Floor Statements

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and amendment No. 2371 be called up.

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

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and amendment No. 2370 be called up.

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

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and amendment No. 2372 be called up.

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

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and that amendment No. 2374 be called up.

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

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent, as well, to call up amendment No. 2377.

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

Madam President, I wish to spend a little bit of time talking about the problems before us in terms of transportation, and then I will go back to these amendments based on whatever the chairman wishes and however she wishes to handle the debate on these amendments.

What I think about is that right now our transportation trust fund is not growing at the rate at which our needs are growing. I do not think anybody--neither the chairman of the Appropriations Committee nor the committee that is responsible for the transportation authorization program--would disagree with that. I do not think anybody else would disagree that in a year when we are going to have a true, not an Enron accounting, but a true budget deficit of $1.8 trillion by the time you count the money we are going to steal from Social Security and other trust funds, that we are going to have $1.8 trillion we are going to borrow from our grandchildren, and at a time when we have, at a minimum, 130,000 bridges in disrepair in this country. And that is the Department of Transportation's own numbers. Out of 600,000-plus, 130,000 either have to have lesser loads or fewer number of vehicles going across them or do not meet the designs needed for the loads they are carrying or are crumbling and are not expected to collapse but are falling apart, that at this time we ought not to be spending our money on anything except roads and bridges.

The debate Senator McCain put out here is just one way of getting at the problem. Inside the Transportation bill is a requirement that if a State gets money and they want to fix a bridge, 10 percent of the money to fix that bridge has to go to make things look nice around it. That is great if we are running a great surplus or we are not borrowing the money from our kids. But right now the fact that we mandated that obligated moneys to State highway and transportation departments, that they have to spend 10 percent of the money that is obligated on aesthetics makes no common sense. It does if we have an excess of funds. It is something to which we would all agree. But when we have the problems where we have 13,000 people a year dying because of the quality of the roads in this country--not quality of vehicles, not driver error, but the quality of roads--and we have this large number of bridges that are truly in the long run not safe, why would we be spending money on anything other than roads and bridges in a transportation project, as far as surface transportation?

I am not talking about trains and inner-city buses. I know we have to do that as well. But for the proportion that goes out, why would we not spend that money on the real needs that are out there?

Madam President, 13,000 lives is a lot of lives. Actually, it is one of those benchmarks on which you can measure Congress. We would rather have $5 billion worth of earmarks that make us look good at home than make sure that $5 billion goes toward saving somebody's life by repairing a road that needs to be fixed right now--right now--not next year, not 2 years from now, right now.

Why are we going to have these things that make us look good and may be a need but may not necessarily be a priority? How many of them are a priority over the fallen-down bridges in this country?

The families who lose members because of road quality in this country do not think those are priorities. They think fixing the roads and bridges are priorities. But you see, we have a disease in the Senate and in the Congress: We think we know better. We do not want to make the tough priorities that might not sell well in a particular area in our home State that would, in fact, solve some of the major problems with transportation in this country because we will not look as good. And yet we can spend money on taxiways for airports that have six flights a day and have very few people through it and subsidize every passenger to the tune of $130 when if they could drive an hour and find an airport, we would not have to spend any of that money on it.

Most of us drive an hour to get to the airport. But yet we do earmarks. We decide, the wisdom of us--it is pretty interesting. I heard the ranking member talk about oversight. There is not any significant oversight going on in this Congress. I almost laughed out loud. For every hearing we have, we ought to have 10 oversight hearings. We talk about we are going to say where the money goes, and then we don't follow where the money goes. We don't do our job of oversight.

The NextGen, I understand that is an important priority. I am not questioning that. But the point of Senator McCain's amendment is not NextGen, it is earmarks. It is the fact that at least here is something we know is going to buy safety in aviation, whereas the rest of the earmarks are not. We have an earmarked museum in the bill. Tell me, at a time when we have 9.7 percent unemployment, we have a trust fund for transportation that is belly up, that we are stealing the money from our kids every 6 months to keep it viable rather than from the taxes of consumption of gasoline and diesel, tell me that is a priority right now when we have run a $1.8 trillion deficit.

The fact is we refuse--we refuse--to make the hard choices in Washington. We make choices for our political purposes. We make choices for the well endowed. We make choices for the well connected, for the well heeled, whether it is beach nourishment and the hundreds of millions of dollars that are made off that or it is a museum or a bike path or the restoration of a train station. Tell me where those are in terms of priorities of the 9.7 percent of Americans who do not have a job and are looking for one and the other 6 percent who are so discouraged they are not even looking anymore. Tell me why that is a priority. Senator McCain's point is dead on.

There is a commonsense test, which is, would the average guy with the same amount of money fix the bridges and fix the highways or would he do the superfluous stuff, the enhancement stuff, the feel-good stuff if it were about his kids and his family? The average guy would not. But you see, we are not the average guy. We do not have to play by the rules because we know that the court of public opinion only comes after us once every 6 years, and if we can, in fact, enhance our ability to raise our campaign funds, if we can, in fact, look good to the well connected, then we are going to be able to find a way to say a message something different than what we actually did.

That is pretty cynical, but when we have 13,000 people dying on roads every year because of the quality of the roads--and those are not my numbers, those are NHTSA's numbers--wouldn't you think every dollar we have ought to fix the roads and fix the bridges and wait on the aesthetics until later? Wouldn't you think the common man with common sense would say, Let's do the most important thing first, that buys us the most safety and the best transportation effect, rather than make the politicians and their well-heeled buddies look good?

I understand why people are upset with the Congress. It is because we make decisions that do not have much connection with reality. And then after we do it and we don't do the oversight that is required, we blame it on an administration.

I thought the debate about whether we could trust the FAA--we can trust the FAA if we do the following things: make sure they will be before us every 2 or 3 weeks talking about the progress of what they are doing; making sure we are having the oversight hearings; making sure we are doing our job to make sure the bureaucracy with which we give the responsibility to carry out policy is, in fact, being held accountable and, if not, withdraw the funds through a special rescission package to make sure that since you are not acting responsibly, we are going to withdraw your money. The last time there was a true rescission in the Congress was 1995.

We talk a big game about what a good job we do in oversight and good judgment. What happens is staff members make the decision of what gets included and what does not get earmarked. Sometimes it is based on economic priorities and sometimes it is based on the economic priority of who is running for reelection.

The other problem we have is things are not very transparent here, in spite of our President's desire that they be that way. I have a couple of amendments that are going to make sure the public reports that are required in this bill are made available to the American people, not just to the committee staff; to make sure that HUD reports to Congress on homes they own and the cost to the taxpayers, not just to a committee of Congress.

Amendment No. 2371

I now call up amendment No. 2371 and ask that it be the pending amendment.

Madam President, I wish to talk about what this amendment does. This amendment forbids the mandatory spending of that 10 percent of money on things that are not going to make a difference when it comes to highway safety and bridge repair. And it says that Gary Ridley, the director of the department of transportation in Oklahoma, can take all of the money and make new bridges and new roads and repair bridges and does not have to worry about taking 10 percent of the money and spending it on aesthetics.

At another time, another place, maybe we would want to do that. But with our infrastructure crumbling, and with the trust fund not with enough money because of the economic shape in which we find ourselves, to continue to mandate that every transportation department in the country has to spend a full 10 percent of their money, not on what is important, but on something somebody may like, not on something that is about safety, but on what somebody may like and what may look good, to me does not connect with common sense.

I am probably a minority in that opinion in this building, but I am not in the minority in that opinion in this country. When times are good, we can afford to make such discretionary spending mandates on the States. When times are tough, when infrastructure is in poor shape, when the quality of our roads is taking people's lives every day, and when our bridges are falling down and chunks are falling off of them and injuring people severely, as happened in Tulsa 6 weeks ago on an interstate bridge, and falls through the windshield of a car and critically injures an individual who is driving down the interstate, it is time for us to use common sense on how we spend this money.

I would make one other point; that is, that this bill, compared to last year, in terms of real numbers--not in terms of the numbers that have been spun out there--is a 22-percent increase. If you go through all the appropriations bills we are bringing to the floor and what we have already passed, it is like there is no recession going on. There is absolutely no inflation. Yet we are growing government at 12 times the rate of inflation, and we are doing it on bill after bill after bill.

There is no apology anywhere from the Appropriations Committee that we are sorry we have to spend this increased amount of money, in spite of the fact we absolutely don't have it and that we can't winnow down and make our priorities sharper and better. No, what we do is we just bump the number.

In case you are interested, if you include contract authority, there is $75.8 billion. Even if you don't include contract authority, you have a 12-percent increase. In the HUD portion of the bill, we have a 10-percent increase. So it is not just transportation. We are increasing housing and urban development 10 percent. So there is no inflation; tax revenues are down. There is no question we have greater needs, but there is no force to say: How do we more efficiently put out the money? How do we hold those spending the money more accountable? How do we get greater value for the money we are spending? No. You know what we do? We take the credit card out of our pocket, and we put it in an ATM that says: Charge to our grandchildren and charge to our children. That is what we do. Then we come up here and we say: This is absolutely necessary.

The vast majority of families in this country today are making tough decisions--very tough decisions. They are either saying: I have a job or I am lucky to have a job or, boy, am I thankful. I don't want to end up without a job, so I think I will start prioritizing where I have to spend money. The people where one of the two workers in the family have lost a job are making those tough decisions every day: What is an absolute necessity and what isn't?

Actually, it is more than the average American. Almost every American is making those kinds of decisions today. But isn't it curious the Congress isn't? Isn't it curious we don't prioritize? Isn't it curious that it has been years--whether under Republican control or Democratic control--since we have had an appropriations bill that comes out and spends less money? Are all these agencies efficient? Could it be done in a better way to get better value with less money? Could we force savings in these branches of government?

Those questions aren't even being asked. There are no priority questions being asked. What we do is we say: Here is our 302(b) number; how are we going to spend the money, rather than seeing what is the need, how efficient is the bureaucracy utilizing that money under the policy proscriptions we give them, and what are we going to do about it? So we come out spending hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars with millions of earmarks.

I heard mention about the earmarks. What the American people need to know about earmarks is this: It is not the earmark that is bad, it is the extortion that comes with the earmark. Because everybody here knows that if you have an earmark in an appropriations bill and you don't vote for the appropriations bill, the next time you want an earmark, guess what happens. They happen to remind you that: Oh, you had an earmark in the last one, but you didn't vote for the bill. So since you are not supporting our bill, we are probably not going to be as likely to include your earmark. What does that do? The problem with earmarks is it takes the focus off what we are doing collectively in the best interest of the country and makes the focus about the individual and the State.

There is nothing in this document--which is the U.S. Constitution-- that gives us the right to think about our States. When you are sworn in here, they do not say: Mr. Coburn, Oklahoma, you will uphold the Constitution as long as it protects Oklahoma. It says: You will uphold the Constitution. Our Founders knew that any State couldn't be healthy unless we as a nation were healthy. Yet earmarks undermine that every time and force us back to parochialism--not Federalism but parochialism. So we take the money from individuals in the various States, and then, through our wisdom of all knowledge in Washington, we send it back so we look good, rather than leaving the money there in the first place and letting you decide how best to spend your own money. So we don't lessen spending. We always increase it.

We claim oversight--which we never do to the level that is required with a government as big as this--and then we complain that somebody wants to eliminate earmarks, and not because the individual earmark may not be a good thing--I can't think of many earmarks that probably aren't good things--but because the earmarks aren't necessarily a priority for the Nation as a whole. That is the difference in being and enhancing statesmanship versus politics. It is OK for Oklahoma to lose for a period of time if our country gets better. I have explained that to my State.

I have refused to do earmarks for my State. The reason is we are in a big pot of trouble right now as a nation--a large pot of trouble. If you watch the dollar index in the markets, what you see happening in the last 2 weeks is the value of your savings going down because the value of the dollar is declining rapidly. Everybody knows that the money we are borrowing today will only be able to be paid back through highly inflated dollars. So what you have worked for your entire life, what you have dreamed for your kids, we are undermining here a little bit in this very bill. It is just a little bit, but a whole bunch of little bits becomes a lot.

So here we go. We don't make the priorities, we don't make the hard choices, and we increase the spending a ridiculous amount for the time we find ourselves in, knowing a good portion of the spending is going to be borrowed

from our kids. We watch the dollar flounder, knowing that the amount you have put aside for your children in the future isn't going to be worth anything. It is a pretty sick, neurotic system we are operating under because it doesn't have enough sunshine on it, and that was the purpose for Senator McCain's amendment. That is the purpose for this amendment, to have some transparency. Let's have some common sense.

Let's not force State transportation departments that need critical dollars for bridge repair and road repair to spend it on a bicycle path nobody is going to ride or a sound barrier that truly doesn't cut the sound. Let's spend it on roads and bridges. Let's not force them to make choices that are stupid. Let's trust people to do what is right.

There is another observation I would make, and then I will close. I was born in 1948, and I have seen a shift in our country in that 60- plus years. Our nature and our history used to be that we trusted American citizens. I am talking of the Federal Government. We assumed you would do the right thing. Unfortunately, today, so much of the assumption of the Federal Government--especially as it relates to the States--is on the basis that we know you are going to do the wrong thing, and we are here to catch you; that we know better, and we are going to tell you how to do it, when to do it, and where to do it.

That has come about as we have had Supreme Court rulings taking away the constraints our Founders said were necessary. It is called the enumerated powers of the Constitution. It is article I, section 8, if you want to look it up. If you read what Madison and Jefferson had to say about that, we have been totally violating the intent of what they said, what they meant, and what they knew we would say about what they meant for the last 30 years in this country. So we find ourselves in a position where we dominate with the power of dollars and taxation to the detriment of our freedom, to the detriment of common sense, and to the detriment of good will.

I am not sure how the chairman and ranking member will respond to this amendment, but for this time and this situation we find ourselves in, we ought to eliminate this mandatory 10 percent and let Oklahoma and Kansas and Texas and Kentucky and New York build bridges and highways, not build aesthetics with the money which we took from them and are now sending it back but sending it with all these restrictions on it.

With that, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, we are going through a travel and tourism bill. I know my leader is coming to say some words on the Senate floor, but I had a couple questions the authors of the bill have not answered satisfactorily. One is they create a new corporation for travel promotion and they create a new travel and advisory board, but there is already a travel and advisory board within the Commerce Department. There is nothing in this bill that eliminates this duplicative function that is already there. If, in fact, the intent of the bill is to promote, as they say it is, travel and tourism, one of the things we do not want to do is have duplicative agencies doing exactly the same thing, wasting the taxpayers' money. It is about $67 million that will go down the drain if, in fact, we do not eliminate the duplicative section of this bill.

The second point I would make is you are going to spend $12 million a year just on this one advisory board. The third point I will make refers to a letter from the European Union noticing that the visa fees we plan on placing with this bill will cause a negative reaction from them and a reciprocal institution of visa fees through the European Union.

I make those points and hope the authors of the bill will answer, for the American people, the $67 million waste in this bill that is going to occur if they do not eliminate programs that are already out there for which they are creating duplicate agencies.

I yield the floor and ask unanimous consent to have the letter printed in the Record.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I will.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and that Coburn amendment No. 2304 be called up.

I ask unanimous consent that the amendment be considered as read.

Madam President, it is interesting to note what we just heard from the Senator from Michigan about how we can't fix this program--admitting that there are several things wrong with it--because the House is out of town and we have to pass it. So we are going to do the wrong thing for the right reason.

I have not heard from a dealer in my State that is not for this program. There is no question it is stimulatory. There is no question, however, that the stimulation is one based on time of sales, not on true total stimulation to our economy. What we are doing is stimulating future sales to be bought at this time. But, more importantly, we have two untoward disadvantages that this program is causing which is actually hurting the poorest and the weakest and those of color in this country.

When we wrote this amendment, we went to the Finance Committee. We were told it was not going to score.

Then when we got to the Joint Economic Committee, they scored this amendment as costing $90 million, but what they did not take into consideration is that if these cars were actually given to charities or to people who did not have a car, it scored exactly the same. In essence, there is no net score with the bill.

The fact is, with this program--because we are destroying half a billion dollars worth of real assets so far in this program and we are going to destroy $1.2 to $1.3 billion worth of real assets, real cars that charities could really use to give to real people who do not have transportation--we are taking that away. In our tough economic times right now, charities' income is down about 30 percent across the board while the demands on the charitable organizations are up. We all recognize that charities use the contributions of automobiles to then turn around to sell and fund a lot of charities.

What this amendment does is allow the vehicles that are traded in to be donated to poor families or to charities. Why destroy a perfectly good car that somebody in a rural area who cannot get access to health care now because they don't have transportation--why destroy that mechanism of opportunity?

I understand there probably will not be the votes for this amendment. But to say we are going to take a perfectly good automobile that somebody less fortunate could utilize for years for transportation purposes, that will elevate them economically, and instead we are going to destroy it, we are going to destroy the opportunity for somebody less fortunate to have that automobile. This program is working for two groups of people: it is working for the auto industry and their dealers, and it is working for anybody who qualifies and uses the Cash for Clunkers Program. But it is not working for everybody else. This is a small minority of Americans who are going to benefit for a specific industry.

I heard the Senator from Arizona raise the question: Why not golf clubs? Why not dishwashers? Why not washing machines? Why not boats? Why not RVs? Why not other industries that also were on their backs, not having the same benefit?

I also would note that several organizations, a couple from which we received endorsements--the Military Order of the Purple Heart and Lutheran Charities throughout America endorse it.

I thought I would raise one other point; that is, this amendment is significantly environmentally friendly. A recent ABC News story on the clunkers quoted the following:

Believe it or not, even some environmentalists are against

the new law. They point out it will end the lives of

perfectly serviceable vehicles with years of life left. One

way to be green is to get a more carbon friendly car. Another

way to be green is to recycle or buy a used car. It takes 113

billion Btus to build a Toyota Prius. You have to drive that

car 46,000 miles before you are even on the carbon footprint.

If you take the same car and give that car to somebody in need, you enhance their economic condition and you do not create another 113 billion Btus of energy.

Hybrids get great mileage, we talked about that, but in terms of net- net, in terms of being green--we hear that all the time. If we want to do what is most efficient from an environmentally safe standpoint, this amendment does it. You still have the Cash for Clunkers Program, but what you do is turn around and use the cars by giving them to charitable organizations or families who need them. If we were to do that, especially if we are going to increase this program $2 billion additionally, you are going to save $1 billion worth of net assets that we can transfer to those less fortunate in this country. For that, the tax consequences will be $90 million, which is exactly the same tax consequences we would have had on these cars had we not had a cash for clunkers program.

It is crazy, in this country, to intentionally destroy perfectly good automobiles. It is nuts. It is not rational. Yet we have a program and we are already doing it. In Oklahoma we had a car that was traded in that had 10,000 miles on it. They destroyed the engine on the car under this program. Granted, it had poor gas mileage, but that was transportation to somebody who was poor, transportation to somebody who did not have transportation.

We have been debating health care around here for 6 months. The biggest limitation on access to health care in rural and poor communities is transportation, and we are going to take away an opportunity to give many of those people transportation. We are going to take it away. The schizophrenia of Washington continues to amaze me, and the lack of common sense that is associated with what we do.

I will make one final note. The reason this bill has problems, the reason the Transportation Department is having trouble with it is it never went through a committee, never had multiple hearings, had not had an oversight on what we were going to do, and it was done in such a short period of time that we did not even allow the Transportation Department an effective amount of time to set it up so it would be effective and not wasteful.

If you hear any complaints from the dealers, it is they don't know where they stand on whether they are going to get paid. They have no clue right now because even though they filed paperwork, getting that money to them--what we are seeing is a lot of problems with unhappy customers right now at the dealers because the Transportation Department cannot be efficient in administering this program.

I conclude by noting that if this is the standard under which we are going to reenergize our economy, then we ought to apply the same standard to every other industry. If we do, we will not be bankrupt in 11 years, we are going to be bankrupt next year.

I want our auto companies to succeed. There is no question there are stimulatory benefits to what we are doing, but it is at a great cost. As the Senator from New Hampshire noted, the net-net cost is $45,000 per net car that would not have been traded in. It is foolhardy.

I hope Members of the body will consider this amendment. I know they have been instructed to not consider it.

I will reserve the remainder of my time.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record four news articles published in the last week about how cash for clunkers has negatively impacted charities. This comes from the North- West Cable News, Denver Post, Fox News, and nbc4.com.

Madam President, I could be a whole lot more comfortable with this bill if you told me there was not another one coming in a month. But the fact is, what we are doing is buying forward sales. Every economist says that. Eighty percent of the sales that come in under cash for clunkers--we are just moving up sales that were going to be there anyway. There is nothing wrong with that as long as we say there comes a point in time we are not going to do that.

I wonder if my distinguished colleague from Michigan would commit to the body that we are not going to see another one of these bills in 2 months, 3 months, 4 months, or 5 months, we are going to subsidize the purchase of automobiles by stealing from our children in this country-- regardless of the economic benefit for one particular industry. Is there an answer to that question? The fact that there is not an answer to the question means it is not going to stop with this one. As soon as this next program stops, and as soon as we run through the money, the sales are going to go right back down.

Then our option is going to be: Well, we have to do another one and another one because we are buying forward sales.

What we need is the health of the economy. I do not deny we need to inject the proper amount of fiscal stimulus, true fiscal stimulus, not a government transfer payment, which is 60 percent of the stimulus bill that was passed, but it is an interesting question: When does it stop?

If we are going to do it for automobiles, and let's say automobiles get healthy but the appliance industry does not, are we going to do it for the appliance industry? How much more can we afford to borrow from our kids? Those are legitimate questions that need to be addressed.

I understand the depth and breadth of the difficulties the States in the upper Midwest are feeling from this recession and especially the impact on the automobile companies. I want to be cooperative. I want to see them come out.

But it would certainly give us much less indigestion if we knew there was truly going to be an end and not another of these Cash for Clunkers Programs when the sales dribble right back down because all we did was stimulate forward sales into this sales period.

With that, I reserve the reminder of my time.

Is it not true that the average plants were down for 10 weeks?

Maybe 10 weeks. I know Chrysler was down longer than that. The fact is, when I drive by the auto dealers, and when I check the statistics with NHTSA, inventories are low.

So we are going to put $2 billion back out, when inventories are at half the level on the car lots of what they normally are. So if, in fact, you pass this, you might ought to spread it out over a period of time so the factories can get the cars to the dealers because that is a significant worrisome part on a lot of my dealers--that if you bring it back now, and you bring it back, we are not going to have the cars to sell them.

I did make a note before, I say to the chairman. He is my chairman. I get along with him great. I have great admiration for him. I am glad Oklahoma does not have any car manufacturing plants right now. I can tell you that. But I did make a point that it takes 153 billion BTUs to make a Toyota Prius. You have to drive that car, on average, 2 years before you are ever at break-even.

So if you take a used car--and this program does not apply to used cars, right? It applies only to new cars. If you take a used car and compare it to a car of similar size, you are at least 2\1/2\ years before you ever get the first benefit, in terms of green, 2\1/2\ years.

So we may see a difference in those, but in terms of BTUs consumed, it is 2\1/2\ years before you see the first change in terms of carbon footprint under this program. Ultimately, I would admit to you there is a carbon benefit to it.

Yes, it is true.

Well, 2 years from now, it is going to have 4 or 5 miles better mileage.

I yield back the remainder of my time.

Madam President, this is a simple amendment. Rather than throw great cars away, give them to poor people. One of the biggest problems we have with rural health care and health care associated with our citizens of color in this country is the fact that they do not have transportation to get their health care.

Under this bill, already we will destroy $500 million worth of good automobiles. As we pass this bill we are going to destroy another $1 billion worth of automobiles.

It would seem to me, since the charitable organizations are so good at utilizing these cars and we have such a need, especially with the economic downturn we have, that we ought not be throwing them away and ruining them. What we ought to be doing is giving them to those who have greater need than those who are turning them back.

Madam President, I move to waive the applicable section of the Budget Act with respect to my amendment.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

I ask unanimous consent that the Republican time for the next hour be allocated as follows: Myself, 15 minutes; Senator Snowe, 30 minutes; and Senator Brownback, 15 minutes.

Mr. President, I rise today to discuss the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to be a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Judge Sotomayor comes to the Senate with a compelling personal story and notable professional accomplishments. She has worked as a prosecutor, a corporate attorney, and then as a Federal district court and circuit court judge. And, after meeting with Judge Sotomayor and visiting with her, I like her. She is a very kind and affable person.

Certainly Judge Sotomayor has an impressive resume; however, the Senate's inquiry into her suitability for a seat on the Supreme Court does not end with her professional accomplishments. Equally important to our providing ``consent'' on this nomination is our determination that Judge Sotomayor has the appropriate judicial philosophy for the Supreme Court. Judge Sotomayor needed to prove to the Senate that she will adhere to the

proper role of a judge and only base her opinions on the plain language of the U.S. Constitution and statutes. She needed to demonstrate that she will strictly interpret the Constitution and our laws and will not be swayed by her personal biases or political preferences. As Alexander Hamilton stated in Federalist Paper No. 78 ``the interpretation of the law is the proper and peculiar province of the courts. The constitution . . . must be regarded by the judges as a fundamental law.'' Hamilton further stated that it was ``indispensable in the courts of justice'' that judges have an ``inflexible and uniform adherence to the rights of the Constitution.'' A nominee who does not adhere to these standards necessarily rejects the role of a judge as dictated by the Constitution and should not be confirmed.

With regard to judicial philosophy, the burden of proof always rests on the nominee. But, in Judge Sotomayor's case, that burden was exacerbated by her prior speeches and statements. President Obama promised to nominate someone ``who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old.'' Senator Obama referred to his empathy standard when he voted against Chief Justice John Roberts. He stated that the tough cases ``can only be determined on the basis of one's deepest values, one's core concerns, one's broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one's empathy.'' She meets his standard but not mine. The President's ``empathy'' standard is antithetical to the proper role of a judge. The American people expect a judge to be a neutral arbiter who treats all litigants equally. There is a reason why Lady Justice is always depicted blindfolded and why Aristotle defined law as ``reason free from passion.'' The judicial oath succinctly expresses this ideal by requiring judges to swear that they ``will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and . . . will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon them under the Constitution and laws of the United States.''

During her hearing, I was pleased to hear Judge Sotomayor disavow this empathy standard. In response to a question asking whether empathy should play a role in a judge's decision, Judge Sotomayor responded, ``We apply law to facts. We don't apply feelings to facts.'' She further stated that she ``wouldn't approach the issue of judging in the way the President does. . . . judges can't rely on what's in their heart. They don't determine the law. Congress makes the laws. The job of a judge is to apply the law. And so it's not the heart that compels conclusions in cases. It's the law.'' While I was encouraged to hear Judge Sotomayor's testimony, I am concerned that these statements and her other testimony were a dramatic departure from her earlier statements. So, I am left wondering: Which Judge Sotomayor are we getting?

I believe a person speaks from their heart when they discuss matters that are most important to them. On numerous occasions, most notably when she was teaching and guiding law students and bar associations, Judge Sotomayor made some impassioned statements about the role of a judge, which contradict her testimony at the hearing. Speaking in 2002, Judge Sotomayor said: ``I wonder whether achieving that goal--of transcending personal sympathies and prejudices and aspiring to achieve a greater degree of fairness and integrity based on the reason of law-- is possible in all or even in most cases. And I wonder whether by ignoring our differences as women or men of color we do a disservice both to the law and society.'' This statement is of extraordinary concern to me. Not only does Judge Sotomayor's statement indicate that she cannot set aside her personal sympathies and prejudices ``in most cases,'' but she does not appear to believe that this goal is even an admirable one.

Even more concerning, Judge Sotomayor stated prior to her hearing that ``[p]ersonal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see'' and ``our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.'' It seems to me, and I think to most Americans, that the facts of a case are pretty clear and, if a judge is picking and choosing the facts they see based on their personal experiences, then they cannot possibly be impartial arbiters. I believe President Adams said it best when he stated: ``Facts are stubborn things . . . and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictums of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.'' I am disturbed that Judge Sotomayor does not agree with President Adams's assessment.

Prior to her hearing testimony, she also stated that ``court of appeals is where policy is made.'' This statement is in stark contrast to her hearing testimony, and that contradiction is deeply disturbing to me. I think Judge Sotomayor believes what she said previously in her speeches, and when you believe in something, I think you should stand up and defend it. You should explain why you can still be a good judge even though you made those statements. That is what I wanted and expected to hear from her during her hearing. I was disappointed that she chose to dodge questions and obfuscate her record.

I was even more concerned that Judge Sotomayor reversed herself when discussing her judicial philosophy on the use of foreign law by U.S. judges. Results-oriented, activist judges who seek to rule based on their personal sympathies and prejudices often look to foreign law when interpreting our statutes and the Constitution in order to reach their desired outcome, and so I was deeply troubled by some of Judge Sotomayor's earlier statements that endorsed the use of foreign law by U.S. judges. Justice Scalia succinctly articulated the problem with using foreign law in his dissent from a recent Supreme Court opinion, Roper v. Simmons. The majority decision in Roper cited the worldwide ``evolving standards of decency'' to strike down a statute that allowed judges to impose capital punishment for juveniles, even for the most heinous crimes. In his dissent, Justice Scalia asserted that the practice of relying on foreign law inevitably leads to judicial activism. He argued that ``[w]hat these foreign sources `affirm,' rather than repudiate, is the Justices' own notion of how the world ought to be, and their diktat that it shall be so henceforth in America.''

I agree with Justice Scalia's assessment. Unfortunately, judging by her statements, Judge Sotomayor does not. During her hearing, I asked Judge Sotomayor about a recent speech she gave in which she stated that prohibiting the use of foreign law would mean judges would have to ``close their minds to good ideas'' and that it is her ``hope'' that judges will continue to consult foreign law when interpreting our Constitution and statutes. In that speech, she condemned Justices Scalia and Thomas for their criticism of the use of foreign law in Supreme Court decisions stating: ``The nature of the criticism comes from . . . a misunderstanding of the American use of that concept of using foreign law and that misunderstanding is unfortunately endorsed by some of our own Supreme Court Justices. Both Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas have written extensively criticizing the use of foreign and international law in Supreme Court decisions. . . . But, I share more the ideas of Justice Ginsburg in thinking, . . . in believing that unless American courts are more open to discussing the ideas raised by foreign cases, and by international cases, that we are going to lose influence in the world.'' In her speech, Judge Sotomayor then specifically cited Roper v. Simmons--ruling unconstitutional a statute permitting imposing the death penalty for juveniles--and Lawrence v. Texas--overturning a law against same-sex sodomy--as examples of cases where the Supreme Court used foreign law appropriately to strike down State criminal laws.

I asked Judge Sotomayor about her statements disagreeing with Justices Scalia and Thomas's criticism of the Court's use of foreign law in cases such as Roper and Lawrence, and she reversed her earlier statement saying she ``actually agreed with Justices Scalia and Thomas on the point that one has to be very cautious even in using foreign law with respect to the things American law permits you to.'' Clearly, her hearing testimony was either inaccurate or designed to be misleading

since she previously said she shared ``more the ideas of Justice Ginsburg'' who has endorsed the Court's use of foreign law in cases such as Roper and Lawrence.

I then asked Judge Sotomayor to affirm that she would refrain from using foreign law in making her decisions and writing her opinions, outside of where she was directed to do so through statute or through treaty. She stated unequivocally that she would ``not use foreign law to interpret the Constitution or American statutes'' and she would ``not utilize foreign law in terms of making decisions.'' I was reassured by these statements.

Regrettably, my reassurance did not last long. In her responses to written questions following the hearing, Judge Sotomayor reverted back to her former stated judicial philosophy regarding foreign law. She wrote: ``In some limited circumstances, decisions of foreign courts can be a source of ideas, just as law review articles or treatises can be sources of ideas. Reading the decisions of foreign courts for ideas, however, does not constitute `using' those decisions to decide cases.'' She further stated: ``decisions of foreign courts can be a source of ideas informing our understanding of our own constitutional rights. To the extent that the decisions of foreign courts contain ideas that are helpful to that task, American courts may wish to consider those ideas.'' This reversion is extremely troubling to me because it suggests that Judge Sotomayor was either misleading or simply disingenuous in her hearing testimony. Equally troubling is Judge Sotomayor's continued concern with world opinion of American law. Prior to her hearing she asserted that ``unless American courts are more open to discussing the ideas raised by foreign cases, and by international cases, that we are going to lose influence in the world.'' She echoed this concern after her hearing writing: ``To the extent that American courts categorically refuse to consider the ideas expressed in the decisions of foreign courts, it may be that foreign courts will be less likely to look to American law as a source of ideas.'' A judge's job is not to consider what the rest of the world thinks about us, it is to interpret the Constitution.

Her judicial philosophy with regard to the use of foreign law is extremely important because it suggests that she will not strictly interpret our Constitution. If Judge Sotomayor believes it is appropriate to consult foreign law in some cases, where will she draw the line? During her hearing testimony, Judge Sotomayor stated that the right to bear arms is ``settled law''; however, the recent Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller left many questions unanswered. One critical unanswered question is whether the right will be incorporated on to the States--meaning that the States will not have the right to outlaw the use of firearms. If confirmed, would Justice Sotomayor be receptive to arguments that foreign countries impose greater restrictions on gun rights and, therefore, be persuaded that some excessive State and Federal restrictions are constitutional? As she noted in her recent second circuit opinion holding that there is no fundamental right to bear arms, there are very few Supreme Court cases addressing the right to bear arms. If confirmed, would she fill in the gaps with foreign law?

Unfortunately, I believe my fears were confirmed by her answers to written questions following the hearing when she refused to pledge that she would not consider foreign law when considering second amendment cases. She stated: ``Because cases raising Second Amendment questions are currently pending before the Court, I would not comment on how I would decide those cases if I am confirmed.'' Her refusal to answer that should give pause to those who, like me, cherish the fundamental right to bear arms.

The concern that Judge Sotomayor may use foreign law to interpret the Second Amendment is further exacerbated by her judicial record on the bench and her hearing testimony, which demonstrates a clear hostility to gun rights. In Maloney v. Cuomo, decided January 29, 2009--post- Heller--Judge Sotomayor joined a cursory unsigned opinion holding that the second amendment is not a fundamental right and also that the amendment does not apply to the States. In Maloney, Judge Sotomayor incorrectly relied on an 1886 case--Presser--which did not use the modern Due Process incorporation analysis, a fact Judge Sotomayor failed to note in her opinion. When asked at her hearing to discuss the holding in Presser, she responded that she had not ``read it recently enough to remember exactly'' what it said even though she had relied on it in a decision issued a mere 7 months previously. Her disturbing lack of familiarity with the case suggests that she did not give great weight to the constitutional right at issue in Maloney. If Judge Sotomayor's ruling in Maloney is upheld by the Supreme Court, States could ban all guns and other weapons for practically any reason.

During her oral and written testimony, she also refused to acknowledge the fundamental right to self-defense, which predates the Constitution, and stated that she did not recall a case that addressed the right to self-defense, despite the fact that the Supreme Court discusses the right to self-defense at length in Heller, the opinion upon which she relied. Judge Sotomayor even refused to discuss the legal test the Supreme Court uses to determine whether a right is fundamental, a basic legal test.

In another notable case about which Judge Sotomayor was questioned, she gave short shrift to a constitutional right that is vitally important to Americans, suggesting that she does not have the appropriate respect for the rights guaranteed by the fifth amendment. In Didden v. Village of Port Chester, Judge Sotomayor extended the government's power to take private property in a cursory opinion that one property professor said was the ``worst federal court takings decision since Kelo.'' He further stated that the opinion is ``very extreme'' and ``is significant as a window into Judge Sotomayor's attitudes toward private property.'' Another notable professor said the opinion is ``a disappointment'' and is ``wrong and ill thought out'' and is ``about as naked an abuse of government power as could be imagined.'' Those are strong criticisms from respected legal scholars and nothing in Judge Sotomayor's testimony reassured me about her opinion in the Didden case.

Following the hearing, I remain concerned that Judge Sotomayor's hostility to gun rights, abortion restrictions, and property rights, among others, stem from a ``personal prejudice'' that will influence her decisions once she is untethered from precedent. It is true that she has an extensive record on the bench; however, the Senate's inquiry into Judge Sotomayor's suitability for the Supreme Court cannot merely rest on an overview of the cases she decided when she was constrained by precedent. Judge Sotomayor's extra judicial statements are critically important to our examination of her fitness for a seat on the Supreme Court because when a judge is free from the confines of precedent--as she was in her speeches and as she will be if she is a Supreme Court Justice--she shows her true colors and passions.

So the question remains, which Judge Sotomayor are we getting? Will Judge Sotomayor follow in the footsteps of Justice Ginsburg or will she adhere to her testimony during her hearing that she will strictly apply the law to the facts? Will she revert back to the judicial philosophy she espoused prior to the hearing, the same way she reverted back to her prior statements on the use of foreign law by American judges? Because I am not convinced that she can put aside her personal politics and preferences, I regretfully must oppose her nomination.

I am pleased to come to the floor today to talk about our Supreme Court selection process. Judge Sotomayor is the third Supreme Court candidate I have had the privilege of getting to know, interview, and ask rigorous questions of during the hearing. She has a miraculous and wonderful personal story. She is very accomplished. She is to be admired for what she has accomplished.

When we look at Supreme Court nominees, we are actually charged to do two things. One is to look at their record of judicial behavior and assess it, and then also to look at their record that is out there besides their judicial decisions. We did a very thorough job in analyzing her 15-plus years as a Federal judge and appellate judge. There

were some very concerning cases that we encountered for which we questioned her, and the record will fully show her defense of that record and the reversal rate that she had at the U.S. Supreme Court.

It is interesting for the American public to know that a Supreme Court Justice is much different than an appellate judge or even a Federal circuit judge because they, in fact, are not bound by precedent. As an appellate judge they have to follow precedent, and when they don't they get reversed, and Federal circuit judges have to follow precedent or they get reversed. But a Supreme Court Justice has the freedom to change precedent, and that is why the inquiry into the candidacy and the qualifications of a Supreme Court nominee is so important. It is also why our Founders wrote extensively on what should be the qualifications of a Supreme Court Justice.

Alexander Hamilton stated in Federalist Paper No. 78: ``The interpretation of the law is the proper and peculiar province of the courts.''

He further stated that it was ``indispensable in the courts of justice'' that judges have an ``inflexible and uniform adherence to the rights of the Constitution.'' A nominee who does not adhere to these standards necessarily rejects the role of a judge as dictated by the Constitution and should not be confirmed.

When we look at the Constitution, we are told in the Constitution how judges are to decide cases. They are given three strict parameters. One is they are to look at the Constitution each and every time. No. 2 is they are to look at the statutes that have been passed by the people's representatives, and they are to look at the facts. They are to look at the facts in a way that will show never a bias--in other words, blind justice--looking at those critical factors of what are the facts of the case, what is the law, and what does the Constitution say.

You can be an appellate court justice for 50 years in this country and still not qualify to be a Supreme Court Justice. It is tremendously important who goes on the Supreme Court. The reason it is important is because we have had a tendency in the last three decades to abandon those three principles and use other principles.

Let me mention two of them. One is that we consider foreign law, that we can become enlightened with foreign law. I don't doubt that we can become enlightened with what other people in the world think about law, but the fact is our Founders said: This is our law. The Constitution is our law. And we have a way of setting law which comes through the Congress. That is what we shall look at with one exception, and that is on trade and treaties where we have to consider the agreements and foreign laws related to those treaties.

The other tendency which has been espoused by our President is an empathy standard, that we can somehow--other than looking at the three main parameters of which our Founders told us we must use in deciding cases at the Supreme Court. Well, I will tell you that a standard other than looking at the facts and looking at the law and looking at the Constitution doesn't meet the test of our Founders nor does it meet the test of our Constitution as it is spelled out in our Constitution.

I wish to say as an American citizen, I think we should all be proud of this nomination: a Hispanic female coming to the Supreme Court. But that is not a good enough reason to say somebody should become a Justice. So I go back to those three founding principles of who should qualify. And who should qualify is somebody who is going to strictly adhere to what our Founders said was the job of a Supreme Court Justice, not with parameters that have been discussed as maybe to be OK or parameters that fall outside of what our Founders said.

During my questioning and my visits with Judge Sotomayor, I found some very disturbing things. I asked her specifically in the hearing: Do individuals have a fundamental right to self defense? She wouldn't answer yes to that question. Now, a fundamental right to self-defense predates our Constitution. That is what liberty is all about. That is one of the bedrocks of our liberty. And the fact that she will not agree that we as U.S. citizens have a fundamental right to self-defense is extremely troubling.

The reason that fundamental right is so important, and it is guaranteed in the Constitution, is because on that rests the second amendment for which I find her somewhat less than comfortable in accepting what our Founders said in the second amendment, adopted almost 200-and-some-odd years ago.

The second area I have concern with is in the area of property rights. It is very explicitly stated, and it is clear except in two cases in this country in the Supreme Court, which I hope that someday will be reversed, that our right to property is a real right. There was a Kelo decision that has markedly limited American citizens' rights to property. On both her cases and her comments and her written testimony, I believe that right of Americans is at risk. I believe judges are going to decide we don't have that fundamental right. I believe she believes, based on what she has ruled and what she has written and what she has said, that, in fact, there are times when judges can decide whether we have that right. That is inherently wrong and 180 degrees against what our Constitution guarantees us as individual citizens.

The final area has to do with the use of foreign law. In her speeches and statements she was highly critical of people who were critical of the use of foreign law. Upon questioning in the committee, she retracted and moved away from those statements. I specifically asked her if she would assure the committee that she would, in fact, never use foreign law to decide U.S. cases. I got her to say yes.

The only problem with that is, in the answer to questions following the hearing, she backtracked 180 degrees from that statement which matched her previous statements in speeches and writings which caused me to ask the question in the first place. So in the area of property rights, in the area of the second amendment and the fundamental right to self-defense, and in the area of foreign law, I believe her viewpoint is something other than what I see in the Constitution.

Regrettably, I believe that disqualifies her from being a Justice of the Supreme Court. That when, in fact, we look at the constitutional basis of how judges are instructed to make law and to decide law-- because every decision makes law; it sets precedent--that when we extract from that the fundamental right of self-defense, the written, specific right to the second amendment, the written specific right of property ownership and due process associated with that, and then we lay on top of that the idea that it is more important for us to look good in our decisions to foreign governments than it is to follow the oath, to follow the Constitution of the United States--make no mistake, I believe this is a wonderful woman, and I think she has done a fairly good job as a judge on the appellate court, but she has been constrained--as we measure her writings and her words with her decisions on cases, what we find is a conflict for those who would strictly follow what the Constitution tells us.

I want our grandchildren to endure and to accept and hold the same freedoms we have. A U.S. Supreme Court Justice will determine that; just one can determine that. So I regretfully announce and state that I will not be able to vote for this very fine woman. But I would also state that we need to be very concerned and very vigilant as we see the Supreme Court make decisions, whether they are sitting Justices today or Justices to come, who violate both the intent, instruction, and the spirit of the U.S. Constitution.

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

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I am constantly amazed. We have three separate programs, of which this administration says we don't need one penny from the Department of Agriculture for this. That is what they say. They say we have plenty of money in CPB to do everything that is needed with the translator stations this year. We are 92 percent complete on everything that has been translated. This is similar to every government program. They never die. Not only do we have the Department of Commerce that is going to have additional funding this year for that very same thing, we have the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The fact is, they want it to go through the Agriculture Department because there is more control. We can direct it. We can have more control.

We are in a crisis. We will have close to a $2 trillion deficit this year. Here we have $4.9 million that the administration says isn't needed. They want to get rid of it. They are right. What do we do? Every time we come to approach a program, we decide we can't eliminate it. Every family in America today is eliminating a lot of programs for themselves.

This appropriations bill is an atrocity. I will go through it so everybody can see what it is. In fiscal 2009, the grand total for this was $128 billion. It is now $123 billion. Do you know why it is there? They got $20 billion from mandatory in the stimulus and another $6 billion in the stimulus. So this isn't a decrease. It is outrageous the amount of money we are spending. We will go through it line by line.

Agriculture programs in 2009, discretionary were $6.85 billion. They are $7.22 billion. That is a 6-percent increase. The mandatory spending was $18 billion. It is now $22 billion. That is a 21-percent increase. Plus they got $1 billion in the stimulus. So if you add that to the $30 billion, we actually have $31 billion compared to $24 billion this year. Think about what kind of increase that is. Title II conservation programs was $969 million in 2009. We gave $340 million, which hasn't been spent yet; it will be spent this year. Yet we increase it another 4.5 percent to $1.015 billion.

Rural development, they got $3 billion this year. In this bill they get 2.7. That is an 11-percent increase. That doesn't count the $4.36 billion that was given in the stimulus. Domestic food programs went from $76 million to $86 million. We need that now, no complaint there. We have a lot of people requiring our help right now, but they also got $20 billion which hasn't been spent yet in the stimulus. So we have gone from $76 million to $106 million, a 45-percent increase. Foreign assistance, we spent $1.5 billion on foreign assistance in agricultural programs in 2009. This is at $2 billion, a 33-percent increase. Plus they got $700 million in the stimulus that has not been spent. So add that together and you have $2.1 billion versus 1.5.

It is ridiculous the amount of money that is in this appropriations bill. All these ought to be trimmed back based on what the stimulus was doing rather than growing them at four times the rate of inflation. We are growing government in this bill four times the rate of inflation. We are going to have a $2 trillion deficit and we are proud of this bill? This bill is a stinker.

FDA Commodities Futures Trading, $2.1 billion to $2.527 billion, a 20-percent increase in one year. Let's talk about some of the separate programs. Agricultural research got increased $200 million. By the time you add in what we did in the stimulus, it goes from $1.18 to $1.23 billion. That is where most of the earmarks are stolen from, agricultural research, and most of that money isn't applied to research. It gets directed through an earmark. National Institute of Food and Agriculture Research went from 1.22 billion to 1.3, an $80 million increase, a 6.76-percent increase; Economic research, up $3 million, just a 4-percent increase; Statistical service, up 7 percent; Animal health inspection, up 4 percent; Agricultural marketing services, up 5 percent; Grain inspection packers, up about 4 percent; Food safety, where we should be increasing funding because of the problems we have had, is up only 2 percent. Where we have the problems, we are not increasing the appropriations. We are actually barely keeping even with inflation. But on food safety, we don't increase it. Farm service salaries, they increase $90 million, a 6.5-percent increase, plus we gave $50 million in the stimulus; Farm service agency loans, if you add in the stimulus, which has not been spent, we get to $195 million from $147 million. That is a 33.3-percent increase.

Federal crop insurance: Up $1 billion, from $6.5 billion to $7.5 billion. That is a 12-percent increase.

Conservation programs. Mr. President, $340 million NRCS was given in the stimulus. It has not been spent yet. And $962 million is what we had last year. Mr. President, $1.015 billion, plus the $340 million, and what you get is a 33-percent increase.

Conservation operations: No money in the stimulus. We go from $853 million to $949 million. That is an 8-percent increase.

Watershed and flood prevention is flat. It is flat. We have all these water conservation dams that are falling apart. Kind of like in our highway bill, we fix the earmarks, but we do not take care of the bridges. That is what we are doing on the watershed.

RC&D, the President terminated it. Finally we got one that is going under.

Rural development: Salaries up 8 percent.

Rural housing: Counting the $330 million we did in the stimulus that has not been spent, you have a $430 million increase--$130 million increase over it, about a 7-percent increase.

You can keep going. I will not continue to bore my colleagues. But the fact is, overall in this bill, we have a tremendous increase in spending when you consider what we did in the stimulus--not a decrease--taking into account for that.

Now back to this amendment. All this amendment does is cut $4.9 million--$4.9 million--out of a $124 billion bill. The reason this amendment is offered is because the administration is doing the right thing. They are eliminating a program that is not needed now. We can say anything we want, but we have three agencies doing the same thing, and what the administration recognized, to their credit, is we do not need three agencies doing the same thing. What we need is one agency accountable. We are 92 percent complete, and let them be responsible for finishing it and save the American taxpayer some money.

That is what the Obama administration wanted to do with this elimination. But, no, it comes right back. Each of the three programs that presently do this work--the USDA, the Commerce Department's PTFP, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting--is a part of their respective agency's budget. Unless we eliminate it, we are going to spend that money, and it will not be well spent, it will not be wisely spent, it will not be efficiently spent. It will just be spent, and they will ask for more next year. Even when we are at 97 percent or 98 percent complete, we will see the same request to come. The logic was because they asked for three times as much; therefore, $4.9 million ought to be OK. Well, $4.9 million is not OK when we need zero out of the Department of Agriculture to begin with.

One of the things the Obama administration wants to do is to streamline this process, not have three agencies going through this. They want to consolidate the current three-pronged effort into one efficient program that is already in existence. And nobody denies that CPB has done a pretty good job with the public television stations and the translator stations through their money.

The USDA received $14 million in 2004, $10 million in 2005, $5 million in each of the years 2006 through 2008. PTFP--which is the Department of Commerce--has gone all the way from 1998, when they got $12.5 million--and every year, all the way up--to 2002, when they got $36 million; and then they went back down to $15 million in 2007. They did not get any money in 2008 because they did not need it.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, however, has gotten, on average, over $35 million a year, and they

got $29 million last year. Plus we spent $650 million in the stimulus on this program. It has not all been spent. So we are lining up. We have plenty of money in the stimulus package, and then we are going to ask for another $4.9 million.

This is exactly the reason the American people are disgusted with Congress. This is a bill that is out of its bounds in terms of its spending. It has not recognized what is in the stimulus that has not been spent. So what we are doing is we are actually going to increase the debt through this bill that is going to be spent.

To put that in personal terms, what does that mean? A $2 trillion deficit is $6,000 for every man, woman, and child in this country. That is what we are going to do this year: We are going to spend $6,000 per man, woman, and child more than we take in for every man, woman, and child in this country. And do you know what. We are on course to do exactly the same thing next year with this kind of appropriations bill. There is no check with reality in the Senate as far as when it comes to spending money, and I refuse to apologize for looking out for the next two generations when we do not have the courage to say no to anybody. What we say is: Yes, I will get this bill for you so you can look good at home.

Well, who is looking out for the 2- and 3- and 4- and 5-year-olds in this country who, when they were born, took on almost $500,000 worth of unfunded liabilities? Our debt is going to double in the next 5 years. It is going to triple in the next 10 years. There is no effort in this bill to make that less burdensome on those children.

With that, I yield the floor on this amendment.

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 want to talk about an amendment I offered that has been ruled nongermane by the Parliamentarian. I flatly disagree with that ruling, and I want the American people to understand what we have ruled nongermane.

We offered an amendment that said grants and contracts under this bill should be competitively bid. Think about that. When we go out to spend money--with the six or seven exemptions in the contracting clause, and the fact that maybe for some things only one person can apply to it, which have been accepted in that--we said for American taxpayers to get value, we ought to ask and mandate that competitive bidding take place on grants and contracts in this bill.

Not one of these has ever passed the Senate, and I want to tell you why. It is because we do not want things to be competitively bid. We do not want your dollars to be spent wisely, efficiently, and effectively because when we do that we take away our political power to say somebody is going to get a contract or somebody is going to get a grant.

So this amendment, which was offered, specifically excluded earmarks because the complaint last week, when I offered the same amendment on the previous bill, was that if they are authorized--and remember, an earmark goes to a specific person, a specific company, those well connected in Washington--I specifically eliminated earmarks from this amendment so we would not have the excuse to say we do not want things competitively bid. But what we were going to find, had this amendment gone to a vote, is that it would have been voted down, too, because the problem is not in America, the problem is right here.

We view political power and incumbency more precious than we view the economic realities and sustenance of this country and the true freedom of the people in this country. We diminish that because we think our positions ought to be enhanced, and we ought to secure our next election by making sure we are the dolers of everything good, and that we can actually connect those who give big campaign contributions to great rewards from the Congress when it comes to appropriations bills. What this amendment would do is require that the contract be competitively bid according to the law. We actually have a law that says contracts have to be competitively bid, except Congress routinely excuses that on appropriations bills.

Just so the American people get this, we don't competitively bid contracts on these appropriations bills. We don't competitively bid the grants. We don't mandate that they are competitively bid, although some grants are competition-based but not based on dollars, based on performance. So Congress wins and the American people lose. Every time one of these bills goes through here without competitive bidding, our children are the real losers.

The President of the United States has said it is his policy that anything over $25,000 the government buys in this country ought to be competitively bid. Yet routinely it is his supporters who vote against that. President Obama means it, but we can't get it through here. We have $350 billion a year of documented waste, fraud, and duplication in the discretionary budget, plus Medicare fraud every year. There has been no attempt to accept amendments to eliminate that, to lessen that.

The fact is, we are on idle pilot to grow this government 8 percent this year in spite of the $787 billion stimulus. If you are sitting at home thinking about that, not very many people have 8 percent more income this year. So one of two things is going to happen in the next 18 months in this country. Here is what is going to happen. Either we are going to default on our debt because people are going to quit loaning us money or the average middle-income taxpayer is going to see a tax hike because, if we take all the income of the top 5 percent of people in this country, we cut our deficit only in half. If we take all the income--I am talking about a 100-percent tax rate of the top 5 percent earners in this country--we will cut our deficit in half.

So if you are a middle-class American, no matter whether you think some people should pay more than they do--5 percent pays 80 percent of the taxes in this country--you can bet that in the next 18 months, you are going to see a middle-class tax increase go through this body. The reason it is going to go through is because we will not apply any common sense to the appropriations bills.

Most American families are cutting back on their spending; some because they have lost their jobs, others because they are worried and they are fearful. What is the Federal Government doing? I am not talking about the stimulus bill. We are actually increasing spending. We are not making the hard choices about what is a priority and what is not; what is a necessity and what is not. We are not eliminating anything. We are building up everything, just like the last amendment we talked about. There is absolutely zero need for that program in the Department of Agriculture, but next year we will have the same debate again.

I have an amendment on cheeses. I am not going to do it because there is no reason to waste the Senate's time. But we created a demonstration project back in the early 1990s with Wisconsin and Vermont and we have been funding it ever since. They have this outstanding large specialty cheese production in Wisconsin and Vermont. They don't need any money, but we are going to send them more money this year because we did last year. The fact is, the specialty cheeses they make cost two and three times what regular cheese costs and they are luxury items, but we are going to fund that not because they need it, not because they are not competitive, not because they haven't grown their industry, but because we have funded it before.

Now ask yourself, if you read the Constitution, where is it in the Constitution that we are supposed to give two States millions and millions of dollars for an agricultural program that should be funded by the State if they want to do it or funded by the individuals who actually produce the cheese and are making good money. But we are going to continue to do it.

So I am not going to offer that amendment. I am not going to waste the time of the Senate on it. But there is a real question of why we are in the

trouble we are in as a nation today. It is because we ignore what the Constitution tells us to do. We ignore what our oath tells us to do, what we swear to do, which is uphold the Constitution. And within that is the enumerated powers, as well as the 10th amendment. The 10th amendment says whatever is not specifically spelled out--specific--and if you read what Jefferson and Madison had to say about what that meant, you will find that all of those responsibilities are left to the States and to the people. That is what they said.

We have this ``cash for clunkers'' going on right now, and the Senate is going to vote for an increase in that program. But the reason we are having to do that is because we can't manage it. We have proven--the Department of Transportation--they don't even know how many applications they have from people. They don't even know if they have over the number. What they know is they have approved $760 million of the money so far, but that doesn't count all of the applications that have come in from the dealers. Here we are incentivizing the purchase of cars, taking money from our grandkids, and Americans are smart enough to know if they can get 4,500 bucks back from the Federal Government, they will take advantage of that. So we have created this wonderful increase in demand for automobiles. But why not an increase in demand for boats or how about RVs or how about refrigerators? They are more efficient. Why not give somebody a $500 credit on their refrigerator? Why are we limiting this to the automobile industry that we now as taxpayers have the responsibility of bailing out of debt?

The fact is, we are clueless. We are not plugged in to what the average American family is going through in terms of a budget. We will not apply that same standard to their money up here, and their kids, our kids, and our grandkids are the ones who are going to suffer.

So ask yourself a question: Why would the Senate not allow an amendment on competitively bidding the contracts and grants in this bill? Hundreds of millions of dollars that we are going to pay much too much for, an area where we could save a tremendous amount of money, and if it is grant programs that truly do a great job, we could get more of that great job done if we got it done more efficiently. It is pretty disturbing that we are so far off course with what we are doing and, more importantly, how we are doing it.

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

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

Mr. President, I wish to speak on the pending amendment No. 2246, which caps the amount of money the U.S. Department of Agriculture spends on conferences and requires transparency on the purpose and cost of the conference sponsored or attended by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

This is a report I issued a year ago on the $90 million in conference costs the U.S. Department of Agriculture has spent. It is a pretty detailed report. You can go to my Web site and get it. But it tells about the lack of attention to any sort of fiscal discipline.

By the way, the Department of Agriculture is the worst practitioner of all of the agencies of the Federal Government on conferences, in terms of wasteful conferences, in terms of the number of people going to conferences--by far the worst. In 2001, USDA spent $6 million on conferences. Within 5 years, that went to $19 million. They tripled.

All this amendment says is, in 2010--9 years later--they can't spend more than double what they spent in 2001. That allows conferences to grow 11 percent a year. Twelve million dollars for conferences is a lot of money. That is less than the amount they spent this last year. It is less than any amount they have spent since 2001, but it is still double what they have spent in 2001.

This amendment also requires an itemized list of expenses and expenditures by the Department on the conference, who the primary sponsor of the conference is, the location of the conference, a justification of the location, including the cost efficiency of the location, the total number of individuals whose travel to the conference was paid for by the Department, and an explanation of how the agency advanced the mission by attending the conference.

It is about transparency. I have seen it quoted before, and I believe it is true: The greatest pleasure in the world is to spend somebody else's money. What our agencies are doing in many instances is not being frugal with the tax dollars we give them. The Department of Agriculture is a great example of that, when they are running close to $20 million a year--not this last year but still above $12 million--on conferences, and when we have the technology now to eliminate half the conferences.

I don't have any problem with travel. I don't have any problem with them going to conferences that are legitimate. But I do have a problem with a 3\1/2\-times increase in the amount of conferences they attend, especially given our economic situation today.

So this is fairly straightforward. We should put a cap on it. We should limit it. It is my hope my colleagues will do that.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw amendment No. 2243.

Mr. President, I note that the Senator from Michigan noted everyone who won. Let me tell you who did not win and that is our kids and grandkids. Americans are not stupid. If you give them 4,500 bucks, they are going to find any old car they have that is running and they have held for a long time. All our farmers are going to the barns. That is why you are getting pickups. They haven't been driving the pickups for years. But they are cranking them up to make them run and trading them in so they can get 4,500 bucks.

The people who lose are our kids. It is $3 billion we are talking about to go to help people buy cars. But where are we going to get the $3 billion? We are going to steal it from our children. What other part of the economy should we not be incentivizing? How about the appliance makers? How about the television makers?

I also ask unanimous consent--actually, I have discussed this with the chairman. Rather than ask for a recorded vote, we will have a voice vote on amendment No. 2245.

I also note that we will have a vote on the amendment in terms of eliminating $4.9 million for a duplicative program in the Department of Agriculture.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

I have a motion to commit at the desk.

Mr. President, the reason for this motion to commit is what we see on the discretionary side of this budget--not the food stamps, not the food support, not the areas in this budget that actually help people get through the tough times--a 15-percent increase in discretionary spending.

We are going to have near a $2 trillion deficit this year. We spent $20 billion last year. But then we spent another $6 billion in the stimulus which still has not been spent. So if you were to add the stimulus to it, you would see a 50-percent increase in the Agriculture discretionary budget. That is entirely too much money.

All this motion to commit says is, bring it back to us with a realistic expectation of what families are having to do. Again, I would caution my colleagues, this has nothing to do with food. We do not eliminate or lessen those mandatory requirements.

But in the operation of the USDA and the Department of Agriculture, let's have the government live within the same parameters that the rest of us are living within now which is--actually we are going to have a negative rate of inflation this year and incomes that are not going to grow significantly.

What we are asking for is still a rate higher than inflation but some fiscal responsibility that says we should live within our means. So when we spent $20 billion last year, through the end of this month, then we gave another $6 billion with the stimulus, and now we come forward with a budget that says we are going to spend $23 billion, a full 15-percent, 14-some-percent increase in the discretionary programs at the Department of Agriculture.

I find it obscene. I find it irresponsible. I find it almost elite that we will not relate to what the rest of the American people are going through, and we have bill after bill after bill, and in a time when our country is on its back and our budget deficits have never been so high, we are going to increase discretionary spending at a rate we have not seen in 10 years in this country. There is no call for it. There is no excuse for it. There is no defending it.

I would note that, in fact, on every amendment I have stood up on, other than the one Senator Harkin defended, we have not had anyone defend this bill. Let's hear a defense of the 15-percent increase for this bill in discretionary spending. The idea is, let's not defend it, let's just not answer the charge.

But the fact is, we are growing the discretionary portion of the Federal Department of Agriculture by 15 percent this year. It ought not to be.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

The honorable chairman noted that most of the increase in spending is in mandatory. This motion to commit does not say anything about mandatory. This is about discretionary. This is about the things we get to decide on. This is about the discretionary side of this bill, not the mandatory side. So we are not confused. This is not about those substantive items that are mandated through the farm bill. This is about what we have discretion to control, and we have indiscretion with this bill because we are going to allow it to grow by 15 percent.

I yield the floor and yield back the remainder of my time.

I ask unanimous consent that both sides yield back their time and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, this is a motion to commit.

The discretionary portion of this appropriations bill grows 15 times faster than the rate of inflation. This is a motion that says it ought to come back to us growing two times the rate of inflation.

There is no excuse for us to pass this kind of spending in this type of climate. I would ask for the support of this motion.

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

Reserving the right to object, I was asked to come down and get my amendments pending. I checked with the staff. All I would like to do is get several amendments up, have them pending, and then we will have the debate after the cloture vote. Is that agreeable?

I ask unanimous consent the pending amendment be set aside and amendment No. 2243 be called up.

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

I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and amendment No. 2244 be called up.

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

I ask unanimous consent the pending amendment be set aside and amendment No. 2245 be called up.

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

I ask unanimous consent the pending amendment be set aside and amendment No. 2248 be called up.

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

I now call for the regular order on amendment No. 2226 and send a second-degree amendment to the desk, ask for its immediate consideration, and ask any consideration be delayed until after the cloture vote and that the second-degree amendment is my amendment No. 2246.

Yes, unanimous consent is requested for that.

I ask unanimous consent the pending amendment be set aside and amendment No. 2246 be called up.

I will change the drafting.

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

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

I call for the regular order on amendment No. 2226, and I send a second-degree amendment to the desk and ask for its immediate consideration.

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

Mr. President, I am expecting Senator McCain on the Senate floor anytime, but I think I will begin.

The Government Accountability Office released a report yesterday that talked about the highway trust fund. What they noted is that over the last 4 years $78 billion of that trust fund has been spent on things other than highways, bridges, and roads.

Some of the things it has been spent on nobody would have any question. But here we find ourselves--the second time in a year--trying to bail out the trust fund, and we are going to get to decide whether we are going to steal it from our kids or steal it from the stimulus bill, which will actually make it much more stimulative than the money that is there.

But we find ourselves in trouble. When this trust fund was first set up, it was set up during the Eisenhower administration. It was designed to build the Interstate Highway System and help us with roads and bridges and secondary roads and bridges throughout the country. What it has morphed into is that a large percentage of it now does not go for any of that.

So we find ourselves in the midst of a recession--with last year having high gas prices which depressed the money going into the fund, and with a recession now, with decreasing revenues going into the fund--and we have all these projects that we know are priorities for us that need to be fixed.

The other thing we learned from this report is that 13,000 people in this country a year die because of bad roads, bad bridges, and bad highways.

So it would seem to me the highway trust fund moneys ought to be spent to eliminate those 13,000 deaths, and the priority ought to be about roads, bridges, and highways.

I will put into the Record many other items where the money is spent. Ten percent is mandated for highway beautification. Well, I think that is great--if we do not have a trust fund that is broken, and we do not have 200,000 bridges in the country that structurally have some defect, 93,000 of which are seriously structurally defective. I think it is important that we turn our attention to priorities that will support that.

We are going to have a lot of votes on this today.

I am supportive of us doing what we need to do for the trust fund. I am also supportive of making sure the priorities of the trust funds are about bridges, roads, and highways. Because of what happened in Tulsa, OK, yesterday, we have a man in ICU. Somebody hit a bridge with a car, and he was driving under the bridge in another lane, and chunks of concrete fell through his windshield and seriously injured him. Our highway department knew we had a problem with that bridge--not going under it or over it, but the foundation was suspect in terms of the concrete underlying it, and the uprights. So the dollars that went to build a bicycle path and to plant flowers along the highways and the dollars that went to put in walking paths means that guy is in the hospital today because the dollars didn't go for what they were intended.

So when we have had $78 billion over the last 4 years that didn't go for roads, highways, and bridges, and instead went for things that aren't going to enhance safety or help save 13,000 lives a year, America has to ask: What are your priorities?

I commend to my colleagues the GAO report: ``Highway Trust Fund Expenditures on Purposes Other Than Construction and Maintenance of Highways and Bridges During Fiscal Years 2004-2008'' on the GAO Web site at www.GAO.gov.

Mr. President, I make the point that as they look at this, there are important things for us to consider. We know that had we passed a better stimulus bill, we would be doing twice as much now in terms of fixing the real problems in this country in terms of transportation infrastructure. But we didn't. We passed a stimulus bill that created transfer payments on 70 percent of it, and 20 percent of it may be considered to be stimulative. So the hope is that, as we go forward-- and we are going to bail this out--what we really need to do is, let's have our own money. In Oklahoma, we have never gotten 100 percent back. The highest was last year. When I came to Congress, we were getting back 74 cents out of every dollar. If we can keep that money, we can get more done with it than what we get done through the trust fund now. That may be one solution to ultimately getting us out of this situation.

Yes, but first I have one other point.

In the last 20 years, we have built 25 transportation museums rather than the money going to highways. Remember the Minneapolis bridge that collapsed? We are putting money into museums, and I wonder if we are going to build a museum about the collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis. We are putting money into museums instead of making sure the roads and bridges--especially the bridges--are safe in this country. Our priorities are messed up, and the American people know that. Hopefully, we can redirect transportation dollars to true transportation projects, not to the aesthetics that we cannot afford now, even though they may be nice, and, No. 2, are causing additional deaths on our highways.

Yes.

The answer to the Senator's question is, they can't. There is no question that there are certain priorities. What has happened is, as we try to address priorities for individual States, because the States don't get their money back--and there may be a great project in there, and along comes a lousy one.

I just make the point that we have our eye off the ball. The eye needs to go back. All you have to do is go read the story that happened in Tulsa, OK, yesterday. Had we been applying money to transportation instead of nontransportation through this trust fund, that gentleman probably would not be in the hospital today. A 700-pound piece of concrete fell through his windshield, trapping him in the car. We don't just have a problem of not enough money in the trust fund, our problem is that the money that goes out doesn't go for the real things the trust fund was designed to do in the first place.

I will restate, and then I will yield back. We have to do one of two things. Until this country gets out of the financial damage it is in, first, we have to make sure the money is spent on transportation projects, real transportation projects, to save some of those 13,000 who are being lost because we are not fixing roads, bridges, and highways. Second, let's eliminate the thing and let the States keep their money, and we will figure out how to spend it at home. In Oklahoma, we have never gotten a square deal yet.

I am happy to.

It could be around 4 or 5 percent. Senator Inhofe will know the answer to that.

Let me add, also, that if you go to USAspending.gov and to recovery.gov, you will find that as of last week--I don't know what it is this week--only $78 billion of the whole stimulus package has actually been spent. More of it has been obligated but not actually spent. I think there is another $150 billion obligated out of that. That is one of the reasons we are not seeing the effect of the stimulus. One, it is not going to stimulate things, and it is not getting to where we need it.

I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and Coburn amendment No. 1879 be called up.

I am happy to yield.

Let me first discuss the amendment No. 1895. The American people need to know what this is.

This is a way to say we are following the law on everything in terms of contracting except if it is an earmark. That is what this amendment does. It says we will follow all the laws on contracting except if we have an earmark that we want some company to get that might be a political friend or political donor or might be something we think is better than somebody else might think. Dorgan 1895 essentially guts transparency for this country in terms of when we buy, what we buy, and how we buy.

My amendment says anything we buy is going to be competitively bid. Senator Dorgan may have something he believes in strongly and believes should be done. There is nothing wrong with that, especially if it is authorized. But there is plenty wrong with saying who is going to get the benefit from that being done, which company, which firm, which special interest group. Most often earmarks are for the well heeled, the well connected in this body. When I bring an amendment to the floor that says we will have transparency, the American people will get value. Even if we do an earmark, at least we know we will buy that earmark at a competitive price compared to what we could have bought it for otherwise.

What the Dorgan amendment does is guts that. It says we will follow the law all the time, the Federal contracting statutes, except when we have earmarked something. So what it does, it allows them to vote to say they are following the law with the exclusion of all earmarks. Whereas my amendment says if you are going to earmark something, at least in these times of trillions of dollars of deficit, maybe the American taxpayer ought to get the benefit of having it competitively bid so that we get real value for it. It is not any more complicated than that.

What we say in my amendment is if it is out there, get good value for the American people, competitively bid it. Make sure it is online. Make sure we follow all the rules and regs. Today it is much more important than ever because government purchasing is more important to those people whose businesses are down-sliding. So we are having many more people interested in competing for the dollars on government work. Yet we have an amendment that is going to be voted on side by side for political cover only that sounds good. It sounds good. It says:

None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available

by this Act may be used by the Department of Energy to enter

into any Federal contract unless such contract is entered

into in accordance with the requirements of the Federal

Property and Administrative Services Act . . . or Chapter 137

of title 10, United States Code, and the Federal Acquisition

Regulation, unless such contract is otherwise authorized by

statute . . .

That is code word for earmark, ``unless such contract is otherwise authorized by statute.''

If you vote for the Dorgan amendment, you want to continue to connect the well heeled, the well connected and you don't want transparency and you don't want competitive bid prices on what we as Americans pay through our tax dollars for what the government buys. It is as simple as that. What my amendment says is, each time, every time, unless it is in the interest of national security, we will, in fact, competitively bid. We may not all agree

where Senator Dorgan or I may want something done, but at least when we are doing it, we will buy it in a more efficient, more effective way and save money for the American taxpayer.

I ask for the yeas and nays on my amendment.

Is the order that we will pool votes for a later time?

I ask that the pending amendment be set aside and I call up amendment 1878; further, that it be in order to modify the amendment with the change I send to the desk. I understand Senator Dorgan has approved this change.

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

Mr. President, throughout this appropriations bill, we have a lot of reports we are asking agencies to come up with. This is another amendment about transparency. I appreciate the fact that the chairman and ranking member will accept this amendment.

What this says is, if we get a report, the agency has to report it to the American people. In other words, they have to publish it. We get to see what the results of that report are. There are exceptions for national intelligence and the military, but in those areas where there is not a reason for the American people not to see it in terms of national defense or our own security, what this amendment says is the agencies have to release the reports and put them online and make them available to the American people. You paid for the report; you ought to be able to see the results. Far to often around here, we get reports but only certain people get the reports. Some of us never get reports. So what this says is, the reports that come out of here that are not related to national security or defense and otherwise are appropriate will be made available by the agency to the American public.

With that, I yield to the chairman.

Mr. President, it is fine for us to accept it.

So I understand, Mr. President, we have accepted amendment No. 1878. I also understand that amendment No. 1884, which requires contracts, has a side-by-side with Dorgan amendment No. 1895.

Amendment No. 1879

Mr. President, is amendment No. 1879 pending?

At the Department of Energy, one of its tasks in this country is to help us with energy efficiency, to help us with a lot of what we would expect to be within the Department of Energy. It is peculiar, however, when the Department of Energy has looked at themselves, they are highly inefficient, according to their own inspector general, with the utilization of energy.

They have 9,000 buildings. The inspector general said last year they wasted at least $13.8 million in energy costs--$13.8 million. There is $13.8 million they could have saved had they done some small, simple, straightforward things like they request every other agency in the Federal Government to do. Isn't it ironic that the very agency that is telling all the rest of the agencies to save money by becoming efficient with their computers, by becoming efficient with their heating and cooling systems, by becoming efficient with their utilization of lighting, does not even follow their rules they ask the rest of the agencies to follow.

This is a very simple amendment. We know at least $13.8 million was wasted last year. That is probably just the tip of the iceberg. This amendment says we are going to reduce their funds by $13.8 million. And I can tell them the steps tomorrow as to how they can save $13.8 million so it will have no net effect on the agency. So with what we do, the American taxpayers get $13.8 million, as a minimum, of energy savings out of the Department of Energy. That is as straightforward as I can say it.

Here is another one of those reports that nobody reads except our staff, and you see the IG is doing their actual work, and now we are bringing an amendment to the floor. It has not been agreed to. It has not been accepted. But it is absolute common sense. I do not understand why it is not accepted, when the IG has plainly listed out where you can save the money and how you can do it. Why would we not reduce their funding to force them to do that?

So it is a no-net-revenue-loss for them because they are going to save the $13.8 million as they reconfigure computers, as they follow their own regulations within the Department of Energy. I will not go on in detail. But this is the kind of commonsense amendment we need to be doing in the Senate to hold the agencies accountable to follow their own rules, as they force everybody else to follow the same set of rules. This is not ``do as I do.'' This is ``do what you see us doing.'' That is the model, and that is the example.

Amendment No. 1884 to Amendment No. 1813

Mr. President, it is my understanding that amendment No. 1884 still needs to be called up. So at this time, I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment, call up amendment No. 1884, and then following its calling up, to set it aside and resume the present amendment.

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

Mr. President, it is my understanding we are back on the previous amendment.

One last point I would like to make is that the Department of Energy is responsible for numerous private sector energy- efficient programs and for the enforcement of those programs. It makes sense that if they are going to be the enforcer and be responsible, they ought to follow those same energy efficiencies to regain the confidence of the very people they are saying they want change from. It is pretty hard to expect people to swallow making changes for energy efficiency in all the rest of the government agencies when the very agency that is telling you to do it does not follow its own rules. So this is straightforward.

I know the appropriators do not like somebody coming and cutting money, but this is a no-net-cost to the agency. All they have to do is about 15 small steps--very inconsequential in terms of cost--and they can save almost $14 million next year. Probably they will save $20 million or $25 million, and that is just based on the two IG reports we have from the fall of last year and the spring of this year. So this is not old data. This is brandnew data. These are brandnew reports from the IG.

I hope my colleagues would reconsider and accept this amendment because it is one of the ways we can save $13.8 million. It is an easy deal.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, the Senator would admit, would he not, that the President's request is what he requested, it is not what was actually spent last year? That is No. 1. What you have done is cut $8 million from actual expenditures in administration last year.

So therefore would the Senator agree to accept my amendment to just adding $5.5 million to the $8 million you have already cut, because you are going to get it back in energy savings?

Mr. President, I enjoy my debates with the appropriators. I love you guys. I think it is great.

The one thing that was not mentioned is that in the stimulus bill the Department of Energy got an additional billion dollars. So there has been no net cut. There has actually been a massive increase in the Department of Energy when you count the stimulus bill.

No. 2 is, you have ramped up the FEMP the Federal Energy Management Program, by 50 percent, going from $22 million to $33 million, the very program that they are enforcing on everybody else. Yet they won't comply with it.

I also would say the Senate is going to get to decide this every time we have an appropriations bill as far as transparency in contracting. I may get smarter at the way I write it, but the American people deserve to have great value.

If you want to change the contracting law to say there are certain times we shouldn't do that in terms of highly specific scientific things, that is fine with me; but the fact is billions and billions and billions of dollars are well placed directly to businesses in this country at higher rates than they would have been otherwise had we had competitive bidding and open contracting. Nobody can deny that fact. Nobody can deny that fact. I am talking about all across the government.

So we are going to get a vote on competitive bidding on every appropriations bill that comes before the Senate. The American people get it. It is a great defense you are offering, but it isn't going to pass the smell test with the American people. They deserve the best value they can get on every penny we spend of their money, not our money.

I understand we think we have decided it. We are going to keep voting it; we are going to keep voting against it, and we are going to keep telling the American people we are still going to connect up with our buddies, we are still going to make sure these people who are well heeled and well connected are going to get the contracts.

I will grant to the chairman there are certain things that should be outside of this that are highly scientific, that are limited to very few potential bidders, and maybe even only one. But, remember, we have FutureGen going in Chicago now, a $2 billion earmark that is going to be a $4 billion earmark that is going to be a $6 billion earmark that we said only one person can do, and MIT says nobody can do it because the technology isn't finished. We have that going. That is a Department of Energy earmark. So it is not just hundreds of thousands of dollars; it is billions and billions and billions of dollars.

America should hear that what we are going to see is we have all the reasons in the world why we are not going to be competitively bid. We are going to give you all the reasons why we are not going to be efficient with your dollars, why now is not the time, why we shouldn't do this now. But the fact is that while we shouldn't be doing it, we are cutting the legs off of our children and grandchildren.

The Senator from Utah mischaracterizes both the intent and the function of the amendment. If something is already contracted that has already been appropriated for, it won't be affected. It is new contracts and new bids. That is the intent.

The reason I come with this is because nothing ever changes here. If, in fact, we pass my amendment, you know what. We will have to change the contracting. How do we change contracting with everything that is coming across the floor? How do we get it through committee? We will never move it until we are forced to move it.

That is why this amendment is written this way, because all of us know the great deal of difficulty to get anything done in this body.

So if, in fact--we are going to do three bills in the next 2 weeks: one on the transportation trust fund, one on unemployment insurance, and one on HUD that has to be done. They will get done. So the reason it is written this way is because it will have to get done and we will do it. We will never get it done the other way, and both of my colleagues recognize that there is truth in that statement.

I am going to insist we have a vote on the amendment. I thank the chairman and ranking member for their debate. I remind the American people that there is always an excuse in Washington not to have transparency, not to be efficient, and not to be effective. We will always find a way not to get good value for your money.

With that, I yield the floor.

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

That will be fine with me.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I am sorry I couldn't be down here this afternoon, and I apologize to my colleagues that we will have a delay on this bill, probably with cloture, until tomorrow morning. My statement is in no way meant to reflect any ill will on Senator Akaka or Senator Collins or Senator Voinovich or Senator Lieberman, but we have before us in this amendment something that is intolerable to the unemployed people in this country today, or should be intolerable to everybody.

In fact, what we are going to do is take $3.1 billion and give it to Federal employees in their retirement systems and adjustments to retirement systems when we have 9.5 percent unemployment and we have six States with over 15 percent. What we should be doing is taking that $3 billion and making sure we are creating jobs so people have jobs in this country rather than paying Federal workers.

I want to enter into the Record what the average pay and benefits are for Federal employees because most Americans are unaware.

The average Federal pay and benefit for an employee of the Postal Service is $80,353 a year. If you work at the Pentagon, but you are not a soldier, your average pay and benefit is $89,000 a year. If you are a soldier, it is about $25,000 less than that. The guy taking the bullets is making $25,000 less than the civilians working in the Pentagon. Then you have all the rest of the Federal employees, and their average is $113,000. That is twice what the average wage in this country is, and we have attached this amendment to this bill--an amendment which has nothing to do with the Defense Department, it has to do with adjusting pension benefits for Federal employees outside of the Defense Department.

I think our Federal employees are valuable, and I do not mind paying them. But I do mind spending more money at that level now when we have a large number of people who are unemployed. If we count people who are not looking for work anymore because they are so discouraged, we have over 15 percent unemployment. The very idea that we would take $3.2 billion from our grandkids to add to a program, when we have millions and millions of Americans not collecting a paycheck at all, to me, is inappropriate. We can't afford it because we are going to charge it to the next two generations. We don't have the money.

That reminds me. If we go back and talk about where we are in this country, we have the first $4 trillion budget ever, this year. That is what is going to be spent--$4 trillion in 1 year. We are spending $1 trillion more this year in the last 7 months than we did last year in this country. We have passed bill after bill after bill after bill that we can't afford to buy things that we don't need with money we don't have.

Let me, for my colleagues, read the unemployment rates throughout the country: Alabama, 10.1 percent; Alaska, 8.4; Arizona, 8.7; Arkansas, 7.2; California, 11.6; Colorado, 7.6; Connecticut, 8 percent; Delaware, 8.4 percent; Washington, DC, 10.9 percent; Florida, 10.6 percent; Georgia, 10.1; Hawaii, 7.4 percent; Idaho, 8.4 percent; Illinois, 10.3 percent; Indiana, 10.7 percent; Iowa, 6.2; Kansas, 7 percent; Kentucky, 10.9 percent unemployment; Louisiana, 6.8; Maine, 8.5 percent; Maryland, 7.3 percent; Massachusetts, 8.6 percent; Michigan, 15.2 percent.

What would the people of Michigan do with $3 billion to invest in jobs in Michigan right now?

Minnesota, 8.4 percent; Mississippi, 9 percent; Missouri, 9.3 percent; Montana 6.4 percent; Nebraska, 5 percent; Nevada, 12 percent; New Hampshire, 6.8 percent; New Jersey, 9.2 percent; New Mexico 6.8 percent; New York, 8.7 percent; New York, 11 percent; North Dakota, 4.2 percent; Ohio, 11.1 percent; Oklahoma, 6.3 percent; Oregon 12.2 percent; Pennsylvania, 8.3 percent; Puerto Rico, 14.5 percent; Rhode Island, 12.4 percent; South Carolina, 12.1 percent; Tennessee, 10.8. If I missed South Dakota, it is 5.1; Tennessee, 10.8 percent; Texas, 7.5 percent; Utah, 5.7 percent; Vermont, 7.1 percent; Virginia, 7.2 percent; Washington State, 9.3 percent; West Virginia, 9.2 percent; Wisconsin, 9 percent; and Wyoming 5.9 percent.

Those are just percentages. But you know what they represent? They represent real hard-core pain for American families today. The fact that we would have the gumption to come and take another $3 billion from them to increase the benefit structure of Federal employees at a time when what we should be doing is seeing how we can become more efficient in the Federal Government and spend less money in the Federal Government flies in the face of the difficulties that these individuals find themselves faced with.

If you look at what is actually happening to our country and take the 75-year projections, this year we are going to spend under $200 billion in interest. Eight years from now we are going to spend $806 billion in interest just on the interest rates we have today.

How many people believe we will have a Fed discount rate of a quarter of 1 percent 8 years from now and that we will be able to borrow money on a 10-year T-bill at 3.6 percent? It isn't going to happen. We are going down the road to destruction, and we are clueless about how to solve it.

So if we add up the 75-year projected unfunded liabilities for Medicare and if we add up the 75-year unfunded liabilities for Medicaid and if we add up the 75-year unfunded liabilities for Social Security and if we add up the 75-year unfunded liabilities for Federal employee retirement and if we add up the 75-year unfunded liabilities for military retirement and if we add up the 75-year unfunded liabilities for every other trust fund this Congress and Congresses before have robbed the money from to spend now--which should have been endowed-- what we come to is $100 trillion.

If we look at what our population is expected to be then, and the percentage that would not be working in the workforce--in other words, the very young children and the very large 40 percent of that population that is going to be retired--what we end up having is an unfunded obligation for every one of those people who are going to be the taxpayers of $500,000 apiece. That doesn't include the debt we have now, which is $11.4 trillion--which is going to double to $22 trillion over the next 10 years--and the internal debt of that will triple. So now we have $122 trillion worth of liabilities. Yet we are saying, now is the time to increase the benefits for Federal employees.

I don't deny that the Federal employees do great work. But when you look at what the average pay plus benefit is for Federal employees versus everybody else in the country, now is not the time to do it. Not only because, No. 1, we can't afford it; but, No. 2, it is patently unfair to everybody else in this country based on the average salaries.

So the fact that we would add an amendment onto the Defense bill-- because it is a bill that is going to move; there is no question it would not survive cloture--that doesn't bother me. I have done that a lot. What bothers me is that we lack the perspective of what is happening. We passed a $787 billion stimulus bill, of which only $80 billion has gone out the door. The unemployment rate is still rising-- and I am not critical. This body passed it. But it is not going to be highly stimulative because most of it was not meant to be stimulative. It was meant to be transfer payments. But we have spent that, and that is all borrowed money. We passed an omnibus. We passed a supplemental. None of that was paid for. Not a penny of it was paid for. That is all borrowed.

So what we have done is we are going to add $2.2 trillion to our debt this year, and now we have something that, well, it just adds a measly little $3.2 billion. But think about what $3.2 billion would do to help people who don't have a job in this country today. Instead, we are going to enhance the benefits of Federal employees. To me, it is an insult to every other worker who is out there who is either struggling to keep their job--and, by the way, we are going to add 100,000 Federal employees this year. So these numbers are underestimating what the real cost is.

Here is the amendment. It is 49 pages long. It has six major titles in it--adjusting. We allow people who left the government to come back and put their money back in, and we will say: Oh, you didn't leave, so you didn't lose any of your retirement. You still get it compounded.

We have institutionalized sick pay and we have made it an entitlement. We have said everybody who has ever worked for the DC government, they can work for the Federal Government and all of their retirement years will transfer to the Federal Government. But we don't do that for anybody else who works for any other State government. We certainly don't do that for people who have retirement plans from any other company. We don't add that retirement to the Federal Government's. So why are we doing things that are patently unfair to the rest of the American workforce in this country?

I plan on speaking on this bill until cloture ripens, which means we are going to be here all night. Until this amendment is withdrawn, I will stay here, or I will have a colleague stay here, and we will talk about how this country is out of control in its spending. We will talk about how we have failed the American people by not being good stewards; how we have not done oversight on the $350 billion worth of waste every year. Not one amendment has passed that has gotten rid of any of the waste that this government wastes every year. Not one has gotten through this Congress. Not one.

We are getting ready to work on a health care bill. We have been working on it. We have spent a ton of time on it. We have $120 billion worth of fraud in Medicare and Medicaid, but we haven't addressed that at all. It is not being addressed. We are twiddling our thumbs as Medicare goes bankrupt, while Medicare doesn't offer the services that are promised, and we are going to create another $1.6 trillion worth of cost for the American people. The only thing I can figure is that Washington thinks we can spend more money to save money in a significant way. We have been trying to do that since 1965 and it hasn't worked once, and it isn't going to work this time.

Let me mention, for a minute, just some of the things that we have been doing that do not fit with the priorities

of American citizens. It does not come anywhere close to matching what every family in this country is doing today. Here is what they are doing.

First of all, they are scared and they are fearful and they are worried. Do you know what they are doing? We see it in the economic statistics. When consumer spending drives normally 70 percent of our economy, we have the highest savings rate we have had in 40 years because they are afraid to spend. One of the reasons they are afraid to spend is because they don't trust what we are doing up here. They think things might get worse. I think things are going to get better, but they are certainly not going to get better by spending another $3.2 billion in this way.

What they do is they sit down as a family and they say here is what is coming in and here is the auto payment and here is the house payment and here is what we have to have for groceries and here is the utility bills. What is left? In other words, they make a list of priorities. They decide what has to be done, what must be done, but what they want to do comes last because we are in tough times. That applies to almost every family in this country. It implies heartaches because it means a father is not doing something he would like to do for his son or a mother is not buying a new dress for a daughter to help her own self- esteem in comparison with other children. It has real-world factors on families.

They make those hard decisions every day, absolutely every day. The reason they make those hard decisions is they do not lack the courage to face reality, such as we do. They also do not have the other option we have, and that is charging our lack of courage to the next two generations.

Most Americans are not cowards. They look at the real world, they look at what is responsible of them, what decision is going to have to be made. They dig in their heels, they work and work to solve the problem, and they will go through tough times doing the very best they can to make good of a bad situation.

That is opposite the behavior this place has been displaying. We have ignored the fact that we have $11.4 trillion worth of debt. We passed a stimulus spending bill, of which less than $150 billion was true stimulus. We have created dependencies of, now, the States. Anytime they are in tough times, they have now been infected with our illness: Don't worry about it, we will just charge it to the next generation. Because every State we helped through the stimulus we did charge it to the next generation. We have now instituted lack of discipline by every State legislature in the country because now they no longer have to worry about it. The Senate will just borrow from their grandkids and send it to them and now they don't have to worry about it, they don't have to have any courage to make the tough decisions.

What all have we done that would secure the honor of the American people, that we are working for them? What symbol have we given them, in terms of limiting our excesses in Washington, that might give them hope?

The Akaka amendment is the opposite of that. It is saying: You don't get it, your priorities are not right. You think you can forget what has happened to us. You think you can charge it to our grandchildren and our children. You think you can steal their opportunity and nobody is ever going to know it.

I have barked up this tree a lot in the last 5 years in this body, and I am not ever going to stop barking up this tree because it is morally wrong to steal the future from your grandchildren. It is morally wrong. It is not just ethically wrong, it is not just conveniently wrong, it is morally wrong to take the great attributes of this country away from your children and grandchildren. It is time for some grownups to start making hard decisions that may cost us reelection but are in the best long-term interests of this country.

So this issue is not going to go away. I may ultimately get defeated on it, but those families out there who do not have a job, those families out there making those hard choices every day--every night worrying where is the money to buy the food that is going on the table the next day, who still have a job--they are going to know somebody is going to fight for some common sense in the Senate.

There is no question, I lost this amendment in committee. I was mortified at the lack of sensitivity to the rest of this country, placing Federal employees' very good benefits--enhancing those above the negatives that are occurring to every family in this country based on our economic situation. Even if we were not having a tough economic time, it would still be wrong to do this. It would still be incorrect to do this.

If you think for a minute about what it costs to fund the interest costs on $500,000--if it is 6 percent, it is $30,000 a year. If I were a schoolteacher here and we had a blackboard, I would be making everybody write home that I am sorry I am stealing $30,000 a year from each of your children. That is what I would be doing--I am sorry I am stealing $30,000 a year just to pay the interest, never mind paying the principal off, on what we have accumulated.

Take a young child 6 years of age today and extrapolate that out to right before their retirement. What you have done is you have stolen their opportunity to have the American dream because it is not just going to be the $30,000, because all the years they can't work it is going to build that they will have to pay and all the years in their retirement are going to be less because they will not have the benefits.

By the way, if you are a Federal employee and unhappy with me trying to defeat this amendment, you should pay attention to something. There is no guarantee to your Federal pension based on the economics we face today in this country. If you think it is guaranteed, you have another thought coming because the world economic system is going to determine whether we can honor that pension. That is what is coming. We are very close.

It was not long ago that Alan Greenspan was asked a question: What is the maximum limit which we can borrow? There is a lot of question about whether people want to loan us money anymore. What he said is, I don't know what it is, but I can tell you we are getting very close.

What happens to us when we tap out? You know, he is not an unrespected thinker in materials of economics and banking.

Here is what happens to us. Interest rates that are 3.6 percent for a 10-year government note go to 7 percent, 8 percent, 9 percent, 10 percent. All of a sudden, the cost of funding our debt becomes $2 or $3 trillion a year, 20 years from now. What is the option? The option is there not be any government pensions, there will not be any Medicare. We will barely have money to defend our country. All these wonderful Federal programs that we have, most of which have a duplicate somewhere in the Federal Government that they defend, that we cannot get rid of because they have a constituency that somebody might be afraid, if we eliminate some of the $350 billion in waste, fraud, and duplication, they are not going to be there.

So what it comes down to and what we are facing is, can our Republic survive our excesses? Can we survive this tremendous direction that we have stepped away from reality, saying economic forces do not apply to us? The answer to that is no. There will not be a Federal pension when interest is at 10 or 12 percent and we have $35 or $40 trillion worth of debt.

Certainly.

Over the first 10 years, $3.3 billion.

It is another trick and game. There is an assumption it will be paid back, but it will never be paid back. What it will do is increase the obligations of the Federal taxpayer--that is myself and you and all your families and everybody we represent--the liabilities of the people who are going to get the benefit from this amendment.

There is no connection between this amendment and the Defense authorization bill.

Mr. President, I wish to finish my line of thought because what I sense is the American people get it and we do not. The American people are worried we do not get it. They are worried we think we can continue spending money, not reform things, not make things more efficient, not eliminate duplication. What they know is this is not monopoly money. They know this is not ``not real money.'' They know this issue about us having common sense, about us being fiscally responsible--they know the future of their children and their grandchildren depends on whether we start acting the same way every other family in this country has to act. That is in the real world. It is not in the world of Washington that: Don't worry, we will put it off because the next election is much more important than I addressing this and taking the next tough vote. We are going to put it off.

I say to my colleagues, I have plenty of topics. I am going to spend the next couple hours going through waste so the American people can actually see how well we have done with their money--waste and earmarks and things that benefit the well-heeled and the well-connected but hurt your children and hurt your grandchildren.

Before I do that, I wish to spend a moment talking about what the heritage of our country is. How did American exceptionalism come into being? How is it that this became the greatest country in the world, that had more technological advances than anybody else in the world? That created the highest standard of living of any society ever known in the world? What was the glue, what was the key, what was the characteristic that allowed that to happen?

I will tell you what it was. It was called sacrifice. If you think back four or five generations in your family and you try to find out what was going on, no matter what your racial background is or what your lineage is, what you saw was people willing, absolutely willing to sacrifice the short term to make sure the long term was better for their children, their family, and their grandchildren. That is what I call a heritage of sacrifice. It is what made us great. It is what created this vast, great country.

I am sorry to say that, since I entered the area of public service-- and one of the reasons I entered it was because I didn't see this trait--is that, since 1994 I have not seen any change. Actually, it is worse.

When you take the oath to be a Senator, what it says is you will do what the Constitution says. You will uphold it, you will make sure it is protected, that you will follow it.

I have a bill, it is called the Enumerated Powers Act. It has a lot of cosponsors, but none of the big spenders here want to cosponsor it. Do you know why? Because it creates a challenge for wasteful spending. What it says is what our Founders thought was pretty important. They very clearly, in article I, section 8 of our Constitution, listed out what the responsibilities of the Federal Government are. They listed them out. What Madison and Jefferson wrote about when they wrote in article I, section 8, they said people are going to try to say it is something different than this. They are trying to say the general welfare clause is we can do anything we want. The commerce clause is-- don't believe them. That is not what we intended. Yet that happens every day in this body. We abandon the intent.

We just had a hearing on a Supreme Court nominee and one of the questions she was asked by a lot of us was: Are you going to uphold the Constitution?

Well, my thoughts and prayers would be that she will do a better job than we do, because we get an F. And the American people know it. They know we cannot tolerate this spending. They know we cannot tolerate this debt. They know we cannot tolerate raising taxes on the American people if we are going to hope to get out of this. Their wisdom needs to be brought here. And the way you bring your wisdom here is to let us know. Hold us accountable. Call, e-mail, go to the offices, write to our homes, make sure that people who are representing you uphold that oath of fulfilling the Constitution, honoring the tenth amendment.

You know, our Founders in the Bill of Rights put in the tenth amendment, and it is a very important amendment, because it says: Whatever is not spelled out specifically under article I, section 8-- here is the limited things the Federal Government is supposed to do--is explicitly reserved for the States and for the people.

So how is it that we are going to have a $2 trillion deficit this year? I can tell you how it is. It is because we have ignored the Constitution. We have done things that are totally outside the realm our Founders thought we would ever do. We have taken over things that are truly the responsibilities of the States and the communities and individuals. We have created dependency by the States, created dependency in all sorts of others.

I got a letter last week asking me to sponsor money for fire engines for Oklahoma. When did buying firetrucks for Oklahoma become a part of the U.S. Constitution? Am I supposed to steal money from people in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and New York so Oklahoma can have fire engines, which is an Oklahoma responsibility? It is not even an Oklahoma responsibility; it is a community responsibility.

As we create this dependency, we create something that is worse after it. If you cannot get it, you all of a sudden are a victim. That is why earmarks are so bad, because what they do is keep us from making the great and hard decisions we should make because we benefit from it politically.

That is why several of us have fought since we have been here to change the earmarking process so that the American people can see what it is about. And what you will see, you watch on this bill, on the appropriations bills that follow, is if somebody has an earmark in this bill, they will never vote against it. Because what they will be told by the chairman or ranking member of the committee the next time they go to request something is: Oh, you requested something. I put it in the bill, but you did not vote for the bill, so I am not going to give it to you.

What happens is, instead of looking at the content of a bill and the best long-term interests of the country, we look at the content of the earmark and how we look back home to the well-heeled and the well- connected few, the source of campaign, the source of political empowerment, instead of looking at our oath that says: You will follow the Constitution.

There is no question we have the right to say where money goes. And there is no question we should be able to have earmarks if they are authorized, which means that a committee of your peers, through the Appropriations Committee, says: This is something we as a country ought to do. But you will not see that. What you see are not authorized earmarks. They do not go through a committee of your peers. So it becomes the very foul stink that ends up corrupting the whole system of following that Constitution and being loyal to that oath.

In 2016, every American is going to pay $13,000 on the national debt--think about that--for interest. I said that wrong. Every American family is going to be responsible for $13,000 worth of interest on the national debt. That is if it does not grow a penny from now. And we know we are going to have trillion-dollar deficits from now for as long as we can see under the budget that has passed this body.

The average American family, do you have $13,000? Do you have $13,000 for us to continue the excess of uncontrolled spending in Washington, the excess of failing to do our job to eliminate waste and fraud and duplication? Do you have it? Maybe you ought to call us and borrow it from the Senators. Maybe you ought to ask us for it since we are the ones labeling you with it.

So as you hear what we are saying today when we talk about what is going on, these are not just words; they are real facts that affect real lives, that limit opportunity, that steal this wonderful country from us and our kids. Because what is happening is we are slowly putting handcuffs on ourselves. We are slowly diminishing our ability to be creative. We are slowly taking away the opportunity and the freedom with which we have excelled.

If, in fact, the government said more about how you live your life than you say how you live your life, you have lost freedom. You have lost it. As we encounter this mountain, this truly high mountain of debt, what is going to happen is those handcuffs are going to get tighter and tighter--they are not going to get tighter, they are going to get closer and closer together before we have little ability to get out of them, little opportunity to change.

We are close to being on an irreversible course. What we do and how we do it over the next 2 years in this country is going to determine whether your children live in freedom. And I do not mean controlled by a dictator, I am talking about having the freedom to have the opportunity to work hard, to develop your skills, to take risks, and to hopefully reward yourself and your family so that, in fact, you can be benevolent to someone else who may not be able to do that. That is what America is all about.

We are losing. It is going away. And it goes away every week in this body. Every week that we create another new government program that limits your freedom and puts a bureaucrat between you and your choice, it goes away. Quite frankly, we have gotten pretty good at stealing your freedom.

For me and the people I represent, we have had enough. We have had enough of the government deciding everything for us. We have had enough of judges not following the Constitution. We have had enough of Federal bureaucrats limiting our property rights, and what we can do on our own property. We have had enough of people telling us what our freedoms are and what they are not. We have had enough of the Federal bureaucracy in education ruining our schools rather than giving us the freedom to educate the children the way we want; taking our taxes, absorbing 20 percent and sending 80 percent back and saying: You can have this money if you do this, this, this, and this. It is interesting, in the Constitution, there is no role for Federal education, no role for the Federal Government to be involved in education. None. Zero. Where did we get the idea that 80 percent of the people who work in the Department of Education, who do not know how to teach a child, should be telling the teachers in this country what to teach, and what to do, and what they can get paid for and what they cannot.

That is a loss of freedom, folks. You have a bureaucracy in Washington that determines the outcome of what your children's education is going to be, rather than you determining what that outcome will be.

I will yield for a question.

I would answer the Senator, yes, but it is even worse in another way, and it is this: You know, we are not going to get killed by one big punch. It is going to be the little pinpricks. This is another pinprick. The fact is, I would love for our Federal employees to get this benefit. But we cannot afford it, one.

No. 2, it is highly unfair to everybody else out there trying to struggle right now to pay the taxes that pay those salaries. No. 3 is, we do not even have the money to fund the pensions for the Federal employees that we have promised right now. So it is about us getting it wrong. Our priorities are wrong. That is my whole point. There is no common sense to what we are doing.

Sure, it is nice, you can be lauded by all of the Federal employees: You did this. You did this. You can get their vote. But what about the future of our Republic? What is going to happen to us?

I have a granddaughter who is going to be born in the next 2 weeks, and I am wondering if she will even recognize what I knew to be what we were like in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, because the freedom, the diminution of our freedom in this country has been massive. It is in direct correlation with the size of the growth of the Federal Government, directly correlated.

The bigger the Federal Government is, the less freedom we have. As it gets smaller, we can possibly get back some of our freedom. But we are talking about growing the Federal Government, we are talking about making it bigger. We are talking about having it more involved in every aspect of our life and taking away the ability of you and your family to make critical decisions about your family.

Are we totally dependent on the Federal Government? If that is where we are, our freedom is lost. If we have decided we do not need the States any more, get rid of all of the State legislatures; the Federal Government is doing it all anyway. And we do it so efficiently and so well, you can interact with your bureaucrat so well. They always make sense, they are always 100 percent responsible. That is garbage.

The fact is, the farther away your government is from you, the less control you have over it. There is no need, if we continue the direction we are in, to have a city council. We are directing what you have got to do on street lights now. We are going to tell you what car you can drive.

I thank the Senator from Alabama for his question. I appreciate his help on a lot of these issues.

This is not anything other than a departure point for our country. So let me spend a little time--first, let me tell you how good of a job we do. We passed a $787 billion stimulus bill of which $70 billion is out the door. So not even 10 percent, maybe 10 percent by this week; I have not checked the Web site this week to see.

Let's talk about what has gone out the door. What has gone out the door in my home State in Perkins, OK, that to get the money for a new water sewage system that the Federal Government said they had to have-- State government did not say it, the Federal Government did--they had to spend an extra $2 million to build a water disposal and sewage plant that originally was going to cost $4 million. Now it costs $6.2 million. Guess what they got from the Federal Government--$1.5 million.

Think about that for a minute. Here is the stimulus. There is no question some jobs are being created from that. There is no question the citizens of that town will have to pay higher water rates and sewage rates to get a new plant. But what we did in the meantime of having the Federal Government involved in it is we raised the net cost of it by $500,000 so that the people who are going to benefit from it are going to end up paying water rates, sewage rates, at elevated levels for a longer period of time because the Federal Government got involved in it.

It doesn't mean we didn't need the sewage plant. We did. It didn't mean the city fathers didn't do the best thing they could for the city. They had to get a bond. So when somebody comes up and says, I am the Federal Government, here is $1.5 million, take it; and you say, maybe I can help my city out and get this thing done--except the net result of that is, it will actually end up costing $2 million more--ask yourself a question: If you were to build a garage onto the back of your house and the Federal Government says: We will give you a grant to help you do that, but when you finish up, the net cost to you is going to be about 8 to 20 percent more than what it would have cost if you did it yourself, are you going to take that deal? No, you are not.

This is money that is already out the door on the stimulus. It is an example of what happens when we lose common

sense and when we lose economic parameters with which to make decisions.

No. 2, in the stimulus was, heretofore, before we got to the health care bill that we just passed out, was the largest earmark in history, $2 billion. Here we have FutureGen. Let me tell you what we know about FutureGen. The idea behind it is pretty good. Let's figure out if we can take coal and make it absolutely clean and take the carbon dioxide out of it and sequester the carbon dioxide and use this resource we have and have a totally nonpolluting coal plant for generating electricity. Good idea, right? It got canceled in late 2007 because the Department of Energy, relying on a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said: We don't have the technology to do it. You shouldn't spend the money. The technology isn't there.

Isn't it funny, in 4\1/2\ months that report gets ignored and we put a $2 billion earmark in to build a coal plant that we don't have the technology for? Let me explain what will happen. We will spend that $2 billion, but when the $2 billion is gone, they are going to come back and say: We almost got it. How about $2 billion more? We will get another $2 billion earmark and another $2 billion earmark, and 5 to 10 years from now, we will have $24 billion in it. Then they will either do one or two things. They will say: We finally figured it out, which means had we waited to build on it a small prototype plant and perfected the technology, we could have done it for 5 percent of that, or they will say: It just didn't work. We can't do it. But we did it on the basis of parochialism and the enhanced interest of some power companies that were well-heeled and well connected to this body. So now we have $2 billion of your money going to a project that MIT says the technology isn't finished yet, and we should not be spending any money to build a final plant. Yet we did it. Yet the claim was that there weren't any earmarks in the stimulus bill.

Here is another fact that a lot of people don't know. Every fact I will give you I can absolutely document, either from the Department of Transportation or somewhere else. We have over 230,000 major bridges in disrepair. Remember Minneapolis. We have tons of those bridges. I am not saying they will collapse, but structurally they have been deemed to need repair.

The stimulus bill spent $24 billion on roads, highways, and bridges. We should have spent $100 billion because we really would have created four times as many jobs. We would have bought things we know we will have to buy anyhow, and we would have fixed problems we know we have today. If we are going to borrow money against our kids' future, it ought to be on high-priority items that will truly benefit us and our kids rather than that which is not going to benefit us.

Here we have Wisconsin, which has 1,256 structurally deficient bridges--more than Florida, Colorado, Arizona, and Alaska combined. Instead of fixing those, they put $58 million into bridge repair to repair 37 rural bridges that people hardly ever use. Why? How? How did it happen? We have interstate highway bridges that need to be repaired that have tens of thousands of cars going over them every day, and instead we repair a bridge to a bar. I guess that Rusty's Backwater Saloon is more important than the safety of kids on the highway.

Then we have a Florida project. When we build highways today, especially interstates, we put these eco-passages underneath them so that wild animals--sometimes cattle, if they are connected lands--can have transportation underneath the highway without going around. Good idea. In Florida, we have a highway sitting there, and less than a couple miles down the road we have an eco-passage, and a couple miles up the road we have one. We are going to spend $3.4 million to put another one in because too many turtles are crossing the road and getting hit. Maybe that is OK. But when we have a $11.4 trillion debt, we are going to run a $2 trillion deficit this year, when everything we are spending this year--50 cents out of every dollar we spend, we are borrowing on the backs of our children--should we be spending this kind of money on turtles? There are plenty of turtles in Florida. It is probably not going to have an ecological impact. But is that a priority? Is that something we should be doing? I think not.

We have a nonprofit that got fired for doing weatherization contracts in one of our States, for poor performance and noncompliance. We get the stimulus, and guess who gets the contract--somebody who has already cheated the taxpayers. Nevada. Somebody has already been fired for noncompliance and not doing appropriate work, and the first thing we do is we hire them back. Do you think there might not have been a political connection with the person who got that contract? Think it is strange?

Here is my favorite. This is Oklahoma. In the wonderful wisdom of the Corps of Engineers, back in the late 1940s and 1950s in western Oklahoma--fairly arid land, good for raising cattle, and where you can get irrigation, it is great for growing wheat--we built a dam and a spillway and generation and everything. Only one problem: There never was any water that came to the lake.

So we have this little road that runs along the edge of it, and they replaced the guardrails 2 years ago. Less than 10 cars a day in the regular summer season go across this, 3 average in the winter. The Corps of Engineers decides, since we have all this money, we need to replace the guardrails. The reason they wanted to replace the guardrails is they are an inch and a half too short for the 10 cars that go by there. But if you run off the road, you run into something down there that is dry as a bone. You don't run into a lake. But because the Corps has the code that you have to have guardrails on anything around a lake, even if you don't have a lake there, we are going to spend millions of dollars putting guardrails around a nonexistent lake because the bureaucratic code is: Never do what is best when you can do what is good for you. Here goes millions of dollars to build guardrails. I pretty well have gotten this one stopped by having my staff out there with the Corps, but had I not done it, we would have spent the money.

What are we doing? Do you like the fact that the Federal Government is involved in all this? Do you think they are exhibiting wisdom and prudence?

We can take Elizabethtown, PA. They have had an old train station that hasn't been used in 30 years. Granted, they could maybe use a train station, but they have been getting along pretty well without one for 30 years in this particular location. We are going to spend millions of dollars to renovate an old train station, not because we have a need but because we have money to spend and it will create a job.

There is nothing wrong with having deficit spending, in terms of Keynesian economics, to try to stimulate the economy, but there ought to be a priority that what we spend the money on actually, in fact, is a long-term benefit that we would have spent the money on anyway. When we throw the money out there and we roll the dice, what happens is, yes, we get a benefit. We get the millions of dollars spent on our behalf. It gets spent on our behalf. But was it the best way to spend the money? Was there another priority that would have been better, that would have created more jobs, that was something we truly have to have, that would have created a permanent job, that would have helped truly stimulate the economy? Those questions are not getting asked.

Here is another one of my favorites. Part of the stimulus was that we give seniors a check. I don't understand that, but we did. But the IRS sent checks to 10,000 dead people. It can happen. I could see how that could happen, but 10,000? So if we are sending checks to 10,000 dead people on a stimulus, what else are we not doing right at the IRS and every other agency? I think it totaled $25 million.

Here is another one of my favorites: Union, NY. The town of Union was surprised when it was notified that it would be receiving a $578,661 stimulus grant to prevent homelessness for several reasons. Here is another interesting point: They never applied for the grant. Second, they don't have a homeless problem. ``Union did not request the money and does not currently have any homeless programs in place in the town to administer such funds,'' said the town supervisor, John Bernardo. ``We were surprised. We were never a recipient before.'' He is not aware of

any homeless issue in the largely suburban town. Where did that one come from? Where is the connection? The people at the Department of Housing and Urban Development just sent them a check. It is not their money. Get the money out the door. Send it to somebody who doesn't need it. When asked about it, HUD just sent the money to every town based on its population, whether it had a homeless problem or not.

When did it become, under the Constitution, a Federal responsibility rather than a community responsibility to take care of homeless people? As we shift that responsibility to the Federal Government, what happens to the freedom of your hometown to care for homeless people? When you get the money from the Federal Government come the rules and regulations on what you will do and how you will do it. Rather than a community-based or a church-based homeless shelter, now you will follow these regs and do these things if you want our help.

What is our help? Our help is taking money from you, filtering it through Washington, wasting 20 percent of it, and then sending it back to you to tell you what you already know how to do, except now they will tell you how to do it and give you 35 pieces of paper and forms to fill out as you tell them how you spent your money that they took 20 percent of to care of your homeless that you should have never sent the money to Washington for in the first place.

Let me spend time--I will pick and choose through a few of these. The Federal Government gives weatherization grants to help people weatherproof their homes. We have been doing this for over 25 years, and we continue to spend more and more money on it every year. Either we are not doing a good job or we have weatherized every home in the country and we are starting to do it a second time.

But here is one from Illinois, where they took the weatherization grant and bought eight pickup trucks for the county--under a weatherization grant.

In Wisconsin, a nursing home got $2.8 million in stimulus money it did not need or request. Prior to the stimulus funding, the Knapp Haven Nursing Home was on track for a loan from the USDA. In other words, they had the finances set up to get a loan to where they could repay it. When the stimulus money came available, the funding source was shifted to a new source of Federal assistance. Carmen Newman, the city clerk-treasurer said:

It's kind of a joke as far as I'm concerned. I don't

understand how they can say this is stimulus.

They were going to do it anyway. The mayor of that city said:

I don't see how the project benefited.

Well, somebody benefited. But somebody also lost, and that was our kids and our grandkids.

Here is a good one: Iowa State legislators are using money freed up by the Federal stimulus cash to buy $11 million in new cars the State does not need. About four dozen brandnew cars owned by the State are already sitting unused in a parking lot near the capitol. According to State Representative Christopher Rants:

Some of them [still] have the [sales] stickers on them.

None of them have license plates. Some of them still have

their seats wrapped in plastic.

But we are going to buy the cars because we got the money. So see what is happening here? There is no priority. Because the money comes in, spend it. Even though you have excess cars sitting in the parking lot, you buy it. Spend it or lose it.

Michigan is going to spend $500,000 to renovate an old freight house for a yoga class. There is no question if you renovate an old warehouse and you employ people to do that, you will stimulate the economy. The criticism here is, are there not other things more important in Michigan that we could spend $500,000 on that would create more permanent jobs, long-lasting jobs, and be of stronger benefit to the community?

The only reason I question this is because it came through the Federal Government down there. If that money came through the statehouse or the city, I would have no business questioning it at all. But in light of where we find ourselves as a country, it is difficult for me to see the priorities that are expressed.

In Macomb, IL, $643,945 was spent on a Prairieview public housing parking lot that nobody wants. Many of the residents whom the parking lot was supposed to benefit have protested it. Explaining his concern, a local resident said: The kids love the grass. We have enough pavement already for all the cars here. We need a playground.

But we are going to pour concrete over it because we have the money to do it--another wasted priority.

In Chicago, rather than help welfare recipients obtain jobs and escape poverty, $1 million will be used to study whether 300 people in Chicago are healthier when living in a ``green'' public housing facility. The study will evaluate whether green housing is healthier for people and will focus on 300 residents at a Chicago public housing facility. Researchers expect to find that residents living in these more energy-efficient facilities will have much lower health care costs. The study will create jobs because it will get two or three people to interview the residents.

Oh, here is another priority that came out of the stimulus. The National Institutes of Health has given an Indiana University professor a grant of $356,000. Maybe this is OK but not now. It is not OK where we find ourselves. But here is what they are going to do with it. They are going to ``test how children perceive foreign-accented speech compared to native-accented speech.'' It will also determine how such accents might influence speech development in children.

I do not doubt that might, in fact, be something we want to study. But we still have a lot of women in this country with a lot of disease and we have a lot of men in this country with a lot of disease. I am not sure accents are as important as studying ways to lower health care costs or funding a professor to do research on one of the cancers that are plaguing our country. How about buying H1N1 flu vaccine? Might that not be a better expenditure of that money? In other words, priorities get lost.

Detroit Public Schools will reap massive benefits from the stimulus despite a $150 million deficit. According to the Intelligencer--that is, evidently, a newspaper in the area--financial management problems became ``so tangled the state recently appointed a manager to take the financial reins.'' The Detroit Public School System stands to get $530 million, which $355 million would have ``no strings attached.''

So we have a school system that has been totally irresponsible with their financing and the management of their money, and what do we do with the stimulus? We reward the incompetence and then give them twice that amount to pull them out of a hole rather than fix the real problem.

Consequences to our behavior are a great learning episode for all of us, no matter how old we are. If we are very young and we touch the hot stove, we learn it is hot. When we are adolescents and we do some of the stupid things we do as adolescents, we learn from them. Do you know what. Governments do not learn, and that is because governments do not have compassion. Only people have compassion. And when you bail out a school system that has been irresponsible, without them suffering the consequences--and I know the answer is: Well, the kids suffer the consequences. That is right. We all suffer the consequence. You do not think kids are suffering the consequences right now in our economy?

So this one is just cute. You will love it. Yale University and the University of Connecticut are going to get $850,000--they have already gotten it, by the way--in stimulus money for research ``to study how paying attention improves performance of difficult tasks.''

Did you ever hit your thumb with a hammer? Studying that paying attention helps you with difficult tasks? I do not know who thinks these things up. But, more importantly, it does not matter who thinks them up. Who would give a grant for that? I am not opposed to giving grants for sound scientific study. But do you know what. We already know the answer this thing is going to give us--a statistically significant answer: You do better if you pay attention; and you do not do as well if you do not. It is pretty straightforward.

Hanscom Field, MA, where we are going to put excess money for additional runways, has received criticism

from local representatives, including a State representative from Lexington. The State legislative leaders did not want us to do it. But do you know what. We did it anyway. The people who represent the area, the political leaders, did not want it to happen because they thought it promoted irresponsible corporate behavior. Do you know what we did? We did it anyway. It goes back to that point we were talking about: freedom. When you give it to us, you lose it. We are supposed to be the bastion that protects your freedom, and what we have become, through this myriad number of Federal programs and spending, is we have been the ones who are taking away your freedom.

In Oklahoma, I trap armadillos in my yard. They come in and they will ruin a good yard because they like grub worms. So all you have to do is to lay a few marshmallows out and then put a marshmallow or two in the trap cage and you will catch those suckers.

Well, that is what Washington is doing to the American liberty. We bite the first little bite off the marshmallow and say: Oh, that tastes good. I got a little benefit here. There is no connection between what I have done and me receiving this benefit. And then we take another little bite off the marshmallow or the next one in. And all of a sudden, before you know it, this armadillo--that runs at night mainly that my dogs chase into the woods every time they see one of them-- pretty soon that armadillo fellow is in my cage. I got him. The reason I got him is he kept thinking he could get something for nothing. He kept thinking: Man, that is a sweet marshmallow.

So what happens is, here he comes down the road, like us--us promising more, promising more--but, remember, whatever we are promising to give you, we have already taken from you. And when we take it from you, we lessen your liberty, to a great extent. We steal your liberty. We steal your choice. We steal your freedom. We steal your ability to be whom you want to be. We steal your ability to be the parent you want to be because we are interjecting us in the education system between you and your child. We are interjecting and planting the seeds of a lack of responsibility and accountability, as we bite the marshmallow, as we walk into the trap, and the cage closes.

There are two things I do with those armadillos--one of two things. I either put them in the back of my pickup and take them 10 or 15 miles away from my property or I shoot them. That is exactly what is going to happen to us. We are either going to be carried far away from what we know, we trust, and believe in to be right or we are going to be extinct as a nation. We are going to lose the wonderful flavor of the greatest Nation that has ever been on this Earth. We are going to lose--and we are doing that--we are losing it, a little bit at a time because we are similar to the frog that climbed into this wonderful pot of water that slowly and slowly heated up, and he never thought to jump out because, before he knew it, he could not.

So I have just listed about 30 of the first 1,000 projects that went out on the stimulus so you can get a flavor as to what kind of judgment is being made with the money we stole from our grandchildren. I would say we are not doing great. I voted for a stimulus bill that would have spent almost $500 billion--I didn't vote for this one, but it was real stimulus. It was real roads, it was real bridges, it was real sewage plants. It included things we were going to have to do. It was really resetting the military because we are going to buy a whole bunch more military. We are going to be forced to do it. To buy it now will create job after job after job, and it will save us money because we are going to buy it now at a cheaper price than what we will pay 5 years from now.

So I am not critical of having stimulus. I am critical of how we manage it, what we are doing about it, and the severe lack of oversight that Members of this body daily fail to do. They do not do the job demanded of them. It is not enough for us to say where the money is spent. What is required of us is to say where the money is spent and then make sure it is spent wisely, prudently, and in the best interests of everybody in this country, not in the best interests of our next election cycle.

I quoted earlier $350 billion worth of pure waste, fraud, and abuse every year in this country. It is not fair for me to quote that without going through it for you so you can actually see where it is. I did this last year, so I am sure it is worse this year since we have not had the courage to do anything about fixing the problems that cause this. But let me go through it. These are either department agency numbers, CBO numbers, inspector general numbers, or General Accounting Office numbers. They are not Tom Coburn's numbers. Every one of them can be backed up.

Medicare fraud: At a minimum, $80 billion a year. We are contemplating a health care bill. We have Medicare that is upside down, both Part A and Part B, running in the red, and is projected to run into the trillions of dollars. Name something that has been done on that in the last 2 years, 3 years, by us. Medicare improper payments, net loss--in other words, we paid out more than we should or we paid out less than we should--the net difference is $10 billion, so now we are at $10 billion a year.

Medicaid fraud at a minimum--and the reason we say it is at a minimum is because Medicaid can't even tell us what their fraud is. They can't even report it--$30 billion. Improper payments, net loss, $15 billion.

So now we are at $135 billion and we have just gone through two programs.

Social Security disability fraud: I hear every day in my office from people in my State about people who are getting disability who are absolutely not disabled, but they get the check. They are living off us, but they can actually go to work and do something. At a minimum, it is estimated to be--I think this is a very low number, and it doesn't mean I don't want to help people with disability if they are truly disabled. But everybody out in the country will know somebody who is collecting a check who can still ride their horse, still run their rotor tiller, still lay brick, or still do anything else they want, but they can't work: $2.5 billion.

Government-wide improper payments in all of the other agencies, but seven of them we still don't have any reporting on, even though the law says they have to report. It is a Federal law you have to report your improper payments every year, but they don't do it. Of the ones that do report, another $15 billion net loss of paying out more than they should. That is just on the agencies that report.

Maintenance of buildings by the Defense Department that they will not use in the future nor do they use now, but we can't sell them because we have all of these laws in Congress that create an impossibility for us to get them to the market. We have created a bureaucratic nightmare that takes about 10 years to put a building up for sale. We are spending in the Defense Department $3 billion that could go for soldier pay, health care for our veterans, health care for our soldiers; $3 billion to maintain buildings that are sitting empty and to maintain security for them.

We have contracting problems. The bill before us, the Defense authorization--everybody recognizes we have a significant problem with contracting in this country. This data comes not from last year but from the year before last. The Department of Defense paid out $8 billion for performance awards to contractors who did not earn the awards. In other words, they had a contract. Here are the requirements to meet the contract. They didn't meet the requirements of the contract. The Department of Defense paid them anyway. It hasn't stopped, folks. Where is the connection?

It is estimated by GAO that at a minimum, if we eliminated no-bid contracts everywhere in the Federal Government--most earmarks, by the way, are no-bid contracts; it is a sweetheart deal--we would save, at a minimum, $5 billion a year--at a minimum--probably closer to $7 billion or $8 billion. Just to eliminate no-bid contracts pays for the entire budget of the State of Oklahoma for 1 year. Every expense we have, just 1 year of eliminating no-bid contracts would have that kind of savings.

Then we have the wonderful trick: we send bills through here that are supposedly emergency supplementals, and we add all of these things of extra spending onto them that aren't emergencies. It is kind of like an earmark process, except the difference is they

don't have to be within the budget numbers, so they just go straight to the bottom line against our kids. So it doesn't pull back any spending anywhere else, but we spend this money anyhow, and that is another $15 billion a year that the Members of Congress do outside of the budget.

So let's see here. We are at $184 billion. We have a crop insurance program that benefits the crop insurance industry but not the farmers, but we refuse to modernize it. We can save $4 billion if we modernize it, but we don't modernize it because the effect and power of the well- heeled and well-connected keeps us from doing what is right.

Then we send $5.9 billion to the U.N. every year. We know--and this is a report we finally got forced to get out of there; it got leaked out and we finally got ahold of it--that our entire contribution to peacekeeping, which amounts to about 40 percent of our contributions-- $2 billion a year--is totally wasted in fraud. In other words, it doesn't help us do peacekeeping anywhere in the world because there is only one agency and one government that is more inefficient than us, and it is the United Nations. Yet we can't have transparency.

Every year I put on the foreign appropriations bill a requirement that for the U.N. dues to be paid, they have to give us transparency about where they are spending our money. It passes 99 to 0, and as soon as it goes to the conference, guess what happens. It gets pulled out because we don't have the courage to confront the U.N. and say: We are giving you $5.9 billion. Tell us how it is being spent. So there is another one.

One of the greatest areas of worry the inspectors general have across all the agencies of government is investment in IT. Last year, we contracted $64 billion of IT contracts through the Federal Government-- $64 billion. What we know is at least 20 percent of that ends up totally getting mismanaged and wasted. It gets wasted because they don't know what they want when they sign the contract. They continue to change what they want as the contract goes through, and when we get to what was going to be a $200 million contract, it ends up being an $800 million contract because we have changed what the contract did.

By the way, the contract isn't no-bid; the contract is cost plus, so whoever is doing the contract has every inclination to give them new ideas to make it better and change it. So what happens is we fall way behind, we don't get it, we pay four times as much. What is estimated is that we lose almost $11 billion a year on that kind of poor management. What is being done about it? Nothing in this body. Nothing in this body.

The National Flood Insurance Program is another $17.5 billion of waste and duplication. If we reformed the Tax Code--by the way, we are now right at $218 billion. If we reformed the Tax Code--if we just made it either straight line or simple, straight, fill it in on a postcard, or went to the fair tax, what we know is the Federal Government, just everything else being equal this year, would have $100 billion more collected because there would be $100 billion less in fraud. Just $100 billion. Just $100 billion. But we have a Tax Code that is this thick that no IRS department will give you the same answer to the same question anywhere else in the country, and neither will any of the big auditing firms because the code is so complex that nobody knows what the truth is. So we spend over $200 billion a year in this country paying our taxes.

I am not talking about the taxes we pay, paying our taxes. Either paying somebody else to figure it out or paying the interest because we couldn't figure it out or paying the penalty because we couldn't get it done on time, but most of it comes from paying people to pay our taxes for us.

Then there is a miscellaneous, another $18 billion. I said $350 billion. The total I have given is $385 billion. The reason I said $385 billion, I don't want to exaggerate, so I cut 10 percent off of it. So nobody can say we have exaggerated the waste, fraud, and abuse in the Federal Government that occurs every year.

What would it be like right now if we weren't wasting that? What would happen to Medicare if we didn't have this high number, billions and billions of dollars of fraud in Medicare every year? What would happen? What would happen is Medicare would last a lot longer. No. 2, we would actually get more resources directed to the people who actually need it.

The one story Dr. John Barrasso, the other physician in the Senate tells, is that Medicare is so well designed to be defrauded that people who deal in drugs stop that and start doing Medicare fraud because it is easier to hit a home run, No. 1; No. 2, if you get caught, the penalties are less. No. 3 is you can make a whole lot more money with a whole lot lower jail sentence. So we have this system that is designed to get defrauded that has $80 billion in it.

So let me make that point and say, if in fact you take--even if you only take half of what I say--$175 billion--but even if you only take half of what I say, here are the things we know: This country is absolutely on an unsustainable course. We cannot sustain what we are doing. We cannot have another year such as this year. We cannot have another year that comes anywhere close to this year.

We can't have another year that moves forward in the direction we are moving in terms of the government taking more of your freedom away and building itself up and building the bureaucracies in this town.

I understand my colleague from Hawaii is here.

I yield the floor.

Will the Senator yield?

I think the record will show that I did not support the amendment.

I thank the Senator. I think he will find another vehicle at some other time. I know this bill is important to him. We just happen to disagree about the priorities. That is what I have been speaking on for 1 hour 20 minutes. I appreciate him doing that as a courtesy to the rest of the Members of this body. I love him dearly as a friend and as a brother. I appreciate it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I think a little bit of history is important for us now. Let me give a quote of what Thomas Jefferson had to say. It is important for us to hear him. We recognize his wisdom in lots of what he did for us as one of the Founders of this country. Here is what he said about guns: Gun control laws disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Such laws only make worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants. They serve, rather, to encourage rather than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.

Granted, that was in a different day and time, but his words ring true. To those who are opposing this amendment who truly believe we ought to have a total ban on firearms, I recognize that is a legitimate position for some of those people. But what I find both disingenuous and also curious and funny at the same time is the number of my colleagues who now come to the floor to preserve States rights when 95 percent of their votes, in the last Congress and this one and the ones that preceded, voted to take away those very same States rights in every other area of freedom.

We just had a hearing on a Supreme Court Justice. She got it wrong on the second amendment. The second amendment is written into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Why was the 14th amendment even brought up to Congress? The historical debate shows that during reconstruction, freed Black slaves were losing their right to own a gun simply because they were Black, simply because they were freed slaves. Many Southern States passed laws taking that right away. The due process of the 14th amendment came about so that we could preserve the right of individuals to own arms and defend themselves.

What I find ludicrous in this debate is any discussion of an assault weapons ban or assault weapons. You can't conceal one. That is No. 1. No. 2, we had the Senator from New Jersey mention the Uzi. It is illegal to own an Uzi in this country. So you are already a criminal, you are already a felon, you are already one of those individuals Jefferson was talking about when you claim to say that we are going to step all over State laws.

We had a vote in terms of honoring States rights in terms of the national park bill on guns. Twenty-nine of my colleagues, thirteen of whom now are defending States rights, stepped all over States rights with their vote against the Coburn amendment when it came to allowing people to have supreme their State law in terms of national parks.

Nobody comes to the Senate floor a purist. The vast majority of people who are debating against this amendment on the fundamental principle of stepping on States rights have a voting record that 98 percent of the time they don't care about States rights; they care about the Federal Government.

I have an offer. Any Member who wishes to vote against this amendment, if you will all endorse the Enumerated Powers Act and see that we pass it through Congress, then you can demonstrate your fidelity to the 10th amendment. Except nary a one of those who are opposing this amendment has endorsed the Enumerated Powers Act in this Congress or the last. The arguments ring hollow when we talk about the 10th amendment because the true action would be to recognize the limited powers of the Federal Government to enforce the 10th amendment, and we wouldn't be having this debate.

States rights are convenient only when it comes to something we don't like. They are rarely utilized to truly defend States rights. You have to follow the laws of the State you are in; that is respecting States rights. For every incident and tragedy of somebody who had a concealed carry permit, we can give you 10,000 tragedies of those where gun control allowed the criminals to have guns but the innocents not.

I hope the American people will look at this debate and say: There is a fundamental right in this country, which the Supreme Court will get right in this next session, that is guaranteed to us as part of our liberty. It was inculcated into everything our Founders did. Knowing it to be true, it was written into our Constitution. Many of the rights we have today that we cling to so dearly were never even considered by our Founders but have come about as a result of what the judicial branch has said.

If you are going to use States rights as a position to defend your vote against this bill, I suggest that your constituencies look at your other votes on States rights and see if there isn't some big dissonance with that position. You will find it in every case.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I call up the amendment.

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

Mr. President, I agree with the Senator from Washington. This simply eliminates inappropriate

bonuses at the Department of Human Services. We did that at the Department of Defense, which saved $500 million. It is also an OMB reg for the agency.

Mr. President, if I understand this correctly, this will actually eliminate competitive bidding on grants so grants may be earmarked and would not have to be competitively bid. I believe it is important the American people know we competitively bid for contracts and we competitively bid for grants on the basis of priority and merit. Therefore, I am in opposition to this amendment and in support of my amendment.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, this is a simple amendment. It is a commonsense amendment. It says we should competitively bid contracts at the Department of Homeland Security, and we should competitively bid grants. If you vote against my amendment, you are saying we should not. That is all there is to it.

Mr. President, I yield back.

Mr. President, I actually have to offer the amendment. I call up amendment No. 1434 and ask for its consideration.

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

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

Mr. President, the problem with this is the earmarks. It is not that New York may not need this. It is that you have taken 50 percent of the money for 10 States. The other 40 States will have to divide the remaining portion of this money for those types of emergency centers and the calculation of risk. It ought to be true competition based on real risk. There is no question New York has greater risk than Oklahoma; that I do not deny. But the fact is, we have taken half the money away from 40 other States and said: You have to compete on the remaining portion, and you may have requirements greater than those earmarked in the bill.

I support this amendment. I wholeheartedly ask my colleagues to do the same.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, in 2007 I offered this direct amendment. We spent 3 hours on it on the Senate floor. Everybody agreed we needed to get rid of this program then. We had some concerns. The thing I do not understand is why we are waiting the extra 5 months to shut down a program. There is nobody who needs this program. That 5 months--just that 5 months of continuing the program--costs the American taxpayers $18 million.

So if, in fact, we are going to shut down the program, I would like to understand the logic of turning it down in January instead of October 1.

First of all, nobody is using this system now. Nobody is using it. Why can't they notify in 3 months all the people--which is zero--who are using this today? The other question is, why does it take $35 million? Where is the backup detail that shows what the costs will be? Maybe it is $18 million.

So why does it take $18 million? There are only seven stations left, and we are talking about facilities that are smaller than these four desks. Tell me how it takes $2.5 million per buoy to shut them down. Only from Washington would it take that much money. Where is the basis for the knowledge that it takes $18 million?

Mr. President, I am happy to yield for a question.

Mr. President, I would tell the Senator from Washington, first of all, I do appreciate that the Senator is attempting to shut this down, and I thank the Senator for that. It has been long overdue. But I do question the amount of money it takes to shut this down. We know the bureaucracies always want more money than what is necessary. You have allowed in this bill that whatever is not used they can plow back into anything they want to use it for.

Why would we not terminate it at the end of the fiscal year? Every month we are running it, it costs $3 to $4 million--$3 to $4 million. I know it does not seem like a lot when we are going to have a $1.8 trillion budget deficit this year, but I do not understand why we would not do it.

I say to the Senator, I appreciate the fact that he is doing it. I think it can be done for a lot cheaper, and I think it could be done sooner, and I would hope the committee would consider that.

With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.

There is not?

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

Mr. President, I wish to spend a few minutes talking about the legislative branch and us and where we find ourselves. I do have an amendment and I appreciate the consideration of it.

Right now, the average income in this country is down four-tenths of 1 percent this year. Historically, people wonder why Congress cannot control spending. They cannot control spending because they cannot even control their own budget. We are going to see about a 3.2-percent increase in the bill. The House is coming in at 6.1. In conference, we will decide what the legislative branch increase in expenses is on the American public. The reason that spending is out of control and the reason we are shackling our grandchildren with an enormous amount of debt--another $5 trillion in the next 5 years--is because we don't even do a good job managing our own office budgets.

I am on the floor a lot complaining about wasteful spending, earmarks, and other issues. I don't do that without setting the proper example in my own office. I have been here 4 complete years. I am in my fifth year. During that time, I have turned back, in 2005, $321,000; in 2006, $529,000; in 2007, $516,000; and in 2008, $491,000--about 16 to 17 percent of my budget.

If I can do that, the question the American people ought to ask is: Why can't everybody up here do that? Why can't we manage our own legislative branch expenses? With the economic environment in which we find ourselves today, the American people ought to be asking what are our elected leaders doing to cut their expenses because we are borrowing a good portion of this money. Why are we not setting an example? If we don't do it, then we are certainly not going to have the various Federal agencies do it.

If you look at spending increases, outside the omnibus and the Recovery Act, Congress increased spending almost 7.2 percent last year. The budget has in it 7.3 percent. That is three times the rate of income growth prior to this recession. Yet we are growing the government three, four times faster, and we are growing our own budgets two and a half or three times faster. This time, it will be five or six times faster than Americans' income is growing.

The question has to be asked: If we are not good stewards with our own offices, how can we be good stewards with the money entrusted to us?

Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 1369 and ask for its immediate consideration.

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

Mr. President, this is a very simple amendment. It says we will take the money we spend and make available online to the American people how we spent it. Right now, there are a limited number of books published. We transfer it from computers to a book, but we don't give it to the American people so they can see how we are spending money on our office accounts. Senators Nelson of Nebraska and Reid have graciously said they support this amendment. We will have limited debate.

The one way to get this spending under control in our individual offices, as well as in the Federal Government, is to make available to the American people how we spend it. So my hope is this will be a short period of time, and at the end of this year, the American people can go on a Web site and see how Tom Coburn spent his money, in terms of running the office of the junior Senator from Oklahoma. I think they will find I am as frugal with their money in my office as I am trying to be frugal on the floor when it comes to wasteful spending. There is $350 billion worth of waste that will go through this year, without one stroke of it being eliminated--$350 billion worth of waste and not one legitimate stroke will be eliminated as we go through the Appropriations Committees and the President's budget--and he is trying to eliminate some. But we won't even do a line-by-line review.

I hope we will accept this amendment and lead by example, and the American people can hold us accountable for how we spend their money.

With that, I yield the floor.

Madam President, I make a constitutional point of order that the earmark for the Durham Museum in Omaha, NE, as contained on page 21, line 15, after the word ``mission'' through line 20, violates article I, section 8 of the Constitution, and also violates the 10th amendment of the Constitution of the United States.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

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

Mr. President, I want to spend a few minutes tonight talking about what is going on in Honduras. I have a lot of friends in Honduras, and I have this peculiar worry that we find ourselves on the wrong side of freedom in the situation that is happening in Honduras.

As you read the press clips, what we have heard is there was a coup. That, in fact, is not true. The Supreme Court of Honduras, under the direction of the Congress, asked the military to intercede because the President of Honduras had violated their own laws. Yet our State Department and our foreign policy sided with Hugo Chavez, Raoul Castro, and the former President.

There is no question that improvements have been made in the past in Central and South America, but tonight we find ourselves supporting an anticonstitutional President of Honduras when, in fact, the Congress of Honduras and the Supreme Court of Honduras have said he is violating their laws. So rather than look at the whole picture, we have decided we will intervene in our diplomacy on the side of a Chavez-type, would- be dictator because what was happening in Honduras was an effort to change so you could have a President for life in Honduras. That is what was going on. That is why the Congress and that is why the Supreme Court of Honduras acted. We now are siding against the people of Honduras.

What is little known is 800 to 1,000 Venezuelan thugs were admitted into Honduras, in the week prior to this, with Honduran passports to create chaos or a systematic attempt to create upheaval and discord and rioting by Chavez's thugs. So now we find ourselves, the free United States, siding with somebody who wants to make sure the Honduran people are not free, to create another petro czar dictator in South Central America.

It is tremendously important we get this right. I think we are heading in the wrong direction right now. I think we are heading in the direction where we are going to make sure Honduras falls into the fold of Hugo Chavez, the last thing any of us should want. He has become the dictator in charge of Venezuela. He has nationalized American assets. He has corrupted the free Democratic process, and he seeks to do that in all the other areas where he can maintain influence. In fact, he was doing it.

The other thing that is important that is not well published is that the President of Honduras was totally associated with drug cartels, cash, the distribution and transmission of drugs into this country, and the moneys associated with that were used to buy people to support his pursuit of permanent power. Now we find ourselves out there on a limb with our foreign policy without looking at the whole story.

My main concern is about all those people who do want freedom in Honduras, who do believe we model in this country what they aspire to, and now the country they aspire to is siding against the vast majority of the people in Honduras. No illegal acts took place under the orders of the supreme court by the military--no illegal acts. Yet we didn't look at it close enough, and we have made now foreign policy decisions I fear are going to be irreversible.

There is no question things could be done better in Honduras, but there is also no question things could be done better here. For us to decide to side with the factors that are going to force Honduras into a situation similar to Cuba and Venezuela makes my blood boil, because not only are we going to eliminate and limit the freedom of those great people, we are going to help perpetuate the loss of freedom in that hemisphere.

So I call out to the President and the Secretary to do a reassessment. Let's relook at the facts. Let's talk to the people on the ground. Let's make sure we have the facts and the knowledge about what the vast majority of people

in Honduras want. You can stimulate chaos if you pay enough money and bring enough people in to do that, which was the intent of President Zelaya.

My hope is that we will slow down, that we will use caution at every turn as we interface with the situation. The Honduran people have the right to have their Constitution followed. That is what they did when they executed the imposition of removal of the President of Honduras. They followed their own law, their own Constitution. They don't have the right of impeachment, but they do have the right of carrying out the orders of the supreme court, which were given. For us to take this position--and this strong of a position--on what I feel has been a diplomatic lack of information of what is truth in Honduras speaks poorly for us as a nation and, most importantly, undermines the hopes of the people from Honduras.

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