Floor Statements

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 President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

The PRESIDING Officer. Without objection, it is so ordered.

Mr. President, I plan on spending some time on the CJS appropriations bill, but I want to delay a moment. We are going to have a cloture vote, whether that is today or tomorrow or sometime, on the Energy and Water Conference Report. I was the one who objected to bringing that to the floor and for some very serious reasons. Unanimously, the Senate body agreed to an amendment that would create transparency in that appropriations bill. There were no objections; it was a unanimous vote. What we attempted to do was to bring to light, to the American people, not just the 30 Senators who were going to get the reports--70 percent of the Senate cannot see the reports--to the rest of the Senators and to the rest of the American people, the reports that are requested by Congress on the operation of this appropriation authority.

We put in there a very specific exclusion for anything that would affect security so those items would not be exposed.

There were no significant efforts to hold this in conference. So I wanted to explain for a few minutes to the American people and to my colleagues why it is important. What we have here are the following reports. The question you have to ask is, why does the Appropriations Committee not want the American people to see this information? What in the world could be a good reason for American citizens and 70 Senators to not be able to see this? There is not any good reason.

I will go through and list what some of the reports are in this bill. Then I will raise the question: Why are we not letting the American people see it? Why are we not letting 70 of our colleagues see it?

An annual report on the Department of Energy, on their financial balances, is important information to me. It should be to every Member of this body. But it also should be important to every citizen out there who is paying for the $1.6 trillion deficit we have this year. Actually, they are not paying, their kids are.

A report by Chief of Engineers on Water Resources, but the way it is phrased, it is on a ``water resource matter.'' In other words, someone very specifically tied that so they would have information others do not have. This is government in the dark; this is not transparent government.

A report by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission identifying barriers to and its recommendations for streamlining construction of new nuclear reactors. If we want to get to clean energy, that is one way to do it. Yet the barriers for that construction, we are not going to know what they are. The American people are not going to find out and 70 Senators are not going to find out. We are not going to have that made available to us.

Two reports to report on the transfer of funds within the Department of Army, and a report on the transfer of funds within the Bureau of Reclamation for oversight activities--in other words, a report on the funds that are transferring for oversight, only appropriators get to see that. The American people do not get to see it. I do not get to see it. The President pro tempore right now does not get to see it. Only the appropriators. Why would we not want to share that with the American people? Is there some reason?

A report by the administration on detailed accounting of receipts into and obligations and expenditures from the inland waterways trust fund. Well, what most people do not realize is when we put out a number that is our budget deficit every year, that number does not recognize what we have stolen from multitudes of trust funds, including the inland waterway trust fund, which is very important to all of the things that go on along the Mississippi River, the McClellan-Kerr Navigation System, the Upper Mississippi River, the Great Lakes. All of those are funded by the inland waterways trust fund--except we steal all of the money out of it so there is no money in it. Here is the report on it, and they do not want the American people to see it. Why would you not want the American people to see that we are stealing from the funds we have set up that were supposed to be dedicated to do certain things? Because you really do not want a transparent Congress so the American people can see what is going on.

A report on remediation efforts by the Corps of Engineers through the formerly utilized Sites Remedial Action Program. Most of us do not even know what that is. But the fact is, if we have former sites that required remedial action, why should'nt we all get to see that? Why should we not be able to make a value judgment on whether the Corps did a good job and what they are doing with the money? But yet we cannot.

A report detailing the implementation and progress of the measurement plans for each funded energy innovation hub. We have these hubs out there to create alternative and renewable energy, except we are not going to see what they are doing. It is not going to be available to us. It is not going to be available to the American people, and they are paying for it. What happens if there is an idea and somebody reads about it and it gives them another idea?

A report by the Secretary of Energy to the Committee on Appropriations of the House and the Senate on the state of defined benefit pension liabilities in the Department for the preceding year. That is something we should all be aware of, not just a couple of staff members on the Appropriations Committee. The American people should know that, in fact, they do not have the money in the bank to fund their pension liabilities. Yet we are going to suppress that information. We are going to keep it from the sunshine. We are going to keep it from the light of day so the American people cannot see how miserably the government runs its own business. We do not want that out. We do not want you to see it.

I could go on and on. I have three pages of reports. Notably, some of them are security related and should

not be released to the American public, which this amendment protected.

What this means is that 88 percent of the Members of the House and 70 percent of the Members of the Senate do not have available to them the tools with which to make decisions. But, more importantly than that, the American people do not have transparency in their government. They are never going to be made available for taxpayers to read. They are never going to see how sloppily the money is spent, how we borrow money from funds that are supposed to be dedicated and spend them on things that are pet political projects. We do not want them to see that. This is not controversial. The only place it is controversial is to those who are working in the dark. And the very fact that this did not come out of conference with transparency--every other appropriations bill we have passed so far has had this transparency for report language. So why would we bring it to the floor? We should be very concerned that was excluded from this conference report, for a republic cannot function, it cannot survive unless it is truly transparent to the people it represents.

Our President was elected on the promise of bringing greater transparency to Washington, not only just to the workings of the Federal Government but to our daily workings as we tend to government. Congress should have supported this effort.

I serve notice on the Senate that any conference report that does not have transparency, which I will offer and have offered to every bill, that comes back from a conference, I will do everything I can to block it until that is put back in it. The American people deserve no less than that. It is, in fact, their government, not 30 appropriators' government. It is not just the 30 appropriators who get to govern this country. The fact that this piece of good government, of transparency, of putting out for everybody to see what we are doing has been precluded sends exactly the wrong message to the American people. So it will be that I will come here again, and I will not give up until such time as the American people truly get to see a transparent government.

The President and I passed a bill called the Transparency and Accountability Act. You can go to usgovernmentspending.gov and you can see where we are spending money. Sometime this spring you are going to see it all of the way down to the subcontractor, subgrantees level. You are going to be able to go online and see where every penny, except for national security purposes, is spent and who got the money. That is real open government. That is real democracy. That is real freedom. That is real liberty.

Without that, based on the demonstration that we make here today by bringing up a bill that keeps us cloaked in secrecy, that keeps the American people in the dark, what we will have and continue to have is less and less confidence of the American people as we try to lead this country back to the greatness it once had.

CJS Appropriations

I am now going to spend a few minutes, if I may, talking about the Commerce-Justice appropriations bill. This is another in a long line of bills that has a double-digit increase in the size of the government, on the back of a double-digit increase last year, and on the back of a $16.2 billion shot in the arm from the stimulus.

We were at $60 billion, essentially, last year, and we are going to increase it by $7.59 billion. That is a 12.6-percent, 12.7-percent increase. I brought a chart out here last week. I will bring it back again today as we debate the amendments I have. But not counting the stimulus, if we keep passing appropriations bills at the rate at which this body has passed this year, the size of the Federal Government will double in 3.5 years.

I think that is probably just exactly the opposite mood of the American people today. Yet we turn a deaf ear to the fact that 43 cents out of this $67 billion that we are going to spend--43 percent of it we are going to directly borrow from our kids.

We do not have the money in the bank to pay for this. We are going to finance it through a lower standard of living for our children. There is no question a portion of this increase is related to the census. The Census Bureau is in a mess. We have a good new Director. It was completely mismanaged by the Bush administration, there is no question about it, by the Secretary of Commerce, and also the Director of the Census.

We had a great caretaker who replaced the previous Census Director, and he did what he could. Now we have a new, very experienced Director of the Census by the name of Dr. Groves, who is handling a very difficult problem.

But it is going to come out that it is going to take $60 a person-- hear this--to count the people in the United States.

Please give me that contract for 10 cents a person. Please let me do it for 10 cents a person. We are going to spend 60 cents a person-- pardon me, $60 a person, $60 a person to count the people in the United States.

Go figure. Let's outline what happened to the Census. The Census routinely uses no-bid, cost-plus contracts. Whatever it costs, do it. Well, it just so happens their plan went awry. They paid bonuses to a company that failed to deliver what was ordered. The Census failed to be clear about what they wanted in terms of the electronic devices. So we have $750 million worth of junk we cannot use. Somebody ought to be held accountable for that.

Do you know who that is? That is us. How dare we waste almost $1 billion on one contract, because it was a cost-plus, was not overseen. We did not know what we were asking for, and yet the people who supplied it did not lose a thing. That is a very profitable contract.

That is why we have problems in the Federal Government. That is why we have $50 billion worth of waste a year in the Pentagon: because we do not know what we want, and there is no capital at risk for the people who are bidding these contracts. So, consequently, they just do whatever because it is cost-plus. They just send a bill at the end of the month, and we pay it. So we are going to have an $18 billion census that has a high likelihood of being the least accurate census we have ever had. There are probably going to be numerous lawsuits over this census.

My hope is that Director Groves can, in fact, salvage the census. But when we get it, it is not going to be accurate. It is going to displace six House seats because it is going to count illegal aliens who should not be counted in terms of the apportionment for the seats in Congress.

There are 561 earmarks in this bill. Two-thirds of them--hear me clearly--go to members of the Appropriations Committee. Is that not a coincidence? One-third goes to the other 70 Members of the body, but two-thirds goes to the 30 members sitting on the Appropriations Committee.

The President proposed that two programs be absolutely terminated because they have zero worth, value, and contribution to the Federal Government. They are both funded in the bill. The bill is one of many we will pass that will have double-digit increases. I wonder how many families right now are seeing a double-digit increase in their income. That is a rarity today in our economy. Yet we put on the floor almost a 13-percent increase which is about the average of everything else we have been putting out here, in spite of the fact we just spent $800 billion of our kids' money on a stimulus package, and this agency received a significant portion of that.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I want the American people to know where we stand financially. The war on terror will not defeat us. We will defeat ourselves. Every known republic to the world collapsed through fiscal mismanagement. We can read the history, Alexander Tyler on the Athenian empire, several other scholarly works throughout the last two to three centuries.

What we are really talking about is our kids. They are not my kids. My kids are grown. They are all in their

30s. We are talking about youngsters this age. She makes a great point. She is already $38,375 in debt, and all she owns is a dollhouse. The sad thing is, she totally underestimates, because her obligation for things we have promised ourselves for which she will have to pay above and beyond income tax rates we have today, Social Security taxes and Medicare taxes, is just a mere $400,000. So by the time she becomes 20, she will owe $800,000, if we count the interest which is coming. It is not long before we will be spending a trillion dollars a year on interest. And this number, by that time, will be $118,000. So now we will have her at $918,000 that she is going to have to pay off for us.

Think about that as a moral question. Should we in fact cut the legs off our grandchildren so that politicians and political leaders today can spin things and avoid making the most difficult choices that we now need to make? If one follows the news, especially the financial news, the problem the United States faces today is the fact that the world is losing confidence in the dollar. There is a reason for that. What is the reason? The world is starting to sense that as we continue to borrow more and more billions and trillions of dollars that we will not be able to pay it back. Therefore, the world's valuation of our currency becomes less confident. Therefore, the cost to borrow in the future becomes higher. The figure I just quoted, the $918,000 per child who is born over the next 30 years, is based on today's interest rates of 3.4 percent on a 10-year note that the Government offers. What happens when the interest rates are 10 or 11 percent? We are talking about a fiscal collapse that has never before been seen in the history of the world. Yet we continue to put spending bills on the floor and laud the fact that we are only borrowing 43 cents out of every dollar we spend this year.

There will come a time when we can't borrow 43 cents out of every dollar we spend. What will we do then? What will happen then? What will happen is the following: We will either see a totally debased currency which means everything we worked for our entire life will be markedly decreased in value or we will see 15, 20, 30 percent inflation. There is no other exit for this other than for us to do the following: We have to start making the hard choices now.

This bill doesn't do it. From 2008 to 2009, the fiscal year ended September 30, we increased CJS by 15.5 percent. This bill comes back and increases it another 12.6 percent. Compound that out and we find, without the stimulus money they also got, that we will double the size of this agency in less than 4 years. I am not sure that is what we want.

Here is what we have done so far. If we look at the bottom corner, inflation is expected to be less than 1.6 percent. Yet we see the following percentage increases: 5.7; 7.2; Energy and Water, 1.4--the only reason it was 1.4 is because they got $45 billion from the stimulus--Agriculture, 12.6; Treasury-HUD, 22.5; Interior, 16.2; and now CJS, 12.6.

Most families--and I know almost every business--are making hard choices right now about what they spend money on and what they do not. They are in tough times. Somehow that hasn't reverberated to this body. If it has, it has not reverberated to the appropriations committees of the House or Senate. That will be an amendment to freeze spending at last year's level, which could easily be done, but we don't have the courage to do that. There will be several other amendments offered. They are working on an agreement at this time.

I will be offering three amendments. I will wait until the Senator from Maryland comes before offering them. I understand they don't want me to call them up at this time. So I will not. One of the amendments limits funding to the National Science Foundation. It has created quite an uproar with political scientists that we would dare decrease the amount of money we spend on figuring out why politicians are vague or why certain people vote a certain way or the other way. What happens when we spend money on obvious answers is that money for the National Science Foundation doesn't go to cure a disease. It doesn't go to make an absolute impact on some child who is suffering from a chronic disease that unless the research dollars are there, they will never have a normal life or lifestyle. In fact, everybody screams when some of their money gets attacked.

So the political scientists in the country, those who get this money, $91.3 million over the last 10 years that we have doled out to political scientists, that $91 million could have gone to the study of biology or chemistry or pharmaceutical science or fields of endeavor such as micronutrients or cellular metabolism or genetic manipulation so we can cure a disease. Instead, where do they spend the money? Campaigns and elections, electoral choice systems, political change, domestic conflict, party activism, political psychology, and political tolerance.

What are some of the good things NSF does? NSF scientists have developed new computer-generated robotics to help people with severe disabilities. They can do what we can do, those of us who don't have a physical disability, except they can now do it with a robot. They become independent again and get their life back. NSF supported engineers that created a bone substitute that blends in tendon tissues which mimics natural bone and provides better integration so that people with lost movement in their joints have it returned. NSF created technology with their grants to engineer the next generation of biofuels. We are seeing the science. They created a new type of fiber reinforced concrete that bends without cracking. It is 300 to 500 times more resistant to cracking and 40 percent lighter in weight which means we can build bridges that will never fall down. We won't have a Minnesota tragedy again. That is the real science from the National Science Foundation.

Let me give a little hint of what the National Science Foundation projects for political science have been.

There is $188,206 to ask the question: Why do political candidates make vague statements, and what are the consequences? We all know the answer to that. They make vague statements because they want to get reelected. They do not want to get pinned down. It is not hard to figure out, but we blew a lot of money on it.

How about a grant for political discussion in the workplace? That has to be an important priority for the country now that we are running a $1.6 trillion deficit.

Here is one: television news and the visual framing of war. I am certain that is an important research topic that we should sacrifice our children's future for, and I know it must be a priority for her, this little girl, whose daddy or mama was smart enough to recognize what the real consequences of our behavior are.

Or how about another study: Why people are for or against military conflicts? Nobody is for military conflicts. They are for the defense of our country. But to spend money to study why people are for or against? Tell me what that contributes to her future?

I am accused of being a flatlander. I do come from Oklahoma. I was born in Wyoming. But there is one difference with us flatlanders: we actually have worked in our lives, we understand common sense, and we have had to make hard choices before.

How about this study, the impact of Medicare reform on senior citizens' political views. I can tell you what it is. We take away a benefit, they are not going to like it; we add a benefit, they are going to like it. Send me the check. I will do it for free. It is plain, old common sense. It may be nice to have the statistics behind that, but we all know the answer to those questions.

Here is another one: evaluate whip counts. Let me tell you what a whip count is. Every party has a whip so they can count the votes before they happen so they think they know what is going to happen on the vote, so they know what votes to bring up and what votes not to. We are going to have a study by Congress: How do whip counts impact party leaders in the legislative process? Who cares. Nobody should care about that. What we should care about is her future. We have our priorities totally upside down and turned on their ear.

How about a conference on the effect of YouTube on the 2008 election. Now, the people who are interested in that are politicians because ``how do we use YouTube to get reelected?'' Should we

be paying for that with your tax dollars? ``How do we keep incumbents incumbents?'' I would think a better study of political science is, how do you throw us all out. That is a better use of the funds. How do you get rid of us since we are doing such a terrible job managing the finances of this country?

Or how about the ``NewsHour'' with Jim Lehrer--to pay for complete, live, prime-time gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Democratic and GOP National Conventions. Guess what. They were covered by three other networks free. We did not pay them a penny. Yet we pay this.

We are going to increase NSF's budget in this bill 8 percent, the National Science Foundation. It is the one we ought to be increasing 12 or 15 percent, but it ought to be on real science, on pure science, on science that has an outcome we can measure that is not related to the observation of common fact but is new research that will derive great benefits for the people of this country.

So I will be offering an amendment to limit the amount of money. We are going to hear all sorts of claims. What we have heard already on the blogs is that National Science Foundation political science research contributes to our understanding of democracy. I think we have pretty well figured what democracy is. ``Our ability to have a free and open democratic process would be significantly harmed without this research.''

You know what is being harmed is her generation, as we foolishly spend dollar after dollar on things that are not a priority--hundreds of millions of dollars on program after program after program that 90 percent of Americans could say: That might be fine if we were in a cash-rich position, but at a time when the Federal Government is about to double every 4 years and the debt is about to double every 5 years, wouldn't it be smart to not spend money we don't have on things we don't need? So that is what this amendment is.

There is another claim: The loss of National Science Foundation funding will significantly harm political science research in this country. Let me give you a few facts about that. The University of Michigan--they are the receiver of the largest grant under the NSF--has a $7.5 billion endowment. That is just one of the universities--$7.5 billion--and we are supposed to keep sending, every 10 years, $100 million for political science research.

Here is the political science--here it is: The heritage of this Nation is that one generation creates opportunity for the next by sacrificing, making the hard choices they need to make to make sure what has worked in the past will provide them opportunities in the future. This does not do any of that. What it says is, the ones who are on the ins, the people who are well connected now, the people who are dependent on millions of dollars of funding--when they are sitting with billions of dollars in their endowments--are worth more than she is. That is exactly the problem.

Until we figure out we are going to have to make some tough sacrifices, her future is at risk. Unless we do this fairly soon, we could very well be on an irreversible course. Two or three more years of spending the way we are spending and borrowing the way we are borrowing will doom her to a standard of living 40 percent below what we see today. Those are not my words, the economists agree. The governments are going to end up consuming 45 or 50 percent of our total GDP. We are at 10 percent this year--the highest in our history with the exception of being in the midst of World War II. Never have we been in such shape as we are in today.

I think we have a lot of things wrong. But the No. 1 thing we have wrong is we have forgotten that service is about sacrifice. Service is about giving up something of you so somebody else gets ahead. We cannot expect the American people to model that behavior if we are not willing to do it. If everything we do is about protecting our own vested political interests and protecting our campaign contributors and protecting the well connected and not excluding and divorcing ourselves from all of that and making great commonsense judgments, we are history as a nation.

I wonder when it started. I wonder when it started that we decided we were more important than the country. I wonder when it started when we decided we would push our hand and say: Stop the heritage of this country. When did it start that we decided we were worth more than the generations that follow us? When did it start that we decided we were not brave enough to take the hits to make the hard choices so the Republic can be preserved? When did it start? When did that cowardice start because it is ever present now as we go through the appropriations process.

I ran a business for 9 years, and I learned a lot doing that. I learned a lot about people. But I also learned a lot about making tough choices. We, in fact, can make tough choices and preserve what is good and best and brightest in all of us. As a matter of fact, hope comes from that, when people make those tough decisions that, in fact, consider the very personal nature of how individuals are affected and they are at work for the common good for the long run.

You see, there is not a business out there today that is surviving just thinking only in the short run. If they are, they will not be here 2 years from now. They are all thinking in the long run. They are all positioning, planning, managing, developing. The same with families. They are doing that right now at the dinner table--positioning, planning, developing what is going to come next: How we are going to get where we want to go. We are in a rough period now. What do we cut back? What is the thing that we sacrifice today to secure the future for our family tomorrow?

Ashamedly, not much of that exists in Washington. What does exist is a willingness to say yes to everybody, and then wink and nod and try to have it both ways. I am not a both ways kind of guy, and neither is America. The great sheet is about to be lifted over the, I would use, imbecilic methods of Washington. When transparency gets its full view, America is going to make some major changes, and I am not talking Republican-Democrat. I am talking both.

This is a problem of elitism. This is a problem of short-term thinking by the political leaders of this country on: How do I manage my political career and to heck with the rest of the country. Nobody in their right mind would bring appropriations bills to the floor that have these types of increases at a time when we are stealing $1.4 trillion from our grandkids. How do we justify it? How do we justify growing the Federal Government at a time when families are struggling like they have never struggled except during World War II and the Great Depression? How do we justify that?

We do not justify it. We cannot justify it. What we can do, and what will happen in the debate on the amendments I bring forward--they will be ignored. They just will not debate it. It will go away. That is what happens when we bring critical amendments to the floor and question the wisdom of growing the Federal Government larger and larger without developing a way to pay for it and without taking a critical look at all of those programs out there.

There is $350 billion worth of waste, fraud, and duplication in the Federal Government right now. The American people ought to be clamoring that we freeze spending everywhere until we have done a review of every government program that is out there--just like they are doing with their own families, just like they are doing with their own businesses, just like every organization in America today is having to do, except governments.

How is it this can happen? How is it we can go down the sewer drain just like other republics, knowing what history says will happen to us if, in fact, we abandon fiscal sanity? That is what this appropriations bill does, and all the rest of them we have passed because, in fact, we will double the size of the Federal Government in the next 4 years, based on 2008, 2009, not counting the stimulus.

If we are running a $1.4 trillion deficit--actually $1.8 trillion when we count everything we have stolen from Social Security and everything we have stolen from, for example, the inland waterways trust fund and the other trust funds; and we have not funded any Federal pensions; and, by the way, we have not funded anything else we have an obligation for, such as

VA health care or military retirement--none of those things are funded--what happens when we get in the crunch?

What happens when nobody loans to us anymore? Wouldn't it be prudent to prepare for that? Wouldn't it be prudent for us to dig in as a nation--Democrats and Republicans and Independents--and say: Time out. Let's look where we are. Let's quit wasting $350 billion a year. Let's eliminate the duplication. There are 800 programs outside the Department of Education that are run by the Federal Government for education--outside the Department of Education. How about eliminating them or at least putting them in the Department of Education and consolidating them. And oh, by the way, education has done a wonderful job at the Federal Government level. As soon as the Federal Government got into our educational system, our scores started declining, our graduation rates started declining, and our college graduation rates started declining. That is the record of the Federal Government's involvement in education in this country.

There is a lot we can fix, not just my ideas. The question I am asking is, Why aren't we asking the question? Why aren't the American people challenging their elected Members to the Senate and the House? Where are your priorities? Does she not matter? Does their future not matter? Answer the question: With $918,000 worth of unfunded liability and debt for which at 20 years of age she will be paying--we will be paying the interest, which means the taxes for that interest will come back to her eventually--how will she get a college education? How will she own a home besides a dollhouse? How will it happen? Will Tinker Bell just come down and give it to her? That isn't going to happen. So as we think outyears, we ought to be thinking about what our actions today are going to cost. Yet we don't.

These are disturbing times. These are not just disturbing times because we face a war on terror, and they are not disturbing times because we have an economic downturn. What is disturbing is that we absolutely have avoided leadership in bringing this country back to its commonsense basics of spending money we have for things that are an ultimate priority, not spending money we don't have on things we don't need. A large portion of these appropriations bills spends money we don't have on things we don't need. We may want them. There is no question that politicians want them. There is no question that the National Science Foundation political science grantees want them. Do we need them? That is the question. And we have no leadership that will discern, at a crucial juncture in our history, a path that will bring us to not only a recovery from this recession but a recovery for an opportunity for every child her age.

It is deeply personal with me. I have five grandchildren. I look in their eyes, and I see the potential of their lives and all of these other children who are out there. There is tremendous potential in them. You know what, we are going to waterboard them. That is what we are going to do. We are going to waterboard them. We are going to flood them with debt. We are going to shackle their opportunities. We are going to limit their possibilities because we don't have the courage to make the difference for their future.

Mr. President, I will yield the floor, and I will come back and offer my amendments when the Senator from Maryland arrives.

With that, I note the absence of a quorum.

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

I ask unanimous consent to call up amendment No. 2631.

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

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to call up amendment No. 2631.

I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and to call up amendment No. 2631.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and call up amendment No. 2632.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside that amendment in order to call up amendment No. 2667.

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

Mr. President, I wish to talk about amendment No. 2667. This is a fairly straightforward amendment.

The House has $5 million for renovation of the Hoover Building. There is

no question that we need to have a continuing ongoing project of renovating that. However, in the Senate, we have $17.5 million.

If we look at the Commerce Department and what is going wrong, what we see is that because we are limited by funds, we don't have an active enough oversight of what is going on inside; otherwise, we could never account for the billions of dollars of waste on the census.

This is a straightforward amendment. It just says: Of that $17.5 million, we are going to take $5 million, which still puts us at 2\1/2\ times what the House has, and direct it toward the Inspector General's Office of the Commerce Department. What that does is it enhances oversight, enhances transparency, and enhances communication back to the Commerce Department so we can see what is going on with an agency that is obviously troubled.

The inspector general's department, and agency-wide, is fielded by tough, great people who probably would pretty much agree with everything I spent the last hour talking about. The fact is, they are limited in what they can do. They are limited by the funds we give them. So we now come down again to priorities. Do we build bicycle racks out in front of the Herbert C. Hoover Building or do we spend money making sure the inspectors general and the auditors can actually see what is going on in this agency?

It is very straightforward. It is going to be a fun vote. I understand how amendments go on the Senate floor when we are in the mood to spend money and not act responsibly. But do we really want transparency, do we really want to know what is going on, do we really want to discover the reason we are in such big trouble, and do we really want to fund the inspector general at a level that will give us the information upon which we can make better decisions? That leaves alone the question of whether we will make better decisions. I have a lack of confidence on that, but at least with the right information, we will be able to, in fact, see what is going on.

We continue not to prioritize funds. The Department of Commerce is going to get a 52-percent increase in funding in our version of this bill. It receives $7.9 billion in additional stimulus funds. That was 85 percent of what they received entirely in 2009, which means in a matter of 2 years we will have given them on average three times what they receive normally in a year. So we are talking about taking a small portion--$5 million--and directing it to the Inspector General's Office so they can do what is needed to be done in terms of carrying out their responsibilities.

There is no question in my mind that the Department of Commerce is suffering from mismanagement. I am not directing this to the present Secretary; I am directing this backwards through the Bush administration. Here are some statements that were made in the Senate report accompanying this bill:

The committee is extremely concerned about the persistent

pattern of cost overruns and schedule slippages on major

projects and missions carried out by the agencies in this

bill.

The committee remains apprehensive about the management of

the census.

Reports have exposed a culture within many agencies that

exhibits a lack of accountability in oversight of grant

funding.

The committee is concerned that the Census Bureau has

failed to implement three recommendations by the IG.

NOAA's satellite programs have undergone extensive

independent reviews after experiencing cost overruns, delays,

and setbacks.

The National Polar Orbiting Operational Environmental

Satellite system has struggled for years with cost overruns

and schedule delays and a high risk of gaps occurring to the

Nation's weather and climate satellites.

The committee remains concerned by the lack of progress in

reducing patent pendency and the overall patent backlog.

I note the committee routinely takes money away from patent fees to use on other funds. As such, the committee has provided bill language to transfer funding to the Office of the Inspector General for the express purpose of conducting all audit engagements in the oversight of U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Despite these concerns--and I didn't list them all--with the Commerce Department, and a 52-percent increase in spending in the bill, if you were concerned, why would you increase spending that much? That is No. 1. The account for the inspector general is increased only by 4.4 percent. So this is a measly little $5 million out of a $17.5 million increase. The House only has $5 million for the Herbert C. Hoover Building. So we put 2\1/2\ times what the House does in the building, and we actually give the IG the money he needs to do his job. There isn't an agency that needs more oversight and more work by an inspector general than the Commerce Department.

I will limit my comments on this at the present time, and I will defer to the chairman, if she wishes to speak; Otherwise, I will discuss one of the other amendments.

We have communication from the GSA that says this amendment will not inhibit any of the plans, upgrades, or improvements to the Herbert C. Hoover Building. No. 2, we all admit there are problems at the Commerce Department. We have a 12.6-percent increase in spending but we increase the IG by 4.4 percent. We are going to increase spending three times faster than the ability to track it and oversee it. We did increase it 4.4 percent, but we increased the agency 12.6 percent. We have our priorities backward. We should be increasing the IG by 12.6 percent and the agency 4 percent, or 1.6 percent to match inflation.

This amendment will not, in any way, according to GSA, impede their ability to make the corrections that they need to make in terms of health and safety at the Herbert C. Hoover Building.

I thank the chairman for her recognition of the problems at this agency. The answer to solve it is to let the dogs run. Let them find it. Let them go after it. Let them bring to light transparency, and let them bring the reports that we need so we can make the changes we need.

Amendment No. 2632

I want to spend a few moments on my next amendment, No. 2632. This is a very similar amendment. I spoke about it earlier. This amendment says that whatever reports we ask for, whatever answers we want from these agencies, in fact, unless it has to do with national security or defense, should be reported to every Senator, not just the Senators on the Appropriations Committee. And more importantly, it should be reported to everybody in America. This is a great open government amendment which says we will be transparent.

We are requesting numerous reports in this bill. Why should the American people not get to see what those reports show? Why should we not get to see how we are spending our money, why we are spending our money, and whether the effect of spending the money is having the desired outcome? H.R. 2847 requires reports, audits, and evaluates all decision documents and expenditures by the Bureau of the Census. We all know that has been a problem. And I dispute that Secretary Gutierrez did anything about the problem, other than talk the former leader of the census into leaving. Secretary Gutierrez should have been following the census to know before it ever got in that kind of shape. We have a wonderful leader there now, and I fully support him. I supported his nomination, and I supported his approval by the Senate.

This would also require a quarterly report by the Attorney General regarding the costs and contracting procedures related to each conference held by the Department of Justice. Why should not everybody get to see that? Why should not Americans, who are actually paying for that, and their grandkids, such as this young lady in the photo, get to see it? Why should she not get to see that? This is straightforward. We will have a vote on this amendment. I have learned my lesson on not getting them accepted. When they go to conference, we still hide it from the American people. So we will have a vote on this amendment and see whether people want to hide what we are doing or want it exposed fully to the American people. It is a good government amendment.

We also have a request for a report that the Secretary, within 120 days of enactment of this act, shall report to the Committee on Appropriations that audits and evaluates all decision documents and expenditures by the Bureau of Census as it relates to the 2010 census. Why just the Senators on the Appropriations Committee? Why not the American people? Why should they not see that?

The other thing it will do is allow us to conduct better oversight. The committee chairman--I have great regard for the Senator from Maryland, because I think she does care about oversight. I cannot say that about all of our colleagues on the Appropriations Committee. We would have done a lot of oversight on the Census Bureau in the Government Affairs Subcommittee. I can tell you that we have great employees there. We have had terrible leadership until now. At $60 a person to count people in the United States, people ought to ask why. How did we allow this to happen?

This amendment is one that the vast majority of Americans concur with and the vast majority of my colleagues, I hope, will concur with.

I yield to the chairman of the committee.

Mr. President, I thank the chairman for her words on this amendment. I have learned a very critical lesson. We have an Energy and Water Appropriations bill that we did the same thing on. For some reason, it didn't come out of conference. Transparency didn't come out. I don't doubt the veracity of the senior Senator from Maryland, but I would just as soon have a recorded vote, if she would not mind.

I also want to answer the story of the rat, which is a great example of the mismanagement at the Department of Commerce. It does not relate to the present Secretary at all. If, in fact, you have plumbing problems in the building, the management is supposed to raise that issue. In fact, the Department of Commerce received a large sum of money with the stimulus. The House has only $5 million for the Herbert C. Hoover Building. GSA says this amendment will not limit at all their ability to accomplish what they want to accomplish there.

So if, in fact, $17.5 million is enough to get it done, why would we object to having more than that--if GSA says it is only going to pay $17.5 million, why are we putting $22.5 million in it in the first place?

The example proves my point: Management is lacking. With vigorous leadership and a vigorous, strong inspector general force that is funded at the same level of increase that we fund the government, as far as percentage of increases, we could hope to accomplish that.

Amendment No. 2631

I will move to my other amendment No. 2631. I spent a lot of time talking about this amendment before the chairman came to the floor. I will not repeat everything I said, but I will discuss the question of priorities.

I have a great respect for a lot of what the National Science Foundation does. I have very little respect for their grants for political science as a science. Part of that is because I think it is low on the priority of where they should be spending money when we can create things through NSF to save lives and also because of some of the grants that have been spent and put out there.

I will review a few of those over a short period of time and then will yield the floor to my colleague, the chairman of this subcommittee.

How do you back up the fact that the National Science Foundation gives a

grant for political science--here is the question asked: Why do political candidates make vague statements and what are the consequences? In the realm of science, being a physician, being trained in the sciences, first of all, it is a question to which we already know the answer. We know why politicians make vague statements. Because they don't want to get pinned down. But most important, they want to get reelected or elected. For us to send money to study something that stupid, that low on priorities is beyond me.

Or why are people for or against military conflicts? Do we need that science to tell us so that the next time we are in a military conflict we go out and manipulate the American people or do we have military conflicts based on the national defense and security interests of this country, even when there are political consequences to it?

The real world would never fund such stupidness. They would never allow millions and millions of dollars every year to be spent on silly things to help politicians understand why they spin or why they do not answer questions or why people might be for or against war. It is pretty easy to figure out.

Or studying how Medicare reform affects seniors' political views. That is pretty easy: If it hurts me, I am ``agin'' it; if it helps me, I am for it. Yet we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars paying for grants, through the National Science Foundation, to universities that have billions and billions of dollars in endowments. As a matter of fact, Tufts University has billions in endowments. They charge their students $40,000 a year in tuition alone. They are the recipients of some of this grant work, and they are the ones squawking the loudest.

So here we have an entitled class of professors in political science who now don't want their gravy train taken away when I say right now there is no way this can be a priority for this country with the debt we have and the economic situation we have. It cannot be as important as a multitude of other things for this young lady. It cannot be.

I do not have any illusions about what is going to happen to this amendment. I know the appropriators reign supreme. What I am hoping is that the American people ultimately reign supreme. So as we vote to vote down this amendment or they vote to table this amendment so they do not have to directly vote on the amendment, one has to walk back and say: What is going on in Washington that you will not clean up the excesses in a time of great national distress? We will not and we haven't, and that is why we have a giant increase from last year and this year. We entered the recession in 2007, remember? That is why we borrowed 43 cents out of every $1 we spent this year because we will not make these hard, tough choices about why politicians are vague, while we continue to spend millions and millions of dollars so somebody can sit in an office and pontificate and you can see the same answer-- all you have to do is look at the news shows and you get the same answers.

I make an inquiry of the Chair. Do we have a limit on time for debate?

I understand. I yield the floor.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. President, will the Senator agree that the Defense Department funds all sorts of research in all sorts of scientific areas, and they don't necessarily do that on the predicate--they do it on the basis of what their need is. There is a very big difference, does the Senator agree, between the social sciences and political science?

Sure, and I am only targeting with my amendment political science, not social sciences, if the Senator reads my amendment.

I thank the chairman for allowing me to ask a question.

Mr. President, I listened very patiently to the last 2 hours about why we need a government-run plan. I want to concur with my colleagues about the problems in the insurance industry. There is no question they are great. But the reason the problems are great is because there is no real competition today. The rhetorical question is, you can't have it both ways. Nobody wants it both ways. The fact is, I saw this on the Internet this week. I thought it was appropriate for where we are. Here is a youngster walking on a street. She says:

I'm already $38,375 in debt and I only own a doll house.

Everybody agrees we have a too costly health care system. Everybody agrees we need to fix that. What we don't agree on is how to fix it. We have heard 2 hours of what is wrong with the private insurance industry that has not been allowed to be competitive, has not been forced to be competitive. And yet

the answer to that question is that we want the government involved. The Senator from Pennsylvania talked about all the government programs. Sixty-one percent of all health care today comes through the government. Every government program is over budget, associated with fraud, and ineffective in its implementation on a cost basis. That doesn't mean we want to get rid of them. It means we want to make them better. The real problem with having the government do more is, right now 43 cents out of every dollar we are spending we are borrowing. We create a government plan. We put $60 billion into it, and we can create competition. But we don't have competition now. Everybody agrees with that. Nobody denies that we don't have good competition. But we don't have good competition because we have failed to act.

The Senator from Ohio showed a chart of CEOs' pay. If they were having to compete, that pay wouldn't be there, especially not at that level. I don't disagree with that. But the way to control that is real competition. Forty-three cents of every dollar we spend this year we will borrow. And it will be worse next year. It will be 45, 46 cents next year of what we spend we will borrow.

This picture doesn't talk about what she owes. This is just what the debt is now, just the $11.8 trillion. What she owes is another $400,000, because we are paying out of Medicare what we have never created the tax base to fund. So in fact what we are doing is, we are going to charge this little girl for our Medicare. The impact of that is when she was born she owed $400,000. By the time she is 20, she will owe $800,000. What will happen to her?

There is no question we have positive benefits with Medicare. There is no question we are taking care of people who can't take care of themselves through Medicaid. There is a question of how effective we are doing with Native American tribes in terms of that. We are seeing improvements in veterans health care. We have all these different programs that are run through the government. So when you only have 39 percent of the health care in the country to put into the market, it is going to be very difficult to lower costs.

What is the problem with health care in America today? The problem is cost. It is too expensive. It is about 40 percent more expensive here than anywhere else in the world. Why is that? Well, there are a lot of reasons for it. But the first reason is, we will not allow real markets to develop in the health insurance industry. We have stopped it. And now we come and say: We are unhappy with it, so we want to create a government plan--a government plan that will compete.

I do not have any problem if you create a government plan if you fund it and make it competitive. But that is not what we are going to do. Because what we are going to do with a government plan is we are going to turn it into another Medicare. It will supply people health care. It will lower their costs. But we are going to transfer the cost to this little girl. It is just $440 billion spent on Medicare this year, of which $80 billion of it was fraud.

So the problem is, which solution do you think works better? Do you think we have the history that says government-run health care is efficient and effective and, therefore, we ought to do more of it or should we say: We know what works in the rest of the industries and markets in this country. Maybe we ought to allow markets to truly compete--which nobody wants to do--to force the insurance industry into a competitive structure where you can actually see what you are getting and you can see what you are paying.

The other problem about this little number is, not only does she have $38,000 in debt right now, and another $800,000 when she gets ready to buy her insurance, we are going to tell her what she is going to buy. We are going to take the freedom away from her to decide what is best for her and her family. Then we are going to yoke her with a whole bunch more taxes.

There is no disagreement in this body that we need to make changes in health care; and the assumption that anybody would say that is absolutely erroneous and fictitious. We recognize that. The question is, which way do you fix health care? Do you fix it with a government that is bankrupt already, that has stolen the future from the next two generations, and add more on to them or do we get common sense back in and say: Well, first of all, we can eliminate 8 percent of the cost if we have good tort reform in this country because 8 percent of the cost of health care is defensive medicine.

I read a study this week. It is interesting--and I have some passion about this because I have been on the end of those lawsuits--I would note that the vast majority of those who have been discussing health care for the last 2 years are lawyers. They are not doctors. They never laid their hands on a patient. They never stayed up 20 hours in a row to take care of somebody who needed them. They have all the answers, but they have never been in health care.

Here are what the numbers are on malpractice lawsuits in the United States: Eighty percent of all the cases that are filed are thrown out of court. Of the remaining 20 percent, 89 percent are thrown out of court. So 3 percent of the cases are legitimate in this country. What do you think that is costing us? And we ignore it? We are not even going to talk about the fact that we have an extortioned service going on in health care that does not cost the lawyers a thing? It costs everybody else in this country billions of dollars a year because we are doing tests that nobody needs, except the doctors to defend themselves. And that is $200 billion a year out of $2.4 trillion. That is what the number is.

So when less than 3 percent of the people--and I am all for compensating people who are truly injured. I have no problems with that. As a physician practicing over 25 years, there is no question I have made mistakes. There is no question. There are no doctors who are perfect, and, consequently, sometimes people are injured because of doctors' mistakes. Most of the time they are not. And it is not about not compensating the injured. It is about changing the mindset in this country that you can extort people into settling when you have no real claim, and that is what is going on with 85 to 90 percent of the cases.

So the answer for health care is: controlling costs. So how do we best do that? It is interesting, we have had the accusation that there are no other plans out there. My colleague from North Carolina and I introduced the first plan in Congress for health care.

What does it do versus what the Baucus bill or the public option bill will do, according to CBO? We cover 94 percent of Americans--identical to what the Baucus bill does. So 94 percent of all Americans will get covered under our bill. We save the Federal Government $70 billion in the first 10 years, close to $1 trillion in the second 10 years.

What does the Baucus bill do? It saves $88 billion, and nobody knows what it is going to save after that. But it costs the States billions. Our bill saves the States, in the first 10 years, $960 billion. We cover more people, with no increase in the cost to the Federal Government, versus a marked increase in the cost to the States by the Baucus bill, or by the public option plan.

It eliminates preexisting condition. We all agree we need to do that. Nobody is fighting that. The question is, how do you do it? Do you do it in a competitive model that costs insurance companies pain if they are not covering the people properly? And if, in fact, there is an incentive to cover preexisting conditions, then you have an incentive for the insurance companies to invest in the management of chronic care rather than ignore covering somebody.

I do not deny there is cherry-picking going on right now, but it is only because we allow it. We do not have to allow it. But the answer does not have to automatically be another long-term, bankrupt plan run by the government. Nobody can deny the $95 trillion, 100-year unfunded liability for Medicare. That is GAO, that is CBO, and that is the Medicare trustees. You cannot deny that.

So we have a program that seniors are fairly happy with, except the Baucus plan is going to cut a half a trillion dollars out of it. But we cannot pay for it. So we are not doing anything to drive that cost down, to drive in efficiency. What we are going to do is create more government, to have another plan that is going to get in the same shape as Medicare.

We all want the same thing. We want to get everybody covered in this country. We want the cost of health care to be affordable. And we do not want to bankrupt our children. We have already bankrupted them. So the danger of having a government-centered, government-centric, government-run, government-devised, government-managed health care program--just by history, look at what we have done.

Medicaid costs tons more than it was ever supposed to cost. SCHIP costs tons more than it was ever supposed to cost. Medicare costs tons more than it was ever supposed to cost. Indian health care--it does not cost more because we just let them suffer. We do not put the money into it. VA costs tons more than it was ever supposed to cost. TRICARE costs more than it was ever supposed to cost. They are all government programs. They are all way over budget.

So the question the American people ought to ask is: If we all want to get everybody covered, and we all want to drive down costs, does the government have a track record that says it has done that? No. As a matter of fact, it has done the opposite of that.

So it is not a matter of whether you trust in government. We have 61 percent of health care running through government. And as a physician who has practiced for over 25 years, I will tell you, it is my opinion the reason costs are out of control is not because of the insurance industry--and I am not a defender of them; as a matter of fact, I hate them about as bad as I hate anybody telling me what I am going to do to my patient--the problem is, we have directives coming from the government that have disrupted the market in health care and created this tremendous differential.

The other difference that we have in the Patients' Choice Act is that we do not put another burden on the States, which all these bills do. The States are swimming in debt. They are struggling to stay ahead, and we are transferring billions, almost--we are transferring trillions of dollars of expense to the State. We are making it nice for four States. We have picked four States and we have said: You don't have any cost the first 5 years. We just, out of the hat--because they are having a little worse economic time than others, we have said: You don't have it. But for the rest of the States, it is the mother of all mandates, and they will never be able to afford it.

There is also another little sneaky provision in the bills--both in the HELP bill, the House bill, and the Baucus bill--which is, we know we are not going to cut doctors' fees 21 percent. The Presiding Officer would agree to that, the Senator from Colorado knows we are not going to do that. But we are not going to recognize it. We are not going to recognize that cost. So we are playing games with the American people. We are saying: Here is what it costs, when we know it is going to cost a lot more than that because we know we are not about to do that. But we do not have the courage to admit that. We do not have the courage to ask for an honest score.

The other difference is, we empower patients and States, not bureaucrats. We preserve the right, the inherent individual liberty right, of an individual to decide what is best for them rather than having the government decide what is best for them. In our bill, 9 out of 10 Americans get a tax cut.

So let me draw the parallel again. We do not have a government-run program. We save the Federal Government money. We save the States $1 trillion. We get more people covered than any other plan that is out there. Nine out of 10 Americans get a tax cut. We eliminate preexisting illness. And we bend the cost curve down considerably.

And, oh, by the way, we do not destroy innovation in health care, which is 75 percent of the innovation in the world, which will go away if any of these other plans are instituted--the incentive to put capital at risk to create opportunity for medical innovation.

There is a lot I could say, but I think what I would like to do is yield to my colleague from North Carolina in terms of someone who has been with me, who knows health care, who has been from the start working with us to try to put forward a plan that says we can accomplish this same thing and save tons of money.

Mr. President, I yield to my colleague from North Carolina.

I thank the Senator. I am sitting here thinking, if I was sitting at home tonight listening to this, how do I hear the story that I heard for 2 hours on having a government-run plan and how bad the insurance industry is? As a physician, I don't like them a whole lot, I can tell you that. I don't like some of their tactics. I certainly don't like the way they cancel insurance policies on people. There is a lot about them I don't like. But I don't want to eliminate them. What I want to do is create a real market where they have to be savvy and compete and they have to be efficient and they have to help us help one another get well.

We are going to hear a lot over the next month on health care. We are going to hear all these claims, much like we did from Congressman Grayson, who made an outlandish claim that my side of the aisle wants people to die. That is what was said in the House of Representatives. What I want is people to live. I want this little girl in the picture to live too.

Do we have an unsolvable problem? No. Do we have ways of making health care costs much less in this country? Yes. Do we have ways of ensuring increased innovation and advanced disease prevention in this country? Yes. Do we have ways to protect this little girl in the photo? Yes. But the debate is over how we do that. One side says we do it by making the government a whole lot bigger--$1 trillion bigger, $3 trillion bigger over the next 20 years. That is one side of the debate.

Our side of the debate says this is inefficient health care. We want to cover everybody. We never want anybody to go bankrupt or to be denied care. We think you can do that without growing the government by 25 percent. We think there are other ways to do it. We are honestly worried about our track record in Washington when we have a $1.4 trillion deficit this year and a Medicare Program that is absolutely bankrupt--it will run out of money in less than 7 years from now, totally out of money--and we are going to be borrowing it all then. Is there another way to do it? So either we make a large jump in the size of the Federal Government and add to the $838,000 that this little girl is going to have, or maybe we can work together and say the insurance companies are bad, but can we keep something like that and make them efficient? Can we allow people to buy across State lines? Can we give people opportunities to buy what they want to buy rather than being limited? Do we trust people to make good enough decisions for themselves?

The Baucus plan doesn't do that. It says we have three or four plans from which you get to choose, but we are going to tell you what you have to buy. And, by the way, you have to buy insurance in this country. Think about that.

I carry with me a copy of the the U.S. Constitution all the time. Every bill out there has said you don't have liberty because the Federal Government is going to tell you where you have to spend your money. You have to buy an insurance policy. So if you make a quarter million dollars a year, it doesn't matter if you want to fund that self-insurance, it doesn't count. You still have to do that. If you don't, you are liable to a tax. If you don't pay the tax, a $25,000 fine. If you don't pay the fine, you are in jail for a year.

How do we get off telling people that and taking away that liberty, that freedom that is supposed to be guaranteed under the Constitution? The answer is, well, it is better for everybody because if we don't have everybody covered, then it is going to cost more because that is the big government answer to it. Maybe it will cost more if we force and drive competition, if we create transparent markets, where you know what something costs before you get it in health care. In fact, there is a real connection with the purchase of health care and the payment because everywhere we have tried that, it is working to control health care costs. But we refuse to do it.

Frankly, the reason our idea is rejected, which is changing the Tax Code to treat everybody the same under the Tax Code, is because the labor unions don't want that to happen. That is exactly why. Everybody knows that is the problem. Everybody in the country knows that is the problem, but we don't have the political courage to face up to how to fix the problem.

As soon as you make everybody the same under the Tax Code, you empower 35 million Americans who don't have insurance today to get it. You save the States $1 trillion over the next 10 years, and you give 95 percent of Americans a tax cut, and guys like me will pay a little bit more for my health insurance and income tax. But we will not do that because the powers that deliver politicians to Washington are more powerful than the principles and the character to follow the pursuit of the Constitution.

This little girl in the picture, and everybody like her in this country, is at risk today. We are going to have this great big debate and say how bad the insurance companies are and how bad

the government programs are. But the fact is, we don't have a bipartisan bill. Our ideas were thrown out, 13-10, at both the Finance Committee and the HELP Committee--13-10, 13-10, 13-10--because the idea is they didn't want a compromise bill. They didn't want to solve the problems. They wanted their way or the highway.

So, consequently, we are going to get a bill. I have no doubt. But my little Lucy right here and her football--she is going to lose her football. She is not going to have any little Lucys because she is not going to be able to afford them. She is going to be paying off her $800,000 worth of government obligations starting at age 20, and she will never climb out of the pit.

So when America thinks about health care, there are a lot of ways to solve it. One is to trust what makes America great--granted, with some changes--or the other is to trust the government to create more government programs.

I will just add this one point. Do you realize that in the bill that passed the HELP Committee there are 88 brandnew government programs-- 88; 219 times we have held the Secretary of HHS to write in-depth regulations. Now, 88 programs interfering in health care are going to be problem enough. But 219 new sets of regulations--oh, by the way, we created the comparative effectiveness committee with the stimulus bill, and we are going to have 26 people tell every doctor in the country how they are going to practice medicine, what is right and what is not right. And, by the way, in all the committees a prohibition on rationing was voted down.

What are we to think? We are going to create a large government program and grow the government by $1 trillion over the next 10 years, $2 billion-plus, maybe $3 trillion in the next 10 years, and we are going to have Washington tell people how the physicians and caregivers will treat, what they will use to treat, and all the time little Lucy will not matter if she gets sick. We will have already made her sick because we have stolen her future, her absolute future.

It is a cute picture, but it sends a devastating message to us as leaders in this country. How dare we do that. I wanted to bring out my other charts tonight, but I didn't want to bore everybody. The fact is, the appropriations bills that were passed--if we keep doing what we are doing--America, hear this--we are going to double the size of the Federal Government in 3\1/2\ years.

We passed the Agriculture bill today, which is 22 percent bigger, and it was 15 percent last year, and that doesn't count any of the supplemental and the stimulus money. It doesn't take long, if you are growing something at 22 percent, for it to double.

My gray hair comes from the fact that I think we are missing a great opportunity to work together. I think we can solve the health care problem. I think we can do it without enlarging the Federal Government. Especially when we pay 40 percent more than anybody in the world, there ought to be savings that we can get to make health care cost less and to cover everybody else. I know we have seen the studies that show that.

So why isn't it going to happen? Why isn't there going to be a bipartisan bill? It is all political. It is not about the people in this country, it is about the political power structure in this country.

Problems can be solved, common sense applied to limited government and restoring freedom to individuals.

There are going to be so many lawsuits in this country, most of them legitimate, over the health care bill. You will not be able to uphold a challenge to the Constitution of forcing me to pay, take my money that I earn privately and spend it on what you say I have to spend it on. It is one of the greatest denials of liberty I ever heard of, and it is going to get challenged. It is going to go through the courts fast, and I suspect the courts are going to uphold the citizens of this country rather than the power center.

I yield the floor or I yield back to my colleague from North Carolina.

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

Madam President, may I ask the Chair what is the pending amendment?

I thank the Chair.

Madam President, I just walked out of a hearing on the census, and the Vitter amendment applies to that. It is interesting. We send a million forms out a year called the American Community Survey, and in that survey we ask people whether they are citizens of the United States. And you know what, they answer it. They give an answer to that. And that is a million of those we send out every year.

We are about to conduct a census that ignores the Constitution and will, in fact, disrupt the true allocation of apportionment in this country because the census we are getting ready to ask will ignore whether you are a true citizen of this country. Legal or otherwise, it will ignore that. It will ignore whether you have voting rights, whether you are here properly, whether you have broken our laws and are here improperly, and we will see a maldistribution to the tune of 10 seats in States that shouldn't have them and States that should have 10 more seats won't have them. And that is based on the Census data this year.

So what Senator Vitter is offering is a response to following the Constitution and also recognizing that we are getting ready to do a census next year that is going to get it wrong. My hope is that my colleagues will consider very carefully that they took an oath to defend the Constitution, and that Constitution speaks very clearly--in this little book--about what the enumeration is supposed to be. It is about citizens of the United States, not residents of the United States. If, in fact, we do this the way it looks like we are going to, what we will be doing is changing our Constitution. What we are actually going to do is we are just going to throw our Constitution down and step on it.

So he is not asking anything from a racial standpoint or anything other than for a fair enumeration by which the Census agrees that if they were to do it properly, they would need to ask that question. They have printed 100 million forms already, and the question is, Do we want to waste that money and throw those forms out? Well, there is an answer to that. All you have to do is put in an insert, and here is question No. 11. That will cost very little money and then we will actually have a true census based on what the Constitution says, not on what we think might politically benefit one State over another.

Madam President, I know the chairman of the Finance Committee is here and would like to make a unanimous consent request, and I will yield to him at this time.

Reserving the right to object, I ask unanimous consent to be recognized for 3 or 4 minutes as I respond to this, if the Senator from Montana does not have any objection.

Madam President, America has to ask itself a question right now. This bill costs $2.8 billion, and 95 percent of the people will not feel anything if we don't do this. But 5 percent will, and I readily admit that. We are going to take $2.8 billion from our kids or from future Medicare payments--one way or the other, we are going to steal it from our kids--to fix a problem for 5 percent of the people who are on Medicare or will be on Medicare.

This is exactly the kind of problem that the Congress ducks. We are ducking it. We are kicking the can down the road because we are afraid to do the right best thing for America.

Let me give a breakdown. First, I will just say I appreciate the leadership of the Senator from Montana on the Finance Committee.

The Social Security Act holds three-quarters of the beneficiaries harmless for increases in the Medicare Part B premium during the years in which there is no COLA, as the chairman just stated. But for the other one-fourth of the beneficiaries not held harmless, little impact will be felt. According to the Congressional Research Service, the majority of this group is comprised of Medicaid, as the chairman just stated, the vast majority of them, which covers their premiums anyway. So if there is a cost transfer, it will be cost-transferred back to the Federal Government anyway because we pay 67 percent of all the Medicaid costs anyway. Finally, the remainder of those not held harmless--high- income individuals making over $85,000 a year as an individual or $170,000 as a couple and new beneficiaries during their first year, for which they will receive Medicare, Social Security, or Medicare Part B benefits--the vast majority of all these people have a supplemental policy, so they won't feel anything.

So what are we doing? We are taking $2.8 billion--and we may be taking it from the Medicare Improvement Fund, which ultimately takes it out of Medicare, or we are going to take it from our grandkids, and we are not going to say that we can't do this. There was no inflation except in health care. And when you look at it, there is actually a negative number, negative inflation. There was actually deflation. Things roughly cost six-tenths of 1 percent less this year than last, and those are the basic necessities of life. And because we don't have the courage to face the situations in front of us, we are just going to kick it down the road. That is what is wrong. That is why we find ourselves with $12 trillion worth of debt, almost now $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities. That is why we find that a child born today has $400,000 in unfunded liabilities, and by the time they are 20 years of age they will be responsible for $800,000 worth of debt on them that they incurred for us.

So I will make two final points. The heritage of this country is for one generation to sacrifice for the next. This generation in this body has turned that upside down, and we are saying to the next two generations: You sacrifice for us because we don't have the courage to make the hard choices. And the hard choices have to be made. We are on an absolutely unsustainable course in this country financially. Read the papers. The dollar is under assault. We are dependent on foreign countries to finance our debt. Our debt will double in the next 5 years and triple in the next 10. And now we are playing the political game of not having a small percentage of seniors having an increase in cost, and mainly those who can afford it.

So the question is, take $2.8 billion from our grandkids, one way or the other, and protect that 5 percent of the seniors, including Bill Gates and every other very rich person in this country, or do as the Honorable Steny Hoyer said, the majority leader for the Democrats in the House:

I don't know how many of you can go to sleep at night

worried about whether Ross Perot can pay his premium, but

this will freeze Ross Perot's basic premium from going up. I

think that as well meaning as this legislation is, it's not

about poor seniors, it's about politics.

I recognize this can come back and we will do it, but at this time, for the good of our country, to restore the heritage of our country, Madam President, I have to object.

Madam President, I rise today to express my serious concerns about the nomination of Mr. Tom Perez to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. First, given his affiliation with CASA de Maryland, an extreme immigrant advocacy organization for which he served as president of the board, I am concerned that he will utilize the Civil Rights Division to undermine immigration enforcement.

Second, Mr. Perez has made statements indicating that he believes health care is a civil right and he has a disturbing view of the responsibilities of health care providers. Third, his views on a Clinton-era executive order requiring health care providers to provide services and documents in languages other than English infringes on the right of States to declare English as the official State language. Finally, though not directly related to Mr. Perez's qualifications, I am deeply troubled by the Department of Justice's failure to respond to legitimate requests for information by the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights regarding the Department's decision earlier this year to dismiss the New Black Panthers voter intimidation case.

I know some of my colleagues have more thoroughly discussed Mr. Perez's positions on immigration issues, but I want to briefly mention some of my concerns. Mr. Perez served on the board of CASA Maryland from 1995-2002 and as president of the board from 2001-2002. CASA provides assistance to Latinos and immigrants in Maryland; it also promotes day labor sites, opposes restrictions on immigrants receiving driver's licenses, and supports in-State tuition for immigrants. More concerning, CASA has been criticized for issuing a pamphlet that instructed immigrants targeted by Federal authorities on what to do if they are arrested or detained. The Washington Times ran an article on the brochure, noting that it ``features cartoonlike drawings of armed black and white police officers escorting Hispanic men in handcuffs and shows babies crying because their fathers are behind bars.'' I have concerns about Mr. Perez's lengthy association with an organization that advocates these extreme positions.

I also believe Mr. Perez has a disturbing view of the health care system and particularly of the responsibilities of health care providers. Mr. Perez has made statements indicating that he believes health care is a civil right. He also has said that health care providers receiving Federal funds must provide services in languages other than English or risk forfeiture of those funds due to title VI of the Civil Rights Act and a Clinton-era executive order directing Federal departments and agencies to ensure that those with limited English proficiency, LEP, are given meaningful access to programs and activities conducted by the Federal Government or by recipients of Federal funds. I would note that this executive order was not enforced by the Bush administration. I disagree with Mr. Perez's interpretation of the Civil Rights Act, and in 2006, I offered an amendment to immigration legislation to repeal the executive order. After I offered that amendment, Mr. Perez wrote an article in which he stated that I had a ``distressing disregard for the doctor-patient relationship,'' and that I would ``undermine meaningful communication between doctors and patients--thus relegating those who do not speak English to a lower rung of our health care system.''

After all my years of practicing medicine, I take offense at someone stating that I have a ``distressing disregard'' for the doctor-patient relationship. I have treated numerous patients who do not speak English and found ways to communicate with them. Often these patients have family members who speak some English or they find other ways to communicate. There is no reason to burden health care providers with the expense of having to provide services in languages other than English.

Following the Judiciary Committee vote on his nomination, Senators Sessions, Cardin, and I met privately with Mr. Perez to discuss my concerns about his positions on health care issues, and not only did he not alleviate my concerns, but he also made no effort to apologize for his incendiary comments. I believe Mr. Perez fails to understand how the executive order undermines

patient care, and I fear this lack of understanding will affect similar policies he will implement if he is confirmed to head the Civil Rights Division.

Although Mr. Perez clearly has a passion for limited English-- proficiency individuals, I am afraid this passion clouds his judgment as it pertains to health care treatment and costs and will affect his judgment as the head of the Civil Rights Division. As proof, I offer the following example. In 2002, the Office of Management and Budget, OMB, issued a study which stated, ``we anticipate that the cost of LEP assistance, both to government and to the United States economy, could be substantial, particularly if the Executive Order is implemented in a way that does not provide uniform, consistent guidance to the entities it covers . . . provision of language services could be most costly for the healthcare sector.'' In contrast, Mr. Perez has stated that he does ``not believe that Executive Order 13166 has a fiscal impact on State or Federal Governments because it imposes no new requirements on them.'' This lack of judgment is concerning to me.

In addition to my disagreement with Mr. Perez on the treatment of health care as a civil right, his views on the Clinton-era executive order requiring health care providers to provide services and documents in languages other than English infringes on the right of States to declare English as the official State language. Specifically, the current acting assistant attorney general for the Office of Civil Rights sent a preemptive letter to Oklahoma's attorney general, threatening prosecution and retraction of Federal funds if Oklahoma enacted a constitutional amendment pending before the State legislature at that time, which would declare English as the official State language. It is unprecedented for DOJ to send such a preemptive letter. Approximately 30 other States have English-only policies, and, to my knowledge, none of these States has received such a letter. Three of those States have laws similar to the Oklahoma proposal. Thus, this letter to Oklahoma was not directed against its current law, but aimed at preventing such a law from being enacted because DOJ views it as possibly violating civil rights laws. Subsequently, the Oklahoma Legislature passed the amendment, and it will be presented to the people for approval in 2010.

I am disturbed that in written questions for the record, Mr. Perez affirmed the Department's position. I asked Mr. Perez if it would be appropriate for the Office of Civil Rights to send such a preemptive letter, and he stated ``if the Civil Rights Division believes that a state's `English Only' provisions do not comply with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it would be appropriate for it to issue that sort of letter.'' He also stated that the Clinton-era executive order does not undermine ``the rights of states to declare English as their official language.'' Furthermore, Mr. Perez believes that the executive order ``does not create new obligations for states.'' As a result of the Office of Civil Rights' letter to Oklahoma, all members of the Oklahoma delegation have sent a response letter to Attorney General Holder. The letter asks him to explain why the Office of Civil Rights sent the letter to Oklahoma, whether similar letters have been sent to other States or cities with English-only policies, outline what type of funding would be denied to Oklahoma if the law was enacted, and whether this preemptive letter-writing process is DOJ's policy. To date, the State of Oklahoma has not received a response. Without such explanation, it appears that Oklahoma was specifically targeted in a political maneuver by DOJ since there was no Oklahoma law enacted that violated civil rights laws at the time it sent the letter.

In his writings, Mr. Perez also has advocated for affirmative action in admissions to health care schools because he believes minority applicants are more likely to work in underserved populations. On March 30, 2009, Linda Chavez--former Staff Director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1983-1985, and Secretary of Labor nominee--wrote an article critical of Mr. Perez's arguments for race-conscious admissions policies for health professions schools. She notes that in one article, Mr. Perez ``cited a handful of studies that purport to show that minority doctors are more likely to provide medical care to underserved poor minority populations than white physicians are. He then leapt to the conclusion that the best way to improve access to medical care for underserved populations was to insist that medical schools use race or ethnicity in choosing which students to admit.'' She claims that this appears to be an argument in support of ``a form of medical apartheid in which minority patients should be served by minority doctors under the presumption that both groups benefit from this practice.'' She calls this argument ``insulting and dangerous'' and notes that ``doctors who primarily treat patients enrolled in government programs are less likely than those with private insurance to have passed demanding board certification in their specialties and to have access to high-quality specialists in other fields. Under Perez's rationale, it shouldn't matter whether the doctors who serve poor people are less likely to be board-certified so long as they are black or brown.'' She further notes, ``Perez's solution to the problem is to lower standards even further so that more under-qualified minority physicians are admitted to practice medicine. Medical schools already admit black and, to a lesser degree, Hispanic students with lower qualifications than whites or Asians.''

Finally, I am deeply troubled by the Justice Department's failure to respond to legitimate requests for information regarding its decision not to pursue the prosecution of the New Black Panther Party voter case. Earlier this year, House Judiciary Committee Members exchanged a series of letters with the Justice Department requesting an explanation for why the Department decided not to pursue the case against the New Black Panther Party for alleged voter intimidation that occurred in the November 2008 elections in Philadelphia. These Members sought an explanation for the dismissal of the case, which the Bush Justice Department had filed in early January 2009. The Justice Department did not respond to these inquiries until mid-July, and even then they were vague and indicated possible political interference with this case. Following the denial of this request for information, the House Members asked members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to hold Mr. Perez's nomination until the Department provided a more thorough response. Senator Sessions also sent a letter to the Justice Department and did not receive an acceptable response. The independent U.S. Commission on Civil Rights also has demanded that the Justice Department explain its dismissal of the lawsuit against members of the Black Panther Party and have not received a satisfactory response from DOJ.

Voter intimidation is unacceptable, and Congress deserves an explanation of the Justice Department's actions. Oversight of the Department is a legitimate function of Congress, and Members deserve an explanation rather than stonewalling. For this reason, I will vote against cloture on Mr. Perez's nomination--as a protest to this lack of cooperation. I will vote against Mr. Perez's nomination based on the aforementioned concerns about his policy positions.

Madam President, I thank Senator Cardin because he graciously arranged a meeting between myself and Senator Sessions and, I believe, Senator Kyl several months ago. There is no question that Mr. Perez is a very bright, engaging, and competent individual.

Regretfully, my concerns with his nomination were not allayed by that meeting. I think Senator Cardin has done a great job shepherding this, and I know the outcome. I still think the American people ought to hear about the concerns I have.

We are in the midst of a lot of difficulty in our country. We are struggling somewhat with our mojo, our confidence, with where we are going and how we are going to get there. A lot of it comes back to how did we ever get to the depth of problems we are having today? I think about this a lot, because I think the answer to it is the solution for how we get out of the problems we are in. Where do we go? How is it that we have an almost $12 trillion debt right now, $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities, and a budget deficit this year that, by the time you count what we stole from Social Security and

all the other trust funds, is about $1.8 trillion, and debt that will double in 5 years and triple in 10--how did we get there?

I think this nomination is a key answer for us. How we got there was building a Federal Government that has forgotten several things, but, most importantly, what the Constitution said about its real role. No. 2, it has allayed the concerns and the benefits of personal responsibility in this country.

I think Mr. Perez is a fine man, but I think his viewpoint is a disaster for the future of this country in terms of what is a civil right and what isn't. It is a civil right, according to Mr. Perez, that I have to, as a physician or a hospital or a grocery store, interpret language for anybody who would come to this country and cannot speak the language.

Our history is that people who have come to our country learned the language so they can succeed. One of the things that has made us great has been the commonality of English. The very statements Mr. Perez would make--that doctors who don't agree and health care providers who don't agree with his perception of a civil right of having somebody speak your language, no matter what it is, that they don't care about their patients and don't care about healing--is a step too far. But those are his statements.

If we are to get out of the problems we are in as a nation, it is going to take us time to relook at what made us successful. I mentioned all these other problems before, because in the Constitution--I read a letter from a constituent this morning about how my obligation for Oklahoma is to represent only Oklahoma's interests. I said, you know, that isn't the oath I took. The oath I took was to uphold the Constitution. So now we have this expansive Federal Government we are choking on, not just in terms of its costs but also in terms of how its tentacles reach into people's lives. We are getting ready to have a health care debate to enhance that by another 25 percent in terms of the reach of the Federal Government into your individual lives, and we have a nominee for the Justice Department who believes that individual responsibility and personal accountability don't fall equally across this country, it falls only on those providing services.

The other issue is the fact that 30 States have English-only language. The Justice Department this past spring and summer sent notification to the State of Oklahoma on a bill that was in the legislature, threatening the State of Oklahoma if they passed that bill. Well, 13 other States have identical bills, or laws, on what was being passed in the legislature in Oklahoma, and it will come to a vote of the people. So the legislature passed it, and it will come to the vote of the people this November. But they sent a threatening letter. They won't answer our letter asking how many other States have you sent that letter to. They didn't. It was about discussing whether an individual has any personal responsibility to be able to communicate.

Finally, we have the Justice Department refusing to answer questions about true voter intimidation and the dropping of a case where that occurred. You cannot be on both sides of the civil rights issue. You can't say it is good over here but not over there. Denying people or manipulating voters has as great an impact on individual civil rights as any other thing.

I come to the floor not to say Mr. Perez is not a fine man. But it is his kind of thinking that expands well beyond what our Founders ever thought was a guaranteed civil right. I readily admit that our Founders were wrong on several of those issues. But when we expand it beyond the case, that goes away from personal responsibility and accountability. There is a balance, and we need to protect everybody's civil rights in this country. We are having a human rights hearing in the Judiciary Committee right now on some of these very issues.

Mr. Perez's extreme views, in fact, are that if States have English- only laws, he will go after that, and if we don't have the same viewpoint he has, rather than what the Constitution says and what the precedent from court hearings says, I think that will not lead to an outcome that will be favorable for our country.

I will finish up by saying our problems are gigantic. They are not simple. There are not simple answers.

The condition in which we find ourselves is from excess--whether it is excess earmarking, excess program, lack of oversight, or the excess of one hardened position over a balanced system that protects human rights but also does not destroy our system. I believe although Mr. Perez is qualified, his foundational biases should eliminate him from this position.

I again thank my colleague from Maryland. He has been very accommodating during this course. I had lifted previously my hold on Mr. Perez, and I think he knows that. But I am concerned with the direction of his leadership and what it will mean in terms of where we go as a country.

I yield the floor.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

Through the Chair, I ask the Senator, my problem is not with that; I agree with the Senator on that. My question is as we carry out expansion beyond that in terms of Executive orders that are not in the law but are Executive orders that we have never ruled on, and then we are going to consider that.

Specifically I ask him, does he recognize the estimated $6 billion cost in the health care system if, in fact, Mr. Perez's interpretation of that Executive order was carried to its fullest extent by making translation services available to anybody of any language at any time throughout the whole country? That would be my question. I appreciate his thought.

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

Mr. President, later we are going to vote on an amendment I have that is a prohibition on taking earmarked money from the operation and maintenance account of our armed services. Operation and maintenance--not procurement, not research, but operation and maintenance. The very key thing that funds the ability of our warfighters and our Defense Department to do what they do is being used to pay for some very good projects, some not very good projects, most of which all are parochial; in other words, directed toward State benefit, through the operation and maintenance account.

Last year, I would remind my colleagues, the Navy ran out of operation and maintenance money. We had to supplement it. Why did we supplement it? Because we took their money last year and put it into earmarks instead of giving the Navy what it needed. I would remind the people listening to these words that when we do a supplemental, we charge the money to our kids and our grandkids. We don't have to live within the budget parameters.

So as we vote for this, earmark is another question. The question is: Where do you take the money when you go to earmark? When we take it from the very things that support, equip, and protect the people who are defending this country, and we put them at risk by not having the amount of dollars that are necessary for that, I think we are sending a terrible signal not just to the American people but to our troops that our parochial desires are more important than their well-being.

When the amendment comes up, I will defer saying anything else so we can move on. But the American people need to know. This is a couple hundred million bucks that is going to be taken away from the very necessary things they need. There are a couple of other gimmicks in here that actually lessen that account that allow for other things to be done in terms of not looking into inflation correctly, but we will pass on those amendments. But the fact is we ought not be playing games with the money that goes to protect our troops.

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

This is a simple amendment. I am appreciative of the fact that the National Guard and Army Reserve will get additional funds. All the amendment says is, run that by the Defense Department. They don't get to approve it or disapprove it, but they ought to get to see it. And so should we. Every one of us has National Guard units. Many of us have Army Reserve units. Why should we not have access to information as to how they will spend the money? It is about transparency. The American people ought to see how they will spend the money. I want to see how it will be spent in Oklahoma. All Senators should be able to see how it is spent. The Secretary of Defense will not be able to stop it. It only says he is knowledgeable and responsible, when utilizing those forces overseas, for their deployment and equipment.

Mr. President, I spoke earlier on this amendment and will yield my time to the Senator from Arizona.

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, what is the order of business?

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and amendment No. 2569 be called up.

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

Mr. President, I have several amendments that go along this line, but my question to the Appropriations Committee is one of trying to clarify for the American people the numbers that were used to downsize the operation and maintenance account based on what the expected inflation rate was.

It is important to know. The O&M account is what runs everything. What came out of the bill was $294 million because you chose to use an inflation rate that was less than what CBO and OMB had stated it would be. You did use the one that was the one prior. But the one presently would, in fact, add another $294 million to the operation and maintenance account. I would be glad to hear the reasoning why we chose to use it. I think I know why the reasoning--because it allows more ability to do other things Members would like to do.

What this amendment is trying to do is to restore that money to truly reflect the inflation rate that OMB and CBO have said it would be. Three-tenths of 1 percent makes a big difference when you are talking about taking something from our military. I would remind my colleagues that last year the Navy ran out of O&M money and we needed an emergency supplemental to supply it. So by undershooting what the real inflation factor is for their costs, both in fuel and maintenance and operations, if we undervalue that account, what it means is we are going to take away from readiness. I know that is not the intent of this committee. The intent of this committee is to make sure our military has the needs and the means with which to carry out their requirements.

Let me get a little more detailed on it. When the committee set the O&M number, they used a GDP index inflation rate from the Congressional Budget Office that was 3 months old, and they ignored the updated one for August, which was three-tenths of a percent higher. That means that if--and I agree, they are estimates; they may not be correct. What I would like to know is, what if you are wrong with the lower number you put in? Are we going to be coming back with a supplemental to be able to drive the O&M? For the American people what that means is, when we do a supplemental, it is outside the budget rules, which means we borrow it. We borrow the money.

This amendment says let's realistically predict what the inflation rate is going to be in the operation and maintenance account. Let's truly put the money there that should be there. What this amendment does is simply restore it.

We know, by history, that O&M has been rising faster than inflation for the past 9 years. We have not gotten it right once, in terms of the actual amounts. How this amendment technically works is it restores $294 million by striking part of section 8091 of the bill that reduces that funding.

I will not spend any more time on it. I will discuss it again later.

Amendment No. 2563

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that this pending amendment be set aside and amendment No. 2563 be called up.

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

Mr. President, this is a straightforward amendment, and the Appropriations Committees heretofore have agreed with it. This says, other than in terms of national security or something that should not be released for general circulation, the reports that are authorized and paid for in this bill, which are going directly only to the Senators on the Appropriations Committee, be made available to the rest of the Senators in the body as well as the rest of the American public. If there is a good national security reason not to do so, fine, there is no problem with that, but all the rest of the American people ought to see it. It is called transparency. The American people are paying for them. The American people have a right and an obligation to see them if they are going to be involved in the governance of our country. In fact, they are supposed to be in charge of the governance of our country.

So what it will do is allow the American citizens to see how their money is actually being spent and allow them to get to see the results of those reports. It is very simple.

My hope is the chairman and ranking member would be inclined to support this amendment.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside.

I ask unanimous consent that amendment No. 2565 be called up.

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

Mr. President, in this bill we are attempting to address what I agree is a very serious problem, the funding of our National Guard and Reserve. I do have some concerns, though, about how we are going about doing that.

I would love to be corrected by either the chairman or the ranking member. As I understand the bill, the $1.5 billion in upgrades for the National Guard and Reserve actually bypasses the Department of Defense, bypasses the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and goes directly to the committee in terms of the approval of how they do that. I would inquire of the chairman if that is accurate.

Absolutely. I am happy to do that.

I ask unanimous consent to set this amendment aside.

I note the absence of a quorum.

Reserving the right to object, I have no objection to the Senator from Minnesota offering his amendment. I wanted to get two other amendments pending. I ask that I be included in the request.

If the Senator objects for me, then I will object to him getting his.

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

Madam President, I think the leadership has been working on some amendments and agreements. I don't think any of our amendments are going to come up for votes tonight, but I did want to take a couple of moments talking about several of them.

Amendment No. 2560

One is a McCain amendment I am a cosponsor on, amendment No. 2560, on competitive bidding.

Every time we bring this amendment to the floor we get a side-by-side amendment so everybody on the other side who does not want us to competitively bid earmarks can have cover to say they voted for competitive bidding. The fact is, in this bill are directed earmarks that are not competitively bid to individuals and companies out there, for specialization of what one Senator may want in their home State.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to help your home State. What is wrong is to not competitively bid. If it is something we need, why shouldn't we use a competitive bidding process to get the best quality and the best value for all this money we are going to spend?

We are going to see again on the McCain amendment the competitive bidding amendment--I have offered this on many of the appropriations bills we have--a side by side. America should not be fooled. If you do not vote for the McCain amendment and you vote for the side by side, what you are saying is you still want your earmarks protected and not competitively bid. That is what it says.

I have another amendment that addresses earmarks. The problem with earmarks is it takes our eye off the ball. It is not they are not good ideas, but we vote on bills on the basis of having an earmark in the bill rather than on the total bill and what is in the best interest of the country, not our particular parochial State.

The competitive bidding amendment, when it has the side by side, what you are going to see is you are going to see the true competitive bidding amendment defeated and the false competitive bidding amendment win. That is

because if you count the number of Senators who actually have earmarks that are not competitively bid, you get the majority of the Chamber. That is true on every appropriations bill. So we will not ever pass it until the Members start thinking about the long term and what is best for the country, rather than what is best for them. I thought that explanation needed to be made.

Amendment No. 2565

I also want to discuss for a moment an amendment, Amendment No. 2565, a very simple amendment. We know the National Guard has gotten shortchanged a lot of times in terms of equipment. I don't think there is anything wrong with setting aside money for the National Guard. But the way the bill is written is the chain of command in the U.S. Government, in terms of our military, will be excluded from the decisions made on how to spend this $1.5 billion.

The Secretary of Defense, who is ultimately responsible for the defense of the Nation--even though we use National Guard, and part of this money is going to be used for our Army Reserve, a very small amount--is not going to be able to have any input. The only people who are going to have input is the Appropriations Committee.

What that says is the American people are not going to get to know, we are not going to have the judgment of the people with the best experience to comment on it. I am not even saying they have to veto it. What we are saying is they have to be aware of it, they have to be part of the process. Yet they are not. So the more concern I have with our amendment the more concern I have about what is happening with this $1.5 billion. My hope is we will eventually find out. We may not find out until after the $1.5 billion will have been spent. But the problem is will it be spent efficiently and properly for the National Guard and the Reserve? The secrecy that shrouds this process is somewhat concerning, and also the reaction that we would offer an amendment that says we want somebody in the chain of command to be involved in this, outside just the Appropriations Committee and the individual guard units.

Amendment No. 2562

On another amendment, amendment No. 2562, other than national security issues, why should not every report in this bill be made available to every American? It is a real straightforward amendment. If we want transparency in our Government, then the reports that do not have anything to do with anything that would be a national security risk, for example, ought to be made available to the other Senators in the Chamber and the body as well as the American people. That is a pretty hard amendment to say ``No, you don't,'' because there is not a good defense to that if it is not related to a national security concern, and, Americans--43 cents out of every dollar we are spending we are borrowing from our grandkids. We ought to be proud to let them see what we are doing with the money.

Amendment No. 2569

Finally, I have an amendment that is a prohibition. We have this operation and maintenance account that has been robbed heartily for earmarks. I know I will never win the battle on earmarks. But should not we say it comes from somewhere else, other than to fund the actual day-to-day operation and maintenance of our military? We have already cut into the amount of money that is in the O&M account because we are using a false inflation number, to the tune of about $300 some odd million--$294 million. Shouldn't we say, if we are going to take that, let's take it from somewhere else in the military rather than operations and maintenance? What is a greater priority than making sure the troops on the ground have what they need on a timely basis?

It was just last year that the Navy ran out of O&M money. They restricted flight training. They restricted training on the ships. We had to pass an emergency supplemental because we did not authorize them enough, we didn't appropriate them enough money to adequately operate and maintain their force structure. Yet we have all this money, including other money that is related to other amendments, that comes out of their operation and maintenance account. If we want to do something that is outside the scope and outside what the military wants to have done, let's not make two wrongs. Let's not take the money from O&M. What this amendment would do is simply prohibit any directed earmark from coming from O&M funds.

Our military needs us to be efficient. I think overall on this bill the appropriators have done a good job. I think there is tons of waste we could get out of the Defense Department. I think it is about $50 billion a year that we could actually squeeze, which would make plenty of money for earmarks, it wouldn't hurt operation and maintenance, yet we will not have the oversight, we will not do the things that are necessary to lessen the waste that is in the military. My hope is, as we come back next week--I notice we are going to have a couple of votes here in a little while; not on these amendments. No. 1, my hope is the American people will let us know about priorities and what we ought to be doing. I think these are straightforward amendments.

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

Mr. President.

Mr. President, I wish to spend a little bit of time today talking to my colleagues and the American people about where we are. I don't know of a better description of where we are than this sign. The President said and some in the House have said that certain facts about health care reform are indisputable, but nobody will dispute this one: Forty-three cents out of every dollar we spend this year, we borrow against the future of our children; 43 cents out of every dollar the Federal Government spends. What does that come to per family? What that comes to is $15,603 per family--every family in this country--we borrowed against this year.

The reason I came down to the floor--I have a lot of problems with both the CR and this bill, but I want to know where the leadership is in America today. We are in tough times, and if

there ought to be one bill the Congress passes with no increase in spending, it ought to be the bill that pays for the things we do. The reason it ought to be that bill is because we ought to lead by example. What we are saying with this legislative branch bill is that, you know what, there is just not 5 percent to cut in our efficiency. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Every year I have been here, I have been allocated a certain amount of money for my office. In no year have I turned back less than 18 percent of that money, 460-some thousand bucks. We didn't spend it because we know how to run things efficiently and effectively.

That is a misnomer for the Federal Government, as led by the Senate, as exampled by this bill.

So what have we done so far this year? Here is what we have done. Here is where the 2009 increases were, and here is what we are proposing this year. This doesn't take into account any of the money we spent in the stimulus or any of the money in the emergency appropriations we passed or that we wanted to increase the baseline.

Last year, we increased our own budget by 10.88 percent. Inflation was minus last year; there was a negative inflation. So we had an infinity, as far as recognizing the increase of our own budgets, because, in fact, the costs actually went down in America. CPI declined. This year, we are at a 1.4-percent CPI increase year over year, from September 30 to September 30.

Legislative branch is almost three times what inflation is; Homeland Security, four times inflation; Energy and Water--because they got such a large bump with the stimulus bill, we only increased it 1.41 percent. Every other bill, such as Agriculture, is 12.68 percent; but if you look at it, it is almost 22 percent. The THUD bill is 22.54 percent. Interior is 16.28 percent. Here is the inflation rate, 1.6 percent.

Where is the leadership? That is what the American people ought to ask. I don't fault the chairman. He is given a number and he is supposed to meet it. I fault our leadership. Things are never going to change until we model the behavior that will set the example to cause everything else to change. When we don't have the self-discipline and the courage to make hard choices in the running of our own offices and our own facilities, how can we ever expect anybody else in the rest of the government to do that?

You heard Senator DeMint talk about what kind of shape we are in. Our debt today is $11.790 trillion. That is going to double in the next 5 years. It is going to triple in the next 10 years. Medicare is an unfunded liability. For Medicare alone, it is $89 trillion. What are we doing? Why are we not--Democrats and Republicans alike--saying the problem is in our leadership? The problem is the example we set. We can't even hold our own expenses flat at a time when the rest of the country is making the most difficult choices. Every family and every business is in tough times, and we are flying through it because we don't have to lead by example. We don't want to make hard choices.

There is something lacking in America today. It is sorely lacking. The trouble we are in isn't partisan. It is not one party or the other. It is the combined leadership of this country that fails to recognize the depth and severity of the problems before us, and then it is compounded by not making the hard choices and leading by example to give us a result that will change that path. No other appropriations bills have passed Congress. There have been no conference reports passed for this year. The one that we are going to pass is the one for us. That doesn't fit with any sense of reality to the average family in this country.

Today, it was released that we have a 16-percent approval rating. That is way too high. That is way too high. Leadership is about sacrifice, giving up something so somebody else can gain. We have none of it in any of these appropriations bills we have passed. But they have not gone to the President because we don't have conference reports. Then we have the gall to bring in our budget at three times the inflation rate for us and pass it as the only one. Everybody else will be frozen, with minor exceptions, in the CR. Everybody else--the rest of the government--cannot plan. They don't know what they can do. But we are going to make sure we take care of us. That is exactly why we have a 16-percent approval rating.

I struggled a long time with whether I would seek my seat in the Senate again. Quite frankly, I came down to the fact that, other than three or four of us, nobody in the Senate is speaking about the real long-term problems. Nobody is thinking long term. What we are thinking about is short-term parochial instances such as the $200,000 the chairman put in for his own State. It may be a great project, but now is not the time to do that. It sends a signal to the rest of America that I am going to take care of me and the heck with you. It is the wrong message. Yet we are going to do it anyway. We are going to say: Oh, well, never mind. It is a good cause, $200,000 doesn't matter.

When we are growing up, our parents try to teach us a lot of things. It becomes the small things that are important. This legislative branch bill is a small bill compared to all the others we are going to pass. But it is big on symbolism because this is never going to change until we change. The symbolic act of passing this bill, where we are increasing our own expenses three times the rate of inflation, when most people in this country are spending less money on everything they do, some by choice, some out of fear, and some out of absolute circumstances that they have no control over--yet we pass a bill for us that makes us look absolutely foolish in Americans' eyes. America gets it. We don't. This is an embarrassing time for us as a country. The reason is because there is a difference between what the American people expect and want out of Congress and what we are delivering. It is not about Republicans or Democrats. People are scared. What is the future going to be like? I can tell you. If, in fact, we don't reestablish frugality and common sense in how we fund our expenses and every other aspect of the Federal Government, what we will see is the diminishment of the greatest magnitude of freedom this country has ever seen. We are starting to see it. Where do you think we got the 43 percent we are borrowing? We got most of it from people outside this country. They now have an influence over our ability to remain free because they control the money strings.

This isn't just a rhetorical statement. We know--and I put it on the floor 10 times--nobody disputes that there is at least $350 billion worth of waste, fraud, and duplication in the Federal Government. Not one time in any of the bills that have come through this Chamber have we addressed the significant causes of those problems or addressed fixing it to right them. When we make amendments, they are defeated but not on party-line votes; they get defeated by the appropriators. The greatest power in the Senate is not Senator Harry Reid, it is the Appropriations Committee.

Consequently, when we try to fix the problem, we have a united front that says parochialism and short-term thought is much more important than the long-term future of the country, and our political positions are more important than the health of this Nation. Consequently, tonight, even after points of order will be raised--and I plan on raising some myself--we will pass this. Everybody will say the shower from Coburn is over and we can keep on doing what we have done.

America, don't let us get away with this. Don't let us lead by this poor example. Don't let us not sacrifice in our own offices so we can create the kind of leadership that is necessary to right this ship. This is the worst display I have seen in my years of service in the Congress. It is not about the details. It is the very fact that we have the audacity to take care of us before we take care of the rest of America. We have the audacity to increase our own budgets, which are fat.

If I can turn back the large amount of money I turn back every year, and every office could do the same thing, we could cut significant moneys from this bill. But we don't have the courage, the spine or the backbone that every American family has today--the actual guts to make hard choices. So we ignore them because it is so easy to take the credit card and say charge it to the next generation.

Yesterday, I heard Senator Schumer go after several members on the Finance Committee over Medicare. He

said: You can't be against this. You are for Medicare, aren't you? Sure, Medicare is great.

The only problem is, the unfunded liabilities with Medicare are going to cripple our economy starting in 2017. Alexander Tyler said all republics die, all republics fail. They fail at that moment in time when the vast majority of the citizens of the republic figure out they can vote themselves something from the Public Treasury.

Is it morally acceptable for us to continue to steal from our children? Is it morally acceptable to take opportunity away in this great land of freedom? Or will we sit back some day and tell our grandchildren about what it used to be like to be free in this country? All republics fail because all republics become deficit ridden.

It does not have to be that way for our country. Real leadership, real courage, real clarity of character says that now is the time, whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, to lead on the issues that will solve the problems in front of this country. This bill doesn't do it. As a matter of fact, this bill conditions more apathy and less confidence in the country and rightly so. We are not going to see that level of confidence come back to the Congress until we start paying attention to the long-term needs of this country and making those decisions in a way that doesn't have any consideration of our political position whatsoever, but every consideration about the truth, welfare, and long-term viability of our country. This bill doesn't do it.

The fact that this bill is used as a vehicle to fund the rest of the government, and we put us ahead of everybody else, to me, sends a very clear message to America: It is time to change who is here. It is time to send new people here. It is time to have people who are more interested in the country than their political careers or their party.

We example the worst of Washington politics and the worst of parochialism when we put us first and our desires first and our careers first, rather than the long-term viability of this country.

The CR contained in this bill violates the budget resolution-- violates 311 of the Budget Act. It is all over the place. Even though we will raise points of order, we probably will not win. But when we don't win on that, America, you ought to ask why didn't we win. It will be because the Members of this body think more about their budgets than they do yours. They think more about their comfort than they do yours. They think more about their future than they do yours. It is very easy to solve this situation. What should happen is the legislative branch should be frozen like everybody else in the country, and we should pass bills coming out of conference committee as soon as we can, and we ought to work hard on doing that. Then we ought to pass a CR tonight that is free of this, that doesn't violate the Budget Act.

I want to make one more point talking about the $4 billion and the postal provisions. There are a lot of great people who work for the U.S. Postal Service. There is no question about it. They are a victim of technology today more so than anything else. The fact is we use electronics rather than the mail, and the first-class mail volume and the volume for second and third-class items is going to go down. There is nothing the post office is going to be able to do to turn that revenue around. There is nothing. And that is not the average postal worker's fault. But the postal portion that came out of the Homeland Security Committee contained a very key component that has been ignored in this CR, and that was this: the negotiation of labor rates in this next round. Heretofore, they have never taken into consideration the financial health of the post office. Some of us find that kind of strange, but they never have. But there was an amendment that was agreed to in the committee that said: This time, when you arbitrate the language for the postal service employees, you have to consider the health of the post office, because that is where the revenue comes. Well, that has been conveniently left out of this CR. It passed out of committee. Yet we didn't put it here.

What does that mean for the post office? That means when we go to negotiate the labor agreements, the fact the post office is going to lose $8 billion or $10 billion next year--they will lose at least $8 billion this year, maybe even $12 billion or $14 billion next year-- there won't be any consideration given in evaluating the labor contracts. Any other business whose revenue is declining rapidly that ignores the revenue side and ignores expense increases is sure to fail.

As Senator DeMint said, this is the third time in 5 years we have tried to put a patch on the U.S. Post Office, and this patch is only going to last for 1 year. It is not going to solve anything. We are going to ignore the hard choices that need to be made both by the postal employees and the post office in order to fix this so it is not a drain.

That is what I am talking about--the failure to lead. We duck the hard problems. We don't want to offend anybody. What we have to do is to start thinking long term. We have to start being about a vision of America that is financially healthy, and we have to swallow the hard, tough medicine of getting there.

We are setting an example with this bill that says we don't care; it doesn't matter. So America is disgusted. And that is what it is when 16 percent have confidence in us. I guarantee a large percentage don't--84 percent. A good portion of that is disgust with us. You know what. I am disgusted too. I know the individuals in this body. They are great people. But there has to be a change in the dynamics of the thought and the reasoning or we are going to suffer the consequences. Actually, we are not; our kids are. They are going to suffer the consequences.

I will end with this point. If you were born today--September 30, 2009--in this country, the first present you get for your birthday is an IOU for $400,000. Because when you take all our unfunded liabilities and apply to it the living segment of Americans over the next 70 years, their portion of our indiscretion is $400,000. It just takes simple math: Take 5 percent interest--and none of us can probably borrow any money at 5 percent interest--and that is $20,000 a year for the first 20 years of their life they are going to have the pay the interest on. So what does that come to, 20 years times $20,000? Now we are at $800,000 before they are out of college.

How in the world will they ever own a home? How will they ever send their kids to college carrying that kind of load? There is one of two answers to it: We either enter into the real world and start making the hard decisions and fixing the programs that are broken and eliminating the waste, fraud, and abuse, or we devalue our currency and everybody's assets in this country are going to shrink by about another 30 percent in terms of their real value.

That is the answer.

But those are inconvenient truths. We don't want to talk about them. We don't want to talk about the consequences of our actions. A former President said: Freedom is a precious thing. It's not ours by inheritance alone. It is never guaranteed. It has to be fought for and defended by each and every succeeding generation.

How do you fight for freedom when you owe $800,000 and you are not out of college yet? How do you do that? When will we start to take the shackles off the next two generations? When will we start to eliminate the burden of our excesses on our children?

We are not far from a time when it is going to be too late to reverse this course. The international financial market is signaling that now. Wouldn't it be wise for us to lead with courage, to make tough choices, and truly secure the freedom of our children and grandchildren?

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

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the time during the quorum call be equally divided between the majority and the minority.

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

Mr. President, Senator Carper successfully offered an amendment to this act that would authorize the EPA to conduct a study on black carbon emissions to ``improve global and domestic public health'' and ``to mitigate the climate impacts of black carbon.''

A similar bill, S. 849, was also introduced by Senator Carper and approved recently by the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works.

While I did not object to the purpose of the bill, I did object to the bill because the cost of the study--$2 million according to the Congressional Budget Office--was not offset.

As I wrote in a letter to Minority Leader McConnell and Senator Carper outlining my objections to this bill, ``At a time when our national debt is greater than $11.6 trillion, we cannot afford to add to this debt that will be inherited by our children and grandchildren. Even our best intentions need to be paid for with offsets from lower priorities or wasteful spending.''

I also requested the opportunity to modify this legislation if no offsets were made.

I intended to offer a second-degree amendment to offset the expected cost increase in spending as a result of the Carper amendment by capping the amount of funds EPA can spend on conference travel. According to EPA, $17.296 million was spent on conference travel in 2006--the last year for which we have records. This amendment would have capped conference travel spending at $15 million, thus assuring that the full cost of the study will be offset.

In the past couple of years, as Americans were tightening their belts and travelling less, EPA was growing its conference budget and travelling more. This is reflected in its annual costs for

conference participation and related expenses, which increased from $10.781 million in fiscal year 2000 to $17.296 million in fiscal year 2006.

Conference attendance for Federal employees in many, if not most, cases is discretionary, meaning that it is up to Federal agencies to determine to what conferences agency employees should go and how many employees should go. Some conferences provide valuable educational or agency-related information in a format unavailable in a normal office setting. Many conferences, by the sponsors' design, are held in locations chosen to attract attendees.

That being said, it is the responsibility of the U.S. Congress and the managers within Federal agencies to exercise due diligence in performing oversight over an area of Federal spending that has cost taxpayers over $2 billion on conferences from 2000-2006. This spending has increased over 95 percent, from over $200 million a year in fiscal year 2000 to almost $400 million a year in fiscal year 2006. In addition to the financial cost of these trips, oversight hearings I held as the chair of the Federal Financial Management Subcommittee highlighted the lost productivity of government employees when they are out of the office on nonessential travel.

The EPA is just one among many Federal agencies that I believe has overspent on nonessential conferences and travel. In my research I found numerous instances where EPA showed questionable judgment in this regard.

In September 2006, EPA sent 23 employees to Paris, France, for the International Society of Exposure Analysis Meeting, at a cost of $56,000. This conference featured a gala dinner cruise on the River Seine and a cast of presenters that consisted primarily of Americans.

The agency's employees attended an annual National Beaches Conference in Niagara Falls, NY. The 2006 conference was attended by at least seven EPA employees, at a cost to taxpayers of $52,500.

One EPA employee attended a December 2006 GSA Small Business Conference in Palm Springs, CA, at a cost of $4,100, with his or her travel costs alone listed at $1,800.

A Cancun, Mexico, meeting attended by two EPA employees cost $4,200, with travel costs listed at $2,900.

A March 2007 Waste-to-Energy Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico cost taxpayers $48,000 for nine EPA employees and two taxpayer-funded nonemployees to attend.

A 2006 ``Beyond Translation Forum'' sponsored by the EPA in Texas to ``engage the Hispanic community in becoming environmental stewards'' costs $52,100 for the attendance of 20 EPA employees and 85 taxpayer- funded nonemployees.

Over 2 years, EPA also spent $2.6 million in grants and contracts and over $300,000 in travel and related expenses for brownfields conferences in Oregon and Missouri.

EPA spent $235,000 in grants and $25,000 in travel costs for the National Tank Conference in Memphis. Costs included events at BB King's and seeing the Memphis Grizzlies basketball team play.

EPA spent $355,000 in grants and contracts and $167,000 in travel costs for the Community Involvement Conference in Milwaukee.

In February of 2007, EPA spent $150,000 to sponsor the ``Measuring Program Results'' Conference, to which it sent one EPA employee and paid for the attendance of four nonemployees.

Instead of specifically capping the amount EPA could spend on conference travel, Senator Carper has graciously modified his amendment to transfer $2 million from the EPA's Environmental Programs and Management account to fund this study of black carbon emissions. This EPA account ``provides personnel compensation, benefits, and travel and other administrative expenses for all agency programs.''

It is my hope that this transfer in funds will help EPA better manage the funds it is entrusted with by Congress and limit questionable expenditures and unnecessary conference travel and related expenses.

I am pleased that the Senate has agreed to this offset and hope that Congress can begin to prioritize funds for its priorities with real offsets.

First of all, let me say my biggest concern for my patients in this whole debate is, will the American consumer still have the power and the ability to select who is going to give them this most personal of all care when this is over? The answer to that is ``no.'' It is not ``no'' for everybody, but it is a ``no'' for half of the American public. That is what it means.

We don't know, but most likely half of them will not. The whole debate ought to be how do we get more value out of the health care system we have today rather than how do we add more money to the cost of health care to cover more people.

The reason my patients have trouble getting care is cost. Right now, they have choice, except if they are in Medicaid, and they have some choice if they are in Medicare because we are seeing a larger and larger percentage of doctors who cannot afford to take the Medicare reimbursements. But can they afford the care? This bill does nothing to lower health care costs. It does nothing to lower health care costs.

Premiums will.

I agree. We have offered for years a couple of ways to do this. I think it is important for the American people to know how much there is. The Department of Health and Human Services estimated in 2007--that is the last year for which they have numbers--that $62 billion was improperly paid out of Medicare. The GAO, when they looked at that report, said: No, you are way off. It is at least $85 billion, and we think it is higher.

If you look at that, that is almost 20 percent--20 cents out of every dollar--Medicaid pays out is lost to fraud. Why wouldn't we fix that first rather than say that if we fix it, we are going to take it from Medicare and put it somewhere else, when the trust fund, the HI trust fund, the hospital insurance fund, is going to be belly-up in 2017?

That is right. And Medicare is already unsustainable. So what is going to happen? There is another factor, which is we have it fixed that, with this bill, there will not be a big cut to the payments to doctors under Medicare. But in the years that follow that, there will be a 25-percent cut. If access is a problem for Medicare patients today, it is going to get worse. It is part of the lack of truth in this bill that they do not address what we have set in motion to take dollars away from the health care industry.

The first thing is you put uncovered patients in the Medicare system and you put people in jail who are defrauding Medicare. If 30 or 40 doctors went to jail in the next 6 months in this country, you would lower Medicare costs by 10 percent because all of a sudden they would start thinking about: I can't skirt this. I can't play this game. I can't do it. The risk is too high.

As a matter of fact, here is one of the things we know. In Florida, the drug dealers have switched from being drug dealers to Medicare suppliers because they can make more money defrauding the Federal Government. It is harder to get caught and the penalties, when you are caught, are less than when you are dealing drugs. Consequently, we have all these people in the business of defrauding Medicare, and there has not been a plan that has been effective in cutting Medicare fraud because nobody knows--and the government is all about Medicare. So it, by its very design, is designed to be defrauded. We should make structural changes so it is not and with that get better care and lower cost care, like paying for outcomes rather than paying the American Medical Association to use their CPT code.

Mr. President, I wanted to make some comments based on the comments the Senator from New Mexico raised.

He talked about $4,000 a year in terms of imported oil into this country and then he talked about we needed to do offshore exploration, but I note for the Record he voted against an opportunity to expand offshore exploration yesterday. You can't have it both ways. If we are going to get off oil and hydrocarbons, it is going to take us 25 years. But when we have an opportunity to decrease that cost of $4,000 per family and use American oil, we do not have the same consistency as the rhetoric when it comes to the votes. I think the Record needs to show that although the Senator claims that, when he had the opportunity yesterday to vote in a way to expand domestic offshore exploration, he voted against that opportunity.

I wish to take this time to bring up several amendments and make them pending. I thank the chairman of the committee and staff for working with us. We will try to make this as painless as possible and do it in as short a period of time as possible, but I have been down here for the last 4 days, every day, trying to get things done and unable to get them done. So I am going to take adequate time to explain these amendments and also explain a couple of amendments I agreed not to offer but I think it pertinent the American people hear about.

Amendment No. 2463

First, I ask the pending amendment be set aside and amendment No. 2463 be called up.

I ask unanimous consent that further reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

I ask unanimous consent the pending amendment be set aside and amendment No. 2523 be called up.

The clerk will report.

I ask unanimous consent the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

I ask unanimous consent the pending amendment be set aside and amendment No. 2483 be called up.

I ask unanimous consent the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

I ask unanimous consent the pending amendment be set aside and amendment No. 2482 be called up.

I ask unanimous consent the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

I ask it be set aside and amendment No. 2511 be called up.

This is the last one. These are all in the agreement the Senator and I had that I would bring up and this is the last one.

I will be happy to do that. No. 2511.

This amendment is as modified without the second degree, with agreement of the chairman of the committee, and you should have the modified amendment at the desk.

I ask unanimous consent this amendment be as modified, and I yield to the chairman of the committee.

Mr. President, I will try to do this, to save some time, in the shortest amount of time I can. I also thank the chairman of this committee for working with me.

There are several amendments I did not offer. I want to spend a couple of minutes talking about those because I think the American people need to hear about them.

Less than a block from this building is the Belmont House. It is a foundation. It is a beautiful building. It has $4 million in the bank, the foundation does. There is an earmark in this bill at this time of a $1.8 trillion deficit, of a 16-percent increase in this bill. The Senator, Senator Landrieu from Louisiana, is sending $1 million to that building. They have the money in the bank but we are still going to take $1 million from our grandkids and send it there. I am not offering that amendment in conjunction with having the pleasure of the chairman consider my other amendments. But the American people need to know that kind of thing is going on. It is absolutely not indicated. Who uses that building? We do,

for fundraisers. We do for events. We do for social events. In fact, there is a high price paid when you rent it. But what we are going to do, without regard to what our fiscal situation is, is we are going to send another $1 million as though it is a peanut and send it to that building. That is all I will say on it, but to me it is one of the reasons why this Congress, and we in particular as Members of the Senate, lack the respect of the American people.

The other amendment I am not going to offer that was objected to by the chairman of the Resources Committee is for us to know what kind of land we own. We don't know, since 2005, how much land we have or where we own it.

Supposedly the BLM puts out something. Supposedly the Geological Survey puts something out. But there is not a concise list of the land that the Federal Government owns--and it is somewhere in excess of a third of all the land of this country--and it is 650 million acres. In this bill is another $300 million--almost $400 million--to buy more land. At the same time, the National Park Service has a backlog of $11 billion. We do not have one national park that does not have significant factors of erosion and dilapidation that is now putting both the employees and park visitors at risk. Yet we are going to spend $400 million to buy more land, to require more of their services to take care of, rather than to take care of what we have. It does not fit with common sense.

There is no way the American people as a whole would embrace that kind of stupidity. Yet that is in this bill. We are going to buy more land, we are going to take more land off the tax rolls, we are going to hurt the States, we are going to limit the ability of property owners, and we are going to continue--the Park Service, this year, their backlog grew by over $400 million.

We have the Carlsbad Caverns where we had sewage leaking into the cavern. I won't spend the time to go through the hundreds of examples the Park Service has given us, that they cannot maintain the parks because we will not send them the money to do it. We would rather spend it on an earmark or buy more land. The priorities here are amazing.

Let me talk about amendment No. 2511. I will spend a short period on it. That is the competitive bidding amendment. We have carefully crafted that with the concerns of both staff and the chairman and ranking member of this committee. What it says is we are going to use competitive bidding, much like the President campaigned, when we go to buy things that are approved in this bill. We very carefully exempted the sections of the Native Americans where their sovereignty reigns, where we would not step on their sovereignty--although I am not sure we should not require them to competitively bid, but we agreed not to do that.

Here is what we do know. If you take different branches of the Federal Government, about 5 percent of the costs are excessive because we do not have competitive bidding. If you take the Pentagon, it is about $20 billion a year because we do not have competitive bidding. In the Interior it is much smaller. But any penny we can save, in terms of enhancing the value of the American taxpayers' dollars by saying what we buy is going to be competitively bid, we ought to do that. We ought to get the best value we can. We may not always get great value but at least we are going to have a competitive bid and we are at least going to have everybody in that who is qualified to have a shot at some of that business. So it is a ``two-fer.'' It is, No. 1, better value for the American people but also opening up all this to everybody who has a opportunity to offer a service when the Federal Government buys it.

With that, we have an agreement and I appreciate the chairman accepting that amendment.

Amendment No. 2463 is an amendment for the public to see all the reports required by this bill if, in fact, that will not in any way compromise national security. I think we have worked out an agreement on that amendment to where that is going to be accepted. It is about transparency.

We ought to make sure the American people see what we are doing, and if we ask for a report that will not in any way endanger the security of this country that comes back to us, there is no reason the American people should not be able to see that and we make it available to them so they can make a judgment to judge us on what we are doing and whether we are responding properly to problems identified in such reports.

So I am very thankful for the chairman in terms of accepting this amendment. I look forward to her comments on it. We should do the same thing with this amendment as we did with the last one.

Madam President, I switch now to amendment No. 2523, which is a prohibition on funds being spent in this act that would actually limit the effectiveness of the Homeland Security Department in terms of securing our borders and protecting us.

This amendment basically ensures that the wilderness areas and other public lands are protected from crime and pollution. I know it is not seen that way, but what is happening is a very big and sad story about what is happening in our wilderness areas.

Border violence and trafficking is at an all-time high. Our public lands along the border are being exploited by drug and human smugglers. Wilderness concerns hinder law enforcement efforts. How do we balance properly our concerns for the environment and still secure our borders and still protect our population from both drug smuggling and human trafficking?

Wilderness areas also are being destroyed by these very smugglers because we do not allow the enforcement agencies access to be able to make a difference. We have not acted on it; we have not acted on it in this bill. We have to make sure there is the proper balance between protecting our wilderness areas and protecting our country and our citizens.

We have sought to address in the last couple of years our border security concerns by appropriating a large increase in Federal funds for law enforcement and for significant legislation to construct infrastructure along the southern border.

In the Secure Fence Act of 2006, Congress sought to ensure that the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security was able to take the actions necessary and appropriate to achieve and maintain the operational control over the entire international land and maritime borders of the United States.

The goal of the act was to prevent all unlawful entries into the United States, including entries by terrorists, narcotics, and other contraband, except it has not had the desired impact, and in large part, to the unwelcome increase of illegal human and drug trafficking through public lands, along our southern border. So we have a conflict of desires by agencies to do their jobs.

Amendment No. 2523 would prohibit any funds from within the Interior appropriations bill to be used to prohibit or restrict the activities of Homeland Security on public lands to secure our borders. The effect of this amendment would be to ensure that DHS is able to further secure our borders from terrorists and other national security threats and protect the environment of these lands.

I know there is some concern on the other side with the language, the way we have written it. I am more than willing to work with the chairman of both the Resources Committee, Interior Committee, and the Appropriations Committee to try to put that in a way that properly balances it. I know this is a tough amendment. I do not deny that.

But when you hear the testimony--and I am going to ask that this be printed in the Record. This is former

Border Patrol officers and field supervisory Border Patrol agents who testified in Congress last April about what is going on in our wilderness areas.

Do you realize that these people, because we do not have law enforcement in there, they are setting fires in our wilderness areas to distract us to the fire so they can smuggle contraband and humans while we are addressing the fire?

Our wilderness areas are being defiled near McAllen, TX. It relates: When a wilderness area or refuge is established near the border, the criminal element moves in and trashes it because the restrictive wilderness or refuge status accorded to these lands effectively prevents all law enforcement from effectively working the area.

This is Border Patrol:

In other words, refuge or wilderness designation actually

serves to put the environment at a greater risk of being

seriously damaged and defaced. Law enforcement must have

common, unrestricted, free access to all lands near the U.S.

border.

He goes on to clarify that it needs to be at least 50 miles. The other thing that was especially telling and which is horrific is the comments about what is going on along Interstate 8 and Interstate 10 in Arizona: numerous reported ``rape trees'' have been identified in and near the current Pajarita Wilderness near the U.S.-Mexican border.

Rape trees mark the location where drug and alien smugglers

habitually sexually assault and rape illegal alien females

that are being brought into the United States across the

Mexican border. These locations are marked by the

perpetrators who prominently display and hang--

I will not use the words that he does.

the underwear of their victims on a particular tree. I

visited one such reported tree on March 27, 2008, and noticed

30 sets of underwear. These rape-tree trails begin at the

Mexican border and travel all of the way through the Pajarita

Wilderness.

In southern Arizona we are experiencing increased incidents of wildfires from two primary sources. The first source is illegal aliens who cross into the United States illegally and start fires through carelessness. The second is from illegal aliens engaged in other criminal enterprises who start wildfires intentionally to create a diversion so they can smuggle things into or out of the United States.

You cannot deny the fact that we are having a conflict between the Department of Interior and the Department of Homeland Security in terms of law enforcement along our border. The tragedy is that the very intent of the Department of Interior to protect the environment is actually being made worse by their policy of not allowing law enforcement efforts, i.e., the Border Patrol, into those areas.

So this amendment is intended to do a couple of things. Let me talk about what the claims against this amendment are first, and that I am more than willing to try to work out a sensible agreement. What is driving me nuts is those two Departments have not worked out a sensible agreement themselves, which we ought to have significant oversight hearings on the fact that we are having to do something that they should be taking care of.

The claim is that if this amendment passes it will devastate the environment and give the Department of Homeland Security the mandate to show no regard for the environment. Nothing can be further from the truth. The interpretation of congressional intent that we currently have has led to the destruction of much of our wilderness area because human and drug smugglers have been able to use these lands as major thoroughfares without fear of law enforcement.

Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security will still be obligated to conduct its law enforcement activities in a manner that seeks to minimize or mitigate any negative environmental impact. Do you realize in Arizona they are cutting down 150-year-old cactuses to block the road to inhibit anybody following them? And the fact that we do not have significant law enforcement, i.e., Border Patrol there, these majestic, 100-year-old cactuses, which are protected, are intentionally being destroyed to protect the smugglers.

In the past, when the Secretary of Homeland Security waived 30 environmental and other laws and regulations associated with the construction of tactical infrastructure along the southwest border in compliance with the Federal law, he still required the Department to practice responsible stewardship of natural and cultural resources.

The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol is also committed to do that. I will stop with this: I do want to have printed in the Record a letter from the National Border Patrol Council, which is the AFL-CIO representative of our Border Patrol agents who fully endorse this amendment because they are the people actually on the ground seeing the problem, and we are not allowing them to do their job.

Well, that is perfectly acceptable to me. I want the problem solved. I think security is just as important as protecting our environment. We are not going to allow one to trump the other.

I would next like to talk about amendment No. 2483. This is the amendment that moves the Federal Land Acquisition Fund to backlog.

There is no question my colleagues in this body know of my concern about an ever-expanding, ever-enlarging Federal role in terms of land ownership. In fact, I have had a lot of conflicts with the chairmen, whether it was a Republican chairman or a Democratic chairman, in terms of expanding the amount of property the Federal Government owns.

It is not just about expanding. When we expand it costs more money. It costs our kids more money. But in this bill, we have almost $400 million that is going to be put in to buy more land where we cannot take care of the land that we have today.

What we know is the following: Federal land management agencies across all these different branches of government, as well as within this bill, are responsible for a large and aging number of structures. As we have continued, through the Federal Government, to consume more private land nationwide, Federal agencies have increasingly been unable to maintain the existing land holdings.

All one has to do is talk to any park ranger. Go up to the Statue of Liberty, they have an $800 million backlog. Go to the Washington Mall, well over $1 billion in maintaining some of our most significant structures. If you go to the Grand Canyon National Park, people are continually being limited because we can't maintain the trails and because we don't put the money in to do it. The National Park Service, which receives most of the money to buy more land in this bill, faces an $11 billion backlog.

When I first started talking about the issue, the backlog was $6 billion. In 4 years, we have seen the backlog with the National Park Service almost double. Although I am thankful for the increase in maintenance funds this bill does add to the national parks, it does not come sufficiently close.

What is the priority? Is the priority for the Federal Government to consume more land, restrict more access, limit the freedom of people around that land and on that land, or is it to let Americans own the land and take care of the land the Federal Government already has? It owns a third of the land. How much land is enough for the Federal Government to own? How much is enough, especially when most of the land we own we are not taking care of. We are letting it fall down. The question has to be: What are the priorities?

The committee says the priority is to buy more land. This amendment says the priority is to repair and take care of the land we have. It specifically directs this money to the National Park Service to help with a backlog of falling down structures and the increased risk of safety for both park employees and visitors.

I obviously don't have all the information the committee has, but as the Senator from New Mexico knows, I have been looking at land acquisition and land bills for the last few years. I have not been successful in slowing them down, but I think the American people need to know about this. They need to recognize that our priorities are screwed up and that, in fact, we ought to be about taking care of what we have before we add to it.

I yield the floor.

The chairman makes my point for me. Yes, we might miss an opportunity. But we don't have the courage to put the priorities right. We are going to miss an opportunity while structures fall down at Yellowstone. That is what the choice is. We are going to take large, valuable land segments that are now paying property taxes and, because they are up for sale, we are going to spend that money rather than repair Carlsbad Caverns. That is the choice. The chairman made my argument for me. We are not going to do the sensible thing.

Many of these things will come back. They are not gone forever. What we are saying is, because we don't have any limitation on what we spend or how we spend it, we therefore have no limitation in worrying about whether things fall down. The fact is, now an $11 billion backlog, which grew $400 million last year alone in the Forest Service, documented by the Forest Service--those are not my numbers--we are going to say these are more important now than putting back in proper order things that relate to safety or security in the national parks. I will end with the fact that if we don't do this, what we have done is earned the reputation we are garnering, that we refuse to make tough choices. Life is about tough choices. Maybe we don't get to add to one of these parks right now. But how about taking care of what we have? Why not make that a priority?

It is kind of like when your front porch is falling down and that is the only entrance to your house, you start building a garage rather than fix your front porch or you buy an extra five acres so you can have a big garden. We wouldn't do that. The American people wouldn't do that. We need to respond with some commonsense solutions. Instead, we are adding to the cost as the backlog grows.

I am uncomfortable with the fact that that is how we think here. I know the American people are uncomfortable with that fact. I am disappointed we will not have the support of the committee. I look forward to the vote.

The next amendment I will call up is pending, but I will discuss amendment No. 2482.

I am happy to.

I would be happy to have a UC on this amendment that would exclude the inholdings, if that would satisfy the chairman.

In fact, the inholdings are a very small amount of the $400 million. A very small amount of the money for land acquisitions is inholdings. I would be happy to accept a second degree that would exclude the inholdings from this.

I thank the chairman for her comments on that. I am sure it is important. It is important to preserve what we have. You can't go to one national park and talk to the park rangers and talk to the person in charge without hearing them talk about the declining status of their individual parks. We have to start making some choices. We are going to refuse to do that. So next year, instead of it being $11 billion, it is going to be $11.6 billion, and then it is going to grow. What is happening right now is, we are shutting off parts of our parks. We are saying, since it is dangerous or it is in disrepair, we cannot let people experience it.

I will put in the Record hundreds of examples where that is happening right now. We have researched and the parks have told us where they are limiting access because of the lack of maintenance funds and funds for repair of required things in the parks.

With that, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Madam President, I wish to put my colleagues on notice that we are trying to work out an amendment so it can be acceptable to all parties concerned. It has to do with the heritage areas. If, in fact, you are a landowner in this country or you are a farmer or you are a rancher or you happen to have 20 acres in the country, you ought to be very worried about the implications and the consequences of those who come in and change the zoning laws on heritage areas.

Most people in this country have no idea they are in a heritage area. They have no knowledge that they are in a heritage area. As a matter of fact, the whole State of Tennessee is a heritage area. So what we are attempting to do is to create a mechanism where anybody in the country who is in a heritage area who doesn't want to be in it can be out of it with their property.

We also want to respectfully protect some efforts in North Dakota on one specifically where they would have to opt in. So we are working on an agreement. We will come back and talk about this when this is finished. Hopefully, this is the start of restoring property rights to Americans that have been trampled, in my opinion, by those who are empowered through the heritage area name.

My hope is we are going to make good progress on this with this bill. It is important. If you are a farmer or a rancher, if you are a farm bureau member, if you are a cattleman or if you are a dairy farmer, it is time to make sure this stays--whatever agreement we come to--in this bill as it goes to conference. Because real property rights are at risk. They have been at risk. They have been trampled on. This is a great solution in terms of solving it.

Mr. President, I think we can dispense with two fairly quickly, one with a vote and one without. We have worked out an agreement on amendment No. 2482. I believe the modification is at the desk. We have an agreement between the chairman and ranking member of the committee and the Senator from New Mexico, who is chair of the appropriate authorizing committee, which allows private property owners to opt out of heritage areas. I ask for its consideration now, rather than spending more time on it, and ask unanimous consent it be accepted.

We are on amendment No. 2483, which was not agreed to. We could not work out an agreement. I want to take a minute or two--we don't have a time agreement on this--to talk about this amendment, what amendment No. 2483 will do.

I am not sure I was present. Do we have a unanimous consent in that regard?

I should have been here to object.

We have an $11 billion backlog in the national parks. It grew by $400 million this year. The Land and Water Conservation Act of 1965 was not meant just to buy land. It was meant to take care of the backlogs and the problems associated with outdoor recreation enjoyment by the American people. There is almost $400 million in this bill to buy more land rather than take care of the things we have today. This amendment simply moves that to take care of the backlog at every national park we have. If we do not do that, we are soon going to be at $12 billion, soon at $13 billion.

The fact is, it is common sense. Every American knows you do not build a garage when your front porch is falling down and that is the only way to get into your house. That is what is happening to our parks. I know there is some increased funding for the parks but the fact is they are falling down, whether it is Yellowstone--I don't care where it is, there are significant maintenance problems in the parks. That ought to be a priority before we add 1 more acre to 650 million acres we already own.

In a moment after we are set up.

Mr. President, I wanted to spend a few minutes--I guess I would inquire of the chairman and ranking member, we are not allowing amendments to be brought up at this time; is that correct?

I have germane amendments, most of which will be germane postcloture.

We cannot call them up and make them pending.

I thank the Chair.

I wanted to spend a little time talking about the appropriations process before I speak on the amendments. I have seven amendments, maybe eight. All are commonsense amendments. Most people in America would agree with them.

But this first chart I am showing shows that what we are doing this year is, out of every dollar the Federal Government spends, we are borrowing 43 cents against our kids, against our grandkids. That is even true in this bill. This bill we have before us--a large portion of the money to pay for this Interior appropriations bill is going to come from our children.

So one of the things you say is, well, what is the inflation out there in terms of what are the costs that are actually increasing and how do we compare to what everyone else is facing in terms of spending based on increased costs? And in 2008, 2009, during that fiscal year, we actually had a minus three-tenths of 1 percent inflation. That is called deflation. And so far this year, we have had 1.6 percent, and it is probably going to go lower than that when we see the end of the fiscal year. So let's say 1.6 percent is the cost we are seeing in terms of inflation this year.

Well, one of the first bills we passed was the Legislative Branch appropriations bill, and when we had a minus three-tenths of 1 percent increase, we increased our expenses in the Congress by 10.88 percent. This year, we have already passed the bill, and we increased it three times what the rate of inflation is. So just even in our own budget, running our own offices, running the Congress, we are increasing what we spend three times faster than the rate of inflation.

If we look at the Homeland Security appropriations--all these numbers, by the way, don't include the billions of dollars each of these agencies received with the stimulus package--from 2008 to 2009, Homeland Security was increased 9.97 percent. That is a number of infinity in terms of inflation because we had no inflation. So a 9.97- percent increase, almost 10 percent, as compared to no inflation, we grew the government in this area. This year what we have passed already is another 7.22 percent growth, despite tens of billions of dollars going to the Department of Homeland Security with the stimulus package.

Then we had the Agriculture appropriations bill. For the 2008-2009 fiscal year, we increased it 13 percent. This year we are increasing it 12.68 percent. At this rate, we will double the size of Homeland Security and the Agriculture Department in 4.75 years, if we take the multiple of this, if we continue at this rate. The Transportation-HUD appropriations, which we passed last week, 13.31 percent in the 2008- 2009 fiscal year. This year we have 22 percent we have increased it, fully 15 times more than inflation. And in transportation, the costs have actually gone down in terms of what it costs to build a road or to repair a bridge because of the economy.

Then we have this bill. Last year we increased Interior 4.13 percent. Now we are increasing it again 16.28 percent. Does anybody out there have anything on which they are seeing those kinds of increases in income in America? Remember, 43 percent of this is borrowed from our children's futures.

To sum up, look at what we have done so far. Legislative branch, increased 4.75 percent; Homeland Security, 7.2; Energy and Water, 1.41--we actually did one that is at inflation--Agriculture, 12.68; Transportation and HUD, 22.54; Interior, 16.28--all the time when we have an inflation rate of 1.6 percent. What is going on? The American people ought to be highly concerned with the appropriations bills flowing through here. It is all borrowed money. All the increases are borrowed against our children and grandchildren.

Here is what we have done so far in the Senate. There is no question the Interior bill will pass. The appropriators will make sure of that. They have their earmarks in it. Whether they claim to be a fiscal conservative or not doesn't matter. They will vote for the bill to protect their earmarks. We can see what kind of growth we are experiencing in the last 2 years in this country in expanding the size of the Federal Government. These aren't small increases. They are gigantic. Nothing in the 8 years preceding this came anywhere close to it. We have this ballooning Federal Government that at the rate we are going this year will double in less than 5 years. The size of the Federal Government, if we continue this trend, will double in the next 5 years.

That doesn't count a health care bill that will add another 150,000 Federal employees and another $1 trillion of expenditure. We ought to be worried about our future. We ought to be paying attention to what the Chinese are saying, the biggest purchaser of our bonds and bills: You are spending too much money.

They are right. They are absolutely right.

How is it, in a time of economic decline and almost nonexistent inflation, we can justify rates of increase that will double the size of the Federal Government in 5 years? I don't understand that. I don't believe 80 or 90 percent of the American people understand that, unless they are not paying any taxes and don't care. But their grandchildren will care.

Let me translate what will happen. What is going to happen with this kind of explosive government growth, with an almost $12 trillion debt we have now that will double in the next 5 years and triple in the next 10 years, according to the budget plan passed by those on the other side of the aisle, is that our children and grandchildren will see a standard of living 30 percent below what we have today. That is the consequence of borrowing 43 percent of everything we do. Interest rates are not always going to be as low as they are. In 2013, this government is going to pay over $1 trillion in interest costs per year. That is $1 trillion we are taking from the American people that is not going to help anybody. It is just going to offset this terrible precedent we are setting on spending. We can't afford it. If we want the dollar to sink and we want inflation to come roaring back, all we have to do is keep doing what we are doing.

Then the value of our homes, the value of retirements, although already hit by the decline, will erode even further. We cannot create wealth by trying to borrow our way out of trouble.

What I see, as I look at my five grandchildren, is we are acting totally irresponsibly. There is no other thing we could do to describe what we are going to do. Yet tomorrow, when we get into cloture on this bill and we finally pass the bill, what are we going to do? We are going to mortgage the future of this country.

Let me explain. That means stealing hope, the propensity to think about tomorrow being better, when, in fact, we, the Members of Congress, have ensured it will not be. We are taking away the hard- earned assets, not only through taxes but through inflation, of the American worker. We have a real problem in front of us. We have an irresponsible Appropriations Committee that continues to send bills out that are growing the government at a rate that is absolutely unsustainable.

What is the answer? The answer is to ask Congress to start making hard

choices. Just like every other family is doing out there today, make the hard choice of prioritizing. What is most important? What is next most important? What is superfluous? What is not absolutely necessary now that we want to steal from our grandchildren to be able to have today? The heritage of this country, the thing that created American exceptionalism, the thing that built the most powerful, most successful economic model in the history of the world was a heritage of one generation saying: We will sacrifice to create opportunity for the next generation. These bills and this one, in particular, abandon that heritage. What we are saying is: We want for us now, and we don't care about our children and grandchildren. These are indisputable numbers. These are CBO numbers. At a minimum, this is what we are going to do. At a maximum, it is going to be much worse.

Next year we are going to borrow more than 43 percent. We are going to approach 50 percent of everything we spend based on the budget plan. We are going to have another $1.6 trillion deficit. That is Washington accounting, Enron accounting. The real deficit, when we take all the money stolen from all the trust funds, will put it closer to $1.9 trillion. Do the math: 300 million people into $1.9 trillion; we are spending $6,000 more for every man, woman, and child than we are taking in.

I carry with me, based on last year's numbers, what the Federal Government does per family, per household. The year that ends this month, we will spend $34,000 of your money--not counting the States, not counting municipalities--$34,000 per household through Federal Government programs; 43 percent of which, which comes out to about $15,000 per household, is borrowed. We will spend $9,000 on Medicare and Social Security; $5,800 on defense; antipoverty programs, almost $5,000; this year per family $1,210; in 3 years, $850 per family. Federal employee retirement benefits per family, you are paying $1,000 per family for Federal employees' generous retirement benefits. We are paying $800 for veterans benefits. For regulation and research, we are paying $700 per family. For highways, we are paying $500 per family; for justice administration, $452; and for unemployment benefits, $900 per family.

If we total all that--all the others count $1,361 per family--we come up with $33,800 per family. That is going to be $40,000 next year per family that comes through the Federal Government, of which almost 50 percent will be borrowed.

We can't continue to do what this bill purports to do. It is not only unconscionable that we would not make the tough choices, and the reason we don't make the tough choices is politicians don't want to offend anybody. It is not only unconscionable that we will not make the tough choices; what we are doing is immoral. We are stealing opportunity. We are stealing the potential American dream of our children and grandchildren because we are going to shackle them with a debt they cannot get out of.

I delivered babies for a living before I came up here. I have delivered thousands of babies. When I deliver a baby now, it is a mixed blessing. It is a wonderful thing to see that new life come into the world, to look at the parents' faces, to see the glow and to think about all their hopes and dreams for that young child. But the downside is, if you are born today, you have the responsibility to pay off the interest of over $480,000 of expenditures that are coming that we haven't provided the revenues for.

Now, think about your grandchildren and your children. Do you really want to load them down with that kind of number? Just paying the interest--if interest is 5 percent--you are talking about they have to make up $20,000, at least, before they are even just carrying the debt service on that kind of load.

We are destroying this country through the lack of discipline and the cowardice of not making the hard choices that need to be made right now--not tomorrow, not next week, right now.

For us to bring a bill to the Senate floor that increases the Interior spending by 16 percent, in a time when we have 1.6 percent inflation, and to not make the hard choices about priorities and getting it to where we do not spend any more right now so we start creating that hope of opportunity for our next generations, I do not understand.

I walk off this floor and beat my head against the wall because I do not think the Senate gets it. They do not understand what the average family is doing today in terms of making these hard choices. They are making the hard choices at home, only to see us not make the hard choices, and to offset the tremendous difficulties you have in making those hard choices by making sure your kids are going to have to make even tougher ones.

Even when the economy turns around, this does not go away. America is the longest surviving Republic in the history of the world. If we look at the history of the republics--all of them that have ever been created--what happened to them? They all collapsed. Do you know why they collapsed? Some of them were defeated externally, but the reason they were defeated externally is because they became a fiscal mess, much like we are, and they all ultimately collapsed over the lack of fiscal discipline and limiting the size of the government's take in terms of the size of the economy.

It is projected that in America, in 10 years--if things keep going the way they are--the Federal Government will consume 40 percent of our GDP. When it gets to 50 percent, we are over, we are gone. What we have today is a situation that is not irreversible. But all prophetic indications would say, if we keep doing this, it is going to be irreversible.

I know those are tough things, but let me tell you how Senators think. Senators think in the short term because it seems too often the most important thing is getting to the next election. So we do the short-term, expedient things that make us look good to a group of people in one State by sacrificing the greater good of the country.

What is needed today in America is people with long-term visionary thought, combined with the courage to lose an election to do what is best for the American public in the long run. What is best is for us to get back to the roots and our oath that is outlined in the Constitution of the United States.

This bill strays a long way from that, and my amendments will show some of that. We no longer have a limited Federal Government. We have an overly expansive Federal Government. It is not going to be long when we will not need States because the Federal Government is going to be involved in everything and telling the States what to do on everything anyway--and there comes the collapse of our Republic.

These are just little warning symptoms that say we do not have our eye on the ball, that we have our eye on the wrong ball, that we do not believe in the oath we took to honor the Constitution and its prescribed method of maintaining a limited Federal Government, with everything else, as depicted in the 10th amendment, left and reserved for the States and the people of this country.

When we are growing the Department of Interior by 16 percent, what we are doing is abandoning that. There is no justification. If you read this appropriations bill and the report that goes along with it--if the American people were to read it, they would throw up. They would throw up at the lack of priorities. They would throw up at the tremendous parochialism that says we put our State ahead of our country. They would throw up at the waste, and they would throw up at the earmarks. They would be literally sick.

So we find ourselves with multiple appropriations bills that are inexcusable, given the situation we find ourselves in, and, more importantly, the sacrifices that American families are having to make now in their own budgets. But, more importantly, it is inexcusable to steal the hope and future from the next two generations, and this bill does that, and so do the rest of them.

We are stealing. We are selfish. We are saying: I would rather be reelected to the Senate than do what is best for America. I would rather protect my parochial interests than do what is better for America. I would rather not have to make the hard choices of eliminating some things that are not a priority rather than do what is in the best long-term vision for this country.

It is discouraging. It is disappointing. The only way it changes is if the American people demand that it start changing. There should not be 10 votes for this bill, but it will get 60 or 70 because there is no backbone. There is no backbone to do the right, best thing for the country, even if it costs us. Serving your country means sacrificing. Service without sacrifice is not service at all. If it is not costing you something, you are not doing anything, and we shun the responsibility of doing the best and the right thing for America.

Let me talk for a minute, if I may, about the amendments I have. I will preview those amendments and will not spend a lot more of the chairman's and ranking member's time. I have a total of seven amendments--actually eight. Let me talk about them since I cannot call them up.

One amendment is on transparency. My friend, President Obama, wants us to be a transparent government. Throughout this bill are tons of reports that you, as American citizens, will never get to see. As a matter of fact, I will not even get to see them because they are directed only to the Appropriations Committee. What is that all about? As a Member of the Senate I cannot see reports that are committed by this bill in terms of reporting back from agencies. Yet only the Appropriations Committee can see them? More importantly, you cannot see them to be able to hold us accountable to see whether we are doing our job? So one of the amendments just says, if there are reports required, and they do not compromise national security interests, everybody in America ought to get to see them.

In the last appropriations bill that amendment was accepted. But I will tell you what will happen to it. They will take it out in conference. They will say: Oh, it did not make it through conference. The American people cannot see this. They will not come out and say it. I will have to publicize it. But they will deny the ability for you to see the very reports they are asking for in this bill.

There is an earmark in this bill for a building less than two blocks from here called the Sewall-Belmont House. That house is used for a multitude of things. They have $4 million cash in the bank right now, and we are going to give them another $1 million. They have money in the bank, but we are going to give it to them anyway. Mostly what happens over there is fundraisers for Members of Congress, for which they charge $5,000 to use. They make money. Yet we have decided we are going to give them $1 million. Tell me that is a priority right now in this country.

So what we do is we take that $1 million and send that $1 million to the National Park Service because right now we have an $11 billion backlog in our national parks, and they are falling down. But we refuse to fund them because we are doing things like this.

There is another amendment I have. We now have a conflict between agencies where the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Interior will not allow Homeland Security to protect our southern border because they are afraid it will mess up the environment. So what we have done is we have said protecting wilderness areas is more important than protecting our border.

This amendment says none of the funds in this bill can be used to prohibit or impede the Department of Homeland Security from protecting us on the southern border. Yet it is happening every day. We have testimony. We have internal documents that show the Department of Interior is limiting the ability of Homeland Security to protect our southern border. It makes sense that we should not do that. We should protect the environment, but we will not have that environment if we do not protect our southern border.

What we do know is, those areas where our Border Patrol cannot get to are where all the infiltration is coming today. It is where the drug trafficking is coming today. It is where multiple, multiple people are being raped by the people who are transporting illegal aliens through those wilderness and fish and wildlife areas.

So what this amendment says is, you cannot use money in the Department of Interior to preclude Homeland Security and the Border Patrol from doing their job, which is to protect us from the illegal transport of people and drugs and weapons into this country.

I have another amendment. We want to try to become more energy independent. We have all the renewable we are trying to do--whether it is wind or solar--yet the Department of the Interior is blocking the ability to create the transmission lines from where we have renewable sources. They will not allow the transmission lines to go across those areas. We want to get off foreign oil. We want to decrease our carbon use. Now we have started to develop alternative, renewable sources, and we have an agency that is blocking the ability to get that power to us. It makes no sense.

We can do that in an environmentally friendly way. So we cannot allow the Department of the Interior to block that and the ultra- environmentalists, who say they want us to have renewable energy but, by the way, they do not want us to be able to use it. So we will develop it and not have a way to use it.

There is several hundred million dollars in this bill to be used for the Federal Government to acquire more land. The Federal Government owns about 35 percent of all the land in the country today, but we cannot take care of the land we have. I mentioned earlier the backlog at the national parks. The National Mall has a backlog. The Statue of Liberty has a $600 million backlog. Some of our biggest and best parks--the Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, several others--have hundreds of millions of dollars in backlog.

All the national park backlog grew $400 million last year. In other words, we are letting what we have crumble as we go and spend almost $360 million more on buying more land. This amendment says: Do not buy the land. Put the money in fixing our national parks, bringing them up. They are falling down. We actually have testimony where we are putting visitors at risk because our maintenance backlog is so great.

Third from the last is an amendment to require a report so we know what we actually own. We don't know what we own. The last time we had any estimate it was of 658 million acres and that was 2005. Nobody has done anything to know what we own, prioritize what we own, or say what is important. What do we need to protect the most? What do we need to get the backlogs straight on? How do we manage what we own? You can't manage what you own if you don't know what you own. All it does is require a report on the total land owned by the Federal Government and the cost to maintain the land so we can make coherent judgments about how to make priorities of what is important and what is not. This appropriations bill shoots from the hip, because they don't have the facts with which to make the decisions on how to prioritize.

Finally, we have this idea of national heritage areas. We now have four times more than was ever authorized in the original bill. What happens is we create a national heritage area and pretty soon you are out there on your farm or in your neighborhood and because it is a national heritage declaration, we fund special interest groups that come in to lobby to make sure what happens to your land is what they want to happen, not what you want to happen with your land. So what we say with this amendment is if we are going to create a national heritage area, all the landowners ought to be notified. If they want to be included in that, allow them to opt in. Allow them to choose to be in the national heritage area. But if they don't want to be, their property rights ought to be secure. So what we say is allow them to decide whether they want in or out and they have to opt in if they want in.

Our Bill of Rights guarantees our right to our property, an unfettered right. The national heritage areas destroy that and allow groups with an interest that is funded by the Federal Government--you didn't get any of the money--to come in and have the power and the money to lobby to change the restrictions and land codes against your will. Most people who have found themselves in a heritage area don't know it until they get ready to do something with their own land and find out that: Oh, my goodness, the Federal Government has caused somebody to change my ability to do what I want to do with my land. I am not talking crazy; I am talking responsible action by a landowner. So what we are doing

is denying a fundamental right guaranteed under the Bill of Rights as we create all of these heritage areas.

It is fine if you want to be in one, but if you don't want to be in one, you ought to have the ability to not be in it and it shouldn't be assumed you are in it because we in Washington say you should. You ought to be able to say you should and you ought to have the knowledge with which to make that decision. That is called real transparency. That is called protecting freedom. That is called letting people be responsible for their property rather than us mandating from Washington what will and won't happen with our property.

Then, finally, an amendment I offer on every appropriations bill. It comes from what President Obama said he wanted to do, and that is to mandate competitive bidding on everything we buy--no more well- connected, well-heeled inside deals but competitively bid so that the American taxpayers truly get value for the dollars they are sending here and, even more importantly, the 43 percent our kids are going to be paying for, that they get value. Since we are borrowing their money, we are borrowing their future, at least when we borrow it, we ought to--and we are going to do misguided priorities and we are going to overspend and we are going to grow the government and double it in the next 5 years--the least we could do is to get real value when we go to spend your money and your kids' money.

As my colleagues can see, I am not a very big fan of this bill. As a matter of fact, I am not a big fan of any of the appropriations bills, because the whole premise under which they operate is: Here is what we had last year and we are going to start from there, without ever looking at: Here are how many billions we are spending and is it being spent properly? Is there great oversight? No, there is not. There is terrible oversight. Is there duplication? We don't even care; we don't even look. We don't make the hard choices that the next two generations need us to make.

The most powerful committee in the Senate and the most powerful committee in the House is the Appropriations Committee, and $400 billion of your money will be appropriated this year that is not even authorized. The appropriators don't even pay attention to the authorizing language because they are going to appropriate $400 billion of things that aren't authorized. So then we have this parliamentary rule that says you can't legislate on an appropriations bill. Yet they legislate all the time by funding things that have never been authorized or have expired authorizations for spending. So we can eliminate $400 billion tomorrow by following the rules of the Senate and the rules of the Constitution, but we play the game and people come to kiss the rings, to get what they want at home, to look good at home. Consequently, we are extorted to pay with a vote for a bill that is like this one--this big 16.28 percent increase--so we can look good at home.

I want to tell my colleagues the American people are waking up. There is a rumble out there like I have never seen. It is a rumble I have been praying for. This country needs to be taken back by the people. This country needs to hold the Members of this body absolutely accountable. The only way that happens is if the citizens stay informed.

I will end with this. There was a President named Ronald Reagan. My little 3-year-old daughter at the time called him President Raisin because she couldn't say Reagan. He said one of the most profound things I have ever heard said. He said: Freedom is a precious thing. It is not ours by inheritance. It is never guaranteed to us. It has to be fought for and defended by each and every generation.

I am telling you in the last 20 years, our generations haven't come up to defend it. He wasn't talking about our military; he was talking about us being well informed citizens, holding us accountable, creating the pressure for us to be transparent so that you can, in fact, know and count on us doing the right, best thing every time and that we put ourselves second and the country first. That is what he was talking about.

The rumble that is occurring in this country can't come soon enough or big enough to change both the Senate and the Congress. It is not partisan. It is sick on both sides of the aisle. What we need is a real revolt against the status quo and an engagement and an enlistment by the average American to speak out, to come out and hold us accountable to do what is best for the generations that follow and cause us to reembrace what built this country, which is a heritage of sacrifice today to create opportunity for the future.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I wish to spend a few minutes this morning on some amendments I have offered. I ask unanimous consent to withdraw amendment 2373.

Will the Chair advise when we will be out of morning business?

Mr. President, I will spend some time discussing the amendments we have. There is some opposition to our amendment to allow the States to opt out of being required to fund transportation enhancements. This does not eliminate the enhancements. What it simply does is give the State of Colorado or the State of Oklahoma the opportunity to say, with roads in such disrepair and 138,000 bridges in disrepair, that we have the ability, if we so choose, to take all of the money, instead of 90 percent, and apply it to solve the problems we have.

So it will not force California to not do enhancements. It will not force any State to not do them. It will give them the privilege of electing whether they want to do those enhancements when, in fact, we have such a critical need in terms of roads, highways, and bridges.

So the goal of this--and it is important to know where the money comes from. The money is taxes that are collected from individuals in Colorado and Oklahoma and every other State that are then sent here and then sent back. In my State--I do not know about Colorado--we have never gotten more than 93 percent of what we have sent here. We used to average about 74 percent. But now, as to the money that does come back, 10 percent has to be spent on enhancements, whether that is sound barriers or walking paths or bicycle paths or numerous other enhancements, as under the SAFETEA-LU bill.

So what this amendment does, it does not force anybody to not, but it gives them the option to fix the problems in their State.

I would note that the National Transportation Safety Board notified us that last year 13,000 people died on our highways, not because they made a driving error, not because someone else made a driving error, not because they had a problem with their automobile or with their truck, they had the accident because the roads were substandard. Thirteen thousand people lost their lives.

So the question of priority, of whether my department of transportation in Oklahoma ought to have the ability to fix roads and bridges instead of building sound barriers ought to be left to us.

This amendment is for this year only. It does not eliminate, does not change the law. It just says: We are going to give you the option this year with this money, if your State has needs--and Oklahoma has significant needs; I know Colorado does because I am there a lot--that we do not necessarily spend it on sound barriers, that we can actually spend it on something that is going to save somebody's life. So it does not force anybody to not do enhancements but gives them the right to choose the priority of saving lives over enhancements, if they so desire.

The Senator from California made a statement yesterday about what this amendment would do. There is no force in this amendment other than to allow. It allows the States the freedom to do what is best for their citizens rather than saying 10 percent of the money they get back has to be spent on things that are not going to save lives, are not going to enhance safety, but, in fact, are going to enhance aesthetics.

So I think it is a commonsense amendment. There is no force; that if California wants to continue to spend 10 percent of their money on enhancements, they can. There will be nothing that will keep them from doing that. It will be what the State decides to do rather than what we decide to do.

Since it is money taken from those States, it would seem we would want to give the States the option to make the best priority choice for those dollars for their individual citizens.

I am very appreciative of Senator Murray's agreement to take two of our amendments that are based on transparency to the American public. One requires HUD to report to Congress on homes that are owned and the cost to taxpayers so the American people see what the Department of Housing and Urban Development is doing. The other is an amendment to make available to the public all the reports--and there are numerous reports required in this bill of the Transportation Department--to make those available to the public as well so it is in the light of transparency. I am very thankful for Senator Murray's agreement on those two amendments.

I have two other amendments I will talk about when Senator Murray gets to the floor. Otherwise, Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I believe the desk has a modification to amendment No. 2370, and I ask unanimous consent for that modification.

Mr. President, I wish to talk about all three of the amendments I plan on getting votes on. I will give a little summary on amendment No. 2371.

The way the highway trust fund spending is set up now is that if we send your State $100 million, $10 million of that $100 million has to be spent on enhancement projects, regardless of the condition of your roads, regardless of the condition of your highways, regardless of the condition of the bridges in your State. All this does is allow States to not have to follow that in this, No. 1, tough economic time; No. 2, when we know highway deaths related to roads and bridges alone account for 13,000 deaths a year. So we will intend to ask for a vote on that. It does not prohibit the States from doing these enhancements, much as was claimed in debate yesterday but, rather, gives an opportunity for the States to make good value judgments about what is in the best interests of their State in terms of highways, roads, and bridges.

Amendment No. 2372

Amendment No. 2372 is an amendment which requires us to prioritize. Unbeknownst to most Americans, money that is collected from the purchase of your gasoline has been used--$28 million of it, as a matter of fact--to fund transportation museums. That may be a great use in a time when we are not in the economic situation and circumstances we find ourselves in today. What this amendment does is say, until we get out of the trouble we are in and until the trust fund gets back to where it needs to be, we shouldn't be prioritizing and we shouldn't be earmarking money for transportation museums. It goes back to common sense. The money we are collecting in gas taxes ought to be used to repair and build highways and bridges and roads, not fund museums.

As a matter of fact, several of the museums that have been funded in the last 5 years are already closed. They came through earmarks. We spent millions of dollars. Nobody had any interest in them; consequently, they were closed. In this one bill we have one that has been earmarked. It may be the right thing to do, but now is not the right time to do it.

So what this amendment simply does is say that for this year--this year only--we are not going to allow lower priority items such as a transportation museum to displace money that could be used to enhance somebody's safety or protect their life. I don't know what the outcome on this will be, but I think it will be a telling statement for the Congress that if we decide museums

are more important than somebody's life--more important--the priority is there--it will show a disconnect in this Congress as to whether we are willing to make good priorities with Americans' taxpayer dollars or do we continue to ignore common sense and spend the money the way some or one or many individuals would like to do it, without regard to what the original intended purpose for the money was and without regard to the very serious situation we find with our roads, highways, and bridges.

Senator McCain and I asked the Government Accountability Office to look at where the money was spent over the last 4 years prior to this year, and $3.7 billion of highway money went for transportation enhancements, of which museums are one. Granted, it wasn't a lot of money, but when you take $38 million and apply it to defective bridges in Oklahoma, what you can do is fix 75 of our defective bridges-- bridges that are putting people's lives at risk and money that Oklahomans paid out that ought to come back and take care of the problems we have. The same for Colorado. The same for Missouri. The same for all these States. We are behind.

We have 137,000 or so bridges that are suspect in this country. We recently had an individual in Tulsa, OK, who was seriously injured when a chunk of concrete fell from a bridge through his windshield. So it wasn't the people driving over the bridge; it is the people going under the bridge who are put at risk, simply because we have focused money on things other than highways, bridges, and roads. So it is by law right now that we have to spend 10 percent of that money, and some of it goes to museums.

All this amendment says is, right now, let's not spend money on museums and let's fix roads and highways and bridges. We authorized $4.1 billion over the last 5 years for transportation enhancement set- asides. All of that comes out of the 10 percent mandatory--and I have the other amendment I talked about before.

Let me go through what the GAO report said: $850 million had to be spent on scenic beautification and landscaping projects. Well, $850 million could have built a lot of highways in this country. It could have repaired a lot of those 137,000 bridges. Yet we mandated that the money got spent on something other than roads, highways, and bridges. We allocated $488 million for behavioral research. There is no question that some of that is absolutely necessary in terms of us making decisions. We allocated $224 million for 366 projects to rehabilitate or operate historic transportation buildings--$224 million. That is half of what Oklahoma spends a year on what they get from the trust fund, and we did it to preserve historic buildings and transportation novelties rather than spend it on highways, roads, and bridges. We allocated $84 million for road-kill prevention, wildlife habitat connectivity; $28 million, as I said, to establish 55 transportation museums; $19 million to control outdoor advertising.

What this GAO report says is we refuse to make the hard choices about priorities. All this museum amendment says is not now. For 1 year, let's spend the money we were going to spend on museums and put it into real infrastructure, real highways, real bridges.

Amendment No. 2370

I have one other amendment I wish to discuss--and then I will reserve the remainder of my time and give the chairman her time--and that is amendment No. 2370. We know, because of the increased price of gasoline, and we know because of the economic recession we find ourselves in, that dollars going into the highway trust fund have been added. As a matter of fact, twice in the last 2 years, we have borrowed money from our children and grandchildren to keep the trust fund viable because the taxes coming in off the trust fund have not kept up with the pace of spending we have authorized and subsequently obligated to be spent. We know the highway trust fund is on the brink of insolvency. Within a year, if we don't get the 18-month extension which I think is being planned, we will go back and steal another $7 billion or $8 billion from our kids to keep this system viable.

What this amendment says is, if we are going to do that or until it becomes viable on its own, we should preclude the transportation enhancement program. We know we don't have enough money to take care of the very serious problems we have on our roads, on our highways, and with our bridges. Yet we continue to force the States to spend 10 percent of their money not on highways, roads or bridges. That doesn't make any sense. So this is a much stronger amendment than my earlier amendment that says, until the highway trust fund becomes solvent, until we quit stealing money from our kids and our grandkids and actually pay as we go, pay for what we are wanting to do, at least that 10 percent of the money is going to get spent on real roads, real bridges, and real highways, not on enhancements.

I know many do not agree, and I am readily perceptive of their disagreement. The fact is, if you go out and poll the American people and you ask them: Should we fix the highways that allow 13,000 people a year to die because of the quality of the highway or should we build a walking trail or a sound barrier, they will all say: Fix the highways first.

Come back and do these other things later. Should we build a museum when we have roads in disrepair? No. They will all say that--unless they are the ones benefiting directly from the money going to an earmarked project for a museum.

So it is not a question of common sense, and it is not a question of priority; it is a question of whether we will break the chain of how things are done here and, in fact, say: American taxpayers, you are paying this money every time you pump a gallon of gas, and we are going to make sure that goes for roads, bridges, and highways first; and when we get extra money, we will then enhance the areas around or surrounding the highways.

I reserve the remainder of my time.

I think, first, the Senator doesn't understand amendment 2371. It doesn't eliminate any money. It allows the States to opt out of the enhancement if, in fact, it is better.

The Senator talks about life. With 13,000 people killed on bad roads last year, that didn't have anything to do with driving skills or the cars or anything else, other than we didn't put good roads into place. It is a question about priorities.

There will be no job loss at all. There will be no decrease in spending under amendment No. 2371. What it simply says is that you don't have to take 10 percent of your funds anymore and spend it on enhancements, if you know you have people who are going to die because you don't fix a road.

She talks about 200 deaths versus 13,000 deaths. There are 137,000 deficient bridges. Should we fix the roads or build a sound barrier? Which one is important? Should we fix the roads or build another museum? Should we fix the roads or enhance walkways? It is not as if we don't have walkways and trails. The question is, where is the greatest need? And will we make prudent judgments about giving freedom back to the States and say if, in fact, they don't want to enhance in this tough economic time, they don't have to? It doesn't preclude California or Washington State from doing enhancements. They still can. It just says that in those States that have significant critical infrastructure needs and roads that are at high risk, under amendment No. 2371, they get a chance to opt out and do what is best for their citizens and their State, and to fix some of the bridges, instead of building a walkway or a bicycle trail. They will be able to fix a bridge or fix a road and take a curve out where people are dying, instead of building a museum. It is not onerous. The arguments are specious.

The fact is, we are giving back to the States and saying they can prioritize this. If you think enhancements are not as important as the risks you have on your highways, you can opt out--this year only--and put it into roads, bridges, and highways.

I want to finish my point. The Department of Transportation in every State is not run by idiots. Their No. 1 goal is for the protection and enhancement of their citizens. We are now saying to Oklahoma or Colorado or Delaware, you don't get to make the decision about what the priority is because 10 percent of the money you get has to be spent this way.

All this is saying is for this year alone--for this year alone--you can opt out of certain provisions. Some you

may want to do, some you may not want to do. But if you choose to put $7 million in to take a curve out of a road that is killing people versus building a bike trail or a sound barrier, you can do it. You are actually going to save more lives. It will make no difference in the number of jobs created or saved. It has no effect on that whatsoever. The exact same amount of money is going to be spent, and it is all going to be spent on construction of what the highway trust fund was--I am not saying these are not good ideas. I am saying it is the priority of placing them ahead of safety and improving roads, improving bridges. How do we explain to the family of the person who was injured in Tulsa, OK, that we are going to build a sound barrier rather than the bridge where a piece of concrete fell through his windshield and critically injured him? That noise is more important than that individual's life?

I say give the freedom back to the States for this one year to not require a mandatory 10-percent allocation to enhancements. Most of the States probably will not take that. But I can tell you, in my State, where we have the second or third largest number of deficient bridges, we are going to build bridges, we are going to fix the broken bridges, we are going to save people's lives, and we are going to save more people's lives.

By the way, our taxpayers put the money into the highway trust fund for this with every gallon of gas. Oklahoma has never gotten more than 94 percent back and over the last 20 years has averaged less than 80 percent of what we send here. So it is highly insulting in this year of tough, difficult times for us to get less than what we send up, one, and then say: 10 percent of it you cannot spend on the greatest need in your State; that we know better, Washington knows better. Washington does not know better.

We do not preclude any of the enhancements anywhere else. If the State departments of transportation want to do every enhancement and go to the 10 percent, they can go to it. What we are saying is, if your State has a need that is critical to saving people's lives, maybe you don't build a sound barrier right now but, in fact, you fix the road or you repair the bridge. It is common sense.

The question will be, Do we do what is best for the American people or do we stand with the dogma that says we know better? Can we trust Governors and State departments of transportation to make good decisions for the safety of their individual citizens in their States? I think we can.

I am not excited about what will be the outcome of this vote, but I tell you that this kind of common sense--it does not eliminate it. It just says we should do that.

To save the Chamber time, I will ask unanimous consent to withdraw-- Mr. President, I want Chairman Murray to hear this, if she will. I would ask unanimous consent to withdraw amendment No. 2370 which puts a limit until the trust fund is stable. I will stop that. I will withdraw it, if I can have unanimous consent to do that.

We will spend the time voting on something I don't think will be adopted anyway.

On amendment No. 2371, none of the claims the Senator from California made are accurate. They are not accurate. There will be no decrease in jobs. There will actually be the opposite of what she said--enhancement and saving lives. There will be a real ability for the States to make the best decisions for their citizens.

With that, I yield back the remainder of my time.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, we just had the debate. All it does is allow States to opt out, if they find critical infrastructure needs, from the mandatory 10-percent enhancement rule.

I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. President, the amendment is very carefully written so it will not allow the enforcement of administration of funds. If you will carefully read public law--that is how we got it germane--it does not allow the enforcement. It doesn't mean they can't do it. The money can still go out. If you still want to do the enhancements, you can. It simply says you may not have to if you don't want to.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw the amendment; amendment No. 2370.

Mr. President, 13,000 people died on American roads last year because of the quality of the roads and bridges. We have spent $48 million in the last 4 years on museums, some of which are already closed. The money we collect from taxpayers should be prioritized to build roads, bridges, and highways. This amendment is a simple amendment. It says we should be spending right now, this next year only, no money for museums until we get the roads back.

I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.