Floor Statements

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I wish to spend a few minutes this evening to outline where we are and one possible solution to help us as a nation. We are on a course to double the debt in 4\1/2\ years. We are on a course to triple the debt over the next 10 years. Think of what that means for our children and our grandchildren. That is not President Obama's fault. I am probably one of the few Republicans who will say that. It is Congress's fault, because Presidents don't get to spend money we don't let them spend. We are the ones who offer the spending bills.

How did we get here? How did we get to the point where we are borrowing money that we don't have against our children's future to spend on things we don't need? It is simple. We have forgotten what the Constitution says. We have ignored the Constitution at almost every turn.

Today, myself and 17 other Senators introduced a bill which is called the Enumerated Powers Act. It goes back to article I, section 8 of the Constitution. Here is what it says. It very plainly lists the responsibilities of the Federal Government. When you think we are going to have a $3.6 trillion budget and a $2 trillion deficit this year--and that is real accounting; that is not Washington gimmick accounting--how did we get to where we could do that? How did we get to where we can put our children and grandchildren in such dire straits in their future? We got to it by ignoring the enumerated powers of the Constitution.

If you go to the textbooks and read the history, you will see that Madison wrote that section. If you read what he had to say about what he meant in article I, section 8 of the Constitution, he said, People are going to try to get around this. People are going to try to say it doesn't mean what it means. But, in fact, here is exactly what we mean. Anything that we don't want the Federal Government doing, we are going to specifically reserve for the States. That is where the 10th amendment came from in the Bill of Rights. Because you can't limit what the Federal Government does without saying, Here are the things that should be done, but they should be done under the authority of the people and the States.

When Ben Franklin left the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he was asked by somebody in the crowd: What did the convention produce? He said: It produced a republic. Then he said: If we can keep it.

Well, I can tell my colleagues that ``if'' is a great big word. We have a Medicare Program that over the next 30 years has a $39 trillion unfunded liability. So the factors I have mentioned already don't have anything to do with that. That is $39 trillion on top of $11.5 trillion today and $2 trillion more we are going to add to the debt this year. Then we have Social Security, which is unfunded. We have Medicare Part D that has an $11 trillion unfunded liability. Then we have Medicaid, which is about $17 trillion. So what we have basically done is abandoned what our Founders thought was prudent so we could enhance politicians. We put that big ``if'' up there for our kids and our grandkids.

The task of keeping a republic now falls to this Congress. It doesn't look bright. We passed a stimulus bill, $787 billion. By the time you count the interest rate over the next 10 years, it is $1 trillion. We passed an omnibus bill that increased spending by each branch of the government over 9 percent. We passed an emergency supplemental that had $24 billion in it that we didn't need, but we spent it, which will raise the baseline in future years, which will raise spending even further. The first appropriations bills coming out are a 7-percent or 8 percent increase when inflation has been a minus four-tenths of 1- percent increase.

The whole purpose behind this bill is to say when you write a bill in this Congress and any Congress that follows it, you have to know in that bill where you get the authority in the Constitution to spend this money or to authorize this program. You can still introduce a bill without it, but it creates a point of order that says a Senator can challenge that bill on the basis of what the Constitution says because you have not clearly stated in this new piece of legislation where you get the authority as a Member of the Senate to author it when, in fact, it is outside the authority given to us under the Constitution. The bill then sets up a debate on which the Senate will have to vote. I am not so naive as to believe I will win a whole lot of those, but I know I will win something, because the American people want to hear that debate, and that debate is something they are not hearing today.

They are not hearing our justifications why we can take freedom away and we can make a bigger, more powerful Federal Government that is going to borrow more money from their children to spend on things we don't need, money we don't have. The American people are entitled to hear the reasoning behind why we know so much better than they do, and to hear the reasoning why we can ignore the wisdom of our Founders in terms of our ability to grow the Federal Government.

The Federal Government is far too big and far too removed from people's lives today. That is why we are feeling this rumble out in the country. That is why people are worried about the deficits. That is why people are worried about their children's future, because the debt is going to triple over the next 10 years. We can't even come close. Interest payments next year are going to be close to $500 billion. Think about that. Just the interest on the debt is starting to approach a half a trillion dollars a year--a half a trillion dollars a year. Had we been prudent and not borrowed money, that would be a half a trillion dollars we could either give back to the American people or create tremendous abilities and opportunities in terms of solving some of the problems in front of us today. Health care, for example. The reason why we can't get a health care bill out of the HELP Committee is because nobody is satisfied with the tremendous costs that

CBO has estimated because we are spending tons of money. We don't have the money, so we are now handicapped.

This bill, S. 1319, requires that each act of Congress shall contain a concise explanation of the authority, the specific constitutional authority under which this bill would be enacted. What it does is makes Congress go to the Constitution, and particularly article I, section 8, and say, here is where I get the authority. We won't win many of those arguments, even though many of the bills will be outside of the authority granted us under the Constitution.

Thomas Jefferson thought such an exercise was vitally important--we have ignored his advice--he thought it was important for Congress to undertake in order to study what those who ratified the Constitution had in mind. In a letter in 1823, he said this:

On every question of construction, let us carry ourselves

back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect

the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying

what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented

against it, conform to the probable one in which it was

passed.

There is no question what the context and the meaning was of our Founders when they wrote out the enumerated powers section. We have prostituted it to our own demise. The words of Benjamin Franklin ring true today: Can we keep it. If we can keep it.

S. 1319 is a little exercise in self-discipline for the Senate that maybe we ought to be explaining to the American people where we think we get the authority to trample on the 10th amendment, to tell them what to do, how to do it, and by the way, we need some money to tell you how to do that. The whole goal of the Enumerated Powers Act is to make us accountable. My whole goal in the Senate has been transparency. We ought to be transparent about how we get or where we get or from where we get the authority to grow the size of this government even further and to make it less effective.

Finally, in a recent speech, retiring Justice David Souter recently commented that the American Republic ``can be lost, it is being lost, it is lost, if it is not understood.'' He went on to cite surveys that show Americans cannot even name the three branches of government. That is why he and retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor have both undertaken, in their retirement, efforts to restore America's civic education.

I am convinced that if Americans know what is in the Constitution, they will start holding us accountable. Part of our job ought to be to explain how we can be accountable. We have 17 Senators who think this is a good idea. That is a lot for a bill in the Senate. I encourage my colleagues to look at this bill, to become accountable and transparent with our constituencies.

I will end on one final note. When the Presiding Officer was sworn in this year, he took an oath. That oath said he would uphold the Constitution. Not once in his oath did it mention the State of Alaska from where he and the people he represents in the Senate hail, but his oath was sworn to the betterment of this country, not to the betterment of Alaska, as mine is to the betterment of the country, not to the betterment of Oklahoma. For Alaska and Oklahoma can't fare well if the country doesn't fare well. So our Founders knew that when we took this oath to uphold the Constitution, they knew our direction would be national interests and long term. We have fallen away from that. We have become parochial and we have become short term.

This bill says you can still cheat on the Constitution, but now you have to explain to the American people why you are cheating, and there will be a point of order against any bill that doesn't provide an explanation to the people.

That is one of the ways we get our country back because the American people become informed. I guarantee you many will become outraged when they hear some of the statements on why the Senate thinks we have the authority to do some of the things we do.

With that, I yield the floor.

I wish to take a few minutes this evening to kind of discuss with the American people what is going to happen on health care--what it looks like is going to happen.

As a practicing physician, there are things I know that if we start from ground zero we would do in health care in this country. But as I was reading some articles, I pulled this quote. This is by Adrian Rogers, and it really belies what is happening right now with this idea of transferring the wealth. Here is what he said:

You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating

the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without

working for, another person must work for without receiving.

The government cannot give to anybody anything that the

government does not take first from someone else. When half

of the people get the idea that they do not have to work

because the other half is going to take care of them, and

when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to

work because somebody else is going to get what they worked

for, that, my dear friend, is about the end of any Nation.

You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.

Those are pretty wise words.

As I think about the trillions of dollars that have gone through Congress this year and the fact that our spending is totally out of control, with minimal effect other than things like the Senator from Georgia--had we actually spent the $35 billion on a tax credit to stimulate housing rather than spending about $100 billion on true, true stimulus activities and another $680-some billion on other items, and the fact that all of a sudden we are now talking about pay-go--that is about me paying and you going--and we have spent $800 billion in the last year and avoided pay-go 15 times in the Senate in the last year. Fifteen times we have said: Oh, time out, pay-go does not count. And we spent another $800 billion. What that means is we did not have the money, we borrowed it.

So as we start into the health care debate, there are some things I believe are critically important that I think most Americans would agree with.

The first is that individuals ought to be in charge of their health care. Nothing should stand between you as a patient and your physician. No bureaucrat, no government-run program should get in between that relationship.

The second thing I know is you ought to be able to pick what you want, you ought to be able to afford what you want, and you ought to be able to do that at the time that is appropriate for your health care needs. That means you have to be in charge of your health care, you cannot have someone else. I am reminded of that fact because we have a Medicaid Program in which 40 percent of physicians in this country do not participate, and what we are really saying to people on Medicare is: We will give you health care, but we will limit a large number of physicians and providers because we are not willing to pay what it actually costs to do that.

The third thing is that we cannot assume, which we have, and I am worried we will, that people cannot manage their own health care, that they have to have Uncle Sam manage it for them. Nothing could be further from the truth.

There are some key components. Health care is about people. It is not about an insurance company, it is not about your employer, and it is certainly not about the government. It is about you. And if it is about you, you ought to be in control of that--absolutely, without a fact be in control. You ought to have a caring professional who will be able to spend the time with you to truly teach you prevention, to truly work with you on wellness, to truly manage your chronic disease, and then we ought to recognize that those services ought to be paid for, not outlandish fees but appropriate payment.

You recognize that in none of the government-run programs, which is now 60 percent of health care, do we truly pay for prevention. We will pay for it when you get sick. That is why we have ``sick care'' in America. We do not have health care, we have sick care. And we do not have real insurance. What we have is prepaid health expense, which about 20 percent, 25 percent of the money that went into that health insurance doesn't ever come back to help you get well or prevent you from getting sick.

So we ought to be about the fact that we know there is something wrong with health care in America today. We all know that. We are dissatisfied, whether it is the bills you get after you get a test that you can't read or can't understand or you have to wait or have an approval to get something. Regardless of what your doctor thinks, you still may not be able to access that care. There is no question we need to

fix health care, and I will be the first to admit we need to do that. But how we do it--how we do it is ultimately important, not just for the health care of Americans, but it will markedly impact our economy.

The very idea that we have to have another $1.3 trillion to $2 trillion to fix health care does not fit with any realistic set of facts anywhere else in the world. We spend twice as much per person in this country as anybody else in the world save Switzerland. We are not getting value for what we are buying.

Now, why aren't we? One of the reasons we are not is because you are not in control of your health care. You do not get to see a transparent price or quality or availability for what you purchased because we have given over the payment for that to some other organization. So we are less inclined to be prudent purchasers because it is not coming out of our pocket, whether it is Medicaid or Medicare or a health insurance plan. We ought to be about fixing that. And our health care cannot be about bureaucrats in Washington. It is personal. It is also local.

The trust in a patient-doctor relationship is enhanced by transparency of the cost and transparency of the quality. You ought to be able to go and buy a health care service and know what it is going to cost before you buy it, and you ought to know that you are likely to get great outcomes based on transparency of quality. That has to be there.

The second thing that has to be there is you have to know we are going to spend the dollars in a way to prevent you from getting sick, not just take care of you once you get sick. Grandmom was right: An ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure. Yet we do not incentivize that in any of the Federal Government programs we have today. And we do some--especially in the ERISA-based plans or the company-owned plans, they have learned this.

A great plan that is out there that people are fortunate to have is Safeway. Safeway's health care costs have risen one-half of 1 percent in the last 4 years. The average of other plans of other employers has risen 42 percent. What is the difference? Why is it that Safeway, with 200,000 employees, has been able to have only half a percent, plus they also have increased satisfaction with the health care they are getting? What is the difference? The difference is prevention and wellness and management of chronic disease.

So anything we do that does not address prevention and incentivize it, wellness and incentivize it, and management of chronic disease and incentivize it will not make any fix we do here sustainable. We can cover everybody in the country. We can charge $1.2 trillion or $1.3 trillion to our kids over the next 10 years and we can get everybody covered, but if we have not fixed the sustainability to where we do not have a 7.2-percent automatic inflation in health care every year, we will not have done anything. And it will not be long before we will not be able to afford it, and then we will take the people in the government-run option and we will put them into Medicare, and then we will do a price control.

There is no question that we need to carefully address America's health care challenge. We need to find immediate measurable ways to make it more accessible and affordable without jeopardizing quality. We need to make sure we give individuals choice at every point in the health care continuum. And we need to make sure we allow personalized care. We are not a bunch of cattle lining up in the chute. Everybody is different. Everybody needs to be able to make their own decisions.

On top of that, the No. 1 thing we have to do is protect the doctor- patient relationship. Half of getting well is having confidence in the person who is treating you. When you do not get to choose that, as you do not in Medicaid and oftentimes in Medicare because we are limited to the doctors who are taking Medicare, you are limiting the outcome.

If you cannot get treatment when you need it, there is a crisis. If you are denied the ability to choose the doctor or hospital that is best for you, that is a crisis for you. If you cannot afford the coverage you need for you and your family, then you have a crisis.

We need to stop looking at it from a global perspective and restore the humanity to health care. We need to focus more on people and less on the system.

I have a lot of ideas on health care. I, along with many others, have introduced the Patient's Choice Act, where we allow everybody to have insurance in this country. We equalize the tax treatment for everybody in this country.

All the studies say that any plan Congress puts forward, our plan will do as well or better with some major differences. We do not raise the cost at all. It does not cost anything. As a matter of fact, it saves the States $1.3 trillion over the next 10 years just on Medicaid alone. And every Medicaid patient out there will have a private insurance program, and nobody will ever know if they got it through Medicaid or not. They will be truly accessing and having the care, and we will not raise taxes on anybody to do that--no one.

The other thing we do is, if you like what you have today, you can keep it. You absolutely can keep it. If what you have is what you want, it gives you care when you want it, access to the doctors you want or to the hospital you want, and you can afford it, you are going to keep it. But if you would like something different, and not be locked in, not having to stay at a job because you are afraid you will not have insurance when you leave, you need to look at what we are talking about.

There is no preexisting illness exclusion. There is no individual mandate, although there is an auto enrollment where you can opt out. If you do not want health insurance, you do not have to take it, but you do not get the tax credit that goes along with buying it.

So, in fact, of the 46 million people who do not have access to care today through an insurance program, they will have it under this program, and they will have prevention, and they will have wellness, and they will have a medical home or an accountable care organization to manage their chronic disease, help them manage it. And they will get to do that where they want to do it, not where some bureaucrat tells them they will do it or where some insurance company tells them where they will do it.

We have a chance to hit a home run for the American people on health care--not just on their health care, but keeping us globally competitive, keeping jobs here at home instead of shipping them off where the labor costs and health care costs are less. We have a chance to hit two home runs. The question is, Will we do it?

We have before us in the HELP Committee a draft of a bill that has three big blanks on it. We do not have any analysis by the CBO on what it is going to cost. We have no knowledge about what it costs, and we are going to be marking that up in a week. We are supposed to get health care done in 6 weeks in this country, which is 17 percent of our GDP, one-sixth of our economy, and we are going to do it without knowing what we are doing.

The parameters under which this Senate is addressing health care are a prescription for disaster. What we should do is put out the bills, have a legitimate debate about what is a proper way to go, and let the American people hear the debate and see which way to go. I will tell you, if you allow the American people to decide: Here is a government- controlled option or here is my option, with me choosing everything, me not depending on the government, me making the choices for my family-- when I want it, where I want it, and how I want it--individual freedom and liberty will win every time over a government-mandated program or a, quote, public government-run insurance company.

Madam President, I ask for 10 additional minutes.

I thank the Chair.

One of the questions we ought to ask the American people is: Would you rather pay the costs you pay today for the quality of care you currently receive or would you rather get in line, pay less, not have the same quality,

and not get to choose the health care you are going to get or your family is going to get--defer the decisionmaking about you and your family's health care to a government bureaucracy?

All of us agree, Democrats and Republicans, we want to fix health care. All of us want prevention, wellness, management of chronic disease. All of us want as much freedom as we can give the American people. But the difference lies in how we do it and who pays the bill. That is why I started out with the article from Adrian Rogers. We are going to spend $2.4 trillion on health care this year, and we are going to get back $1.7 trillion worth of health care.

We should not be spending a penny more. What we should be saying to the Senate is: Why aren't you fixing what is wrong with this terrible, broken system? And the answer is: We need more money. That is the government's answer every time. Every time: We need more money. We need a new program.

We do not need a new program. What we need is to allow the individual entrepreneurship and ingenuity of the American people and give them the resources with which to buy their health care and make their personal choices, and what you will see is a dynamic that squeezes $500 billion to $700 billion out of the cost of health care in this country.

There are a lot of components. Health care is a complex issue. Everybody who worked on it knows it. It is hard in a 20- or 30-minute talk on the floor to explain a bill fully. But if you had absolute access, and you could afford health care, and you got to make the choices, and it did not cost your kids any more in the future to pay for that by borrowing against their future, most Americans would say: I will buy something like that. That is a fix.

And by the way, we are going to incentivize the $40 billion we spend every year supposedly on prevention to where it is actually making some difference on cost. We are going to quit paying for food that is terrible for you through the Food Stamp Program. We are going to fix the School Lunch Program so we do not feed you high carbohydrates and fat. And we are going to give you protein, fruits, and vegetables. We are going to do that which is necessary to put us on a glidepath to where we have real health care instead of sick care in this country. People will buy that.

I cannot wait for the real debate to start on health care. When you hear the talk, and you read the articles that have been written--just for example, on comparative effectiveness, the director who is involved in that in England said it was the biggest mistake they ever made. It explains why people in England die earlier. It explains why they have a cancer cure rate about a third lower than ours. It explains why people cannot get care because they have a government option. They have a government option that eliminates the ability for true choice, true access, and true affordability.

One of the things our bill will do is make sure, no matter how sick you are, you get an insurance policy. When it comes time for renewal, they cannot deny you. Our bill gives everybody insurance in this country and incentivizes you to the point where you will have extra money with which you pay for the additional costs associated with that care.

Our plan does not mandate anything, except the base minimum plan is the base minimum plan the Members of Congress get. If you want to buy more than that, you can. But nobody is going to tell you what you have to buy. You buy what is right for you, what is right for your family.

One of the costs of health care in this country--and it is about 8 or 9 percent of the cost of health care--is doctors like me ordering tests you do not need because I fear a malpractice lawsuit. We incentivize the States to make changes--very simple changes--do not eliminate the right of any individual to go to court, but set up health courts or set up judge-doctor-lawyer panels or a combination thereof, and we give them extra money if, in fact, they will do that. It is an easy, cheap buy. Because if we reform the tort system State by State, we get back about a hundredfold for every dollar we put out that comes out of health care that will then go to prevention, wellness, and management of chronic disease.

We have cost-shifting in this country. If you opt out and you go to an ER, your State can buy you a high-deductible policy, whereas you are still covered. You are not going to ever lose your home because you had an accident or you had a major health complication because you will be auto enrolled as soon as you hit the ER. So we eliminate about $200 billion in cost-shifting.

I have just outlined $500 billion that can go away under our bill out of $2.4 trillion--money that does not help anybody get well, money that does not prevent anybody from getting sick.

I had an orthopedist in my office today and he had a patient who he thought had a torn anterior cruciate ligament. That is a ligament connecting the femur to the tibia. And she could not relax. He is a good orthopedist. By clinical exam, you can tell if somebody has torn an ACL, anterior cruciate ligament. So he said: Well, you can't relax. We'll do an MRI. So she comes back a week later and says: Doctor, I didn't do the MRI. I didn't want to pay for that. And she brought a glass of wine with her, a glass of chardonnay. She said: I think if I drink this, about 15 minutes after I drink this, I think I will be relaxed enough for you to do it. Well, sure enough, she did, and she relaxed. She had a torn ACL, and she never had to have an MRI. It just saved us about $1,800. It saved her and us $1,800. He could have given her xanax and done the same thing.

But the point is, she made a logical decision not to spend $1,800 because there was another way of doing it. Part of that was because she had a $5,000 deductible health care policy, so she made a good economic choice. Multiply that 100,000 times in this country every month and see how much money we can take out of the health care system by people acting in their own best health interest and financial interest.

We have a lot in front of us, and we have a lot that is riding on us. I hope we get to see the bills, which we have not seen yet, and what people want to do. The first bill out is: The government does everything; the government is in control. There is not one government program that either offers the services or is not bankrupt that we have on health care today. Medicare is bankrupt. Medicaid--we are bankrupt, so they are bankrupt. They have $80 billion worth of fraud in Medicare; $40 billion worth in Medicaid. The Indian Health Service is a sham, especially on the reservation, because we do not have the quality and we have not put the money there. Why shouldn't a Native American have an insurance policy to be able to buy health care wherever they want? Why shouldn't a veteran be able to get care wherever they want rather than have to travel 200 miles to a VA health care center? Why can't we keep the commitment that we would say: If we are going to offer you access, then we are going to offer you access to the best, the highest quality health care, with you making the decisions about your care, when you get that care, and who gives you that care.

The patient has to come first. Senators' egos have to come second. And we have to fix this program in a way that not only solves the health care crisis but does not create another crisis for our children down the road.

With that, I yield the floor.

I thank my colleague from Rhode Island for his patience, and I wish him a good night.

Madam President, I have given a lot of thought to this, and I appreciate what the leader said about health care. I am the only practicing physician in the Senate. We have one of our colleagues who is no longer practicing. But it struck me, as a physician, that what we should do in health care ought to be what our patients want us to do. What is it the people--the very personal aspect of health care--would like to see?

There is no question we have big problems in health care. There is dissatisfaction in the insurance side, with Medicare and Medicaid, and the lack of access. But what is it we should be talking about that will solve the insecurities, the problems, the concerns of the American people? I wish to go through with you a little list of items I think individuals in this country would agree with on how we ought to handle health care.

First, we ought to make sure health care is available to everybody in this country and that it is affordable. We will spend, this year, $2.4 trillion on health care, or 17.5 percent of our GDP. Yet we know that out of that $2.4 trillion, $700 billion doesn't help anybody get well and doesn't prevent anybody from getting sick. We now have an administration that wants to spend another $1.3 trillion over the next 10 years, or $130 billion more per year, to try to solve this problem. The money is not the problem. We know, in Medicare alone, there is $70 billion to $80 billion worth of fraud and in Medicaid $40 billion worth of fraud and that is in the government-run programs.

The second thing we ought to make sure of is that everybody can be covered. We can do that with the money we have today. We can make sure everybody gets covered. The other thing we ought to do is make sure everybody who has a plan they like today can keep it. After all, health care isn't about health care, it is about individuals, it is about persons, what they desire, what they need, and when they need it.

We can, in fact, fix the fraud, waste, and abuse in health care. It is something we can do. Not long ago, we discovered we had one wheelchair that had been sold multiple times by one durable medical equipment company in Florida, but it was never delivered, and they collected $5 million from Medicare for that one wheelchair. That is just the tip of the iceberg of the fraud.

Another thing we know we need to do, and that patients want us to do--because we have a government-run system for 60 percent of our health care today--is we ought to prioritize wellness and prevention. Do you realize Medicare doesn't pay for wellness and prevention and Medicaid doesn't pay for wellness and prevention? So we don't have wellness and prevention. What that leads to is additional chronic disease, which we then will have to manage--a disease we could have prevented.

Another issue I was thinking about--especially with my patients--is that

some are employed and have insurance through their employer, but those who are employed but don't have insurance or they own their own business or they are self-employed, they get a totally different look from the IRS about their health expenses. If your employer pays for it, there are no taxes, but if you have to pay for it or you are self- employed or you have your own business, you have to take dollars, after tax, and pay for your health care. So one of the things we have to do is equalize that so everybody is treated the same under the Tax Code for their health care.

How does that work out? Well, if your employer provides your health care, you get about $2,700 worth of tax benefits a year. But if you provide your health care, you get only about $100 worth of tax benefit. It is ironic because it is so unfair to say you don't get the same benefit under the Tax Code because you happen to either work in a place that doesn't provide health insurance or you own your own business or you are self-employed.

The other issue I thought about that my patients would want is: What should we not do? What should we make sure we do not do? I think about my patients, and the last thing they want is more government involvement in their health care. We heard the minority leader talk about what happens in Canada when you get sick and how you have to wait and what happens in England when you get sick and are denied care because you are not worth it because of your age. Health care delayed, in the case of the lady he mentioned from Canada, is death. Health care denied, as he mentioned about the gentleman from England, is death--for both those individuals.

If you think about the government-run health care programs today, talk about Indian health care, a government-run program that is so substandard nobody would embrace it. If you think about VA health care--although it is improving through the years--it is still far below the standards of health care in this country. Then, if you think about the fraud in Medicaid and Medicare and the hoops everybody has to jump through, in terms of those two programs, I think most Americans would say: Let's fix it so everybody can have what they need and let's make sure everybody gets covered and let's make sure we do that without having government bureaucrats deciding what, when, and how we get our care.

The final issue is we know one of the problems we have today--besides a recession--is this huge amount of people who are unemployed. Yet we also know 72 percent of all new job creation comes from small business. A proposal is floating out there that we are going to tax you, through a pay-or-play mandate, if you don't provide health insurance for your employees, and you are going to pay into the government to do that. That will kill job creation in this country.

We can fix health care. It needs to be fixed. Everybody agrees with that. How we fix it is the most important issue we are going to deal with in the next 2 years. The idea that we can come to a solution of this in the next couple months, with the complexity we have, will assure us of one of two things: One is a government bureaucratic takeover of health care, or a piece of legislation that will deny care, which will put somebody in between a patient and their doctor and will either delay care or, in fact, will raise the cost of health care.

As somebody who has practiced for 25 years in the field of medicine, obstetrics, and allergy, what I know is that we have a good health care system if we can get the government out of it and not put more government into it. What we need is fairness in access, fairness in the Tax Code, and allow the true American experiment to work in health care as we have had it work in so many other things.

I yield the floor.

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

Madam President, I wish to speak for a few minutes on the bill we are proceeding toward and to ask a few questions of the American public.

We have a bill that is going to regulate tobacco, and I am OK with us regulating tobacco. I do not have any problems with it. I think we should do it. What we should be doing is banning tobacco. Nobody up here has the courage to do that. It is a big business. There are millions of Americans who are addicted to nicotine. And even if they are not addicted to the nicotine, they are addicted to the habit.

But we have a bill, we are trying to do something positive, and we find ourselves constrained by our own shortsighted vision. We have an agency called the Food and Drug Administration. I have had a lot of experience with them. I manufactured medical devices in the 1970s and had several investigational new drug permits under them. I know the rigors under which INDs are managed and the care that is put forth by the employees of the Food and Drug Administration, as well as their advisory councils, as we go through that.

But if we go back and look at the charge of what the Food and Drug Administration is, the Food and Drug Administration is about safety and efficacy--``safety,'' meaning they are responsible to make the judgment that if we are going to approve this medicine or this device that is within an acceptable risk--there is always going to be down sides to anything they approve, but within an acceptable risk, in total, it is going to be better for the country.

In this bill, we allow existing tobacco products not ever to be eliminated. So we are going to take products that we know are not safe and we know are not efficacious and we are going to apply the resources of an agency that is having trouble meeting its demands right now, as well as meeting the demands of food safety right now, and we are going to take resources and put them there.

The first problem with that is we send a totally mixed message to the Food and Drug Administration: Your job is no longer about safety and efficacy; your job now is to warn everybody about the downside of tobacco.

We know that. What we have to do is stop new addiction. We know that. If we really want to make a difference in health and we want to eliminate dependence on tobacco, what we have to do is to stop the addiction. We have had all of these lawsuits through the years where billions of dollars have gone into attorneys' coffers, and about 40 percent of it has gone into, supposedly, stop-tobacco-use programs, and we are going to say to the Food and Drug Administration: Your job is about safety and efficacy, making sure that what it says it does, it does, and we are going to turn them into a different kind of agency. I believe that is where this bill is misdirected.

We ought to have an agency that does control tobacco, that does heavily regulate its advertising in terms of the warnings on the packages, in terms of limiting what young people can get to, so we can actually stop this trend toward addiction. But to do it in the Food and Drug Administration sends a mixed message: No longer is our job efficacy, no longer is our job safety; our job is to control advertising, we are going to control packaging, we are going to control and have them report to us on the contents of all of these thousands of bad products that are associated with tobacco, that are in tobacco--not just nicotine and not just the effects of the tobacco, whether it be inhaled or chewed or sucked on. The fact is, we are going to change the direction of the agency.

So what should we do? We should regulate tobacco. We should set up a way for us to do that which will effectively stop new addiction, especially among young people because that is where it starts. It starts with the young, and there are certain personality types as well as certain genotypes that, even with some of the medicines we have today, cannot wean themselves from the addiction to nicotine.

So why wouldn't we go another way? We have the Department of Health and Human Services, of which FDA is a part. Why wouldn't we create a smaller agency that is just about tobacco, just about regulating tobacco, so that we can see clearly--and we can also do it, by the way, for about a fourth of the cost of what it is going to cost to do it under the FDA. So for one-fourth of the cost, we can create a new agency within HHS that will be solely focused on this and this only, that will have one primary objective, and we will force and guide and direct and measure whether they are accomplishing their purpose. Instead, we are going to hide it in another agency that is struggling today.

We are at $400 million to get a new drug through the FDA right now. That is the cost of processing. That doesn't even talk about the research costs, but the new drug. That is just the cost to get it through the trials and get it through the FDA. We have all of these drugs today that aren't approved, that could be saving people's lives, because we can't get it through the FDA. And now, what are we going to place on the FDA? We are going to place the regulation of tobacco on the FDA.

Tobacco is not safe. In no way is it efficacious for any individual. Yet we are going to put a segment within the FDA and say: Run it the way you are running the rest of the business. It makes absolutely no sense to me. It doesn't mean that the goal behind this legislation isn't a good goal. It is. It is a good goal, but how we are doing it and where we put the control of this is totally counterintuitive.

I think if you would ask anybody in America, you want the people who are approving the drugs that are good for you to also control--why don't we put alcohol under them? Why don't we put the DEA under them, under the FDA? If, in fact, we want a controlling agency, then let's move it to the DEA--the Drug Enforcement Agency--or Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, right? Why don't we put it in ATF? We already have other agencies. But to put it in the FDA, when the total goal of the FDA is to approve new products for our benefit, our safety, and to cure health needs--tobacco creates health needs; it doesn't cure them. The only thing I know that it cures is if you get a wasp or a red hornet sting and you take some chewing tobacco and put it on the sting, it takes the pain away. I experienced that a lot as a young boy. My grand dad would pull it out and put that plug right there, and the pain would go away very quickly. That is the only efficacious thing I know about tobacco.

So I would just ask my colleagues to think again about what we are doing. Let's do the intent of the bill, but let's do it in a way that makes sense, that doesn't send a cross signal, and either put it into one of the other organizations we already have that is handling products that are bad for Americans--not products that are good for Americans--or let's put it into a separate agency where we can see it transparently and clearly.

I wish to make one other point. Inside this bill is the banning of any new nicotine products. I wish to tell my colleagues that is totally shortsighted. If you are a smoker today and we could get you off of smoking even though we still give you nicotine and we can do that through a new product, such as a dissolvable flavored lozenge, where we supply the nicotine addiction to your body but you are no longer creating lung disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, bolus emphysema, or increasing your chances for heart disease and hypertension, markedly increasing your chances for lung cancer, if we could convert that to something that would satisfy the demand yet wouldn't harm the rest of your body--we ban that in this bill. We stop all positive movement through commercial products to create a nicotine source that is other than chewing tobacco or cigarettes or cigars.

So why would we want to do that, especially if, in fact, we could take these millions of smokers today who, most of them, their habit is--there are two addictions they have. One is the nicotine craving that actually hits at the intercellular level. It is called a nicotinergic interface in terms of receptors on certain parts of the body. If we could do that in a way that would allow us to put nicotine in there to solve it but not cause all of the other disease, why would we say with this piece of legislation that we are never going to let that happen? Yet we are. I don't understand it. We could do that in a way where that could be highly restricted to only people who had a prescription, where they were already nicotine addicted.

So there are things we are missing in here from a general health standpoint that are going to be very harmful because what we are saying is: You can use the nicotine patch, you can take some of the new drugs that work in the brain to relieve the nicotine addiction, but rather than supply something in a harmless way that has no other ill health effects--I don't understand why we would not do that.

So I would appreciate my colleagues considering my comments. I believe the FDA is the last place we ought to put this. I think we ought to do it. We ought to change some of the things on how we are going to do it. We ought to create a capability to have nicotine supplied other than through chewing tobacco or cigars or cigarettes so that we can take the effects of it that we know are very harmful today and lessen them for the citizens who are addicted to nicotine.

My hope is that we wake up before we pass this bill because what we are really going to do is we are kind of shooting ourselves in the foot. If we really want to stop and help those people who are already addicted and really want to prevent new addictions, then

we have to allow for some of these new products, and we ought to do it at an agency that doesn't have purposes counter to what the charge of that agency is.

With that, I yield the floor to my friend from Oregon. I also thank him for being so kind to allow me to go first.

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

Mr. President, I asked the managers of the bill if I could have some time to discuss this bill for a moment. I offer a lot of amendments around here and, quite frankly, there are several amendments I should have offered, or should call up, but I am not going to call up because, quite frankly, I am not prepared to do it.

I wanted to talk about this bill because it has been described in a lot of ways as funding for our troops, as things that we have to do. I want to put a few holes in that for a minute.

There is funding for our troops in this bill, there is no question. We need to do that. One of the promises of the President--and I hope it comes about this next year--is we will never see another one of these to fight the wars. It will be incorporated, as it should have been in the past.

I am on record of voting against three of these requests from the Bush administration for the fact that it should be incorporated into the regular budget. We know we have these expenses. When we do a supplemental or an emergency--that is what we are calling this--there is something that happens most people do not realize. Mr. President, 100 percent of this bill will be borrowed by the Treasury when we start spending the money. This is not money we have. It is money we are going to borrow from the next two generations because the Congress refuses to make priorities of what we need to do, and we continue to spend money on things that we should not be or do not have to do, which are not a priority, and the money we are going to spend is borrowed money.

We have not heard much of that in the entire debate on this bill. Every dollar will be stolen from the future of the next two generations to come, and most of the people who are hearing my voice today will not pay the cost of this significantly large bill.

It was not all that long ago that the entire Federal budget wasn't the size of this, less than 45 years ago. Yet we are going to pass, in very short order, with very few amendments, a bill that does a lot of things besides fund our troops.

Of course, there is another thing most Americans don't know. It is that all the things that are in this bill that go to other executive branch agencies will be utilized to raise the baseline next year for the starting point of the budget process. In other words, we are raising the baseline. So when we look at it, when it comes through the budget next year, and the appropriations cycle, it will not be what we actually appropriated under the budget. It will be under the budget plus what we spent on the supplemental. We do not go back to where we should be. We go back to an elevated area because we had an emergency spending bill.

There is money in here for the United Nations Development Program, Peacekeeping Operations, $721 million. Here is a fact that most Americans don't know. Forty percent of every dollar spent by the United Nations on peacekeeping operations is absolutely defrauded or wasted. So in this case, $300 million of the $720 million that we are going to appropriate, some shyster connected with the United Nations, either in New York or in some foreign country, is going to steal that money. It is not going to go to help anybody keep the peace. It is not going to go to clothe and feed someone. It is not going to go to protect the rights of those who are discriminated against, those who are living not under the rule of law; that, in fact, $300 million out of the $720 million isn't going to do anything except line the pockets of crooks.

Yet we have that report, which we had to get from the U.N. because we don't have transparency on where our money is going. That is the U.N.'s own report. Yet there is nothing in this bill that requires them to give us an audit of how they are spending it. There is no metrics on how it is going to be spent, and there is nothing in this bill that says they are going to have to tell us and show us that they didn't let it get defrauded or get stolen. We are not paying attention. We are running like there isn't an economic crisis.

There is another area in this bill that is extremely disturbing to me, which is that we are going to give a $1.3 billion pay raise to all the Foreign Service officers in this country.

They hire 500 to 600 new ones each year. They have 25,000 applications for these jobs without this pay raise. This is called a locality pay differential, and it started because it is so expensive to live in Washington that we give a 21-percent increase to all Foreign Service officers who get stationed in the United States, but we are now going to give it to them no matter where they live.

So what we are talking about is a $15,000-a-year pay raise on the basis of nothing, to people who, on average, make more than $75,000 a year. Ask yourself a question: When we send a colonel to South Korea, do we give him a locality pay increase? No. When we send a sergeant to take care of the troops who are stationed around the world, do we give him a pay increase or her a pay increase? No. And they just happen to make a third of what our Foreign Service officers make. Yet with one broad stroke we are going to add $1.5 billion over the next 4 years, and then at least $400 million a year to everyone who works for the State Department.

Why are we doing that? Why are we saying Foreign Service officers are more important than our men and women in uniform? Why are we creating a differential when, in fact, there is no hardship, and we are having no trouble getting employees. By the first data I put out there, we are not. There are no statistics to suggest they have a greater loss than they are capable to reproduce. Yet in this bill, $400 million a year, just as a gift--just as a gift.

Think how demoralizing that is to the men and women who wear the uniform of the United States. We have decided that technocrats are more important than the people on the front lines. We have decided that, not based on merit, not based on performance, we are just going to give them a raise.

I don't have any objections due to the cost of living in DC that we might have a differential pay for that. But why would we say no matter where you live--if you live in Muskogee, OK, where I am from--and you happen to work for the State Department; that because you work for the State Department and not because you produce more or do a better job, you are going to get a 21-percent pay increase that is never going to get rescinded.

What are we doing? And why are we doing it?

Also in here is $.5 billion for the start of--and they have a legitimate claim, the State of Mississippi--a hurricane prevention program. We asked the Corps to do a study. We are putting money in. It is unauthorized money. It has never been through the committee, and I am not saying that we may or may not want to do this. But the Corps hasn't even finalized their evaluation of the study on whether it is viable. Yet this is the first $.5 billion in a $2 billion to $7 billion project that I am not sure right now, without authorization of the appropriate committee, we are going to jump in line ahead of every other priority program that the Corps of Engineers has just because we can do it. And the Corps hasn't even accepted the premise of the study on which the money is going to be spent.

America, wake up to what we are doing. This ship has a lot of holes in it, and we are taking on water faster than those with common sense can bail it out. These are just three prime examples of things in this bill that ought not be handled the way they are handled in the bill.

The No. 1 thing we are not doing is we are not being honest with ourselves about where this money is coming from and how much more it is going to cost the people in this country who are struggling every day just to pay their mortgage, just to put groceries on the table, and to pay their utility bills.

We are going to give $108 billion to the IMF. We had an amendment that got defeated. The fact is--and pay attention to this--it may not help. The assumption is we will get paid back because they have never not paid us back in the past. Well, this is a different day, and there is a high likelihood that, even though we only charge $5 billion for the cost of this $108 billion loan, we will never see a penny of it come back--a very high likelihood--especially if you look at the total debt and money assets of all the European countries compared to their GDP ratio.

We wring our hands and say: Well, we have to do this. We have to do this. What we have to do is preserve America first. What we have to do is defend America first. What we have to do is restore confidence in America. The way we are doing it with this bill does just the opposite.

I am sorry I haven't had time to go after the issues in this bill. There are tons of things we ought to be doing differently, and if we are not going to do them differently, we ought to hold the Members accountable on a vote to say why we are not doing them differently. Borrowing this money against our children's future and not making hard choices on some of the $350 billion worth of fraud and waste that we know the Federal Government has, not even looking at it, not making an attempt to pay for any of it, to me, is a tragedy.

It is not just a tragedy of the moment because what it clearly spells out is that there has been no change. There is no change in behavior. There is no recognition of the difficulty we are in. There is no set of priorities that says we do what is most important for the country first, and if it is not really that important, we don't do it at all now so that we can protect the way of life we have come to know. I am disappointed in us because we have failed to grasp the seriousness of where we are today in this country. And where we are is not far from losing the essence of what America stands for.

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

I will. I withdraw my request.

It was my understanding the Senator was going to put down a substitute bill?

Madam President, it is my understanding the substitute is open for amendment, is that correct?

I send an amendment to the desk and ask for its immediate consideration.

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

Madam President, I send another amendment to the underlying bill to the desk.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded to ask a question of the Chair, a parliamentary inquiry.

Madam President, I have a cloture motion.

Mr. President, would you advise me when I have 10 minutes remaining?

Let me say to the majority leader before he leaves, I want to thank him for his good-faith effort in working with us on this amendment. I appreciate the manner in which he has done that.

I want everybody to know what my motivation is. This is not about a political vote. I know it seems that way, but that is further from the truth than anything that I know. This is about the U.S. Constitution.

We have two agencies within the Federal Government that, through bureaucratic means, not a vote of Congress, have limited severely the second amendment rights of individuals in this country, both on National Park and Fish and Wildlife Service land. That is 190 million acres--190 million acres.

So the motivation is for the Congress to decide when we are going to take away rights guaranteed under the Constitution. We have had a recent Supreme Court ruling that has upheld the second amendment in a strong fashion for what it really is, and this is reserved to citizens of this country.

This is not about hunting. This is not about having a gun to go hunting. A lot of people are going to make statements about, this is going to increase poaching. It does not have anything to do with that. It will not affect that at all.

In fact, on U.S. Forest Service land, the second amendment reigns as a right guaranteed under the Constitution. Under Bureau of Land Management land, the second amendment reigns. They do not have any significant increase in poaching versus the areas where we do not have guns. So the point is that people who are going to break the law are going to break the law. So we see no difference.

The second point I would make is that this is about States rights. Senator Feinstein is going to come down and talk about this. But if California decides they do not want guns in their State parks, they do not have to have them. If they decide that, then this amendment would say they do not have to have them in the Federal parks.

What it says is that we are going to allow the States the right to determine, under their gun laws, who can have a gun and where, as long as it passes the muster of the U.S. Constitution.

So this amendment has two key points. One is to protect the second amendment; and if we are to choose to eliminate somebody's second amendment rights, the Congress ought to be onboard as affirmatively limiting those rights rather than bureaucrats.

The second point is to say that States should reign supreme in terms of their parks and the national parks in their jurisdiction so that they have coverage over what their State gun laws would have in terms of application.

Let me reveal data, talking about national parks, that I don't believe many people are aware of. The latest year for which we have statistics is 2006. There were 16 homicides, 41 rapes, and multiple attempted rapes, 92 robberies, 16 kidnappings, 333 aggravated assaults, and 5,094 other felony violations. We have 1 park ranger for every 100,000 visitors, and we have 1 park ranger for every 180,000 acres. What we know is that if in your State you have the right to carry on to public lands or if you have conceal carry laws, that ought to have application to your State, not to the Federal Government's predominance over your State.

The numbers I cited only reflect what the Park Service has investigated. They do not reflect all the other offenses of the Drug Enforcement Agency, which are thousands. It doesn't reflect the Federal Bureau of Investigations or local law enforcement investigations in these areas. So even though parks are relatively safe, the fact is that oftentimes the best deterrent is for the criminal to know that if they have a gun, somebody else might also have a gun.

As a physician, I hate what guns do. I don't want guns to be used. But the fact is, the second amendment to the Constitution is real. What we have is a situation before us where bureaucrats have said: We will take your rights away. It may be that the Congress says we should do that. But if we do it, it ought to be us doing it, not unelected bureaucrats through redtape fiat to truly limit your ability and your rights guaranteed under the Constitution.

What does this amendment do? This amendment restores the second amendment rights as outlined in each individual State back to the national parks and Fish and Wildlife Service. It says if States want to change their laws with regard to those, they can. But it leaves it to the government at the closest level to the people rather than the one farthest away from the people.

We will have a lot of claims that this will have an impact on poaching. It won't have any impact. But even if it does, tell me how poaching, the unauthorized killing of animals, is a higher value order than a right guaranteed under the Constitution. You can't find it. If we are that upside down in our country about guaranteed rights and the Bill of Rights and the underlying Constitution, then we are in a lot more severe trouble than most of us would recognize.

What we also know is that on Forest Service lands, we see a certain amount of poaching, but we have a certain amount of poaching now on parklands. So we are not going to see a corresponding increase. And if we do, it is still illegal.

This amendment doesn't apply to national monuments. It preserves States rights. That means no national monument does this amendment apply to. It preserves a State's right to do what it should do. In fact, it makes Congress responsible for the limiting of our rights under the Constitution rather than bureaucrats.

The consequences of the rules that we have today are bizarre. Not long ago on the Blue Ridge Parkway, a gentleman was convicted who had a Virginia right to carry. But because he drove through the national park with his gun not broken down and not in his trunk, he was convicted of a violation of national park policy. He was traveling from one place in Virginia to another and went through a park, as he did that on the roadway. So he was found liable under a Federal law which was never intended by us and never intended under the Constitution. Yet he was compliant with his own State's gun laws.

The whole purpose of this amendment is not a gotcha amendment. It is to say: Does the second amendment mean something? If we are going to limit it, it ought to be us who do it. Do States rights mean anything and should we have bureaucrats limiting individual rights versus the Congress? If it is going to happen, the Congress has to be the body that does it.

For decades, regulations enacted by unelected bureaucrats at the National Park Service, NPS, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, FWS, have prohibited law-abiding citizens from possessing firearms on some Federal lands. The enactment of these rules pre-empted State laws, bypassed the authority of Congress, and trampled on the constitutional rights of law-abiding Americans guaranteed by the second amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

This legislation enables Congress to belatedly weigh in on this important matter.

The Protecting Americans from Violent Crime Act of 2009 would ensure State gun laws and citizens' constitutional rights are honored on Federal lands by prohibiting the Department of Interior from creating or enforcing any regulations prohibiting an individual, not otherwise prohibited by law, from possessing a firearm in national parks and wildlife refuges in compliance with and as permitted by State law.

This legislation would prohibit Federal bureaucrats, activist judges, and special interest groups from infringing on the right for law- abiding Americans to defend themselves and their families in national parks and refuges. This legislation does not affect current hunting and poaching rules in national parks and refuges.

This legislation is still needed.

While the Department of the Interior, DOI, finalized regulations permitting the possession of firearms in national parks and refuges in accordance with State law over a 2-year time period, several anti-gun groups have successfully sued the Department of the Interior to prevent this rule from being implemented for the time being.

An activist judge blocked the final gun-in-parks rule because the Bush administration did not conduct an environmental impact analysis of the rule change. Such an analysis was not conducted because the rule change neither authorized the discharging of conceal carry weapons, nor the poaching of animals.

DOI decided not to appeal this ruling, and is, instead, conducting a lengthy environmental review before it makes a final determination on the rule change.

Even if this rule, allowing visitors to carry concealed firearms in accordance with State law, is reinstated, future administrations or activist judges could repeal these regulations without congressional approval. Unelected bureaucrats and judges should not continue to have the ability to revoke a constitutional right of law-abiding Americans. Passing this legislation will help ensure that such a comprehensive gun ban may never again be enacted by unelected officials.

Congressional leadership inappropriately blocked consideration of this measure repeatedly.

Members of Congress have repeatedly attempted to bring up this measure for a clean, fair vote. Unfortunately, congressional leadership has gone to extreme lengths to avoid having a straight up-and-down vote on this measure.

On December 19, 2007, Majority Leader Reid entered into the record the following unanimous consent agreement:

Mr. REID. `Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the

Senate proceed to Calendar No. 546, S. 2483, the energy lands

bills, at a time to be determined by the majority leader,

following consultation with the Republican leader, and that

when considered, it be considered under the following

limitations: that the only amendments in order be five

related amendments to be offered by Senator Coburn; that upon

disposition of all amendments, the bill be read a third time,

and the Senate proceed to vote on passage of the bill.

The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is

so ordered.

This agreement permitted five related amendments to an omnibus bill that included dozens of bills that modified National Park Service lands. The Parliamentarian ruled legislation allowing for firearm possession in national parks in accordance with State and Federal law was related and in compliance with Senator Reid's requirement. Instead of honoring this agreement, however, they majority leader pulled the entire bill from the floor and reintroduced a nearly identical measure to technically ``honor'' the unanimous consent agreement without allowing for a vote on related firearm legislation.

Repeated attempts to bring this bill to the new bill were thwarted. Consequently, a version of this bill was included at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee markup along with a package of lands bill. This amendment was adopted as a stand-alone measure by an 18-5 vote with the understanding that this bill would be included with the package of lands bill approved during the same markup. Despite a letter signed by five Senators on the committee asking the chairman of the committee, ``to honor this agreement and the bipartisan will of the Committee by including S. 3499 in the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2008,'' this measure was excluded yet again.

When Members of the House of Representatives were close to forcing consideration of the Protecting Americans from Violent Crime Act as an amendment to this year's Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009, almost identical to the 2008 bill, Democratic leadership in the House and Senate coordinated to pull the bill from the floor in the House and add the entire bill in the Senate as a replacement to a previously passed House bill on designating a battlefield as a historic site. While Democratic leadership in the Senate had already managed to block a vote on the Protecting Americans from Violent Crime Act, by enacting this maneuver, the House leadership was also able to block any amendments from being considered in the House.

Last attempts to add firearm legislation to the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 proved unsuccessful.

Gun bans on Federal property were enacted by unelected bureaucrats without the authority of Congress.

In 1936 the National Park Service established regulations banning firearms in national parks. These regulations were updated in 1983 to allow for guns to be transported through national parks if they were unloaded and stored in the trunk of cars.

In 1976 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service established similar regulations for Federal refuges. These regulations were last updated in 1981.

Congress has never endorsed or debated these gun bans.

Unfortunately, however, State laws permitting concealed carry of firearms were not recognized on Federal land managed by NPS and FWS. Americans

on these lands could not possess a loaded firearm in or on a motor vehicle, a boat or vessel except in specific circumstances. Firearms could only be transported in or on a motor vehicle, boat or horse if they were rendered temporarily inoperable, or packed, stored or cased in a manner that prevented their ready use. The penalties for violating the gun prohibition included a fine of $5,000 and 6 months in prison.

In addition to criminalizing law-abiding citizens for exercising their constitutional rights, these regulations exposed the great threat of bureaucrats overstepping their authority--a threat that still exists.

These regulations and the corresponding penalties were established without any congressional mandate or legislative approval.

It is troubling that Government bureaucrats, single-interest groups, and activist judges could take away the rights of law-abiding citizens guaranteed by the Federal Constitution on Federal property and without the consideration of the Federal representatives of the people. The Supreme Court recently ruled that a complete ban on firearms is unconstitutional, yet Federal bureaucrats have managed to completely ban firearms for over 70 years on all 83.6 million acres of national park lands and for over 30 years on all 90.79 million acres of FWS lands, except for hunting purposes.

Recently, a judge also repealed the new regulations governing firearm possession in national parks and refuges on the grounds that no environmental review was completed prior to the promulgation of the rule.

It is unclear how allowing conceal carry has a significant impact on the environment, or how the National Environmental Protection Act supersedes the second amendment rights of law-abiding Americans on more than 170 million acres of Federal lands.

While the activist judge ruled administration officials ``abdicated their congressionally mandated obligation'' to evaluate environmental impacts and ``ignored, without sufficient explanation, substantial information in the administrative record concerning environmental impacts'' of the rule, she failed to consider the constitutional obligation to protect the right to bear arms.

A handful of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats and judges should not possess the ability to overstep the authority of the U.S. Congress, the Supreme Court, or the U.S. Constitution. ``There was no legislative process--[NPS and FWS] bureaucrats arbitrarily terminated this Constitutional right.''

Given the fact that a recent investigator general report of the FWS Office of Law Enforcement found that this agency has been unable to even account for firearms under their own management, it also seems inappropriate for these agencies to concern themselves with regulating the second amendment rights of law-abiding citizens.

It is clear that Congress should address this issue, and many in Congress have already expressed their opposition to these regulations, including 18 of the 23 members of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in the 110th Congress who voted for this amendment-- including the current Secretary of the Interior. Fifty Senators, including 9 Democrats and 41 Republicans, also signed two letters to former Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne asking him to remove these regulations. Several additional Senators have indicated their support for allowing State laws to govern firearm possession on public lands and 25 Senators sponsored similar legislation last Congress.

Even the Department of the Interior--the agency that oversaw the creation of these regulations--commented in 2008 that ``It's appropriate to look at updating these regulations, to bring them into conformity with state laws [on guns use]. Following the release of the final regulations, a spokesman for the Department of the Interior pointed out, ``This is the same basic approach adopted by the Bureau of Land Management and the United States Forest Service, both of which allow visitors to carry weapons consistent with applicable federal and state laws. . . . Federal agencies have a responsibility to recognize the expertise of the states in this area, and Federal regulations should be developed and implemented in a manner that respects state prerogatives and authority.''

No other federal land agency has enacted anti-gun rules similar to the National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service.

As a spokesman for the Department of the Interior pointed out in a press release, both the Bureau of Land and Management and the U.S. Forest Service allow for the law of the State in which the Federal property is located to govern firearm possession.

FS and the BLM have not experienced any difficulties as a result of allowing firearm possession.

According to the BLM, ``Laws and reg[ulation]s pertaining to concealing and carrying firearms are within [states'] jurisdiction and we only enforce them on public land if we have state authority by way of a local agreement. The BLM has some regulations on the use of firearms that pertain to specific areas, such as recreation sites and other areas that may be closed to shooting (but that does not make it illegal to possess a firearm in those areas).''

If other land preservation agencies never had to enact regulations infringing on the second amendment--including one agency within the Department of the Interior--why did NPS and FWS, which are both within the Department of the Interior?

This legislation will protect law-abiding citizens without threatening natural resources or wildlife.

These anti-gun regulations were intended to ``ensure public safety and maximum protection of natural resources,'' according to Scot McElveen, the president of the Association of National Park Rangers.

According to NPS and FWS, prohibiting citizens to carry legally owned and registered firearms was necessary to prevent the poaching of animals living on NPS and FWS lands. Anti-gun groups sued the Department of the Interior to repeal the implementation of the finalized rule change, claiming in part that overturning the gun ban will compromise the safety of humans and animals.

The Department of Justice argued against the lawsuit, pointing out that the new rule ``does not alter the environmental status quo, and will not have any significant impacts on public health and safety.''

This legislation will likewise not enable or permit illegal hunting of animals on these lands. Other NPS and FWS regulations specifically governing illegal hunting will remain in place, ensuring that poaching will still be illegal.

It will also not authorize the discharging of firearms or target practice in these natural reserves.

Proponents of these extreme gun restrictions have also claimed that the unconstitutional regulations are a necessary law enforcement tool against poaching and other crimes. They reason that if guns are outlawed in parks and refuges, law enforcement can use the possession of a firearm to prosecute would-be poachers.

In addition to the fact that the second amendment was not recognized by our founders to give law enforcement officers in national parks and refuges an additional tool to eliminate poaching, the fact that both BLM and FS have not ``required'' these additional regulations further proves these anti-gun regulations are unnecessary.

As the former Department of the Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne points out, ``Since the [proposed federal regulations similarly] maintain existing prohibitions on poaching and target shooting, and carrying weapons in federal buildings, [it] would not cause a detrimental impact on visitor safety and resources.''

Crime rates on Federal lands are rising.

National parks, while still generally safe for visitors, have seen an increase in crime.

According to the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service, in 2006 there were 16 homicides, including one manslaughter charge, 41 rape cases, including two attempted rapes, 92 robberies, 16 kidnappings, and 333 aggravated assaults out of 5094 part I offenses. In national parks there were a total of 116,588 offenses. These offenses only include homicides and other

crimes handled by national park and refuge law enforcement, but don't account for the homicides and crimes other law enforcement agencies processed--e.g. the Federal Bureau of Investigations, Drug Enforcement Agency, local law enforcement.

Overriding State laws that give its residents the ability to defend themselves may increasingly place NPS and FWS visitors in unnecessary danger.

NPS and FWS anti-gun regulations disarm individuals and leave them and their families vulnerable to crime on public lands.

In a Seattle Times article titled ``Crime Slowly Creeps Into Parks, Forests,'' Captain John Klaasen of the U.S. Forest Service states, ``If you see [a crime] happening in the city, it happens in the forest.'' Whether it is meth labs hidden amid lush forests or car prowls at trailheads, park rangers and forest officers are seeing an increasing amount of criminal behavior.

Following the grisly murders of four women at Yosemite National Park in 1999, Elaine Sevy with the National Park Service stated, ``You're not escaping society when you come to the parks. Understand that parks are a microcosm of society.''

For many criminals, parks and forests offer a safe haven. Consequently, visitors enjoying some of our Nation's natural treasures are increasingly vulnerable to harm and personal injury.

According to a San Francisco Chronicle article, ``National Parks' Pot Farms Blamed on Cartels; Mexican Drug Lords Find it Easier to Grow in State Than Import;''

Hikers in national parks such as Yosemite and Sequoia-Kings

Canyon are encountering a danger more hazardous than bears:

illegal marijuana farms run by Mexican drug cartels and

protected by booby traps and guards carrying AK-47s. . . .

Park service officials said the drug cartels took extreme

measures to protect their plants, which can be worth $4,000

each. Growers have been known to set up booby traps with

shotguns. Guards armed with knives and military-style weapons

have chased away hikers at gunpoint. In 2002, a visitor to

Sequoia was briefly detained by a drug grower, who threatened

to harm him if he told authorities the pot farm's secret

location.''

A more recent news story also highlighted this dilemma. Special agent eradication teams heavily armed are needed to clear thousands of pot plants in State and national parks and other public lands. Many of the marijuana fields are located next to popular trails. However, ``The folks who are growing the marijuana are not your peace hippies from the 60s . . . These are armed members of the Mexican drug trafficking organizations, who utilize assault style weapons, assault rifles to protect their cash crops.''

A February 2005 report, ``Marijuana and Methamphetamine Trafficking on Federal Lands Threat Assessment,'' concluded that already high levels of cultivation of cannabis and methamphetamine production by Mexican drug-trafficking organizations are likely to increase.

``Cannabis cultivators and methamphetamine producers on federal lands often are armed, and cannabis grow sites and methamphetamine laboratories frequently are booby-trapped. Law enforcement officers have seized shotguns, handguns, automatic weapons, pipe bombs, grenades, and night vision equipment from drug producers and smugglers on federal lands.''

With one law enforcement officer for about every 110,000 visitors and 118,000 acres of national park land, park police may not always be close by and individuals may be left to defend themselves. While park rangers now use bullet-proof vests and automatic weapons to enforce the law, regular Americans in States where carry laws exist, are denied the opportunity for self-defense because of these NPS and FWS regulations.

Drug and human smuggling across the U.S. Mexico border has made it impossible and dangerous for scientists to continue their research and for visitors to frequent ``well-marked but unofficial trails'' in a national park.

``Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument stopped granting most new research permits because of increasing smuggling activity. Scientists must sign a statement acknowledging that the National Park Service cannot guarantee their safety from ``potentially dangerous persons entering the park from Mexico.''

Lands managed by the Department of the Interior lands make up more than 39 percent of our border with Mexico. Mexican drug trafficking organizations smuggling operations rely on back routes and private roads through these lands to transport marijuana and methamphetamine. These drugs are primarily smuggled through NPS and FWS lands.

A report by the National Parks Conservation Association in 2007 titled ``Perilous Parkland: Homeland Security and the National Parks'' detailed how over the past 2 years at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, ``park rangers have arrested and indicted 385 felony smugglers, seized 40,000 lbs. of marijuana, and intercepted 3,800 illegal aliens. The Border Patrol estimated that 500 people per day (180,000 per year) and 700,000 pounds of drugs entered the U.S. illegally through the monument in the year 2000.'' It is no wonder the law enforcement staff of 11 park rangers is encountering difficulties in managing a 330,000-acre park with numerous activities initiated by Mexican drug cartels.

This park was ranked by the Fraternal Order of Police as the most dangerous national park in 2003. While two other parks on the Mexico- U.S. border were listed in top 10 most dangerous national parks in 2003, other parks included on this list were in States such as New Jersey, Florida, Virginia and Wyoming--Yellowstone National Park.

The Government Accountability Office, in a report entitled a ``Actions Needed to Better Protect National Icons and Federal Office Buildings from Terrorism,'' additionally expressed concern with the ability of the Interior Department to maintain adequate security in the post-9/11 world of heightened alerts due to potential terrorist attacks. According to a survey by the National Park Service, safety concerns have played a significant role in the decreasing number of National Park visitors.

Another result of this surge is that, ``National Park Service officers are 12 times more likely to be killed or injured as a result of an assault than FBI agents.''

According to the group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, ``National Park Service commissioned law-enforcement officers were victims of assaults 111 times in 2004, nearly a third of which resulted in injury. This figure tops the 2003 total of 106 assaults and the 2002 total of 98.''

Because of this threat, rangers in higher crime areas often carry automatic weapons and wear bullet-proof vests.

In a CBS News article titled ``Crime Rates Up in National Parks--More Rangers Find Themselves Battling Lawlessness,'' former executive director of the U.S. Park Rangers Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police and 30-year park ranger, Randall Kendrick noted that ``The National Park Service has an astoundingly poor safety record for its officers . . . If anything, these assaults against park rangers are undercounted. If there is not a death or injury, pressures within a national park can cause the incident to be reported as being much more minor than it is in reality, and it is not unheard of for an assault to go unreported altogether.

FWS refuges have also experienced significant crime and law enforcement concerns. The Cooperative Alliance for Refugee Enhancement released a report this past May that pointed out that refuges are also becoming increasingly dangerous to visitors. According to the report ``Restoring America's Wildlife Refuges,'' there is one law enforcement officer for every 555,000 acres of refuges.

President of the National Wildlife Refuge Association and chairman of C.A.R.E., Evan Hirsche, said the following:

A decrease in law enforcement has left the refuges

vulnerable to criminal activity, including prostitution,

torched cars and illegal immigrant camps along the Potomac

River in suburban Washington, methamphetamine labs in Nevada

and pot growing operations in Washington state. . . In some

cases, we find that drug operations have set up shop in

refuges.

The C.A.R.E. report finds that, ``On many wildlife refuges, drugs are a serious problem. These aren't small-time marijuana gardens; drug operators on refuges frequently defend their plots with armed guards . . . A 2005 report by the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) detailed the urgent need for additional law enforcement to

respond to commercial-scale drug production and trafficking, wildlife poaching, vandalism, assaults, and a host of other crimes.

For example, according to C.A.R.E., because of staffing cuts, Tishomingo National Wildlife Refuge located in Oklahoma, will now share one law enforcement officer with a refuge in Texas--one law enforcement officer for 200,000 annual visitors.

While better prioritization of Federal funds may be needed to increase law enforcement efforts in our public parks, refuges, and forests, allowing visitors to national parks and refuges to possess guns provides responsible gun owners the ability to defend themselves in the event that other protection is not available.

Gun regulations were confusing, burdensome and ineffective.

The contradictory patchwork of Federal regulations within different agencies created the scenario where a law-abiding gun owner traveling from public land managed by BLM to an adjacent NPS or FWS unit was subject to a $5,000 fine and a 6 month prison sentence for violating Federal regulations.

In many States, people have to pass through designated Federal lands every day. They should be able to do so without having to worry about which laws apply on what type of public land, if they are authorized to carry firearms under State law.

A man driving along the Blue Ridge parkway in Virginia was stopped for failing to obey a stop sign by a national park ranger. Upon further inspection, the ranger found two loaded firearms in the car. The defendant was licensed to conceal carry under Virginia State law and did not know he was in violation of National Park Service regulations and had not observed any signs prohibiting the possession or transportation of loaded and operational firearms. The road he was on also serves as highway between routes 460 and 220 in the Roanoke area. The defendant was found guilty, even though he was in his car and permitted under State law to possess firearms because of an administrative rule.

The bureaucrats seemingly well intended goal of ``protecting'' the public and natural resources holds the same flaws of other anti-gun efforts: It ensures that only criminals possess firearms and makes law abiding citizens subject to criminal penalties for exercising their constitutional rights.

An editorial in the Colorado Spring Gazette pointed out that ``Armed law-abiding citizens aren't the source of violence, criminals are.''

Likewise, John Stossel commented that:

[L]aws that make it difficult or impossible to carry a

concealed handgun do deter one group of people: law-abiding

citizens who might have used a gun to stop crime. Gun laws

are laws against self-defense.

Criminals have the initiative. They choose the time, place

and manner of their crimes, and they tend to make choices

that maximize their own, not their victims', success. So

criminals don't attack people they know are armed, and anyone

thinking of committing mass murder is likely to be attracted

to a gun-free zone, such as schools and malls [or national

parks].

If you are the target of a crime, only one other person

besides the criminal is sure to be on the scene: you. There

is no good substitute for self-responsibility.

Individuals who are already willing to break the law to illegally hunt on public lands, after all, are no more likely to obey Federal regulations that disallow the use firearms on public lands.

Federal law enforcement in parks and refuges is ineffective and incompetent.

According to the inspector general of the Department of the Interior, NPS law enforcement agents and rangers are ineffectively managed by ``non-law enforcement managers.''

In a statement before the Senate Committee on Finance, inspector general Earl E. Devaney remarked that various superintendents of a number of dangerous parks opposed increasing law enforcement staff to combat rising crime levels for a variety of reasons.

Some superintendents ordered rangers not to carry firearms because they thought it would ``offend park visitors.''

Other superintendents assigned law enforcement staff non-law enforcement work to prevent them from becoming ``too much like cops'' or because ``the public does not want park rangers with the same edge as FBI agents but instead what the public wants is the park ranger to be cut from the same cloth as a boy scout.'' One assistant Park Police chief sought to address safety concerns with the statement that terrorists ``are not incredibly sophisticated.''

According to the Washington Post, a February 2008 assessment of the U.S. Park Police by Mr. Devaney concluded that:

The U.S. Park Police have failed to adequately protect [ ]

national landmarks [ ] and are plagued by low morale, poor

leadership and bad organization . . . The force is

understaffed, insufficiently trained and woefully equipped .

. .

The International Association of Chiefs of Police also described law enforcement staffing at the Park Service as ``patently illogical and erratic.''

This legislation will enable law-abiding citizens to defend themselves in national parks and refuges.

This legislation would not void State and local laws that prohibit the possession of fire arms and do not provide State residents with conceal and carry permits. National monuments would still be governed by U.S. law that prohibits the possession of firearms at Federal facilities, and visitors to national parks in States with no conceal and carry laws would be required to follow State law.

This legislation, similarly to the recently implemented rule change, does, however, require the National Park Service and any other agency under the Department of the Interior to promulgate regulations regarding firearm possession that do not conflict with state and local laws--including conceal and carry laws.

An aggressive black bear was shot and killed in the Denali National Park in Alaska. Luckily one of the three park employees threatened by this bear was authorized to carry a gun. ``An attempt to divert the bear with pepper spray was ineffective,'' and the bear was shot and killed. Typical Americans would not have been permitted to defend themselves with anything besides ``ineffective'' bear spray.

A boy celebrating his tenth birthday in Tonto National Forest in Arizona was attacked by a rabid mountain lion. The lion made two attempts to attack the boy, but was shot both times by the boy's uncle with a pistol. The second shot killed the mountain lion. If this event had occurred in a national park or refuge, the uncle would not have been allowed to even have brought an unloaded pistol along with him.

Additionally, a 38-year-old man hiking in British Colombia was attacked and mauled by a grizzly bear in June and would have been killed had he not managed to shoot the bear twice. Even though he was able to shoot the bear, he still needed 40 stitches and suffered a broken hand and multiple puncture wounds. In national parks and refuges, this story would have most likely ended tragically.

The Washington Post also featured a two-part story recounting a double murder in 1981 and an attempted double murder earlier this year on the Appalachian Trail. Many of the 2,175 miles that make up this trail are under the jurisdiction of NPS. Adopting this amendment would ensure all law-abiding citizens would be able to protect themselves from rare, but dangerous, four- and two-legged predators on this trail and other NPS and FWS lands.

By passing this bill, the Senate will be voting to increase the safety of families and discourage criminals from taking advantage of vulnerable families on Federal lands managed by the Department of the Interior. Congress will also finally ensure that elected representatives, instead of federal bureaucrats, determine second amendment policies in this instance.

It is claimed that gun restrictions enacted by the National Park Service, NPS, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, FWS, are different than those of Bureau of Land Management, BLM, and U.S. Forest Service lands, FS, because the roles of the agencies are different.

The fact is all four agencies have generally similar responsibilities to manage and protect Federal properties and national resources.

The NPS mandate is to ``[preserve] unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the national park system for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations.''

The FWS mandate is to ``[work] with others to conserve, protect, and enhance fish, wildlife, and plants and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people.''

BLM's mission is to ``[sustain] the health, diversity, and productivity of the public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations.'' According to the FS Web site, ``the mission of the USDA Forest Service is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the Nation's forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations.''

Besides the fact that the missions of all four agencies are similar, because additional regulations prohibit the inappropriate use of firearms in nondesignated areas, allowing for State conceal and carry laws will not compromise these agency missions. Instead, by allowing for State firearm laws to be recognized, visitors will feel safer and more protected in areas where there is limited or no law enforcement.

It is claimed that animals will be poached and not adequately protected if visitors are permitted to carry guns in Federal parks.

The fact is that separate regulations already outlaw such behavior. This legislation will not void those regulations.

This legislation is necessary to enable law-abiding Americans to defend themselves and their families--not to permit more hunting.

Additionally, officials from FS also have poaching regulations and, just like FWS, also have the option of enforcing Federal Wildlife crimes under a criminal code called the Lacey Act.

It is claimed that it would be impractical to enforce State-by-State conceal and carry laws on NPS lands.

The fact is that both the BLM and the Forest Service have not expressed any difficulties or frustration in recognizing State laws.

As it currently stands, the NPS does not enforce NPS regulations that void State concealed carry laws, except if violations are found inadvertently according to NPS congressional liaison. Even then, rangers will normally only give a warning to visitors that NPS regulations do not recognize State conceal and carry permits.

This bill would actually simplify rules for national park and refuge visitors by requiring them to abide by State and local laws regardless of what type of Federal land they are visiting. Currently, visitors in some States may carry operational firearms in State parks, BLM and FS lands but not in national parks and refuges.

It is claimed that recognizing concealed carry State permits would compromise the effectiveness of NPS law enforcement.

The fact is that concealed carry permits exist for the protection of individuals--not law enforcement by regular citizens.

Current police forces are spread far too thin as it is and are not sufficient. According to GAO, for every one law enforcement officer there are about 10,000 visitors and 118,000 acres of land. According to a report, FWS only employs one law enforcement officer for every 550,000 acres of national refuge land.

Both FS and BLM do not believe their effectiveness has been compromised because State laws governing firearms are followed on their lands. Additionally, thousands of Americans with concealed carry permits in 48 States have not compromised the effectiveness of our law enforcement in States. Why should allowing concealed carry in national parks produce a different outcome?

It is claimed that poaching has decreased as a result of these regulations.

The fact is that according to CRS, there is no way of determining such a conclusion because poaching data is not maintained on a national basis throughout national parks and refuges for a variety of reasons. Attempts by both NPS and FWS to keep poaching statistics have not succeeded for a variety of reasons. Additionally, NPS, up until recently, did not even differentiate between different types of poaching when reporting any instances of poaching--including poaching archaeological relics, trees and plants, and animals.

According to DOI's limited recordkeeping of poaching incidents, there has actually been a 10 percent increase in these incidents between 2003 and 2006--a jump from 365 incidents in 2003 to 405 in 2006. In contrast there were 16 homicides; including one manslaughter charge, 41 rape cases, including two attempted rapes, 92 robberies, 16 kidnappings, and 33 aggravated assaults out of 5094 part I offenses.

It is claimed that hunting is already allowed in a number of specially designated areas.

The fact is that this bill is not about hunting but concerns the right for Americans to protect themselves and their families from criminals and rabid and dangerous animals. This legislation will not overturn hunting regulations.

It is claimed that 7 former NPS directors have spoken out against changing the current regulations along with organizations such as the Association of National Park Rangers, the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, and the U.S. Park Rangers Lodge. This legislation directly contradicts the opinions of those most knowledgeable of law enforcement in national parks and refuges and thus should not be endorsed.

The fact is that many of the concerns listed by these organizations have to do with poaching, not self-defense. The current situation in our national parks and refuges does not afford many visitors the benefits of adequate law enforcement protection--a fact that is emphasized by the increasing level of crime and violence experienced by law enforcement officers of these public lands.

The Association of National Park Rangers has requested that Congress weigh in on these Federal regulations concerning the possession of firearms in these public lands. This amendment gives Congress, representing all Americans, instead of unelected bureaucrats the opportunity to do so.

It is claimed that the regulatory process improperly did not include a full environmental impact study.

The fact is that both the current and previous administrations agreed that this rule change does not significantly impact the ``environmental status quo, and . . . public health and safety.'' This bill does not authorize poaching or illegal gun use.

With that, I reserve the remainder of my time, suggest the absence of a quorum, and ask unanimous consent that the time be divided equally.

I ask unanimous consent to reserve for me 10 minutes.

I am happy to yield 5 minutes to the Senator from Virginia.

Mr. President, following up on what the Senator from Virginia said, there actually was an event in his State on the Blue Ridge Parkway where a gentleman who was licensed to carry failed to stop completely at a stop sign and was stopped. Under his law, the laws of the State of Virginia, he was licensed to legally carry, but the park ranger found that he had guns in his car--all within the laws of the State of Virginia. Yet he was convicted because he drove through an edge of a national park, carrying a gun in a national park.

Senator Webb has described it well. This is about establishing clarity. You still can't go out and target shoot. You can't hunt. But what you can do is be within the law. So by protecting the second amendment and by protecting States rights, we will have common sense.

I would make the other point--the Senator from Connecticut is here-- if your State says: We don't want to do these things, you can under this amendment. So if you have a national park and you don't allow guns in the State park, you can say you don't allow guns in the national park. So it follows completely. When the Senator from Connecticut asked me about this today, I went back to my staff, and, in fact, that is the case, that State law will reign supreme as long as there is consistency within the State and the park that is part of that State.

So I also agree with what Senator Webb said, which is the natural reaction is, this is nuts. It is not nuts. It is about commonsense application of the second amendment. It is about States rights, and it is about not putting people in jeopardy who are in jeopardy today because they are lawfully carrying out the laws of their own State.

With that, I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. President, as I told the Senator from Connecticut, the underlying bill has many things I am in favor of. I don't want to see it fail on this, but nor should we want to see the second amendment trampled, nor should we want common sense to go out the window as we apply laws in this country.

The fact is, we have had very many good commonsense amendments come out of the Senate that don't come out of conference committee. I am not sure I would expect a different result on this one.

The fact still remains that we have an incoherent policy that takes away a right that has been done by bureaucrats. If we decide we don't want to do that, then that is the Congress speaking that we are not going to do that, and that is fine. But to have bureaucrats eliminate some of these second amendment rights and do so in a way that causes people confusion and puts people at risk is wrong.

So I thank the Senator for his comments. I hope he can support the amendment because it is a commonsense amendment. He has supported many other of my amendments. What you do in conference will determine whether it comes back out with that on it.

I yield back the remainder of my time.

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

Mr. President, first of all, let me relay my appreciation to both the chairman and the ranking member for this bill. It does a lot of things that needed to be done for a long time. I would also say it will not do anything unless the President puts in the right person who has the right character; that is, mean as all get out, thorough, and comprehensive in what they are going to do and plans on staying there for a long time.

The other points I wanted to make, and I will be brief--really there are two. I have listened to all of this debate, not necessarily here but from my office. There is one thing that is missing in the debate. We have had the problem with contractors, and there is a problem with the Pentagon. But not once did I hear there is a problem with us.

The real reason we have gotten into trouble to the degree we have is because we have not done the oversight. We have not done our job. So we are seeing a great response now by the leadership of the Armed Services Committee to do some of the right things. But had we been doing our job, much of what we see in terms of failed major procurement systems, lack of transparency, we could have had that transparency had we been doing the oversight.

I will give you an example. Senator Carper and I did the transparency on the C-5 retrofit, and we had a supposed Nunn-McCurdy breach when, in fact, there was not a Nunn-McCurdy breach. The people wanted there to be a Nunn-McCurdy breach. The fact is, we could in fact cut down costs, create transparency, not just with the effects of what this bill is going to do, but if we are much more aggressive.

The last point I will make is that there is no question that the earmarking process hampers us far more than it helps us in the Pentagon. When we see the amount of time that is spent on most projects versus oversight, the American taxpayers are getting shortchanged. They are just getting shortchanged.

I hope people will recognize that although sometimes earmarks turn out to be fantastic, the vast majority of times they do not, and we spend staff time doing that rather than managing what is happening there today.

Our No. 1 charge under the Constitution is the defense of this country, and we do not just spend $500 billion on that or $600 billion. When we add up everything we spend, it comes--if we count nuclear weapons maintenance and we count the research for nuclear warheads, if we count everything that goes through, we are about at $1 trillion. When we add everything else, that comes to that. And we are highly inefficient.

I am very appreciative with what is happening within this bill. But I think the American public ought to recognize that the earmarking process in Congress has hurt the Defense Department because it has taken away from us doing our regular job.

No. 2, Congress has hurt our procurement and our ability to defend ourselves because we are not doing the work we need to be doing, the oversight on a monthly basis on major programs. We cannot depend on IGs and the GAO. We have to ask them: Are you on time? Are you meeting the schedule we need to do this because we are putting one-third of our assets that we expend every year into defense? It is rich. And when we pay out $7, $8 billion for performance contracts that the performance contractor did not make, did not meet the requirements, but we pay it anyhow, we are the ones who allow that to happen.

Finally, the last point I will make: Until we address the revolving door of working in the Pentagon and going to work for a contractor and how that impacts what people do in terms of procurement and major decisions, we are not going to solve this problem. Whether it is an ethical constraint or a positive statement of principles, somehow we have to address that issue because we cannot blame the people who are looking for their next job to be less than perfectly independent in this job if, in fact, it is going to affect their future.

So we have not addressed that in this bill, but that is still one of the things that has to be addressed because it is problematic not only in terms of how well we do but what we get for what we actually pay out.

Again, I thank the chairman and ranking member. I appreciate their work. I appreciate them taking our amendment. My hope is that when we combine what we have put forward with a--I cannot use the word I want to use on the Senate floor--but someone of significantly tough demeanor to ramrod this through there, that, in fact, we will see great savings, better performance, and better procurement for the American taxpayers.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I would like to take a minute to briefly discuss my opposition to the nomination of Gil Kerlikowske to be Director of National Drug Control Policy. Chief Kerlikowske has had a long career in law enforcement, and he enjoys the support of many of his colleagues. However, the concerns I have about certain aspects of his record prevent me from being able to support his nomination to be Director of ONDCP.

The principal purpose of ONDCP is to establish policies, priorities, and objectives for the nation's drug control program. The office has arguably never been more important, as the United States seeks to deal with the violent drug cartels whose influence has begun to cross into our borders. Yet Chief

Kerlikowske has no experience with international drug interdiction, which is among my chief concerns with this nomination.

Although I suppose my concerns about Chief Kerlikowske's lack of experience with international drug enforcement could be overcome by a strong record of domestic enforcement, I am afraid that Chief Kerlikowske lacks such a record. Instead, he has gained a reputation for being soft on marijuana enforcement, once stating that pursuing possession offenses was ``not a priority.'' Despite local attitudes on this issue, as the top law enforcement officer in Seattle, Chief Kerlikowske has an obligation to make all crime a priority.

Chief Kerlikowske's lax record on marijuana enforcement has even led many pro-marijuana groups to endorse his nomination. In this country, marijuana remains a Schedule I drug and is known as the ``gateway drug,'' because it can lead to the abuse of more dangerous substances. For this reason, the next ONDCP Director must be a strong opponent of marijuana and all illegal drugs, as well as act as an aggressive enforcer of the laws regulating these harmful narcotics. I am concerned that Mr. Kerlikowske does not have such a record or reputation.

I have other concerns about Chief Kerlikowske's record that I will not detail here. Those concerns include: his decision to withhold police from a riot that broke out in 2001, in which a 20-year-old college student was murdered; his direction for police not to check immigration status or take action on any such violations; and his record on gun control. With respect to the Second Amendment, at a time when facts about the influence of American guns in Mexican drug cartel violence are being distorted--often with the intent to restrict the constitutional rights of American citizens--it is crucial that we have leaders who are ready to defend those rights. I am concerned that Chief Kerlikowske will not be such a defender.

In short, Chief Kerlikowske's lack of experience with international interdiction and his record of lax enforcement of domestic laws respecting drugs--particularly marijuana--and other crimes leaves me concerned that he is the wrong person to lead ONDCP at this crucial time. Therefore, I will oppose his nomination.

Mr. President, I have a second-degree amendment to the Reed amendment. What it says is we create a pilot study. We have 69,000 pieces of property we cannot get rid of. It represents $83 billion in assets to us as a government and to the American people. It is $83 billion we would not have.

What we set up is a pilot program that manages 150 pieces of property a year to dispose of them. It gives 20 percent to the agency, 80 percent back to the Government. It creates a way, in a pilot project, for us to do real property reform.

We have gone through and we have created 250 homeless shelters out of 30,000 properties at a cost of $300 million. We are spending over $8 billion a year just maintaining properties we do not want, do not need, yet we cannot get rid of.

This is a simple, straightforward amendment that is common sense. There is no reason why we should not accept this amendment.

With that, I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. President, I move to waive the budget point of order, and ask for the yeas and nays.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Reed amendment be the pending amendment.

Madam President, I call up my amendment to the Reed amendment.

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

Madam President, I am going to spend a minute talking about the Kerry amendment. I am sitting over here listening to him. There is no question he is right on what should happen in terms of notifications on evictions. But we are about to make the same mistake we make all the time. That is a State issue. State laws apply, and we are going to pull that in and make it a Federal issue. Anybody who has any connection with Federal insurance, FHA, anything else, we are now going to start writing the laws on contract law in my State, in his State, and every other State. That is exactly how we got into the trouble we are in today.

I hope the American people will look at how we got where we are. We got where we are because we are putting our nose into States' business. We think we have a nexus, no matter what the problem is, we ought to be solving it, which means why have State legislatures anymore? Why have Governors? Why not solve all the problems?

Amendment No. 1042

Now to the amendment at hand. You cannot help but be discouraged about the Congress. We have all these grand ideas and new programs to expand the size and scope of the Federal Government, but we never want to pull it back in when it is not effective and when it is not working. So what do we do? We create a new program or we renew a new authorization, not looking at the facts, not looking at the downside consequences of it. What we do is just reauthorize it with a good goal in mind.

Helping homeless people is great for us to do. The McKinney-Vento Act in the past has made a great contribution to 250 homeless shelters in this country. But nobody pays attention to the fact that we spent $300 million and went through 30,000 properties to fund 250 homeless shelters.

The other thing that is not recognized is that we have all these pieces of property we cannot get rid of. It is actually 69,850 properties that the Federal Government owns that it is not using. Some of them need to be razed, but they are costing us billions every year to maintain because we have a bureaucracy that we cannot get through to sell the property.

We have $89 billion of cash sitting there right now--right now, $89 billion. That is conservative appraisal values today on properties. We could put that money into the Federal Treasury. That is $89 billion we would not borrow against our grandchildren if, in fact, we had a commonsense, cogent way to dispose of excess Federal properties.

All this amendment does is say let's create a pilot program for 5 years. Let's offset anything 100,000 square feet or less. Anything bigger let's go around it. We are not going to have 100,000-square-foot homeless shelters. And let's incentivize the agencies to get rid of their property by leaving 20 percent of the money they would get from selling those properties in the agency.

The GAO says one of our biggest at-risk programs is our real property management. Peter Orszag testified in his hearings on confirmation that it is a giant problem. So now we come up with an amendment that is common sense. It is a pilot project. All it does is say let's test it on a limited number of properties for 5 years and see if we can't move some of this property, can't lower the cost of Government for the American people, and let's do it in a way that is smart.

We have over 10,000 properties that need to be razed, need to be torn down, that we are expending tons of money to guard or protect or to maintain in a small fashion that is absolutely wasteful. Yet this body does not want to do that. It does not want to approach a commonsense program.

This does not do anything to homeless people. This does not take any opportunities away from them. There is a very set guideline in here on how they get to perform against the properties under the pilot project. But we are going to claim--because the homeless groups that support McKinney-Vento are not happy with it, we are going to claim we cannot do anything. So we are not going to accept this amendment. They are going to raise a point of order because it costs $20 million. But when CBO scored it, they did not count any of the funds coming from the properties.

It is a net gain of billions, and we are going to get a point of order. Why? Because we would rather satisfy completely an interest group than do what is best for the country as a whole. We would rather spend more money than save money. We would rather look good in one area than protect the future in the long term.

One cannot read this amendment and not say it doesn't make common sense for us to be doing it. It is absolute common sense. What the American people know, better than we do, is there is not much of that up here; otherwise, we would have solved this problem 4 years ago when I started offering amendments on it. But we don't want to do it. We don't want to take on the established, connected lobbyists and interest groups that say: No, we don't want that to happen.

We had an offer from the House to do five properties over 5 years. That was the offer from the House--5 out of 69,000 properties--69,000 pieces of property the Federal Government has that it wants to get rid of and we cannot do it because we are afraid we might miss one opportunity to put a piece of property in the hands of good people who want to do the right thing for those less fortunate.

Yet we sit here and we deny common sense. If we sold $89 billion worth of properties, compound that interest over what we are borrowing right now over the next 5 years. Think about how that could offset some of our difficulties today. If we just did half of it, what would happen? The first thing the American people would say is, Hey, they are starting to get it. They are starting to understand what we are going through, making priorities.

The risk of missing an opportunity for a homeless shelter versus getting rid of a high-risk problem that this Federal Government has-- not denying but maybe missing one opportunity as small compared to how it is going to impact the future homeless people in this country, who are going to be our grandkids who will never be able to afford to buy a home because we are strangling them with debt.

It will be fine to challenge this on a point of order. I will make a motion to waive the point of order. We can have a vote in the Senate about whether we are going to take commonsense actions that actually help our kids and our grandkids at the same time we are helping the homeless or we are going to say: No, we are not going to do anything new. We are not going to do common sense. We are not going to apply what the ordinary man would do with their own money. We are just going to reject it.

The fact that this is not even considered to be accepted in this bill is a

statement about this body that is unbelievable. There is no legitimate complaint with this pilot program. The only complaint is, those who lobby on the other side do not want it or the only complaint is they are afraid we will not get everything we want if you do that.

This Nation needs to learn right now; if we are going to get out of these problems, we are all going to have to sacrifice something. Everybody is going to have to sacrifice. That means we can't have everything we want. So the very idea that we won't address this issue at this time on housing, when we have a big, large, overburdening problem with real property in the Federal Government, says: What are we thinking about? Why does this not fit within the bounds of what we are supposed to be doing right now? Who are we going to hurt if we create a pilot program to get rid of properties over 100,000 square feet? How much money are we going to save just on maintenance every year? It has to be seen in the light of the whole picture, not just in the light of the homeless. If we fail to do that, we fail to think about the long- term benefits that will come from having common sense in real property reform. We ought to be doing this. We ought to be helping the next two generations.

I am reminded that I did 27 townhall meetings while we were on break. And I will never forget, this guy came up to me and said: I don't care what you do to me, quit hurting my children. Quit hurting my children.

Not accepting this amendment hurts everybody's kids. It is money we could save if we wanted to, but we won't because we don't have the backbone or the courage to do what is the best right thing for the country right now. I have no doubt we will do the politically expedient thing. We won't work on real property. We won't solve this big issue that costs us billions every year just in maintenance costs. We will do the easy thing.

I will have more to say about this as it is challenged on the point of order, and also before the vote, but I hope my colleagues start becoming partisan for our kids, partisan for our children. We can help the homeless and help our kids too. We can help the homeless and create a better future for our kids, but we can't if we won't take a risk. So my challenge to my colleagues is to at least look at the amendment and say: If it was my money, what would I be doing? And the fact is, if it was your money, you wouldn't be sitting on $89 billion worth of property that is costing us billions every year to maintain, that we are not using, and that we can't get through the process to get rid of.

With that, I yield the floor.

I appreciate Senator Reed's understanding of our effort, but the question arises: We have 69,850 properties. This isn't a big pilot. It only allows 750 properties to be disposed of. Think about that--750. It is barely over 1 percent. It is going to be $800 million to $1 billion, and we are going to block everything--a pilot--because it is too big, too expansive--750 properties out of 69,850. We don't think we ought to attach that now?

We put in extra provisions to make sure the homeless can have these, but most of them aren't good for anything. In fact, most of them will probably be razed. But the fact is, to say we can't do it--we have been saying we can't do it for 4\1/2\ years. Can't do it. Can't do it. When can we do it? And 750 properties to look at over a 5-year period is just 150 properties a year. How small does it need to be for us to have a pilot--out of 750, 150 properties a year? A total of 69,850. One hundred fifty, and we can't do that? And because we can't do that, that becomes a symbol for the rest of our failures. We can't sell 750 properties and protect the homeless while we do it and lower some of the burden of the excess real property this Government has. If we can't do that on this bill, a small number of properties, I am wondering what we can do.

It confounds me. It doesn't fit with any sort of common sense. It doesn't fit with any reason. It doesn't fit with any long-term view of how do we get out of the mess we are in. What it fits with is that we don't want to do it because it is hard. We don't want to do it because somebody might yell, somebody might scream. But how do we do the best right thing--not the best thing, the best right thing--for the country? I can tell you that letting another year go by when we have 73,000 properties and $98 billion worth of money and $8 billion a year to maintain it isn't the best right thing.

I am used to standing up and losing, but I am not going to stop putting forward ideas that we shouldn't be rejecting, that make a difference in the outcome for the future of this country. This doesn't have a liberal or conservative slant to it. It is just plain old, good old Oklahoma common sense, good old Connecticut common sense, good old Rhode Island common sense. The fact we would reject it says that our motives have to be somewhat suspect on the reasons we would reject it at this time, especially when we are in the trouble we are in.

It is so discouraging to go home and hear people say, why are you doing what you are doing? Why aren't we fixing this? Why aren't we making the small steps that create a big step that create a yard that create a mile that secures the future?

It is amazing to me that you can have a real objection to this amendment--not 150 properties a year. That isn't going to impact anybody except our kids in the long term, and it is going to impact them positively. But we are going to have a parochial reason why we might not do it? I think that is what I might have heard implied. A parochial protection? We are going to die of parochialism. It is going to kill us. Eighty-plus billion dollars sitting there and we could take and lower the impact of this tremendous downturn and make a difference. Yet we are going to say no.

As they say in Oklahoma--go figure.

I am happy to yield.

Homeland Security.

I appreciate the Senator's offer.

I am happy to take the Senator up on that offer as soon as I lose my amendment.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I wish to spend a few minutes talking about the budget that is before us and make some simple notes.

In 73 pages, this budget spends $3.5 trillion in 1 year. That is an astounding amount of money. It spends $17.9 trillion, at a minimum, over the next 5 years.

This budget is more than a document full of numbers. It is a statement of priorities. My feeling is it does not address some of the key fundamental challenges we face as a nation. In fact, it is going to make some of the challenges we have worse because we are

going to be spending money we don't have on things we don't need. Every family in this country today, as we know by decreased consumer spending, is making hard choices. They are making priorities. Their priorities are: How do we do the absolute minimum necessary, as well as how do we say we are going to have the largest savings rate we have had in 40, 50 years in this country so we can save for tomorrow? Most of the time, those families are not just thinking about the adult members of those families; most of the time those families are making those decisions because they are thinking into the future about their children.

We are not doing that with this budget. As a matter of fact, the only thing we are thinking about in this budget for our children is how much we are going to put on their backs because we refuse to face the realities of living within our means as every family is trying to do out there today. We are going to transfer a doubling of the publicly held debt. Over the next 5 years, it is going to double, and over the next 10 years it is going to triple.

That is going to have a serious impact on us as a nation, but it is going to have a personal impact on every young child out there today. Let me tell my colleagues what the impact is going to be. We are going to steal opportunity from them because we refused to make the hard choices today. The impact is going to be that a large portion of them aren't going to be able to afford to go to college. We know education is one of the areas that advance our society, that create opportunities for American exceptionalism, that create opportunities for advancement of all through education. Yet the things we are doing today, by stealing the money from them in the future and burdening them with an interest obligation that most of them won't earn the amount we are going to have to pay every year, seem to me to be penny wise and pound foolish.

The other thing this document does is it has go-pay. It doesn't have pay-go in it; it has go and pay. What it says is: We are not going to be responsible, so you--meaning the next two generations--you go and pay for it. We claim pay-go, but, as seen in all of the documents, there is no pay-go application to the biggest expenditures in this bill. We just take it off line and we allow us to create all of these new programs and new items. Yet we don't have to be responsible to make the hard choices about what is important, what is a priority, and what is not a priority.

Last year, families across this country saw less than a 2-percent increase in their incomes. After a 9-percent across-the-board--not counting the stimulus, just the omnibus bill--we are going to then bump up another 7.2 percent. So we are going to grow the Government 4 times faster than the income increase was last year, and now we are going to grow it 3\1/2\ times more, faster, than what personal income has risen and 70 times greater than what the net inflation is going to be. That is called real spending, real growing the Federal Government, not making the hard choices. What it results in, in spite of what we call it--whether it is my favorite pet program or somebody else's--what it results in is less liberty, less freedom for the generations that will follow. You tell me a country where you can have real freedom when you have no economic freedom. There isn't freedom when there is no economic freedom. What we are doing with this budget is slashing into the economic liberties of the children and grandchildren who follow us.

During the Senate consideration, I offered numerous amendments that were designed to make us make hard choices, including allowing penalty- free withdrawals from retirement accounts to make some of the mortgage payments people are having trouble with today, to allow us to help. It was accepted unanimously. Not one person voted against it. It is not in this final document.

Ending bogus performance bonuses by Government contractors and executives--not one person expressed an objection to that--it is not in the final budget.

Reviewing the budget line by line for waste, fraud, inappropriateness, and metrics was agreed to. As a matter of fact, the chairman said right before we voted on the final bill that this is one we will try to protect in the conference. It comes out of conference, nothing is there. That is one of President Obama's promises. We won't even help him do the things he said he wanted to do.

To set performance standards to identify failing Government programs, not one person objected on the Senate floor. It was unanimous. Yet when it comes out of the conference, none of it is there.

Ending no-bid contracts--something every American knows this Congress has a problem with because we let the favorite one get no-bid contracts, the well-connected, the well-heeled; requiring competitive bidding on anything above $25,000 outside of national security issues, nobody objected to that. It actually had a vote prior where we had a 97-to-nothing vote. When it comes out of the conference, it is not in there.

Protecting patients and health care providers from health care coercion, it is not in there.

So we are going to pass a budget and say: You go pay, and all the things we really need to do to make the programs we have today efficient and to measure the programs we have today and control some of the waste, fraud, and abuse that is over $300 billion a year--all of the things that needed to be in this budget to make sure that happens got rejected in the conference. What should the American people think about that? They are certainly not going to go out and have their plumbing redone in their bathroom without getting some quotes on it. They are going to make people competitively bid. If they buy a car, they are not just going to go to an automobile showroom and pay the first place they go; they are going to price that because it is a necessity to get good value today. Yet we reject that as a body. The House rejected it. The Senate rejected it in conference. What should the American people think about us? We won't do any of the commonsense things they are having to do right now so we can get rid of some of the $300 billion of waste that we don't want to charge to our children. We won't do it. Why is that? Why is it we won't do that? Is there some other reason? Can somebody explain to me why we would not want to go through the budget in a time when we are going to run close to a $2 trillion budget deficit that is all charged to our kids, that we wouldn't want to go through it and find the waste, fraud, and abuse in the programs that don't work? This conference report rejects doing that. Are we just lazy? Maybe we don't care. Which is it? It certainly can't be that there is a logical reason we wouldn't do that. Yet we didn't do it. Why would we not get rid of some of the waste? We have $80 billion worth of fraud a year in Medicare and Medicaid. Nothing is being done about it.

We are going to have a reconciliation process that is going to totally change the history of the Senate forever in terms of the 1974 Budget Act. We are going to hand to us a redo of all of the health care, and the health care we run today, which accounts for 61 percent if you count everything that the Federal Government is into, is the most wasteful, fraudulent, lame system in the world. Yet we won't address it.

I don't want a legacy of stealing opportunity from my grandchildren or anybody else's. If you vote for this budget without this kind of hard work that we should be required to do, of accountability to the American people to get rid of some of the waste, and do what any other prudent person would do in terms of competitively bidding projects, you are saying that is OK, it is OK to steal. There is no other word for it. It is theft of opportunity from our children and our grandchildren because we don't have the backbone to stand up and do the hard work.

President Obama has asked for this. He has asked for us to go line by line. We have an opportunity with a bill moving through the Senate to do that. What do we do? We say, no, it is our way or the highway, Mr. President. You can do it over there. But we are the ones who control all of these programs. And we have done a terrible job. As a matter of fact, if you look at the oversight hearings that occurred in the Senate and measure them compared to all of the other hearings, they count for about 2 percent of the hearings we had. What do we do when a new problem comes up? We don't look to see how the present program is working

and what we can do to fix it; we just create another one and charge that to our grandkids rather than say: Where are the metrics to measure what this program is doing? Is it accomplishing what we want? Is it efficient? Could we do it a different way? We just ignore it and we create a brandnew program. This budget is full of that.

So I will finish my remarks by again saying that if you vote for this budget, there is a real question in my mind whether you actually can represent to your constituencies that you feel their children are worth the hard work of this body. There is also the question of whether what President Obama ran on in terms of doing a line-by-line, of getting rid of the waste, of actually measuring the effectiveness of programs, whether we are going to help him do that. This document says we are not.

So all the commonsense reforms that would put some burden on us we have taken out, and then in this budget we have said: Children, we are going to be at $17.3 trillion of publicly held debt in 10 years, and you go pay for it. You go pay for it because we don't have the courage and we don't care for you enough to make the hard work and hard decisions now to lessen that burden on you.

That is what this budget is about. It is about growing the Federal Government at a size and a pace that we have never seen before in this country--have never seen--and growing the debt to a level that is going to cripple productivity and opportunity in the future.

There are the votes to pass this budget, but the American people need to know what this budget really is. What it is is an escape from responsibility, an expansion of the Government knowing best, and an elimination of opportunity of generations to come.

With that, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and that amendment No. 983 be called up.

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

Mr. President, I appreciate the chairman giving me this time to offer this amendment. We have adopted an Isakson amendment. We have a McCain-Dorgan amendment. This is a similar amendment, but I think it gets to the root of the problem. It does not cost very much, and it actually will tell us something we need to know.

The underlying assumption with the bill is that fraud is the primary, if not the sole, cause of this crisis. That may be true. We do not know that. But what we do not know is how much we as Members of Congress played and the extent to which we played a role in helping create this crisis. This is a fairly straightforward amendment that asks the IG to come give us information so we get the answers to the question about our own role in the evolution of the problems we find today.

What we do know is the GSEs undertook an unprecedented assumption of subprime and all-day loans, and those need to be investigated--the extent of them, the amount. We also know they invested more than $1 trillion in those loans. But what we do not know is the volume, the timing. What we do not know is the impact of the significant amount of lobbying by these GSEs and what effect that had on policies and procedures both within the administration and the Congress.

For example, when did Freddie and Fannie begin to purchase large quantities of subprime and all-day loans? In what years were those types of purchases the highest? To what extent were these purchases induced by congressional action or executive order? To what extent were those purchases induced by the Department of Housing and Urban Development affordable housing regulations issued in 1995? What actions by Fannie and Freddie contributed to the overvaluation of mortgage- backed securities?

The amendment also looks to the possibility that congressional action could have contributed to the risky changes in behavior of Fannie and Freddie. What we know is, between the 2000 and 2008 election cycles, GSEs and their employees contributed more than $14.6 million to the funds of both Senators and representatives. We also know Fannie spent $79.5 million in that period and Freddie spent $94.9 million in that period on lobbying Congress. Mr. President, $170 million was spent lobbying Congress making them the 20th and 13th largest lobbying spenders in the country.

This amendment will assure and ensure that some of the toughest questions are asked regarding the GSEs'--Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's--special relationships with Congress and whether any conflict created by those relationships influenced the GSEs' behavior, especially to the taxpayers' detriment.

It requires the inspector general to study what political contributions were made, what lobbying expenditures were made, what contributions were made to any other lobbying organization.

It is a compromise step. It is something we already have the people in place for. It is something they have the access to the numbers for. We ought to be able to get that.

We have a mess. Usually, as a physician when I have a mess, I start thinking back: What did I do before? And what caused part of the mess? Where was I wrong in my diagnosis of the signs, symptoms, and history? And then what do I do about it?

If we do not look through the IG at these things, then it is highly unlikely--no matter how many commissions we put together because commissions are going to ask for this anyway--but we are going to ask for it as a special report from the IG under this amendment.

There are a lot of additional considerations, and I will not take time on the floor at this time to do that. But if you want to have a transparent Congress, this is the first question we have to ask: How much were we involved? How effective were the lobbying efforts to change things that were detrimental? Maybe they were positive. But the fact is, we ought to know those things.

The idea is we will be transparent with the American people, both in terms of the lobbying efforts, the contributions they made, and the timing--not just for Congress but also the executive branch; where we look at the actions of both of those--so the American people can see the culpability. Where is it? I happen to believe it is right here in this body, us. We allowed this to happen. I think the onus of the blame needs to be here rather than pointing at other people.

That is not to distract from the idea that we ought to go after fraud. But the biggest fraud is to deny the fact that we had some culpability, and this amendment is designed to measure how much culpability we had by using the IG, the inspector general, to tell us this very specific information.

With that, I yield the floor.

Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senator from Arkansas be given 5 minutes as in morning business and then that we return to me and go back on the bill.

Mr. President, earlier today amendment No. 1006 was passed by a voice vote. If there had been a rollcall vote, I would have opposed this amendment, as it added more than $40 million to a bill that already costs nearly half a billion dollars.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending motion be set aside, and I offer a motion to instruct the budget conferees.

Madam President, this was accepted during our debate. The reason I bring it back is that if you ask the American people what they are worried about, they are worried about their jobs, they are worried about their health care, but they are also worried that we are spending their children into oblivion. And they are right--we are.

One of the great things about President Obama's promises was that he said he recognized we have waste in the Federal Government. He recognized we have duplication in the Federal Government. He recognized we have programs that aren't working in the Federal Government. And the commitment he made--and he has made three times since being sworn in as President--is to do a line-by-line evaluation of every Federal program out there, to check it for waste, No. 1; No. 2, to check to see if it is duplicative of something else, which a third of them are; and No. 3 is, does it have any metrics on it and is it being defrauded?

The fact is, it is now common knowledge that at least $300 billion a year--at least $300 billion a year--is either wasted, defrauded, or duplicated in the Federal Government. The real problem is that even though we now have a President who wants to attack that, Congress hasn't been willing to do it. We have not been willing to keep our side of the bargain in terms of oversight and evaluation.

It strikes me that if all the money we are borrowing to run the Government today was really our money, none of us would ever allow what is going on in the Federal Government. None of us would. None of us would allow the duplication.

We had a hearing yesterday in Senator Carper's Federal Financial Management Subcommittee on the waste and fraud in Medicare and Medicaid. It went up to $74 billion--$74 billion, and we are not doing anything about it? Total improper payments. We only have improper payments in about three-quarters of the Federal Government even though it is a mandated law that they have to supply it. But they can't measure it because they don't know what they are paying for.

The fact is, we know we have big problems. We have a fraud bill in front of us that we haven't finished working on that is to go after fraud. Well, the biggest fraud is right here. The biggest waste is right here. So the point ought to be, as we go into a conference on the budget, that we ought to commit to the American people that we are willing to do what they are having to do right now; that we are going to look at where things aren't working, we ought to look at where things are wasted, we ought to look at things we are not measuring and start measuring them, and the things that are not effective, we should get rid of. That is all this says. It just says we will go line by line through every Federal program; that we will have oversight at least once a year on everything that is out there, and we will make a dent in this $300 billion-plus.

Here is the question. Is it moral to waste $300 billion and that $300 billion come out of lost opportunity of our children? Is this a moral position the Senate wants to stand on? Does the Congress want to stand on that? Can our country ultimately survive, if we keep doing what we are doing? The answer to that is emphatically no, we cannot. Every republic in the history of mankind has died under fiscal collapse. They have not been invaded from outside until they rotted from within.

This is a straightforward commitment by the Senate and the Congress, through the budget, to meet President Obama's request that what he is going to do we are going to do, and we are going to weed out a large portion of the ineffectiveness, of the duplication, and of the waste that is in our Government and our grandkids' Government. There is no reason for us to have anything other than a unanimous vote on this motion to instruct.

If you do not think we should be doing that, you do not belong in the Senate. If you do not think we have a constitutional obligation to evaluate where we are spending the money, get rid of the waste and go line by line through all these programs, we need some other people up here. That is because right now our Republic is in jeopardy. It is not from terrorism. It is from our own potential fiscal collapse. The time to attack that is now.

It is my hope the Senate will send a huge vote on this motion that we mean business, we are going to join hands with President Obama, and we are going to fix most of what is wrong, in terms of these programs.

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

I withdraw that. I see Senator DeMint is here.

Mr. President, I will be very brief. This is fulfilling a campaign promise of Barack Obama. He said he wanted us to go through the budget line by line to eliminate wasteful programs, eliminate duplicative programs. We accepted this earlier. This is a vote to say we are going to do that. We are going to hold up our end of the bargain, as the President is going to hold up his end of the bargain, and we are going to go through and find some of this $300 billion worth of waste.

With that, I yield back.

I will accept a voice vote.

Mr. President, I wish to make a note for the record there was no ``no'' voiced on the vote.