consumers.

In the end, the Federal Reserve sought to strike a balance. They sought to strike a balance that was fair to consumers and better protected their interests, which need to be better protected, and at the same time not to further disadvantage our financial institutions in this country, many of which are struggling literally to survive. That was the balance the Federal Reserve sought to strike. The Federal Reserve promulgated regulations last December after literally receiving tens of thousands of pages of comments on the draft regulations they promulgated earlier, last year.

What we are doing now is, rather than simply waiting on the Federal Reserve regulations to be implemented between now and July 1 of 2010, Congress is seeking to codify, to literally turn into law those regulations and in some cases to move the effective date of those regulations up earlier and in some cases to add some provisions that were not covered by the regulations.

One of the changes that is affected in this regulation was not raised in the regulation. It deals with credit cards and kids. It is really credit cards and people under the age of 21. My boys are 19 and 20. They are in college. They have been receiving preapproved credit card applications for a number of years, including when they were in high school. I think Senator Dodd has talked about one of his girls, who I think is 7 or 8 years old, having received a preapproved credit card application at the tender age of 7 or 8.

The question is, do we need to do something differently? It is interesting that the Federal Reserve, in their regulations, did not think so. The legislation which comes out of the committee and comes to us for consideration says, no; we should do something. What the legislation calls for, for us to do differently in this country, is if a young person, under the age of 21, wants to sign up for a credit card, either, No. 1, their parent or guardian has to cosign for them, with them, for that credit card, or, No. 2, the young person has to demonstrate the ability to pay their debts.

For the most part it means have a job, have a source of income to pay their debts. That is something that is in addition to the Federal Reserve. I agree with that. I think it is a good change, and I think most of my colleagues do, too.

In terms of being guided by your own personal experiences, I don't know about the rest of you, but one person who called in today on a call-in show said: Why don't we just let the marketplace make the decisions for us? We are smart. We get these credit card solicitations in the mail. There are a lot of choices. Let the marketplace work, and let people choose what card they want.

As it turns out, we have a lot of smart people in the Senate, maybe staff who are even smarter. There are a lot of people in this country who, frankly, have not had the opportunity for an education that some of us have had, and they lack, as do some of us, the financial literacy that will enable them to make the right decision on a multitude of options, choices; to understand them, read the fine print and understand how it will impact them.

As a result, we are not going to just let the marketplace work as it worked in the past because it didn't work perfectly. What we are trying to do is correct some of the bad behavior, clean up some of the behavior on the part of the credit card issuers, and that will get to a point where the marketplace can work, and the market will actually work on behalf of consumers. That is really what we want to see happen.

I will use a couple of examples from my own personal life. I have three credit cards that I use. One of the credit cards I use is for my personal use. Another credit card I use is for government-related expenses, official business. A third is for campaign-related expenses. The Presiding Officer may have a similar kind of arrangement. It helps keep everything straight for me. That is a benefit, a real advantage, and I believe it is an example of how our credit cards can be used for our advantage.

I had a credit card several years ago for campaign-related expenses. I lived in Wilmington, DE. The credit card bill had to be paid in New Jersey. I was getting the bill about 10 days before it was due, and in one instance I remember sending a check for that bill and it took 5 days for my check to actually get to the credit card company and be credited as a payment--5 days, Wilmington, DE, to New Jersey. I could have driven it in less than 5 hours, but it took 5 days to credit.

The other thing I noticed about the credit card company, the due dates for my bill were always Saturdays or Sundays. They didn't process on Saturdays or Sundays. I finally realized what was happening, and I said we will not use that credit card again. I tore it up, paid it off, and got another credit card that did not have that problem. That is an example of letting market forces work.

Hopefully, a lot of us are smart enough to be able to do that sort of thing, but honest to God, not everybody is as sophisticated as they need to be to be able to lay that out for themselves.

Another issue that has come before us is the issue of caps, our credit card limits. If Senator Grassley over here has a credit card limit, and I am his credit card issuer, he has a limit on the credit card he has from us, from our company, say, a $1,000 limit. Currently, if he exceeds the $1,000 limit, we let him. My credit card company lets him exceed it and he starts paying fees. If he continuously goes over the limit, he pays more and more fees.

I don't think that is the way the system should work. The Presiding Officer doesn't think that is the way the system should work. The legislation before us says that is not the way this system should work.

Going forward, when a person signs up for a credit card, if there is a limit--we will say there is a $1,000 limit--unless the cardholder objects, that will be a limit. It will be a hard cap. If the cardholders want to exceed that limit, they may do that, but they fully acknowledge that they will accept fees in doing so. I think that is a reasonable way to approach this.

There is another major issue that has been before us, the issue of whether the credit card companies should be able to assess risk and charge for that risk, the perceived higher risk on the part of the cardholder. We worked with Senator Shelby, who is here today, to try to strike a reasonable balance that says, again, I am a credit card company, he is the credit card holder, and we send him his statement. He doesn't pay within 30 days. What the Federal Reserve said is after 30 days, credit card companies should have to charge a higher interest rate. We changed that a little bit, and we say we will give the cardholder 60 days. If the cardholder has not paid a minimum payment within that 60 days of it being due, the credit card company can raise the interest rate; however, we give the holder of the card 6 months on- time payments, minimum payments for 6 months, to earn back the lower interest rate. To me, that seems like a fair balance, looking out for the consumer, looking out for the company in addition.

I want to mention, yesterday we had the opportunity to debate the question of a usury ceiling. The question was 15 percent--shouldn't we have a 15-percent uniform usury ceiling on credit card rates. Maybe 33, 35 people voted

for it. I did not. I said to my colleagues wondering how they should vote, there are actually two or three problems with the amendment before us, or any usury ceiling rate.

If it is a 15-percent ceiling rate, the idea was we should limit banks to charging 15 percent because credit unions are limited to 15 percent. As it turns out, credit unions do not operate under the same rules of the road as banks. The banks complained the credit unions get a break and the banks do not enjoy that in a number of ways. To simply say because the credit unions are capping at 15 percent we ought to cap the banks at 15 percent, frankly, it is not a logical argument in my mind.

One thing I know is, if there were a limit of 15 percent, everybody here, all the Senators, would be able to get credit. Most of our staff would be able to get credit. The folks who would not be able to get credit are lower income people. They wouldn't be able to get a credit card because they may have a high risk, and if they do have a high risk and it is proven by their payments scheduled over time, those people are going to be cut off. That is not an intended consequence, it is an unintended consequence, but by virtue of not adopting yesterday's amendment we allow credit card companies to charge eventually for risk, but at the same time to offer the credit card holder the opportunity to earn back a lower rate of interest.

I compliment Senator Dodd. I commend Senator Shelby and their staffs. They have worked very hard to get us to a point where all of us, whether we happen to come from States where we have a lot of credit card companies or we happen to come from States where we have a lot of credit card holders, to try to get a right balance. I think you came really close to doing that. I understand we may have one amendment offered later today dealing with fees that are paid by, in some cases, the merchants--the interchange fees. I understand there is language in the underlying bill that says--this is not something on which we have had hearings, I understand, in the Banking Committee. I understand maybe other committees have had hearings on it years ago. We have not had hearings on this in the Banking Committee. It is a lot more complex than people would lead us to believe.

Why don't we give the appropriate agency, and I think in this case the GAO, the Government Accountability Office, a year to come back to us, study this, vet it, and tell us: This is what we think you should do. To me, this makes a lot more sense on the Senate floor, without having had the benefit of hearings, informed hearings from the Banking Committee, to tell us what we should do. Let's take our time and let's do this right.

I commend my colleagues. I thank them for giving my staff and me, other Members who have had an interest, whether on the committee or not, the opportunity to weigh in, express our concerns, and have the opportunity to shape in a small way the outcome of this legislation.

Mr. President, this spring, the fourth class will graduate from the Delaware Military Academy, and I would like to take this opportunity to recognize Commandant Charles W. Baldwin for his years of dedicated service to the school.

The Delaware Military Academy, DMA, is a unique public charter school affiliated with the Red Clay School District. Cofounded in 2003 by Commandant Baldwin and opened that year with only grades 9 and 10, the DMA has quickly found success.

Today, in addition to being a Middle States fully accredited school, the academy has grown to enroll 525 students in grades 9 though 12 and has a waiting list of more than 200 applicants. Since 2006, DMA has earned a superior rating every year from the Delaware Department of Education. In 2008, the school was named a Superstars in Education Award Winner by the Delaware Chamber of Commerce.

Designated by the United States Navy as a Distinguished Unit with Academic Honors, the academy has the unique privilege and responsibility of naming nine nominations among the Naval Academy, Air Force Academy and West Point Military Academy.

The unique school offers students a tuition-free, 4-year high school program. The entire school is incorporated within the Navy Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, and as the first school of this nature, has become the model high school for this Navy Training Corps.

The Delaware Military Academy's college preparatory academic curriculum is supplemented with courses that include naval operations, navigation, leadership, seamanship and oceanography. With its cadet hierarchy, students are placed in leadership positions and given responsibilities rarely found in a civilian high school. As a result, they emerge from the academy better prepared to meet the demanding challenges of the adult world.

In just 6 short years, the academy, under the leadership of Commandant Baldwin, has done what takes some schools more than 20 years to accomplish. It has built and maintained a successful system that instills values and responsibility into our children while providing them an excellent education. Moreover, the commitment of DMA and its student body to community service is widely known and appreciated in the State of Delaware.

While success in such a short period is certainly a credit to the faculty and students of the academy, Commandant Baldwin has indeed played a critical leading role.

A 24-year Navy veteran himself, Commandant Baldwin has dedicated his life to training, teaching and recruiting, including a tour of duty as principal of the George V. Kirk Middle School in Delaware's Christiana School District. Before cofounding the Delaware Military Academy, Commandant Baldwin established NJROTC programs in Delaware's Seaford and Christiana School Districts. During this time, he has received both military and civilian awards for excellence, including the Meritorious Service Medal, the Military Order of the Purple Heart, Christiana Teacher of the Year and the Christiana School District Citizenship Award. In addition, he twice received Presidential awards for management excellence.

On a personal note, I have known and admired Commandant Baldwin for more than a decade. My sincere hope is that as he steps down from his leadership role at the Delaware Military Academy, he will consider leading an effort to establish other public charter schools in the state that are based on the DMA's unique model.

I want to personally thank Commandant Baldwin for his commitment to Delaware, to the education of its young people, and to preparing them for lives of service. I warmly wish him the best.

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

Mr. President, I rise with some reluctance today to oppose the amendment before us. The amendment is being offered to what I think is a very good bill. The provisions of the underlying bill are worthy of our full support. The notion that we are going to expand the ability of FHA and Rural Housing to modify loans is something I certainly support and I believe others should. The idea in the underlying legislation is that we should expand access to the HOPE for Homeowners Program, we should provide a safe harbor for servicers who otherwise would modify a loan. We have a situation, as the President may know, where we tried to encourage the modification of loans to help people who are in a bind to avoid foreclosure. We find out that among the parties who have to agree to the loan modification are the servicers, the people to whom we send mortgage payments. They have not been anxious to participate in modifying the mortgages because, first, they get no financial incentive upfront for doing the work and, second, if they do the work to modify the mortgage, they end up being sued by the investors who own these mortgage-backed securities around the world. That is not much incentive and, as a result, servicers have not done the work they need to do to help modifications take place.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my time count against the Republican time. I understand it has been cleared with our Republican friends.

In any event, the underlying legislation addresses in a very satisfactory way an approach so that servicers will be more likely to participate in mortgage modifications.

Finally, the underlying legislation creates more enforcement tools for FHA to use to go after bad actors, bad lenders. That is all good stuff and we ought to support it, and I certainly do.

I am sorry to say I cannot support in its current form the so-called bankruptcy cram-down legislation offered by our friend from Illinois. A year or so ago we visited this issue. We had a vote on the floor about whether to bring a provision similar to this to the floor for debate. I did not vote to bring it to the floor for debate at that time. I was not sure if the issue was ripe and I didn't know that we were ready to do it.

My view has changed. I think it is an appropriate time and place for us to negotiate--to debate the issue of cram-down. I think it is unfortunate that we cannot offer an amendment, a second-degree amendment or perfecting amendments to the provision that has come to the floor. I understand things have been worked out by others here, maybe in our leadership, to bring the amendment to the floor without the opportunity to perfect it further. I think that is unfortunate, but it is what it is.

About a month or two ago I hosted, back in Delaware, a forum that was designed to introduce to the people of my State the most recent initiatives launched by the Obama administration to encourage the modification of home mortgages, to help people who are in danger of becoming in default and facing foreclosure of their homes. The administration has given us a couple of very good proposals. I think our earlier HOPE for Homeowners proposal that we adopted when I served on the Banking Committee last year was a very good proposal, but the problem was we couldn't get the servicers to cooperate and be part of it. I think we figured that out in the underlying bill today.

When I hosted my forum back in Delaware earlier this year, some of the participants were fearful of losing their homes, some were approaching foreclosure. They wanted to learn more about foreclosure. We had housing counselors there. It was a helpful forum for a lot of people.

One of the things I learned there was from one of the people who participated, a woman who is a bankruptcy lawyer. She came up to me and she said: You know, we are having a hard time in some cases getting financial institutions, the lenders, to take seriously the opportunity to modify mortgages. She said: I think they would take that opportunity more seriously if they knew at the end of the day, if they were not serious, they would face in a bankruptcy court the possibility that a bankruptcy judge will come in, lower interest rates, reduce principal and stretch out the time for repayment of these mortgages.

I thought she made a compelling case. I since then decided that maybe this is an issue we ought to bring to the floor. It does have value. This is the appropriate time. A lot of people are facing foreclosure, a lot of people are in foreclosures, and this could be a tool--not something that would be a first choice but maybe a last option. It could be the last option after whoever is the homeowner facing difficulty had gone through all the programs that are offered by the new administration and would then take advantage of whatever programs are offered by lenders--Countrywide and others.

The legislation before us today is an improvement over some earlier versions. There are a couple of problems I have with it. I want to mention those, if I could. One of the problems occurs when you have a situation where a person has asked a lender to modify a mortgage and the lender has agreed to do that and then in the next year or two the homeowner, who has actually gotten out of bankruptcy a better deal, turns around and sells their home at a profit. I believe the lender, having gone through the bankruptcy and the mark-down, if you will--that lender should be able to participate more fully than is envisioned in this underlying bill.

The House takes it a little differently. This amendment says the lender would appreciate, I think, maybe to the tune of 50 percent, 50- 50 with respect to an appreciation in value following the bankruptcy. In the House they have a different approach. The first year the lender would get 90 percent of any appreciation, the second year 70 percent, third year 50 percent, and eventually phase out. I think that is a better approach.

I would like to have seen and encouraged that we consider more tightly constraining the period of years that would be covered; that is, from which mortgages would have been originated the number of years that might fall into this approach.

In the legislation before us, you can go all of the way back in time, whenever. There is no beginning date. The ending date is January of this year. And I think, whether it would happen to be a subprime mortgage, an Alt-A, almost any kind of mortgage would still be able to participate in a bankruptcy. That is a bit broad. At the very least, I would hope we would be able to come up with something that would say, we would end the period of eligibility maybe from 2002, 2003, to the end of 2007. That seems reasonable to me. We do not have that kind of constraint in this amendment.

If we could have fixed that provision, maybe moved the eligibility back from January 1 of this year to January 1 of a year ago, that would have certainly helped make it easier for me to support the amendment. The idea of giving the lender a better opportunity to participate in appreciation of the home that later on comes out of bankruptcy, a person comes out of bankruptcy and sells their home for a profit, I think the lender ought to be able to participate more fully than is envisioned here in this amendment.

I think it is unfortunate that we do not have a chance to perfect it further. I do not know that we will see this issue again. My hope is what the administration--the programs the administration has launched will have great effect, a lot of people will take advantage of them, that the mortgage modifications of the individual companies, the individual lenders will be more effective and be better utilized.

I hope the fixes we are providing for the HOPE for Homeowners Program, addressing some of the problems I have mentioned, I hope that helps too. If it does not, and we realize later on that there still needs to be this threat of a bankruptcy cram down at the end of the day, then let's revisit this issue. But I hope those of us who have maybe somewhat different views will have them be debated on the floor, and have an opportunity, if we are not fully comfortable with what comes to the floor, have an opportunity to amend and hopefully perfect it and make it better.

I am going to have to reluctantly oppose the amendment. I appreciate our friends from the other side yielding time on this issue for me.

I yield back.

Mr. President, I will talk, as my colleague has, about the Federal budget, the budget resolution that has been prepared for our consideration as a result of the conference that has occurred between the House and Senate. I express my thanks particularly to the chairman of the committee, Senator Conrad, for the work he and his staff and other members of the committee have done, Democrat and Republican, including Senator Gregg.

I wish to respond a bit to what my colleague from Texas said. This administration didn't inherit a day at the beach. They have inherited a tough situation. We as a country have been around sort of officially since 1787, and if you go from 1787 to 2001, I think that is about 214 years. We ran up in that period of time roughly $5 trillion worth of debt. We essentially doubled that over the last 8 years. We doubled it in only 8 years. We ran up as much new debt in the last 8 years as we did in 214 years as a nation. I didn't hear nearly the kind of bemoaning and railing about the growth in the deficit and the national debt during those 8 years as we hear today from our friends on the other side of the aisle.

I think my colleagues know I am not a real partisan guy, but I think it is important to say this is the hand we have been dealt. The question is what do we do about it. We have a couple of wars we are fighting. We have an economy that is the worst since the Great Depression and we have to do something about it. One of the first things we have decided to do about it is to try to jolt the economy back to life. I remember those old Frankenstein movies where Dr. Frankenstein is in the lab trying to put the electrodes to the monster and jolt that monster back to life. We are trying to jolt not a monster back to life but an economy back to life. Economists on all sides-- liberal, conservative, and everything in between--have said, you have to spend a lot of money and hopefully it will be used to produce jobs and add to the value that will be for a good purpose in our country.

That is what we have done with the stimulus package. As we go through this year, and probably the next year or so, the deficit is going to be a whole lot bigger than I am comfortable with. I was elected to the House and served there for 10 years before I became Governor. I was a deficit hawk and in my heart I still am. I wish to talk about some things we can do, ought to do, and in some cases are doing, to bring the deficit down further.

I am encouraged when I hear our new President say the deficit is large this year, but over the next 4 years we will reduce the deficit in half. I think that is fine. The important thing is we don't just stop there, and if we have the same administration or a new one, it is important that we continue to make progress and drive the deficit back to zero. I am one of those people who thinks it is appropriate to spend when we are in a time of economic calamity, when we are in a time of war, and as it turns out right now we are in both. Hopefully, 4 years from now--hopefully sooner than that--we won't be in both and we can turn back our spending. When the economy is sound, when we are not in a national disaster, in war in places around the world, I think it is appropriate to balance our budget. In fact, one of the things I was proudest of as Governor is we not only balanced our budget for 7 years in a row, we reduced taxes and paid down our debt a little bit, and that made me proud, and the legislature too. Hopefully, we will be in a position in the years to come, as we were in 1999 and 2000, when we paid down the debt.

I have suggested to the administration some things we can do, and I have talked about them here on the floor, to reduce the deficit. I wish to talk about one of them and mention one of the others as well. In order to better match revenues and expenditures going forward, we obviously cannot avoid the question of taxes. As far as I am concerned, before we start raising a lot of taxes, the first thing--maybe the better thing--for us to do is to collect the taxes that are owed. Every year we hear about the tax gap. The last one was actually officially done, I think, about 8 or 9 years ago by the IRS and they figured that at the time we had a tax gap--monies owed to the Treasury, not being collected by the Treasury--of about $300 billion a year. By most estimates I hear today, it is almost $400 billion a year. If we can only recover half of it or a third of it, we are talking about real money that would make a real dent in our deficit.

We make a lot of improper payments in this Government of ours. I chair a subcommittee that has jurisdiction over that sort of thing. We know our improper payments that we made into the Federal Government last year were right around $72 billion, mostly overpayments, some underpayments. We need to do a better job. At least we know now for the most part where the improper payments are going, or at least the departments that are making them, but we are not doing a very good job of actually going back, after we have made an overpayment, especially, and recovering the money, recapturing that money. We call it postaudit cost recoveries. We are just beginning to scratch the surface in one of our big entitlement programs, Medicare. Starting about 3 years ago we hired some private firms and said, For monies we have overpaid to providers or medical suppliers, corporate suppliers, let's go back and get the money we have overpaid. We said we were going to do it in three States--California, Texas, and Florida. The first year of this effort we recovered almost nothing. The second year we recovered a little bit. Last year we recovered about

$700 million. That is real money. The idea is not to just do it in 3 States but to do it in all 50 States, and I am encouraged that we are going to do that. If we can recover that kind of money for overpayments in Medicare, my guess is we could recover some money in Medicaid. If we have two of our three big entitlement programs that are sucking up a lot of money, one of the first issues we should face there is reducing the overpayments and going after the money and recovering that money we have overspent or, in some cases, misspent.

The third area we need to focus on is the area of major weapons systems. We have spent a lot of money. Going back to I think it was 2000, we were overspending on major weapons systems cost overruns by about $50 billion in 2000. In 2005 we were up to $200 billion. Last year we were close to $300 billion in major weapons systems cost overruns. Clearly that is an area where we can do better and have to do better. Secretary Gates has come forth with a number of proposals and reforms that deserve our support, and I hope they will enjoy our support as we go forward, to try to better align our weapons systems with buying for the kinds of wars we are likely to fight. We could do a much better job in terms of controlling our costs for those weapons systems as well.

The Federal Government owns a lot of property, not just land, not just military bases, not just buildings, but all of the above, and in some cases we don't use them. We pay security for those properties, we may pay utilities for those properties, but we don't use them. We don't do a very good job of disposing of properties that are not being used. We need to dispose of those properties. Those are only a couple of things we can do and ought to be doing. I hope in the years to come we will do more of each of those.

One other thing I would mention is most Governors have what we call line item veto power--the ability to go and line out a single line item in a budget. They have it by virtue of the Constitution so they can veto bills, they can go through the lines of their bills and veto lines and different pieces of a spending package that they have signed into law. We have something like that in the Federal Government. It is called rescission power. The President can sign an appropriations bill into law, submit that to the Congress, and the Congress can vote it up or down. But if we don't do anything, then it kind of goes away. The President sends rescission messages to us from time to time and we don't do anything, and the rescission of the proposal sort of goes away.

If we go back to 1995, 1996, there was a proposal in the Clinton administration that changed that. The idea was to make the President's rescission powers look more like line item veto powers. I thought it was a flawed effort. I think line item veto powers are oversold in terms of their value of reducing the deficit, but there is some virtue there. They are a good tool to have in the toolbox. But in 1995, 1996, what they came up with, it passed here in the House and Senate and it was signed into law. The President proposes a rescission, the Congress has to vote on it, and unless they vote it down with a two-thirds vote in the House and in the Senate, that proposed rescission is going to become law. Think about that. We are not talking about a bill. We are saying a line or a couple of lines in a bill, the President could propose to rescind those and his recommendations on rescinding spending in an appropriations bill or a tax bill or an entitlement bill, or all of the above, would actually become law unless two-thirds of the House and the Senate said no, we are going to override that. That is a huge shift of power from the legislative branch to the executive branch. I didn't think it was a good idea then. The Supreme Court didn't think it was a good idea either. If not the Supreme Court, one of the top circuit courts of appeal said they didn't think it was a good idea. They threw it out for being unconstitutional.

Having said that, I think the idea of at least compelling us to give a Presidential rescission a day in court, a day on the floor, is a good idea. What a number of us, 21 of us have done, is we have cosponsored legislation that we introduced this week, Democrats and Republicans. The idea behind the legislation is when the President signs a spending bill--not a tax bill, not a revenue bill, not an entitlement measure, but when he or she signs an appropriations bill into law, he or she would have the right to send us a rescission message to propose to reduce or rescind spending in that spending bill. We would constrain how much the President could rescind. He couldn't rescind more than 25 percent. If they are unauthorized, there is no limit. The long and short of it is, though, the President would send a rescission message and we would have to vote on it. We could vote it down with a simple majority; in the Senate, 51 votes, or in the House with 218--not a two- thirds override, not both Houses, just a simple majority in either the House or the Senate. We limit the time for this to occur. In fact, we limit the amount of years that this could be law to 4 years--4 years. I call it a 4-year test drive with enhanced rescission powers for a President. If the President abuses it, if the President should say to the Presiding Officer from New Mexico: Unless you vote for my top priorities, I am going to go after your top priorities, to try to intimidate a Member of the Senate or House--that could happen. As a result, we provide for this 4-year sunset. After that, the law goes away. If Presidents, current or future, continue to abuse this, they will not continue to enjoy this particular balance.

Do I think this will balance the budget? No, I don't. Do I think it might be of some help? Yes, I do.

I will close with a comment on earmarks. Some people think earmarks are the devil's work. The earmarks that we submit in my State--Senator Kaufman and myself, Governor Castle before he became Governor--were earmarks that we are proud of. We have three budgets in Delaware State government, and one of the major budgets is the operating budget which basically runs the State. The second is the capital budget--bricks and mortar, schools, roads, prisons, and that sort of thing. The third piece of our budget, the third budget, if you will, is something called a grant and aid budget. The Governor proposes the operating budget. The Governor proposes the capital budget in my State. The Governor doesn't propose the grant and aid budget in my State. That comes from the legislature. We found in the 1990s that the grant and aid budget was growing like Topsy, kind of crowding out spending in the operating budget and the capital budget. What we decided to do was put a constraint on the growth of the grant and aid budget, no more than 2 percent; no more than 2 percent of revenues. That put a halt to the growth and kind of put things back on the right keel.

With respect to earmarks, among the things we have done here--there is nothing inherently wrong with earmarks, directed spending, but when they are growing like Topsy, as they were for a while, that is not a good thing. We have now decided to limit earmarks to 1 percent of revenue which I think is appropriate.

The second thing we didn't know for the longest time is where the earmarks were coming from and who was asking for them. We didn't know necessarily who was going to benefit from the earmark. We have addressed that so we know both.

The other thing I believe we have addressed is called air drops, where you have a conference committee with the House and Senate on appropriations bills, you don't have an earmark in either one, yet out of the conference committee emerges an earmark from somebody and we don't know where it came from and it wasn't in either bill. That shouldn't be allowed.

The last thing I would mention is at the end of the day, you have the ability for the President to look through a bill, whether with earmarks or other forms of spending, and say maybe this is a bad idea. This is an egregious form of spending. It should be addressed, and basically say to us in the Senate or the House: I have signed this bill into law, but I wanted to come back and vote on a couple specific items. If I cannot get 50 colleagues to vote for an earmark that I have made on behalf of Delaware, I should probably not be asking for that earmark in the first place. That is the long and short of it.

There are a lot of things we can do to continue to make progress. We are getting down to 3 percent of GDP in the next 4 years, and I applaud that. There

are other things we want to do. I look forward to working with the chairman. Those are just a few of the ways we can make additional progress.

I applaud the chairman, and I thank him for all his work. I cannot imagine what it is like to bear the burden of this or any budget, but he has done it well and in good humor for a long time.

Mr. President, I rise today to introduce two bills, S. 920 and S. 921, that I believe could represent the most sweeping reforms of government information technology management reform we've considered in some time.

I would like to start by addressing the IT Investment Oversight and Waste Prevention Act.

Every year, agencies spend billions of dollars on IT investments that they believe will increase productivity, reduce costs, or improve customer service. But agencies often fail to properly plan and manage their investments. Rather, nearly one third of all Federal IT investments are considered by OMB to be ``poorly planned.'' Many of these investments will be delivered over budget, behind schedule, and not performing up to agencies' original expectations.

Some might say that we just shouldn't make these kinds of investments. But many of them are critical to agency missions.

My colleagues and I on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee's Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, which I chair, have held four hearings on the issue of troubled IT investments now, including one today. And what we've learned is that some agencies can't keep the expected cost of their investments down or deliver them on time as promised. Nor do these agencies, in many cases, have qualified IT experts they can turn to before a project spirals out of control. The bill I have put forward today along with a number of my colleagues addresses these issues.

Our bill starts by requiring the Office of Management and Budget to increase the transparency of funded IT investments on a public website. OMB created such a website, known as VUE-IT, this past July following one of our subcommittee hearings. Our bill would ensure that VUE-IT or whatever similar site the new Obama team creates has the cost, schedule, and performance necessary for Congress and the general public to know if a project is a success or should be scrapped.

Our bill also requires that agency plans for new IT systems must contain a clear business case and provide complete and accurate information before the OMB approves the investments. Although this sounds like a simple concept, it doesn't always happen. And OMB has historically been unwilling to turn down an agency IT request.

To correct this, our bill also empowers OMB and agency Chief Information Officers to take action if they realize a project isn't going as planned, before it spirals out of control. This action could be the assignment of highly-trained IT experts who could help bring projects back on track.

Lastly, our bill recognizes that there are a lot of innovative and hardworking federal employees that deserve recognition for the work they do in information technology. Our bill requires the Office of Personnel Management to provide agencies guidance on programs that can be set up to reward employees for their excellence.

Now, I would like to discuss my next bill titled the United States Information and Communications Enhancement Act of 2009.

Everyday, massive amounts of information are transmitted across the global information infrastructure. Some of this information is routine email between friends and family. Much of it, however, consists of highly sensitive military information, however, or commercial secrets.

As all of us can attest to, increasing global interconnectivity has greatly increased our productivity and ability to communicate. However, it has also increased our responsibility to make sure this information is protected.

The Federal Government stores within its databases some of our nation's most critical military, economic, and commercial secrets. Great harm could be caused if it were to fall into the

wrong hands. Knowing this, hackers, criminal organizations, and even other countries are spending a good deal of money and time trying to access it.

In fact, just last week we learned that someone had gone online and stolen our military's most advanced jet fighter plans with the stroke of a button. The cost to the American taxpayer for this single incident is approximately $300 billion worth of research and development, and an incalculable amount if the information were to ever be used against us.

Unfortunately, many agencies have not done as much as they should be doing to prevent these cyber intrusions. Instead they have been led to believe that producing plans about cyber security is equivalent to actually monitoring and protecting their networks. My bill will correct this.

First, my bill recognizes that there needs to be a coordinating office to oversee the multiple agencies that have a hand in cyber space. Today, the NSA and the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense all have different roles when it comes to securing cyber networks in the federal government and the private sector. Their efforts are largely uncoordinated and ineffective. This bill creates a White House office with a director confirmed by the Senate whose major responsibility would be to rectify this situation

My bill also ensures that agencies are spending scarce resources effectively. Instead of agencies wasting precious resources producing security plans that are outdated as soon they are printed, my bill requires agencies to continuously monitor their networks for cyber intrusions and malicious activities, take steps to address their vulnerabilities, and then regularly test whether the steps they are taking to secure their networks are effective.

My bill also requires the General Service Administration to harness the significant purchasing power of the federal government to purchase more secure hardware and software. This is the model the Air Force used a few years ago with Microsoft and it led to a savings of approximately $98 million in one year and an enhanced security posture. This is a successful model that we should continue throughout the federal government.

Lastly, my bill recognizes that the Department of Homeland Security has taken the lead among civilian agencies in protecting the perimeter of the federal government but lacks some of the necessary authority and technical people necessary to realize a more secure civilian cyber space. Therefore, our bill will require agencies to develop policy and guidance for coordinating with US-CERT and give the Director of US-CERT the ability to hire the personnel needed to defend our national security.

I look forward to working with my colleagues to get these important and necessary reforms enacted before it's too late. I think everyone can agree that computers, the Internet, and cutting-edge technology have greatly benefited our government and our society. But we also need to recognize that it has greatly increased the threats we face on a daily basis.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I rise today to introduce two bills, S. 920 and S. 921, that I believe could represent the most sweeping reforms of government information technology management reform we've considered in some time.

I would like to start by addressing the IT Investment Oversight and Waste Prevention Act.

Every year, agencies spend billions of dollars on IT investments that they believe will increase productivity, reduce costs, or improve customer service. But agencies often fail to properly plan and manage their investments. Rather, nearly one third of all Federal IT investments are considered by OMB to be ``poorly planned.'' Many of these investments will be delivered over budget, behind schedule, and not performing up to agencies' original expectations.

Some might say that we just shouldn't make these kinds of investments. But many of them are critical to agency missions.

My colleagues and I on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee's Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, which I chair, have held four hearings on the issue of troubled IT investments now, including one today. And what we've learned is that some agencies can't keep the expected cost of their investments down or deliver them on time as promised. Nor do these agencies, in many cases, have qualified IT experts they can turn to before a project spirals out of control. The bill I have put forward today along with a number of my colleagues addresses these issues.

Our bill starts by requiring the Office of Management and Budget to increase the transparency of funded IT investments on a public website. OMB created such a website, known as VUE-IT, this past July following one of our subcommittee hearings. Our bill would ensure that VUE-IT or whatever similar site the new Obama team creates has the cost, schedule, and performance necessary for Congress and the general public to know if a project is a success or should be scrapped.

Our bill also requires that agency plans for new IT systems must contain a clear business case and provide complete and accurate information before the OMB approves the investments. Although this sounds like a simple concept, it doesn't always happen. And OMB has historically been unwilling to turn down an agency IT request.

To correct this, our bill also empowers OMB and agency Chief Information Officers to take action if they realize a project isn't going as planned, before it spirals out of control. This action could be the assignment of highly-trained IT experts who could help bring projects back on track.

Lastly, our bill recognizes that there are a lot of innovative and hardworking federal employees that deserve recognition for the work they do in information technology. Our bill requires the Office of Personnel Management to provide agencies guidance on programs that can be set up to reward employees for their excellence.

Now, I would like to discuss my next bill titled the United States Information and Communications Enhancement Act of 2009.

Everyday, massive amounts of information are transmitted across the global information infrastructure. Some of this information is routine email between friends and family. Much of it, however, consists of highly sensitive military information, however, or commercial secrets.

As all of us can attest to, increasing global interconnectivity has greatly increased our productivity and ability to communicate. However, it has also increased our responsibility to make sure this information is protected.

The Federal Government stores within its databases some of our nation's most critical military, economic, and commercial secrets. Great harm could be caused if it were to fall into the

wrong hands. Knowing this, hackers, criminal organizations, and even other countries are spending a good deal of money and time trying to access it.

In fact, just last week we learned that someone had gone online and stolen our military's most advanced jet fighter plans with the stroke of a button. The cost to the American taxpayer for this single incident is approximately $300 billion worth of research and development, and an incalculable amount if the information were to ever be used against us.

Unfortunately, many agencies have not done as much as they should be doing to prevent these cyber intrusions. Instead they have been led to believe that producing plans about cyber security is equivalent to actually monitoring and protecting their networks. My bill will correct this.

First, my bill recognizes that there needs to be a coordinating office to oversee the multiple agencies that have a hand in cyber space. Today, the NSA and the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense all have different roles when it comes to securing cyber networks in the federal government and the private sector. Their efforts are largely uncoordinated and ineffective. This bill creates a White House office with a director confirmed by the Senate whose major responsibility would be to rectify this situation

My bill also ensures that agencies are spending scarce resources effectively. Instead of agencies wasting precious resources producing security plans that are outdated as soon they are printed, my bill requires agencies to continuously monitor their networks for cyber intrusions and malicious activities, take steps to address their vulnerabilities, and then regularly test whether the steps they are taking to secure their networks are effective.

My bill also requires the General Service Administration to harness the significant purchasing power of the federal government to purchase more secure hardware and software. This is the model the Air Force used a few years ago with Microsoft and it led to a savings of approximately $98 million in one year and an enhanced security posture. This is a successful model that we should continue throughout the federal government.

Lastly, my bill recognizes that the Department of Homeland Security has taken the lead among civilian agencies in protecting the perimeter of the federal government but lacks some of the necessary authority and technical people necessary to realize a more secure civilian cyber space. Therefore, our bill will require agencies to develop policy and guidance for coordinating with US-CERT and give the Director of US-CERT the ability to hire the personnel needed to defend our national security.

I look forward to working with my colleagues to get these important and necessary reforms enacted before it's too late. I think everyone can agree that computers, the Internet, and cutting-edge technology have greatly benefited our government and our society. But we also need to recognize that it has greatly increased the threats we face on a daily basis.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.