Floor Statements

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and call up amendment No. 86.

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

Madam President, the bill we are considering is designed to help low-income kids have coverage and have care. What do we know about the kids who are in those programs and the care they have? Here is one of the things we know: They don't have access to 60 percent of the doctors in this country because the reimbursement rates are so low they won't be seen. That is the first thing. No. 2 is they don't have access to the best drugs because a lot of Medicaid programs and SCHIP won't pay for the best drugs for those children.

I got to thinking about this bill and what it does and what it is intended to do. What is in agreement in the Senate is that we want all of the kids covered. We want every child in this country to be able to have access to quality care with no limitation of their choice of who their doctor is going to be--the one the child and the parent feel the most comfortable with--because we know if that is the case, they are going to be most compliant. So we want them to have the greatest care, and we want every one of them to be able to have access to care.

This bill brings up Government payments under SCHIP to 300 percent of the poverty level--60,000 bucks, essentially. Anybody making, essentially, over that wouldn't be benefited by this bill but everybody under it. It adds $70 billion worth of taxes to the American people to be able to do that. As it does it, it takes 2 million kids who are presently covered by insurance off insurance and gets 2 million out of the 8.9 million or 9.8 million kids who aren't covered today with anything. So we are going to spend $70 billion to get 4 million kids, a little less than 4 million kids covered, of which we are going to absorb the costs that are already being paid by businesses for those kids right now.

By the way, I ask unanimous consent to add Senators McConnell, Enzi, Cornyn, DeMint, Johanns, Kyl, Alexander, Graham, Burr, Chambliss, Thune, and Barrasso as cosponsors of the amendment.

So maybe it is instructive for us to look at what we are doing right now and say: What could we do with that money? Right now, we have 31 million kids in America who don't have private coverage. In other words, we have 31 million out of the 78 million kids who don't get to choose where they want to go, don't get to have the best drugs, don't get the referral to the best centers, don't get the referral to the best doctors because they are on a Government-run program. So 8.9 million kids aren't even covered by any program right now, and not all of those 8.9 million kids are in families who are at 300 percent of the poverty level or less. This is based on 2005 numbers, and we know it is greater now, but these numbers for the number of children are accurate right now. We are spending $67 billion to do that.

What does that mean? That means we are spending $2,160 each to cover 22 million kids. Well, if you divided the 31 million kids who are out there into this number, you would get $2,160 available for every child at 300 percent of the poverty level who is not covered right now by their parents, and that includes Medicaid and SCHIP. So you have $2,160 to work with.

Now, the average price in the individual market in this country is less than $1,200 a year. Some will say: Well, that coverage is not as good. Well, let's make it $1,700, which is $300 more than what our kids cost. Let's make it $1,700, or let's make it $1,800, or let's make it $2,160. What could we buy for $2,160 for every kid at 300 percent of the poverty level or less who is not on the program? What we could buy for all of them is a top-grade policy outside of Government-run programs that would give insurance to 100 percent of the children who don't have insurance and give them 100 percent access to every quality doctor in this country on a competitive basis and give them access to the drugs the Members of Congress' kids have access to and the same doctors to whom the Members of Congress have access.

The important point is, we have a government-run program and the administrative costs and the inefficiencies of it cost more than private insurance, than if we would just go out and buy every one of these guys an FEHPB--Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan--a top- drawer plan. Why would we run it through the Government? Why would we take away choice? Why would we take away access by running it through a government-run program and one that is highly inefficient?

There is another thing we should know. The rate of fraud in private insurance products is about 3 percent. The rate of fraud in Medicaid is 10.4 percent, and in SCHIP it is 14 percent. So because the Government is running the program and we can't run it well and we don't run it well, we are losing about 11 percent or 11 cents out of every dollar that we are trying to get to kids because we can't run efficient or effective programs.

So wouldn't it be smarter, rather than to have all of this gobbledygook government, to make sure that every kid in this country whose parents don't make $60,000, who isn't covered with insurance today, has access to a top-drawer health insurance policy that gives them 100 percent access, gives them 100 percent quality, and gives them 100 percent access to the drugs and the physicians they want? Who is going to argue with that?

As a matter of fact, several of my colleagues are cosponsors of the Healthy Americans Act, and that is exactly what it does. It is going to be very interesting to see if they are cosponsors of this bill but yet don't vote for this for kids. And that is a bipartisan bill. So if it is good enough for all of America and if it is good enough for the Members of Congress and their kids and if it is good enough for Federal employees, why can't we give that to the children of this country who don't have health insurance? Why can't we do that? We can't do it because it doesn't fit into the partisan rancor of Washington.

This is a commonsense proposal that doesn't cost a penny more than what we spent in 2005. And we cover all of the kids, not just 4 million more; we cover 8.9 million more with the same amount of money. All the children have access.

It is not a child's fault if their parents can't afford or don't have a job that gives them access to 100 percent of physicians or access to the best medicines or access to equal care. It is not the child's fault. So if we are going to spend this much of the American taxpayers' money, why don't we get value for it? Why don't we decide we want value for this money?

So if you take all the kids out there--31 million--on what we spent in 2005, you can spend $2,160 on every one of them--every one of them-- and get them a top-drawer health insurance policy. Top drawer. Top of the line. That is almost double what the charge is for an individual policy now. So we could spend almost twice as much to get that same coverage. Why would we

not do that? What is going to keep us from helping all the kids?

I will tell my colleagues the other aspect of it. We are also not going to raise taxes $71 billion if we do this plan. Let me say that again. President Obama said your taxes won't be raised. This bill raises $71 billion--granted, from tobacco products, which I don't have any objection to--but let's save the $71 billion on tobacco products for something else when we can efficiently buy our kids health care and buy them a health insurance policy.

Another key point: As somebody who has cared for Medicaid kids and Medicaid moms, when you have the ``Medicaid'' stamp on your forehead, it is not equivalent care. When we give all these children access to a private insurance policy of their own, it is no longer a Medicaid program, it is their insurance policy. Providers will never know how they got that policy. They will never know if it was an employment- based policy, an individually bought policy, or a policy that comes through SCHIP and Medicaid.

What we do is we take the demeaning qualities and characteristics of having to be dependent through a government program, and we throw that out. So the bias goes out, the discrimination goes out, and the self- esteem goes up.

What will happen if this passes? The first thing that will happen is we will save $70 billion. The second thing that will happen is not 4 million kids--actually, it is a net 2 million kids will get coverage-- 8.9 million kids will get coverage, and we will do it with the same amount of money we spent in 2005. Every child will be covered. There will be a real choice of who is going to be your provider. Right now you get hustled into whoever will take care of you in these programs. Some are great and some are not. Confidence will be restored. There will be increased quality of outcome and increased access to specialists who now today cannot afford to see a Medicaid or SCHIP patient because their overhead is so great.

Finally, $70 billion--I know we are talking about $1 trillion in the stimulus package--doesn't seem like much, but $70 billion is a lot of money. If you look at it, it is about $2,000 per man, woman, and child over the next 5 years that we will save in this country.

If the goal of SCHIP and all the speeches we have heard all week long is to care for kids, to make sure kids have access, to make sure they have care, if that is the goal, then anybody who is not going to vote for this amendment is not secure in saying they want to cover all the kids. This one will.

This substitute allows the Secretary to develop autoenrollment. There is $100 million in this amendment so we can have outreach, trying to get kids coverage. This takes away the negative consequences of applying for Medicaid or applying for SCHIP when your parents cannot afford to get you coverage.

The other thing it does is there is a compensation in terms of making sure we help people who have insurance keep their insurance by compensating to keep them on their employer's insurance, which costs a whole lot less. It costs maybe $200 or $300 a year. But the most important thing it does is it provides liberty and freedom and equal access for every child in this country.

They are going to say this will not work. But notice there is not going to be a point of order filed against this amendment because this amendment does not cost any money. It saves money. It does not cost a penny. It will not cost us and will cover so many more children.

My question to my colleagues, as we wrap up the SCHIP bill, is: Do you want to do it right? Do you want to do it better? Do you want to cover all the kids. Or do you want to play the games of Washington and political gamesmanship and partisanship and say: Yes, I care about the kids, but I couldn't do the right thing, the easy thing, the commonsense thing, the things that are associated with order, priority, and common sense that says: Gosh, we can buy and get better coverage for less money; why wouldn't we do that?

We are going to hear all the reasons. We may not hear any because most of the amendments I offered nobody will debate them. They know they have the votes to defeat them so they will not debate. They will not come out and say why this would not be a good idea.

The American taxpayers ought to think: Here is a great opportunity for us to save a ton of money and do something very good socially: cover innocent children with quality health care that they do not have access to today, with no increase in cost--with no increase in cost. Yet we are going to see a vote where they are going to say no. Then we are going to know if you care about kids and whether you care about access for kids.

I will end my debate at this time and yield to my colleague from North Carolina, Senator Burr.

I ask unanimous consent to add Senator Vitter as a cosponsor.

Mr. President, first, this does not get rid of the system, and it certainly does not privatize it. What it does is it guarantees every child in this country, all 3l million--which is something this bill does not do--all 3l million who don't have an insurance policy today will be insured with a plan equal to what we have for our children.

What it doesn't get rid of is access. They only have access to 40 percent of the physicians now. It gives them access to 100 percent of all the physicians. We are defending a system that, first, is only going to enroll 4 million new kids, is still going to leave 5 million not covered and 2 million of the 4 million they enroll are from those who already have private insurance, and we are going to say we will stick with a system to take care of the ones we have now and we are not going to give real access, and with the not real access comes no choice of a physician because we limited the number of physicians who can participate because of the economics of it.

I will tell you what it does get rid of. It gets rid of $70 billion of taxpayers' money that we are not going to use to cover every one of these kids. Based on the 2005 numbers, we can buy a premium health insurance policy for all 31 million kids--the 8.9 million who do not have any coverage now and the 22 million who are covered in either SCHIP or Medicaid today. We save all the administrative expense. We autoenroll them so we don't have to worry about picking up only 4 million with an additional $70 billion in taxes.

To say this is privatization is a total mischaracterization of it. What it does is it guarantees that all children will not have a Medicaid stamp or SCHIP stamp on their forehead that says: Yes, we are giving you coverage but you can't see all the physicians, you can't get referrals to the best because you have a government-run program.

Not only do we increase access and quality, we save tremendous amounts of money, and it will still be a government-run program because it will be administered by the Secretary in a way that guarantees these kids are autoenrolled. They will have premium health insurance coverage and we still save money, even after that. We are spending $2,160 per kid now based on 2005 numbers, and we will cover every one of these kids and not spend more money than that.

To characterize this as getting rid of coverage is wrong. What it does is greatly create and increase access for children in this country to have the same access that our children have. It saves money and markedly improves quality for those children. Every American child ought to have access, and what we do is take the money we are spending now and spend it more wisely, and create a system where they all have coverage.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, this amendment really is the amendment that is going to take care of our children. It is going to take the Medicaid stamp and SCHIP stamp off their foreheads. It is going to create access to the finest doctors, not just 40 percent of the doctors as we see in Medicaid and SCHIP. It is going to give the same care to all the children--those at the 300 percent poverty level and under-- that we give to our own kids. It does all that not spending the $70 billion in increased taxes that is in this bill and auto-enrolling children so that we don't just pick up 4 million kids, we pick up all 8.9 million kids who are not insured.

To my colleagues who sponsored the Wyden bill, the Healthy Americans

bill, that is exactly what is in that bill, except we are going to do it for children without increasing costs but increasing the quality, increasing the care, and increasing the outcomes. We are going to truly make children on the same level we are in terms of their access. They are going to get to choose their doctor rather than have their doctor chosen for them. They are going to get a referral to the best rather than to one who will just take them. They are going to get the same thing we get, and they deserve it, and we are not going to spend a penny more than we are spending today.

We don't do away with SCHIP, we don't privatize SCHIP; what we do is say we really care about kids and we are going to give them the same thing we have. At the same time, we are going to save the American taxpayers $70 billion.

I yield my time.

Will the Chair state what the amendment is?

Mr. President, what this amendment does is it says you have 14 percent improper payment rate in SCHIP, we have 10.6 percent improper payment in Medicaid. The average improper payment rate across the rest of the Federal Government on every agency--this amendment says that before New York can go to 400 percent, they have to bring their improper payment rates in line with the rest of the Federal Government. The improper payment rate in New York--New York alone--accounts for 50 percent of the fraud in Medicaid. Fifty percent of that is in New York State alone.

So what this amendment would do is it would delay the improper payment reporting requirements and limit earmark program expansion until the Medicaid and SCHIP improper payment rates match the Federal average of improper payment rates. It is meant to help us get back on track. We just started getting improper payment rates on Medicaid, and they are out of control. We should not be delaying the onset of that, and we should put teeth into it so that where it is bad, we don't expand it and make it worse.

With that, I reserve the remainder of my time.

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

I agree. I withdraw my request.

Madam President, I call up amendment No. 49.

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

Madam President, this is a pretty straightforward amendment. I am having trouble understanding what we are doing. The average improper payment rate, as published by GAO and OMB, is around 3.5 percent for the programs. We, just now, after 7 years, are starting to see the improper payment rates for Medicaid and SCHIP reported.

What is interesting is that the payment Medicaid error rate for fiscal 2008 is 10.5 percent. Madam President, $32 billion was improperly paid out of Medicaid this last year; $18.6 billion of that is the Federal share. The SCHIP rate was a 14.7-percent improper payment rate.

This is the first time we have seen that SCHIP has reported its improper payment numbers for a full year, and it is important in this regard: The worst offender in the country is the State of New York, with an estimated 40-percent improper payment rate. The purpose of this amendment is to restore fiscal discipline by making the Medicaid and SCHIP programs more accountable and efficient and to limit earmark expansions until the programs are working at least within the range of what other Government programs work.

Now, we have an earmark in this SCHIP bill for the State of New York that allows citizens in the State of New York an elevated level of access to the SCHIP program that is some $30,000 above the rest of the country. We can decide to do that. That is fine. But what we should not do is allow the worst State in terms of offense in fraud in Medicaid to be able to expend additional moneys up to 400 percent of the poverty level until, in fact, they bring their improper payment levels down.

Let me refer to a 2005 New York Times article where the former State investigator of Medicaid abuse estimated that questionable claims totaled 40 percent of all Medicaid spending in New York--nearly $18 billion a year in New York alone.

One dentist somehow built the State's biggest Medicaid dental practice. This dentist--she--claimed to have performed 991 procedures a day in 2003. Get that again: 991 procedures a day. Van services intended as medical transportation for patients who cannot

walk were regularly found to be picking up scores of people who walked quite easily when a reporter was watching nearby. These rides cost taxpayers $50 a round trip, adding up to $200 million a year, of which a large portion of that was fraud.

So what this amendment does--it does not affect existing SCHIP programs or States that wish to expand eligibility for families making up to 300 percent of the Federal poverty level. What it says is, until Medicaid and SCHIP payments reach the improved level of 3.5 percent-- the average of other Federal agencies--we should not give New York a special earmark for people making 400 percent of the Federal poverty level.

First of all, it is a matter of common sense. Why would we allow the State with the worst fraud rate on Medicaid to have an additional exception over everybody else in the country, when they are the least efficient with spending their money on the people whom they are covering today?

Now, I do not know if 40 percent is accurate. It may not be. But the fact is, the whole Medicaid Program and SCHIP program are three to four times what the rest of the Federal Government is in terms of fraud and abuse. I think it is important we condition the expansion and the earmark for New York State on them coming into alignment with the rest of the Federal Government in terms of its abuse.

So with that, I yield the floor to the chairman.

He has no comments. I will move on to another amendment.

Amendment No. 50

Madam President, I call up amendment No. 50.

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

Madam President, this is another amendment. It is about being prudent with the taxpayers' money. It is about us doing what we are expected to do. It is about us controlling improper payments. This amendment would require that the final rule implementing the payment error rate measurement requirements under section 601(b) shall not be made later than 6 months after the date of enactment of this act.

Now, the problem that we have is, the legislation, in its current form, would effectively erase this long overdue progress by placing an unnecessary moratorium on the reporting requirements for Medicaid improper payment numbers. Let me say that again. In its current form, this legislation erases this long overdue progress by placing a moratorium on the reporting requirements for Medicaid improper payment numbers.

Section 601 of the bill states:

The provision would prohibit the Secretary from calculating

or publishing national or state-specific error rates based on

The Senator does not want to move on this amendment?

OK. I thank the Senator.

Madam President, the purpose of this amendment is to make sure children don't lose their private insurance and uninsured children can get access to private health insurance.

This amendment would require a premium assistance approach for new Medicaid or SCHIP expansions under this act. It would cut bureaucratic redtape for States to use a premium assistance approach.

I will be the first to say SCHIP was created for targeted low-income children, those families making less than 200 percent of the Federal poverty

level, and I believe that is where the program should stay focused. The Department of Health and Human Services just released new numbers on the Federal poverty level. For a family of four, it is $22,050 a year. That means the current SCHIP without expansions is available to children whose families are making $44,000 a year. That is close to the national median income of $50,000.

The underlying bill will expand the SCHIP program up to families making $66,000 a year or $88,000 if you are fortunate enough to live in the State of New York. I am concerned about this for a number of reasons, but there is little question the majority has the votes to pass the underlying bill and President Obama will pass it. Therefore, my amendment is not about whether to expand SCHIP; my amendment is about how to expand SCHIP.

Are we going to put the majority of American kids on a government-run program? If that is our goal, then we should totally reject this amendment. Or are we going to use an approach that ensures children in America have access to market-based insurance?

Let me tell my colleagues why this is important. Today, only 40 percent of the physicians will take an SCHIP or a Medicaid patient. Sixty percent would not even let them darken their door. So what we have in essence done is put a stamp on the foreheads of people in these programs that says: You get the doctors who are not busy enough so they have to take SCHIP and Medicaid.

What this amendment is designed to do is, if they have an opportunity for insurance, we give them that opportunity, which takes that stamp off their foreheads. In other words, we don't relegate them to lower class health care.

My amendment would require States to use a premium assistance approach to keep kids in private coverage if they want to expand their Medicaid or SCHIP under this bill. The American people know the market generally does a better job of controlling costs and improving the quality than government can. We know that because when we look at outcomes of Medicare versus private insurance, we see it. When we look at outcomes of private insurance versus Medicaid, we see it. When we look at outcomes of private insurance versus SCHIP, we see it. We know that is true. If they need a little extra help to get the private insurance, this amendment would make sure they have it. I believe parents--not government bureaucrats--should be able to make the decisions about the health care of their kids. This amendment will reduce crowdout of private insurance.

Anytime the government offers to give something away for free, it is common sense that an employer or an individual will take them up on the offer. As we offer free health care to higher income children, many of whom already have coverage, we are going to see a resulting drop or crowdout in the number of employers willing to pay for private coverage.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Jonathan Gruber has estimated the crowdout rate of expanding SCHIP to new eligibility groups at 60 percent. The Congressional Budget Office shows that 400,000 children will be newly covered in higher income families, and there will be a reduction in existing private insurance for another 400,000 children. That is our own Congressional Budget Office. If we send the bill as it is written to President Obama, it is going to break one of his campaign promises when he stated last fall:

If you already have insurance, the only thing that will

change under my plan is that we will lower your premiums.

Voting in support of this amendment ensures that President Obama can keep his promise. Not only does crowdout take away the private coverage higher income children have now, it is a bad deal for taxpayers. For those new populations covered by CHIPRA 2009, the SCHIP legislation, one new child for the cost of two. CBO says the bill will cover 1.9 million SCHIP kids in 2013 at a cost of $2,160. However, because of crowdout, taxpayers will actually pay $4,430 for every newly insured kid because we are picking up the tab for those kids who already had insurance. The purpose of this amendment is to minimize that crowdout. Rather than encourage government dependence, it is to help people stay in a private insurance plan. It is also cost effective because the State will only have to subsidize the employee's share of the health insurance benefit rather than having taxpayers pay the entire benefit.

This amendment also cuts bureaucratic redtape to make it easier for States to use a premium assistance approach. Current laws allow premium assistance, but the administrative requirements are so cumbersome that only a handful of States have premium assisted programs. I will note that the underlying bill permits premium assistance but would also note that the administrative burdens would once again discourage States from using this approach.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 55 percent of the 78.6 million children in America have employer-sponsored insurance. If that coverage is working for the majority of American kids, why can't it work for kids who are eligible for SCHIP? The answer is, it can and we have a duty to make sure it does.

The premium assistance language in the underlying bill also denies parents the right to choose certain types of coverage for their children. This language gives parents the right to choose from more coverage options. Parents, not bureaucrats, know best about what fits the needs of their children. A parent should be able to use premium assistance for their share of the employer-sponsored insurance, to buy insurance in the nongroup market, or to buy a consumer-directed product. All this does is give parents that right to make individual decisions about what is best for their children, about what doctor they will have for their children.

Don't forget most people in SCHIP don't get a real choice about who is going to take care of their children. They have a very limited choice. What this amendment does is ensures that a large portion of them can actually choose the doctor they want for their child.

It is not about--this amendment isn't about whether we should cover American kids; it is about the best way to cover those kids. I believe keeping kids with their parents and market-based coverage is going to be better for American kids, better for our country in the long run, and I will guarantee it will give us better outcomes for the children who are covered.

With that, I yield the floor.

I thank the chairman for his consideration.

Mr. President, I wish to ask the Senator from Pennsylvania a couple questions, if he might be so kind as to respond.

Your earlier statement was without this, children will not develop, children will not become productive members of our society.

Having taken care of 4,000 infants and done well child exams on them, what is the number of children out there who are not getting vision and hearing screens right now?

The number is zero because every one of them is tested.

I control the time.

That is simply not true.

They are going to get preventive care, and let me tell my colleagues how. What is the number of children who are not getting preventive care in the first 6 months of life right now? We don't know that number, and that is exactly the problem.

Here is the point: Every one of us wants children to get health care. It is not about wanting children to get health care.

The fact is, we have an SCHIP program now and a Medicaid Program right now where we have 5.4 million kids who are eligible and who are not enrolled.

What we are doing is exactly the opposite of what President Obama stated we should be doing. He stated that we should be being responsible. I would contend that one of the areas of being responsible is to make sure programs work. When we have a program where last year, on average, 5.5 million kids were covered and another 5.4 million kids who were eligible weren't covered, I would tell my colleagues that program isn't working very well. It is not working. So what have we done? We have expanded the eligibility with this bill.

The debate over how we cover all the rest of Americans--we will have that debate, and I am sure we are going to have that debate this year. But the fact that 51 percent of the eligible children under the programs we have now, under the requirements we have now, are covered means 49 percent aren't. In this bill is a measly little $100 million to try to expand the enrollment of those kids who are already eligible.

I would think the average American out there who does have insurance or who may not have insurance might say: Well, why don't you make the program you have today work? We would have more kids covered than this bill will totally cover if we just made the requirements that the States and Medicaid directors throughout do the outreach to get the kids who are eligible.

The fact is, most of the poor women in this country--up to 300 percent right now--deliver under either title XIX or Medicaid. Their children are covered the first year of life. They are not going to miss the first well child visit. As a matter of fact, they are the ones--the biggest problem we have is getting the people who have coverage to be responsible and to bring their kids in. It is not about coverage; it is about responsibility--the very thing our new President said we need to reach up to and grab.

The other point that has to be brought forward in this debate is there is a lack of integrity with this bill. Let me tell my colleagues what it is. I do not doubt this Senator's integrity whatsoever. He is a friend of mine. When he speaks, he speaks from the heart. But when we manipulate the numbers and we drop a program from $13 billion to $8 billion in the last year of the first 5 years of its authorization so we don't have to meet the requirements of living within our means, and then we transfer $13.2 billion so we lower the baseline--this is all inside baseball--what, in fact, we are doing is we are lying to the American people to the tune of $41.3 billion. That is what CBO says. That is what CBO says in a letter to Paul Ryan, the ranking member on the Budget Committee in the House, that, in fact, because we manipulated the numbers, because we cheated with the numbers, that it is actually going to cost $41.2 billion or $41.3 billion more than what we are saying it is going to cost.

Why is that important? Because we have decided to pay for this with one of the most regressive taxes toward poor people that we can. The consequence is that we are going to tax them and then we are going to wink and nod to the rest of the American public to say: This $41.2 billion, oh, don't worry about it; we are going to fudge the rules; we are not going to play the game honestly and with integrity. There is not going to be change you can believe in because the Senate's bill winks and nods at $41 billion. We all know that is there. We all know that is the only way they can do it to where it is scored in terms of pay-go.

So what we did is we paid attention to the numbers but not to the integrity behind the numbers. So the American taxpayer in some way or another will take on, from 2014 to 2019, an additional $41 billion. That is not change, folks, regardless of how good our goal is, regardless that every Member of this body wants to see kids who don't have care covered. Every Member wants to see that. We don't want the first child, we want every American covered--every American covered. But to do that under the guise of ``integrity in our numbers'' puts us right back into the same problems that got us into the deep financial problems we have today.

Let's be honest. Let's talk about what this bill really costs, what we know it would cost if we didn't play a game with the numbers, and what we could do to offset some of the programs President Obama says need to be eliminated so we can do the things that are good. There is not one attempt in this bill to do that. As a matter of fact, there is an attempt to cover non-U.S. citizens at the expense of U.S. citizens in this bill.

So basically we are going to keep a 9-percent approval rating because we are not going to earn the trust of the American people about being honest about what something really costs. I want to tell my colleagues, that undermines the whole debate. It sends us on a track to where we are going to be a Third World country because we won't even be honest about what things really cost. There is nothing wrong with having an honest debate about what this bill really costs, but to deceive the American people on what this bill actually costs--actually costs and will actually cost them--it is not going to cost us; it is going to actually cost them. It is going to cost them in terms of a lower standard of living and less opportunity.

Let's get honest about what it really costs, and it really costs $41.2 billion more than what we say it is going to cost. Let's do the hard work. If the bill is such that the Senator from Pennsylvania thinks it is absolutely necessary so children will develop, so children will become productive, isn't it worth getting rid of things that don't make

kids develop and don't make them productive? Isn't it worth us taking the heat to get rid of programs that aren't effective so we can actually pay for this? Instead, we are in essence lying to the American public about the true cost of this bill. That is what has to stop.

The integrity of those who want to do this is fine. The integrity of the numbers stinks. For us to say we are for children and have that honorable position that we are for children, but at the same time we want to undermine the faith in this place so they can't believe us in the future because we are going to charge them $41.2 billion more than it actually costs says a whole lot about us.

Every child should have an opportunity for health care. Every child should have prevention. Every child should get a hearing screen and a vision screen as we do now at every newborn nursery in this country. Every child should get their immunizations at every opportunity when they encounter--first at 2 months, 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, and a year, their first year of life. The whole purpose for that screening is to see if development is not normal.

The Senator from Maryland talked about the mandated oral health care in this bill. The mandated oral health care in this bill is a direct consequence of one of our other programs to help people. It is called food stamps. When we look at the mix of food stamps, what do we see? We see a high predilection for high-fructose corn syrup in the foods that we use food stamps to buy which causes the very dental caries we are fighting. So do we fix the real problem or do we treat the symptoms? We ought to be about fixing the real problems. So if we want to do and mandate oral health care in this bill, why don't we put a limitation on the high-fructose corn syrup products and high-glucose products that are the No. 1 cause of the dental caries the kids are having? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But we didn't do that.

We didn't come forward with a total plan on health care, which is the whole problem as we try to expand this bill to meet a need. What we need to do--and I think the Senator from Pennsylvania agrees--is we need to reform all of health care. It needs to be based on prevention. It needs to be based on prevention. It needs to be based on teaching and preventing disease rather than treating disease.

My hope is that when we come through this, whatever we do, win or lose--whether my side wins or the other side wins--what should happen is Americans should win. The American people should win. What that means is an honest debate about the numbers--not a game with the numbers, an honest debate about the numbers--and what it really means is an honest debate about what the real problems are and not about things that aren't the real problems.

We have plenty of money in health care. We don't need to increase spending in health care. What we need to do is redirect the spending that is there. We spent $2.28 trillion last year on health care. Thirty percent of that money didn't go to help anybody get well or prevent anybody from getting sick. That is $600 billion. If we would look at it and say prevention is going to be No. 1, and No. 2 is going to be every American insured, we could go a long way toward solving this problem.

Unfortunately, however, we have chosen to start off the new SCHIP by trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the American taxpayer, by playing funny numbers. Why would we leave that out there? Why would we do that? It lessens the integrity of the debate. It lessens the quality of the work product we put forward. It undermines the very thing we need most from the American people, which is their confidence that we are doing what is in the best long-term interests of the country. This bill isn't in the best long-term interests of the country. The bill doesn't address the needs of the Medicaid populations out there today who aren't served who could be served if, in fact, we should mandate that the States go and do it. But we have chosen not to do that. We have chosen to expand up the chain before we fix the problems down the chain. We have chosen to take dollars and give them to those who are more fortunate instead of spending dollars on the people who are the least fortunate in this country, all in the name of a movement to close in ultimately on a single-payer health system. Let's have the debate about single-payer health system.

One final point I will make before I yield to my friend from North Carolina, and that is this: The most important thing after access is choice. We know what. Medicaid offers little choice. SCHIP offers little choice. The reason is because we have a payment system that rewards specialty and doesn't reward primary care. It started with Medicare, and it has worked its way through Medicaid. So our average pediatrician in this country makes about a fourth of what the average surgeon does or about a fourth of what the average gastroenterologist makes, and we ask ourselves: Why can't we get more pediatricians? Our average family practitioner makes a little bit more than that, but not much, and we ask ourselves: Why can't we get people out there into primary care? Our average internist makes just a little bit more but still about a fourth of what the specialists make because we have decided to pay it. Who is going to take care of them? Let me tell you who is going to take care of them: PAs and nurse practitioners. Some are excellent, some are great, but none of them have the training of a physician. We are slowly walking to a health care area where we are going to tell people you have coverage, but the coverage is you do not have choice and you do not have the same level of care because we have not chosen the priorities of compensating primary care, compensating pediatricians, compensating pediatric dentistry, compensating internists to care for these kids.

Choice is the most important thing, and the reason is because if a mother is taking her child to a health care professional in which she does not have confidence, do you know what happens? She does do what they say.

As we eliminate choice, which is what happens in SCHIP and Medicaid because so few physicians take it because the reimbursement rate is so low, we eliminate the doctor-patient relationship in establishing the confidence necessary to make sure, as the Senator from Pennsylvania said, that these kids will develop, that they will become productive.

The idea behind this whole program is we have taken away the most important attribute of consequences of care, and that is confidence in the provider.

I yield to my colleague from North Carolina.

I will make this short because I know we have a swearing in.

I wanted to make a few points. When President Obama talks about being responsible, if you sign an affidavit that you will cover and be the sponsor for a legal immigrant in this country, you ought to do that. That is what he is talking about. He is not talking about: I will do it until I can get someone else to take care of my responsibility, talking about it, if you sign an affidavit that you will do it.

The idea that 22 States already do this is great. If States want to do it, that is what makes our Union so great, that 22 States can, except now they cannot afford to do it, and we are going to be bailing them out to the tune of about $300 billion on Medicaid and SCHIP programs in the supplemental or the spending package or the stimulus package that is coming through.

What this bill is going to do is make permanent that people do not have to be responsible when they, in fact, sign an affidavit that they will sponsor a legal immigrant.

One final point I would make is, the Senator from Pennsylvania listed all of those premium assistance programs that Pennsylvania has because that is what they are, premium assistance rather than a regular SCHIP program. Well, in this bill you have extremely limited any new premium assistance programs without an absolute mandate and an absolute mandate on what kind of program you have. You will be in an HMO. You will not have the doctor of choice, and you will not go where you want; you will go where you are sent.

So great points, great need in our country, great debate, but integrity first. Be honest with the numbers about what they really mean. Everybody in this Chamber knows they are not, but we are not going to change that. Even if we offer an amendment, it is not going to go anywhere because nobody knows what to get rid of to be able to afford to pay for that.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I wonder if anybody has ever asked the question--it has certainly never been answered--if you are a family and you qualify at the new 300 percent and you are buying your own insurance and you are covering your two kids, what happens when you transfer your kids to SCHIP, the Children's Health Insurance Program? What happens to your premium? I can tell you what happens to the premium. Do you know what happens to the premium? It goes down zero because health insurance is sold as an individual or a family product. So by taking two children, if I am earning 300 percent of poverty, and taking them off and transferring--now I am paying for it--and transferring that to the State Children's Health Insurance Program, the taxpayers of this country now will pay for that premium about $2,200 a piece when you can buy it in the private market for $1,100 a piece, but the parents will get no decrease in their insurance premium. That is why the crowdout provision is so negative for the American taxpayer and the generations that follow us.

My friend, the Senator from Ohio, mentioned that everybody wants to cover the 200 percent and below. The fact is, we have done a terrible job of covering the 200 percent and below. There are 5.4 million children out there today who do not have health insurance, whose parents do not have health insurance, who are eligible for Medicaid and SCHIP today, and they are not signed up. What are we doing? We are expanding a program that has only gotten about 51 percent of the kids who are eligible right now signed into the program. We are also being dishonest about what it costs. It is actually going to cost $42 billion more than what we say it is going to cost. Nobody will deny that. So why would we not want to have something that will limit the amount of crowdout because as we take money for kids who are now insured and put it to them through a Government program, it means these same 5.4 million kids are still not going to get covered.

We have not improved the program by increasing the eligibility. What we have done is we have just moved the income scale up to $60,000, some $62,450 a year, and we say: We will now cover your kids, and even if you have them covered now, you will not get any break from your insurance. But the same 5.4 million kids who are in poverty or at 200 percent of poverty still are not covered.

What are we doing? Why wouldn't we want to fix it to where all the kids who are out there today who do not have insurance, who are 200 percent and below the poverty level, why aren't we making sure they are covered? Why are we not doing that? Why are we not saying: States, you can go to the 300 percent if you want but only after you have covered the kids whom the program was designed for in the first place.

There is an amendment by Senator Hatch in that regard. Why would we spend all this extra money?

By the way, we just met with the President. Other than the short-term financial struggles we are in, one of the big concerns with him is the fact that we have an unending entitlement disaster before us and we are getting ready to make it worse. Why would we not address that? Why would we say we are going to help kids but not really help kids? Why would we say we want to help the poorest children and the families who need it the most but still ignore them?

There is an answer to it. There is an answer to it, in that we want to move whichever way we can to eventually have a single-payer system in this country. We gutted the Premium Assistance Program. The Senator from Pennsylvania listed all the great things about the Premium Assistance Program. He listed all the different programs in Pennsylvania. Those are gutted under this bill. You can have one, but by the time you get it, nobody will want to have it.

We have taken what people have and said maybe we could spend $500 per kid per year to keep them in a health insurance program that the parents might have at work, but instead we are taking them all out and putting them in a Government program that costs twice as much as it does to buy them the same insurance in the open market.

Crowdout is a real phenomenon, but the most important thing is it helps the people who need it the least the most. And it helps the least those people who need it the most. That is what we are doing in this bill. We are not helping the lowest. We are only moving it up the chain and we are saying if you make $62,000 a year in this country, your children can be covered by the Government.

Why would you not want to do that? We do not have any other Government program that people do not voluntarily take if we put it out there. That is in the face of the fact that this year--hear my words very clearly--this year the true Federal budget deficit will be $1.6 trillion. The Government will spend $24,000 per family more than it takes in. Hear those words--$24,000 more per family it will spend than it takes in.

What is the future to be for this child at the 300 percent above poverty level? Their parents make $62,000 and we are going to give them this gift of health insurance today. But you will not be able to afford a college education. You certainly will never afford a home. It is doubtful you will ever be able to afford a car that is reliable. You will be in a debtor nation. Those are the consequences of our actions in the name of wanting to expand a program that today is highly ineffective in addressing the needs of the real poor children in this country.

Why would we do that, and just say: Don't worry, you have a pricetag to pay if you ever hope to get out of college or have the ability to get out of college? By the way, we are going to up your taxes if you get out there and get it up here on the front end.

This body is abandoning the very principles this country was built on. This country was built on a heritage of sacrifice, sacrifice by the common man for the common good to create a great, bright shining future for the generations that follow. This bill doesn't fit with that heritage. This bill, as a matter of fact, undermines that heritage. In the name of helping children, we are hurting those children's children. We are stealing opportunity from those children's children.

As I said earlier this morning, I want every child in this country insured. If we took the money that was out there today in Medicaid and SCHIP and the State contribution to it, we could insure every child in this country. We could create an insurance policy for every child in this country that gives them total screening exams, could give them prevention care, could give them acute care, and could give them hospital care. Yet when we run it through the Government, it costs twice as much because of the inefficiencies that are inherent in the system.

Later on I am going to offer a limitation based on improper payments. The American public may not know this. Certainly Members of Congress know. We do not know how much money is wasted in Medicaid because Medicaid has refused to report it. By law they are mandated to report it. They have refused to report it. We now have the information on 17 States on improper payments. The average is 10.5 percent on the 17 States we have looked at. Of that, 90 percent of those are overpayments. In New York City alone their own inspector general said at a minimum $15 billion a year is wasted in fraud, abuse, and deceit on the Medicaid Program. Where have we addressed any of that in this? Where have we put the safeguards to make sure this doesn't happen here? We have not done that.

We are not fixing the problems that are in front of us. What we are doing is creating more problems in the name of expanding a children's insurance program and limiting the future of the things that have been very successful with it, such as premium assistance, and taking that away.

There is going to be crowdout and the crowdout is going to benefit the most wealthy of the upper middle income because in some States, by the time you count exclusions, you can earn $120,000 a year and have your kids on SCHIP. We are going to help them. But not the kids of the parents working at $7 an hour, both of them, making $28,000 or $30,000 a year, of which half of them are not on either Medicaid or SCHIP. Why would we do that? Do we truly care about children's health? Are we really about trying to solve it?

Where are the ideas of combining where the biggest health care disparities are in our country? We know where those are. Why not design a program to go and attach and direct health care dollars to the large health care disparities? We know it pays big returns in terms of childhood obesity, in terms of precluding the onset of smoking, in terms of prevention and vaccinations, in terms of well-child care? Why would we not look at where the problems are and try to direct dollars to where the problems are? Instead, we are going to allocate across this country, to those who can now afford it, we are now going to start paying for it.

Even if we wanted to do that, why would we do it at twice the cost of what you could buy in a private market? Mr. President, $1,156 is the average market cost to insure a child in this country. Why would we spend $2,200 to get the same thing? So we can say we did something?

If, in fact, you could take $1,156 or $1,200 for every child out there--we have more than enough money with what we are spending today to accomplish that--we could buy them all an insurance policy.

I am not sure this bill is about children. I am not sure it is about children's health care. I have some doubts when we are not frugal. If it is about children's health care now, it is certainly not about those children's long-term financial security, when we are not even going to be honest with how much this bill costs. We have pulled a trick so we do not have a pay-go rule, and the trick keeps us from offsetting $42 billion in expenses associated with this bill. Everybody knows that. Nobody will say that is not right. Nobody wants to talk about that. That is what is wrong.

That is why people do not have confidence in the Congress. It is because we have this sleight-of-hand. We want to do something good but we don't want to tell you what it costs and we don't want to get rid of programs that don't work in order to be able to do something good. We are going to hide it under the blanket. So we are hiding $42 billion under the blanket. We are playing the inside baseball game, not being honest with the American people about what it costs; not being honest with the American people that it is a lot cheaper to give premium assistance than it is to give a program directly to a child; not being honest about the fact that this costs twice as much as what you could buy a health insurance policy for, for every child in this country.

We are not being honest at all, so our integrity is in question. Would we do the right thing in the long term for these kids that we say we care about their health care? I do not have the confidence we will. I have the confidence that this train is going to roll, we are going to do it just the way we have done it. There are still going to be 5.4 million kids out there 10 years from now, when we look at eligibility. It will be the same 5.4 million under the 200

percent of poverty level that we did not reach, that we didn't get out and actually make a difference. And then we are going to pay a larger cost as they mature as adults because what we could have prevented will not have been prevented, what we could have taught will not be taught, and the health care costs associated with that will be tremendous.

Mr. President, 5.4 million children are presently eligible for either SCHIP or Medicaid and we have done nothing to make sure those kids get a program that is readily available to them today. We have done nothing. We put $100 million in for outreach and said we will feel good about it because maybe that will reach some of them. We will still have millions of children who are eligible for these programs who will not get it.

We are going about approaching it the wrong way. We ought to be saying let's have a bill that insures every American child. Let's do that. Every American child, universal access with an insurance policy for every American child, why won't we do that? That is what we should be doing. Let's do it for every child. Then the insurance rates on adults will modulate and then husband and wife will not be paying a falsely elevated price once their kids get pulled off of their insurance policy and go into a Government program. Why not buy them all something, from then until the time they are 21, that covers them, that gives them the prevention care, that gives them the counseling, that gives them the immunizations? We know what it costs and we know what we can do it for. Why not do that?

Instead, we have created this complex, convoluted system that can be gamed. The estimate on Medicaid fraud--listen to this--the estimate on Medicaid fraud is $60 billion a year. That is enough to pay for where we cheated on this program if we would get rid of 10 percent of it a year over the next 10 years, if we got rid of 10 percent of the fraud. There is nothing in here on fraud. There is nothing in here to make the States accountable for the money we send out there.

We have done a poor job. We claim we want to help children, we claim we want children to have health insurance, yet we mortgage those very children's futures by not being honest about how we are going about doing it, about how we are going to pay for it and what the ultimate results will be.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank my colleague for his comments. There is an easy way to solve this; it is called auto enrollment. You just write a bill. Anybody in any region under 200 percent who has a claim of deduction for children is automatically enrolled in SCHIP or Medicaid. It is not hard. We do not want to do that. Why are we not doing that? Because we do not want to help all of these 5.4 million children. We do not want to do that.

We have all of these incentives that have not worked in the past. We have done all of these things. All you have to do is auto enrollment. We can write a law. We can pass it. We can say: The IRS can look at every family who has children under 200 percent who files a tax return or files for the earned income tax credit, and their children are automatically enrolled. They automatically get a notice that says: Here is your insurance. Here is your State card. You have coverage.

It is not hard. We can do that. But we have not done it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Stephanie Carlton and Evan Feinberg of my staff be granted the privilege of the floor during debate on H.R. 2.

Madam President, in thinking about where we are today, I asked myself what the average Oklahoman would ask of me about this bill, or the average person from Wyoming or California.

As I think about it, we have a bill that has 45 blatant earmarks in it. It is not a new day in Washington. Despite arguments to the contrary, we are going to significantly alter our access to millions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas by what we are doing. We are going to create a further imbalance. We have almost 107 million acres of wilderness area. We are going to add another 2.2 million acres to that today. We are going to trample on property rights as we haven't in decades, both directly and indirectly. I asked myself: Why are we doing it? I believe we are doing it because we are thinking in the very short term. I also believe we are doing it because we pride ourselves in the parochial benefits that we can return to our States at the expense of the best judgment in terms of decisionmaking for our future.

As has been noted on this floor, there are many of these bills that I don't approve that don't have an impact, that aren't earmarks, that aren't going to take property rights away, that aren't going to limit our access to available oil and natural gas, proven reserves, but nevertheless we are going to do those things today, and there are going to be 20 or 25 votes against it. That doesn't mean the people who are promoting this are any more genuine or sincere than I am, but I think what it does mean is we have a short-term, myopic-focused leadership in the Congress that does not weigh properly the benefits of pleasing the parochial interests at the expense of our future.

So I have fought very hard for many months to try to make sure a majority of these bills don't become law--not because I am opposed to wilderness or heritage areas but because I am for constitutional right of property ownership, because I know the more and more we take away from our ability to fill the gap as we transition to alternative energy, the more money we are going to fund to those people who would like to see us nonexistent.

It is a privilege to serve in this body. It is a privilege to serve with gentlemen such as the Senator from New Mexico, the chairman of this committee, and to benefit from his integrity and his demeanor and cooperation, but it is also a disappointment that, in my line of thinking, when you talk with the average American, we shouldn't be doing anything to take away property rights. We should be doing everything to assure ourselves increased access to energy in the future. We should, for sure, eliminate this blatant, corrupt process of earmarking, not because it is corrupt in terms of at this time or at that time; it is corrupt because it ignores the future and the costs and the lack of priority about how we should be spending what are going to be very limited resources in the future.

So I thank my colleagues for giving me the opportunity to attempt to put forward what I think are important principles.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, would the Chair be so kind as to advise me when I have used 7 minutes?

Mr. President, we have before us today a hallmark piece of legislation that is supposed to be about credit and liquidity and the significant problems we ran into this last fall in this country when we no longer had a functioning, or barely had a functioning financial industry that allowed credit to flow which would allow commerce to ensue.

It was my belief at the time, based on what I was told and what I saw, that extraordinary measures were going to be required for us to handle this significant problem. Consequently, I ended up voting for a financial recovery package that I must say has been handled in a way completely opposite of the way we were told it was going to be handled. That is now water under the bridge. The question before us today is: Are we going to give another $350 billion--not through an oversight process, through an appropriating process--are we going to write a blank check to the Treasury Department to accomplish again what we are assured by the transition team and the incoming administration is for very specific things?

I would like to believe that. As a matter of fact, in a meeting yesterday with some of the officials of the incoming administration, I asked in a closed room where they were giving us this reassurance that this administration was not going to put more money into the auto industry under the pretext it has been done using the TARP funds; that this administration was not going to use this money for other industrial segments of our society but in fact would use this money only when and if it is necessary to keep liquidity rolling, to keep banks' balance sheets to the point where we can accomplish what we need in order to have true commerce in this country. And I must say that I felt somewhat reassured walking out of that meeting.

But one of the things I asked for in that meeting was a public statement so that the rest of America could have that same assurance. We find ourselves today, getting ready to vote on this--and that was communicated very directly, by the way, with some of the highest levels of the incoming administration--we are about to vote on it, yet there has been no public statement whatsoever that would assure either Members of this body or the American taxpayers that we are not going to be using it to bail out companies that are not competitive and have not had to do the hard things to maintain themselves to be competitive; we have no assurance we are not going to go to other industries and do the same thing; and we do not have, in fact, a public expression, an explanation, or a letter of intent of the incoming administration that they are going to use it in a very precise and direct manner to maintain liquidity of the financial sector.

The other thing that we have not heard, along with maintaining that liquidity, is how the administration will handle the toxic assets, which is what we were told the money was for in the first place.

So I come to the floor this afternoon wanting to support our new President. I want to support him. I talked to him about this issue prior to his senior staff coming and talking to us. But I find myself in the predicament of having been fooled once by the present administration not doing what they said they were going to do. They have not been transparent as to where and how the money is being spent. The American people haven't had access. We don't know the priorities under which it was done. And now we are being told again: Trust us.

Well, I am willing to do that, provided we put out to the American people exactly what that means. And the only thing that I can figure as to why it has not been forthcoming--that is what we asked for yesterday afternoon in the meeting with those representing President-elect Obama--is that they do not want to commit. And I regret to say that if the incoming administration won't commit on paper and publicly as to how they are going to use this money, I am disinclined to vote to give it to them. That pains me, because I want our new administration to be tremendously successful in the face of all the problems we have.

To meet the goal of transparency and accountability--which is what this new administration is all about, and I believe it will be far greater than what we have seen in the past; I will give them credit for that--it is required that they publicly tell the American people how, when, why, and what they are going to use this money for. And my only conclusion would be, in the face of that statement not being forthcoming, is that they either have the votes and believe they can accomplish this without being forthcoming--which again goes exactly the opposite direction of what my friend Barack Obama campaigned on--or they weren't necessarily truthful in what they told us on how they were going to use the money.

So I stand ready to try to support them, if in fact we have assurances--public assurances and documented assurances--that they are going to follow

the intent of what we originally gave the money for. Absent that, I would find him be unable to support that and would vote for the resolution of disapproval.

I yield back the remainder of my time.

Mr. President, when President Obama is sworn into office next week, he will inherit an extremely complex and challenging crisis in the Middle East. Since Israel commenced military operations in Gaza to defend its citizens against rocket attacks more than 1,000 have died in Gaza, many of them civilians, while 13 Israelis have died. In spite of this carnage, Hamas refuses to surrender and continues to fire rockets into Israel. No clear resolution is in sight.

As a practicing physician, I find this conflict heartbreaking. Israelis live in constant fear that a rocket attack will snuff out an innocent life. Families in Israel go to bed at night wondering if a rocket will slam into their home. At the same time, Palestinians have nowhere to run from a terrorist organization that uses its own civilians as human shields.

While we all mourn the loss of innocent life, the world must recognize that Hamas deliberately created a situation in which Israel was forced to respond as any sovereign nation would while under attack. Israel, and every nation, has the right to self-defense.

What makes Hamas's actions particularly abhorrent and barbaric is the fact that they are making decisions, I believe, based on a perverse political calculation. While publically condemning Israel, Hamas's leaders and sympathizers in Iran and elsewhere privately welcome the suffering of the Palestinian people as a political opportunity. Hamas knows better than anyone that virtually every area of the densely populated Gaza strip is a civilian area. In Gaza, refugees have no place to seek refuge. The terrible unintended consequences and loss of civilian life we've seen in Gaza is part of Hamas's design and goal.

The United States and the next administration can play an important role in preventing Hamas from achieving its goals. What many on both sides long for is not just the cessation of violence but a real, lasting and durable peace. Some believe this is impossible, but it is in the interest of all sides to work toward this goal.

I trust President-elect Obama will avoid the false choice between unapologetically defending Israel's security and creating hope and opportunity for people on both sides of the conflict who want the same degree of freedom, peace and opportunity for themselves and their children. As Israel's most important ally, the United States should never waver in our commitment to Israel's security. The strength of that assurance is itself one of our most important contributions in the region because it creates the security and stability that are a prerequisite for meaningful negotiations.

At the same time, we enhance security in the region by assuring Palestinians in Gaza with our words and actions that they are not forgotten and that we hear their calls for peace and an end to violence. I've delivered 4,000 babies and I grieve with the pregnant women in Gaza who are being turned away at hospitals because their own leaders have held their lives and the lives of their children in contempt. The next administration can legitimize and support those mothers' pleas for peace while condemning and marginalizing Hamas's tactics of terror.

I believe President-elect Obama has the judgment and temperament to not only maintain our vital support of Israel, but to also create hope in the region and help Palestinians embrace alternatives to Hamas's brand of violence and despair. He will have my prayers and support and I hope he can have the prayers and support of the American people as he confronts this difficult challenge.

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

Mr. President, at 10:30, I believe, this morning, we are going to vote on cloture on this lands package. I wish to take a few minutes--and my colleague has been more than gracious to me in terms of allowing time--to discuss this.

Our country is at a very difficult time in terms of our economic growth but, more importantly, in terms of the number of people who are suffering. We have before us a 1,300-page bill that we will hear has been looked at for a year and a half--the proponents of which, I am sure, have--that is nonamendable and that we will spend somewhere between $10 billion and $12 billion, when we think about the long-term consequences of the bill.

The questions I have before the body on this bill are, No. 1, is this truly a priority for us at the times we are in, considering the nature of the great difficulties that face this country; and No. 2, is it a priority for us in terms of the things that are out there that we can really be making a difference on today that we refuse to make a difference on.

Mr. President, let me highlight that for you for a minute.

This last year we put out a report on the Justice Department that showed very clearly $10 billion a year in waste. I gave a speech on the floor this last summer outlining $380 billion in waste. We know we have at least $50 billion a year in waste at the Pentagon. We know we have at least $80 billion worth of fraud a year in Medicare. The first thing we do in this Congress is create $10 billion more of spending. So we are not attacking the structural problems that actually face our Government, but, more importantly, we are not attacking the biggest problem. The biggest problem is the American people do not have confidence in us as an institution to do what they do every day, and that is to set priorities.

Every family out there today is going through a process, much like I did at the end of the year, seeing how much is going to come in, what they are absolutely obligated to spend, and if there is any left over, where is the priority at which they do that. We are in reverse of that process. We are saying we are not even going to look at that process, we are not going to look at the $380 billion worth of waste, we are not going to look at the programs.

I had a visit with Mr. Duncan, who is the new nominee for the Education Department. To his surprise, he was blown over by the fact that there are more educational programs outside the Department of Education than there are inside. Yet we refuse to work on those very hard things that will actually make a large difference in the outcome.

We are going to be voting yet this week on putting another $350 billion in the hands of the Treasury Department to enhance liquidity. But with that, we hear from Larry Summers that we are going to direct the money to whoever needs to borrow rather than whoever needs to try to be liquid in terms of loaning money. We have it exactly backwards.

Before us is a bill that will markedly undermine attempts at energy independence, will add to the 107 million acres of land that presently are wilderness areas which will make them truly, in all respects, significantly difficult to ever tap any natural resources, regardless of whether we can do that without any impact on the environment.

It is interesting to note that the actual number of acres of land that are in wilderness areas is greater than the total developed land in this country, which is 106 million acres.

We are going to take another 2.2 million acres and move them away from any possibility. Yet nowhere in our thought was--whether we were manipulated by supply-demand constraints or we were manipulated by futures markets--the fact that oil reached an all-time high and we were paying $4 for a gallon of gasoline. Completely outside the scope of this bill was any consideration that we might want to preserve our ability to have access to future oil reserves--even the disputed debate on the Wyoming Range on whether we are going to have access to, the lowest estimate, 5 million barrels of oil and maybe 3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, all the way up to 300 million barrels of oil and 15 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

My complaint and my reason for voting no on cloture is really fourfold. No. 1 is it is not a priority what we are doing. No. 2 is our problems with demand that we would be doing something different than what we do in this bill. No. 3 is the process which has not allowed for significant amendments of our choice on this bill is flawed. And, finally, No. 4, it does not go towards building back the trust in the Congress to actually do things in order of priority that are going to make a difference for this country.

I recognize that I am in the minority opinion of that view in this body. What I don't recognize and what I know is true is that I am not in the minority opinion of the people in this country.

We are about to vote on a 1,300-page bill that will not be amended, that very few have read, that very few have studied hard as to the consequences it will have on our energy dependency, and we are going to pass it. It is probably going to be sent to the new President, and he is probably going to sign it, which gives me great cause for worry because my friend, the President-elect, ran on hope and a promise of change. I don't see any change in the Senate.

My hope is somewhat diminished because I don't see us as a body collectively addressing the big problems that face us as a nation. There is no question that many of the States that have programs in this bill have wanted them for a long time, and they are going to be happy with them, the fact that we do all these things for these various organizations to create four new extensions to national parks at a time when there is a $9 billion backlog on the national parks we have today.

But I wonder if getting something parochially is worth putting the country at risk, and not just at risk with this bill but the risk of process, the risk that we will continue to plow ahead on that which will not make an ultimate difference in the security, the long-term financial outlook of this country.

Anybody who reads this bill will say: Why are you doing certain things now? Why would you authorize the spending of $3.5 million for a birthday party in Florida? Why would you enhance botanical gardens now when we are going to run a $1.8 trillion deficit this year? Why would you build a new orchid garden for the Smithsonian now when we have so many other issues that are so far more important that we should be doing? Why in light of the greatest drought California has ever seen would we disrupt the water supply to 10,000 farmers, creating more than $2 billion worth of GDP? Why would we do that? Why would we do that now? I don't understand why we are doing it now.

I understand the politics of it. I understand the way the Senate works. I understand the reason Members want to get things done for their States. But right now in our Nation, we ought to be thinking about the good of the Nation as a whole, the long-term good of the Nation as a whole.

Confidence--confidence--is what Americans don't have today. They are not confident in their future. They are

not confident in the economics of maintaining their family, their lifestyle. As a matter of fact, the confidence is so low that we are going to have a savings rate that we have not seen in 40 years in this country because people are saving for a rainy day, and they think the rainy day is here. What we are doing is destroying what confidence is left.

Our President-elect's job over the next year, more than anything, is to restore hope and confidence in the future of this country. I believe we fall far short by bringing this bill to the Senate at this time in this way without an ability to amend it in significant ways that preserve chances for energy exploration, that take the silliness out of it--as I mentioned earlier, the 45 earmarks that are in this bill--and do not address the priorities of which we should be authorizing the spending of money in this bill. It is wasteful. It does not meet common sense. It destroys what little credibility we have left, and in the long run it diminishes the promise of change and hope for which our new President-elect stands.

I yield the floor.

Let me clear up the data on the Wyoming Range. It is said there is only 1.5 trillion cubic feet, according to the U.S. Geologic Survey. But you have not read the complete report. The letter is new. The data used by them is older than the data used by the Bureau of Land Management. It wasn't based on the latest topographic and geological studies. That is the first problem.

The second thing they say in their report is they lacked an official map. So it is their best guess, not based on science, not based on known data.

Finally, they only approximated for the following reasons: They only had a general outline of the area and they assumed a homogenous distribution of oil and gas resources across the entire area.

Well, that is a no report. The latest report to come from the National Petroleum Council, which is subcontracted to BLM, estimates, at a minimum, 12 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. So where you get your information and what it says and what it is based on is very important.

So we have had all this defense that this is not going to impact energy based on an erroneous report based on erroneous assumptions by the National Geologic Survey, when all you have to do is read their own survey and that is the footnote to it, which says we didn't have the information, we didn't have the map, so we used an average, not what was there. Having known that the first three gas wells drilled there had to be capped because we didn't have the technology to take the flow, it was so great, the estimates by the USGS are so far out of range it is laughable. As far as 10 years counting whether it is going to have any impact on our energy, I hope we are thinking longer than 10 years. But that is what the CBO says they are going to use--10 years.

Don't forget there is another big issue with this bill in that we step all over property rights in this country. Even though several of the bills in here say they would not use eminent domain, every one of them still has the right to use eminent domain outside the areas we have created in this bill. So we have taken one of the basic rights of Americans in this country, and the Senate, in passing this bill, by saying: Sorry, our parochial interests for what we want to do for the State trumps your property rights.

If you believe in property rights, if you believe people who own land ought to have the right to develop that land, if you don't think the Federal Government ought to be funding those people who will take away your rights--which is what they will do with the heritage areas; they actually change the zoning laws as funded by the U.S. Park Service--I have a bridge I want to sell you.

We ought to be about doing what is in the best interest of the country, not what is in the best interest of our States right now. Our problems are severe. We ought to be doing things that develop confidence in this body, not undermining the confidence in this body. As far as the land exchanges, almost none of those was objected to. They could have come through here on unanimous consent, and everybody knows that. To use that as a reason for why we are at this point is not only insincere, it is inaccurate.

So it is time for us to start behaving and acting in ways that restore confidence in this body and setting priorities that are very similar to the priorities every family has to set. I will say, again, we should have spent the last 2 weeks working on waste and fraud and duplication in the Federal Government because we are getting ready to approve a bill that will spend $800 billion at the same time we know we are going to waste $300 billion in this Government. For us to spend time on this bill rather than the important things that are going to make a difference in the lives of families in this country in the long run, I believe it undermines the best values of the Senate.

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 I be recognized for what time I might consume.

Mr. President, we had an interesting day yesterday. We brought a lot of people to work, I believe unnecessarily, to adopt a motion to proceed that we could have voted on today.

I want to spend some time today outlining what our new, soon to be President, President-elect Obama, said during his campaign and what he said to me personally several times about how we fix what is wrong with our country. If you go to his Web site or what his transition team has said, what you will find are some very significant things that both he and I have worked on over the past 4 years.

He has a plan. It is called the Obama plan for restoring fiscal discipline. It is a good plan. What does it include? It includes conducting an exhaustive line-by-line review of Federal spending and eliminating Government programs that are not performing or are wasteful or are obsolete or are duplicative, paying for new spending commitments--new spending commitments--by cutting other programs--let me say that again--paying for new spending commitments by cutting other programs, slashing porkbarrel spending, rooting out redundancy, and requiring all Federal contracts over $25,000, including earmarks, to be competitively bid, to truly measure program performance without ideologic slant, and enforcing goals and demanding that new initiatives be selected on the basis of merit, not a political process that rewards lobbyists and campaign donors and makes Members of Congress just look good at home.

That is President-elect Obama. I don't know anybody outside of Washington who would not embrace that message. That is a great message for our country. It is a message that our country needs to heed. It is one that we need to accomplish. Unfortunately, the first week we are back in session, we are doing exactly the opposite. Here we have President-elect Obama who next week will become President Obama, and one of his main goals we are working to undermine in the Senate today.

I am going to be an ally of the President-elect on these issues. Every opportunity when we are not doing what he suggested we be doing, I am going to be raising questions about it. We are going to work hard for the hope and change he promised the American people he would deliver.

We have before us a lands package. It is not really a lands package. It has all sorts of stuff in it--165 bills. Initially, it spends $1 billion, but that is not even honest because after 10 years it spends $2 billion to $3 billion more on one program alone. CBO has not even scored

this new package. The last package they scored, if appropriated, would be $8 billion. So we have $10 billion to $12 billion in new spending.

The opportunity to offer amendments on that has been foreclosed.

So I thought, in light of what this bill is and in light of what President Obama said he would like to see us do, that I would highlight some of the amendments I would have offered had the minority, the Republican Party, the Republican Members of the Senate, been given an opportunity to amend this bill.

The best tradition of the Senate--the best tradition of the Senate-- is where the best ideas get debated, the back and forth goes on, and then we settle on what is almost always a compromise but a compromise that is thoroughly debated and where an individual Senator has to put their stamp of yea or nay on ideas to either make it better or not. That is not available in this bill. As a matter of fact, it hasn't been available for 124 days. It has been available once to Republican Members of the Senate in 184 days.

So if we are to accomplish, or at least move in the direction that our soon-to-be President would like for us to, one of the things that is going to be required for that is taking tough votes. The idea we don't want our Members to have to take tough votes is the height of inside political baseball and it wreaks of a lack of courage. As a Senator from Oklahoma, if I can't go home and defend my votes in a cogent and reasonable manner, I shouldn't be sent back up here. That is all there is to it. If Oklahoma citizens believe I have not stood on the principles of which I told them I would try to represent them in this body, they should not send me back to the Senate. But to not have the votes in the first place, so we don't have to defend anything, goes against not just the culture of the Senate but it goes against the very courage that this whole country was based upon and that is the freedom to express and work and try to accomplish what you think is best for the country in the long run.

One of the great qualities of our country is this freedom to get out and express. Until recently, that freedom has been available in the Senate. But this didn't start with Harry Reid. It goes all the way back to George Mitchell and Trent Lott and Bill Frist. It has been perfected under our current majority leader. My thought would be that maybe we ought to take the hard votes rather than ruin the institution. Maybe we ought to do what the American people would expect us to do.

Now, my intent has never been, in all my proceedings on the floor, to extend debate. I mean, I think I could accomplish a filibuster if I wanted to do that. Having delivered 4,000 babies, I know how to stay up all night. My goal is to have the opportunity to do amendments and to have a vote on them. As most people know, agreements to time on amendments are easily obtained, and limitation on amendments are most often very easily obtained.

So the fact is we find ourselves on a $12 billion bill that has lots of good things in it and has lots of mediocre things that probably would be a priority if we didn't find ourselves with a $1.8 trillion deficit this year and getting ready to pass an $800 billion stimulus package that is about $2,700 per man, woman, and child in this country, or about $10,000 per family, none of which is going to be paid for-- none of which is going to be paid for. It will ultimately be paid for, and here is how it will be paid for. When we look toward our grandchildren, what we are going to find is that not so many of them get to go to college because they will not be able to afford to. When we look toward them owning a home, regardless of the housing crisis we find ourselves in now, 30 years from now the ability to earn an income big enough to be able to afford a mortgage is going to be limited because we have been poor stewards with their taxpayer money. So we will have shackled our grandchildren.

So let me spend a minute talking about eliminating wasteful programs, or things that are not a priority, and go over a couple of the amendments we were going to offer simply to point out that we are doing the opposite of what I believe the intent of our new President is going to be. I might also add, it wasn't that long ago that all of us were paying $4 for a gallon of gasoline. There is no question in my mind that a good portion of that price was because of speculation of the very rich in this country asking the very poor to pay out of their disposable income while they made millions upon billions of dollars manipulating the futures markets. But nevertheless, in this bill, we are putting a patch over our eye and limiting our ability in the future to increase our energy independence by taking millions of acres of land and forever closing them to any source of energy. It would not matter what any new technology might be, and it would not matter if we could do it totally without any environmental impact, we are closing that completely off.

That set aside, one of the amendments we were going to offer in this bill was to strike $3.5 million to go to the city of St. Augustine, FL. Now, you might ask, what for? Well, they are going to have a birthday party in 6 years to recognize the 450th year of St. Augustine's existence, the longest Colonial outpost on this continent. I would say maybe that might be a St. Augustine, FL, responsibility or maybe the State of Florida, but when we are running a deficit in this country of $20,000 per family per year, it seems ludicrous to me that we would send $3.5 million for a party. How does that set with priorities? How does that set with eliminating wasteful spending? It doesn't. Yet it is in here, and we don't have the opportunity to try to take it out.

There is $12 million in the bill to build a new facility in Maryland for orchids for the Smithsonian. We may need to do that, but we certainly don't need to do that right now. That is a luxury item. Every family in this country today is making a reassessment because everybody is afraid, and they are going through their budgets and saying: What is necessary? What is excess? What can we do without? Should we be putting money away in case X happens? Everybody in the country is doing that except the Congress. So here we have a new orchid building, costing $12 or $14 million, I don't remember exactly which, that we are going to put in this bill, and we are going to say this is a priority.

Now, some will say: Well, we might not appropriate it. We appropriate $300 billion a year for things that are not authorized anyway, and most of those things are not priority as well. But the fact is, it is a clue to the American public that we don't get it; that in this time of significant economic downturn, in this time of significant debt laying on to the next generations, we continue to want to do things the average person of common sense would say: How can that be a priority? Well, it can't.

There is $5 million in here for new botanical gardens in Hawaii and Florida. I don't doubt that could be a great thing that we could do. No. 1, I would ask the question again: Why isn't that a State responsibility instead of a Federal responsibility? If the State of Florida and the State of Hawaii think that is a priority, they ought to fund it. No. 2, if it is our priority, if it is our responsibility, is that something we should be funding now; that we should be authorizing; we should be saying it is okay to do this?

We are in perilous times. Yet we act like nothing is going on out there; that the average family isn't getting hit hard, that people aren't worried about their jobs; that 573,000 people didn't lose their jobs last month. That is how we are behaving.

One of the other amendments we would have offered is to prohibit the use of eminent domain both in the national trails, the wilderness areas, the new heritage areas, and the new national parks area. It is one thing for the Government to have its land; it is totally different for it, through the force of law, to take your land away from you and tell you what they are going to do with it. There is minimal prohibition in this bill for the protection of property rights in this country--a fundamental freedom guaranteed to every American. This bill steps all over those property rights.

We offered a total of 13 amendments, and we would have probably accepted 5 or 6, with less than an hour debate on each one of them. We could have been finished with this bill. We could have accomplished it last Thursday or Friday. But because we don't want to have to take tough votes or we want to protect a Member from a vote on some

piece of pork that was put in a bill, we have decided to have no votes, no debate on any amendment will be the standard for this body. It is not a good day for the Senate. More importantly, it is a terrible day for this country because we are saying that, even though we have great hope and promise of change by an incoming President, his own party is going to step on that--the careerists, the people who think politically only, the people who think short term only about political gain, instead of thinking about what is in the best long-term interests of our country.

It is interesting to know we have 108 million acres of wilderness in this country right now--more than anywhere else in the world. That number is actually greater than the amount of developed land we have in this country, which is 106 million acres. It is also interesting to know the Government already owns 653 million acres, and we are going to take, at a minimum, another 2.2 million acres and totally wall it off-- can't ride a dirt bike through it, minimal access, can't hunt on it, can't do the things you have always done. If you happen to be unfortunate enough to have property next to it, you fall peril to having the National Park Service fund organizations that are going to take your property rights away, to limit your ability on the land you have that is abutting these areas.

As we come into next week, we approach the celebration of a very great milestone in our country, something that speaks volumes about the American system: the installment and swearing in of the first African- American President, one who leads on these issues while we in the Senate say we are going to keep doing it the way we have been doing it regardless of the tremendous hope that he brought to the American people, the hope for change, that we would operate differently. We hope he will lead a Government that operates differently--and I believe he will try. He is a very dear friend of mine. I believe he is going to try to do that as here we sit in the Senate, worrying about the political consequences of taking a few votes on amendments because we might not look good enough at home.

Talk about the lack of courage; talk about the decline that will be manifested in our country if we continue to have leadership that operates on the basis of fear instead of courage.

My challenge and my hope is that this is the last time we are going to see this tactic brought forward in the Senate. My pledge to the majority leader is I will not delay anything if I get an opportunity to amend it. But if I get no opportunity to amend it, I will delay everything because the lack of an opportunity to amend says that over half of the people in this country, the 160 million who are represented by my side of the aisle, have no voice in the matter. It says, if we don't get it, our voice doesn't count.

I look forward with great hope to the leadership we are going to see at the other end of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. My prayer is that the leadership in this body can come up to the same level of character and courage that I believe we will see demonstrated at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

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

Mr. President, I appreciate the cooperation and willingness to work with me of the Senator from New Mexico. He has been a gentleman throughout. We have always had conversations; we just haven't agreed on what we have done. It has been a pleasure to work with him.

Here is a 1,300-page bill. People are going to say a lot of this has been around for a long time, that it doesn't need any debate, that it certainly should not be amended, but it is 1,300 pages. The CBO has refused to score this one. The last one they scored was between $6 and $8 billion. This is somewhere between $10 and $12 billion, especially when we take the outyears beyond 10 years out of it. So here we sit with a 1,300-page bill that has 45 blatant earmarks in it with no ability to amend.

Since July 16, save one time in September, the minority has not been allowed to offer an amendment on any bill. In 180 days, we have had one amendment. No amendments could be offered. It was announced that cloture would be filed prior to even this vote so that we are going to cut off debate. We could have finished this bill last Friday with four or five amendments. We offered 12 amendments and the thought was that we shouldn't.

My concern is, is there reason to hope for change? A lot of my colleagues on my side of the aisle have things that are important to them in the bill. The question the American people ought to be asking is, with 165 bills, 1,300 pages, is now the time for us to set in motion to take an additional 2.2 million acres out of energy production and limit energy exposure to about 5 or 6 million more acres, and raise the total number of wilderness acres to 2 million greater than that we have in total development in the country? How long ago was it we had $4-a-gallon gasoline? Do we not think that is going to come back?

So on process grounds, for the ability to amend or at least have a vote on an amendment to see whether we think we

ought to be long range in our thinking, I have no doubt President-elect Obama wants to see change, he wants to see change here, he has given our country renewed hope, but the first thing out of the box will be our same old habits.

For a good portion of this bill, there is nothing wrong. The chairman knows there are a large number of bills in this bill to which I do not have any objection. But I certainly have some objection to us tying our hand behind our back on energy in the future, which we will do in tremendous ways. My colleagues from Wyoming, and their plans for protecting a very pristine wild area, want to do a good thing, but it can be done better and still preserve tremendous amounts of oil and natural gas in this country.

So we are here today for the first time in 40 years on a new weekend of a first session--the first time in 40 years--and we are going to use it to force through a 1,300-page, $10 billion bill with $915 million in mandatory spending--at a minimum because we did not score it past that; it is going to go about $3 billion total above that--without a single amendment being allowed to debate and vote on.

As I said, it has been 120 days since the last amendment, 180 days since the last two amendments the minority has been allowed to offer as an amendment to a bill. When you count Republican and Democratic Senators throughout the country, you have 156 million people represented by Republicans. Yet they are shut off from having an amendment on the floor of the Senate--the greatest deliberative body in the world--from having the ability to amend. That is not change.

The other problem is our priorities are wrong. We presently have a $9.6 billion backlog in our national parks. They are hurting. The backlog since this time last year has grown by $400 million. With this bill, we are going to load down the National Park Service with spending, administrative fees, doing all sorts of important things. The Clinton birthplace, one which today is run through private funds, we are going to ask the American taxpayer to now pay for it. We are going to spend $3.5 million to help St. Augustine, FL, have a birthday party 6 years from now. That cannot be our priority. It cannot be.

But what we have done is we have put together a bill so we can build a broad basis of consensus to pass it, with everybody holding their nose on everything except on their own thing. Everybody would admit this is not a priority for this country at this time. As a matter of fact, if we were really doing what we should be doing, we should be working on getting out of the economic mess we are in rather than creating additional barriers and consequences from the actions we are going to take with this bill.

When you think about the national parks and you think about the visitor center in Hawaii with the USS Arizona that is sinking--and in a couple years we are not even going to be able to honor that tremendous site because we do not have and will not have put the funds there to take care of the problems--how is that a priority? Mr. President, 1,117 Americans died on the USS Arizona, and the Senate sits today to spend $10 billion on a large number of things that are not a priority and do not have anything to do with the heritage of sacrifice that so proudly and visibly is demonstrated by that memorial.

The Grand Canyon National Park has a $299 million backlog. Trails are closed because we cannot maintain them. The National Mall, in this very city, has a $700 million backlog in maintenance. Without even considering those things and putting them in priority--one of the things I love about Barack Obama is he gets it that you have to do the long-term things and you have to have a priority and you have to be transparent as you go about that so the American people can make a judgement on us. Yet, without a single effort to prioritize spending or honor commitment to our national resources, we are about to add to the burden 10 new heritage areas; 4 new units to the National Park Service; 14 studies to create and expand more National Park Service; 80 wilderness designations, which are an additional 2.2 million acres of Federal land--the Federal Government owns 660 million acres right now; it is the largest expansion in wilderness areas in the last 25 years-- 92 wild and scenic river designations affecting 1,100 miles of shoreline, and every one of those designations will markedly impact our attempts at some sort of energy independence. You cannot deny that it will have an impact. It will have an impact. It will make it much more difficult, even with clean technology and even with alternative energy, to bring that energy to the American people.

Another significant component of this bill is it massively threatens property rights in this country. Over 100 different property rights organizations are in opposition to this bill, and for good reason. Because even though several of the bills in here prohibit the use of eminent domain, the vast majority of them do not, and several recommend that eminent domain be used to accomplish their purpose. The Government owns 1 out of 3 acres in the U.S. and 1 out of 2 acres in the West. Eminent domain, whether it be from wilderness areas, heritage areas, national wild and scenic rivers, national trails, will have a major impact on anybody living close or in somewhat proximity to any of these new designations because, in fact, they are impacted, even outside of it. In testimony before the Energy Committee, it was stated by the Park Service and several others that, in fact, they will use that to lessen the effect and impact on these new designations.

Let me outline some of the other authorizations we are making in this bill. I know my colleagues disagree with me on authorizing versus what they mean on appropriations, but the fact is, if you read the press releases of Members of this body, when we authorize, they tell the people at home we are going to spend it.

We are going to estimate $1 billion for a water project in California that is 84 years old that will never accomplish what it is supposed to and will have a major impact on 10,000 agricultural entities and impact over $2 billion worth of commerce--$2 billion in commerce--and that $1 billion is just the start of annual mandatory expenditures in the future.

There is $5 million--and I know the Acting President pro tempore is very interested in this, but we have to ask the question--to create a way to limit the impact of wolves on our cattle ranchers in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. We created it. Is that a priority for us right now, to compensate ranchers who lose cattle to wild wolves? Should that be where we are spending our money right now, especially when everybody will agree at the end of this next year, on full accounting, at the end of the next fiscal year, we are going to be close to a $1.8 trillion deficit? Should we annually spend that money? Should we create another Federal program that is going to dole out money--not that maybe we should not do that, but is now the time to do it? Is now the time to put it in the row of saying: Here is where we are going to spend our money.

There is $250,000 to study whether Alexander Hamilton's boyhood home in Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, should be designated as a new national park. Should we spend that money now? Once we authorize that, that is going to come through the National Park Service and they are going to expend the money. They are going to do what Congress tells them to do.

There is $12 or $14 million for a new garden for our arboretum to make sure we have taken care of orchids. We should probably do that at some point in time, but is now the time to do that?

We have 100 environmental groups that think we should not challenge this road through the wilderness in Alaska to one city when we already have an alternate method of transportation. Yet we are going to do that in this bill because we have put it together. Everybody holds their nose and votes.

We are going to authorize the expenditure of money to discover old shipwrecks. We should be doing that now? That is a priority for the Congress and the country in the condition in which we find ourselves?

I believe many things in this bill, this 1,300 pages, we ought to do. But if you went through and polled the average American on everything in this bill, what they would say is: It is probably not worth it for me to get what my State wants and give on all these other things.

We are going to lose 300 million barrels of proven oil reserves. There is no

question about that. The data used by the U.S. Geological Survey is old data. They admitted it is old data. We are going to lose energy, the access to it. We are going to lose the ability to access future energy reserves. But, most of all, what we are going to do is we are going to disappoint the American people because things have not changed. What is a priority for us here in terms of political benefit at home is going to trump doing what is in the best interest, in the long-term interest of the country.

I reserve the remainder of my time.

I yield 6 minutes to the Senator from South Carolina.

Mr. President, how much time remains?

Mr. President, I don't know where to begin. In the last few moments, we have heard the following quotes: fully supported by those who have bills in this Omnibus bill. President-elect Obama says we need to work hard on earmarks. There are 45 earmarks in this bill. I know, I don't want to embarrass anybody. The fact is that most of us don't like the earmarks that are in the bill but are willing to tolerate the earmarks that are in the bill to get something that is good for us at home.

I believe we are at the ultimate tipping point in this country. I believe if we don't make drastic changes over the next year and a half, that 2012 will see the default of the U.S. Government on its bills. I honestly believe that. There are a lot of economists who agree with me on that point.

How do we then, if, in fact, any aspect of that is true, begin to start changing our direction where we start working on the issues that are a priority for America?

I have no doubt that there are key, significant things that need to get done that are in this bill, and a lot of them I am not opposed to. But I will tell you, I am always going to be opposed to wasting money. Another man's waste is somebody else's gold. But you cannot defend the directed earmarks in this bill in any way, shape, or form when we are doing such things that are so foolish, and the American people laugh at us and say: Why would you spend $3.5 million for a birthday party 6 years from now or why would you

even authorize it in a time when nobody will disagree we are going to be close to a $1.8 trillion deficit when we finish up in September 2009. Nobody is going to disagree with that point. We know the structural deficit is $1.2 billion. We know we are going to spend $400 billion of stimulus. And we know we are going to steal $167 million from Social Security. Instead of us working on Social Security and trying to straighten it out, we are sitting here passing a parochial- based bill that in the long run for the country as a whole does not solve the major problems it faces. That is what it comes down to.

I know I won't come anywhere close to winning this vote, but every time in the future, as long as I am a Senator, we are going to take the time to debate. It is going to be painful, but we are going to debate it because the American people deserve to know what we are doing. And if it continues that the minority party in the greatest deliberative body in the world gets no amendments, then we are probably not going to do anything. There has been one amendment since July 16 in this body for a member of the minority that represents over half of the population in this country. This is not the greatest deliberative body in the world. This is the greatest chokehold body in the world.

We ought to have the right to offer amendments. If they are defeated, fine. What are we afraid of? We could have had the amendments done. We could have voted this bill on Friday. We could have had a time agreement and we wouldn't be here today or we could have been here actually doing something that is of massive importance to our long-term future. But we chose the politically expedient route, the politically expedient direction to the detriment of the future of this country.

There is a difference in thinking about the short term and the long term. We cannot ignore the short term, but it cannot be a priority anymore. It cannot be a priority. The long term has to be the priority. Our survival has to be the priority, not a political survival, not a parochial survival, but the very survival of this country.

So when we talk about what we are going to spend and how we are going to do it and we ignore the big issues that are in front of us because we are going to spend the time on the small issues, the country is getting the Senate it deserves.

It is time for us to refocus on the important issues in this country, and that is not our next election.

I yield back my time.

Cloture Motion

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business, the time I might consume not to exceed 1 hour.

Mr. President, let me give some praise to my chairman of one of my committees. He hit right on the nose. Confidence is what the American people need to see. We have great resources in this country, and I am not talking materially. The resource we have that is the most bountiful and most productive and strongest and made of steel is the American people. When we get together, united as a nation, there is not anything we cannot accomplish.

I appreciate his words very much. I also appreciate some of his wisdom and foresight we heard today. I am hopeful that in the months and years to come, we can continue to work and we can draw on that American spirit which he so directly outlined, which is what makes us unique and allows us to come from behind and accomplish the things in front of us. I thank him for his words.

I wish to spend a few minutes--we are going to have several votes between now and next week over the Bingaman lands bill. I thought we ought to spend some time today to do that since I know we won't want to come in early on Sunday. I wish to talk about procedure for a moment so we can understand.

We are going to be here on Sunday not because we have to but because the majority leader has decided that we will. There are other things we can be accomplishing. And goodness knows, the problems in front of this country require extra effort on our part. We are going to have a $10 billion to $12 billion bill in front of us again that will have no amendments available to it and very limited discussion. As a matter of fact, I think I am the only one who has discussed anything on this bill thus far, and we probably will not see a lot of discussion.

There are a lot of issues we need to address, and my colleague, Senator Dorgan, just outlined the most important of them; that is, confidence, how do we reestablish confidence in this country. It is my position that we are not going to reestablish confidence in the country until we reestablish confidence in this institution.

Since July 16, the Republicans have had one amendment allowed on the floor of the Senate. In the last 6 months, one amendment--that was September 10. In 6 months of legislation, we have had one amendment allowed to the minority side to express the views for greater than 50 percent of the American people.

If the Senate is about anything, it is about the ability to debate and amend the interests of the American people. What we have seen over the past 6 months is that the rights of Americans have been taken away in terms of discussion, debate, and amendment of the very large issues that are in front of us.

My position on this bill--which the American people should know is a hodgepodge of a ton of bills; it is not just all lands bills--is about priority. It is about reestablishing confidence. It is about doing the most important things that are of the highest priority for our country and not doing the things that are of the lowest priority even though it may make us look extremely good back home.

Some will contend this is just an authorization bill, that it doesn't spend any money whatsoever, that it will have to be appropriated. I remind them there is mandatory spending in this bill, so there is actual spending involved.

Also--and I won't do this, but I am prepared to do so if I need to--I will

offer into the Record the press releases of everybody talking about all the money that is going to be spent because of this bill. You cannot be on the Senate floor saying this does not spend any money and at the same time send a press release out telling your constituency that you just passed a bill that will spend money that will do something because you are actually creating a false expectation if you don't expect to appropriate the money.

So let's be clear about why we cannot afford to pass this bill. It has to do with a whole lot of things. One is we cannot continue to operate the Senate where there are no amendments for the minority because what it does is it cuts off the voice of over half the American public, by populations that are represented by the minority. But there are other greater reasons.

We have a $10.6 trillion debt at this point. We are going to have a $1.8 trillion deficit next year. That is $1.2 trillion as a minimum estimate by CBO, which does not include the $160 billion we will steal from Social Security and will not include half of the money that is coming in a stimulus package. If you take 300 million Americans and divide them by $1.8 trillion, what you get is $6,000 per man, woman, and child that we are going to run in the red next year, real dollars, real loss in the future, and we are going to have to pay that back sometime. The people in this room, the Members of the Senate are not ever going to be attached the cost of the price to pay that back.

Last year, we paid $230 billion in interest alone. That is about $900 per man, woman, and child in this country--$860, actually--that we are paying in interest, which is going to double over the next 4 years. So not only are we going to run a $6,000 deficit, we are going to run another $800 in interest costs that are going to take away the potential of families across this country who are struggling, and that is what we are going to put into their future.

So when my colleague talks about confidence, what I want the American people to see is us working on the real problems that are at hand, not problems that are not real or are not a priority.

We offered several amendments. We were told we were getting no amendments to this bill. I am going to spend some time going through those amendments because I think a lot of them make sense. I am also going to spend the majority of my time talking about the main reason I oppose this bill.

If you will recall, back in the summer we were paying $4 for gasoline. We saw oil at $146 a barrel, which is now around $40. And the assumption of this bill is we will never see high oil and gas prices again. The very time to be fixing our future energy needs is now, not when there is a crisis again.

What this bill does is essentially take 1.3 trillion barrels of oil in this country and say: You can never touch it. That is 1.3 trillion barrels that we will never, ever--regardless of our technology, regardless of whether we can do it totally without any impact whatsoever on the environment, we will never be able to touch it under the auspices of this bill. It takes 9.3 trillion cubic feet of known natural gas that is in proven reserves right now, enough to fuel this country for 2\1/2\ years, and it says: You cannot touch that; you can never touch it. And then another couple hundred trillion cubic feet that are known to exist, with the technology that is here today.

Why would we do that? We just went through a big problem, and because we are in an economic cycle, we are seeing the only benefit of that is lower energy costs. Yet through this bill, we are going to tie the hands of our children for available energy.

This is not about whether you believe in global warming or CO2 as an anthropogenic gas because even if I agreed with that 100 percent, and everybody would agree with it, we are going to take 20 years to transition away from hydrocarbons. Every dollar we send out of this country for the purchase of energy is part of that $700 billion my colleague, Senator Dorgan, just noted as one of our big structural financial problems. So why would we pass a bill that is going to eliminate our ability to achieve some greater level of energy independence?

Another area of why I oppose this bill: property rights are--should be--pristine in this country, and this bill adds 15 new heritage areas, and the Federal Park Service will then fund those who are against the development of the land around it or in it, against the homeowners, the landowners who are actually part of it, through zoning. Even though several of the individual bills in this bill put a prohibition on eminent domain, the vast majority of the bill has no prohibition on eminent domain.

One of the rights fought for, one of the foundational principles of this country, is property, the right to have and hold property and be free, as long as you are not endangering somebody else with that property. Yet we are going to step all over that with this bill. Five separate property rights groups who recognize this is a protected guarantee under the Constitution have come out supporting the defeat of this bill because it tramples on property rights.

Finally, one of the reasons I am opposing the bill is the fiscal nature of what it does. It sets in motion $12 billion ad infinitum over the next 5 years--year by year by year by year--that we are going to spend, and it is going to go into the mix of priorities that are not a priority. Now, there are some things in this bill, I will admit, 20 or 30 items, that should go through here. But the vast majority of the bills in this mega bill are not a priority for this country. They are not a priority whatsoever right now considering the condition in which we find ourselves. So as we contemplate this bill, I believe it demonstrates that we are more interested in looking good at home than fixing the real problems that are facing the country.

So let me for a moment summarize the bill and highlight some of the things that are in it, and then ask the American people to answer this question: Should we add four new National Parks at a time when we have a $9 billion backlog in maintaining the parks we have today? We can't even take care of the parks we have today. We have 10 million gallons of raw sewage in Yellowstone, in the Grand Tetons, which seeped out because we didn't maintain the pipelines. We have a $700 million backlog on The National Mall; in Lake Mead, NV, a $258 million backlog.

We are not addressing any of the backlogs whatsoever. Yet we are creating greater responsibilities for the National Park Service and the resources they have today. In a declining discretionary budget, because of the fiscal nature in which we find ourselves, we are going to make worse and worse this situation. We are going to create 10 new heritage areas and study 15 others.

Now, remember what happens when we create a new heritage area. We create the inability to ever extract minerals, oil, gas, timber, and other resources. We are saying: Off limits and, by the way, if you like to enjoy the outdoors--maybe you want to go hunting or maybe you want to ride a three-wheeler or four-wheeler or a motorcycle--that may not be available to you. It may be limited.

There are 19 separate provisions in this bill that directly withdraw Federal land from mineral leases, such as oil and gas and geothermal. Nineteen specific. That doesn't have anything to do with the undergirding statutes in terms of the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and heritage areas that will eliminate the opportunity for exploration of energy and make us more energy independent.

There are 130-plus bills in this legislation, 1,300 pages, that was introduced two nights ago. I will tell you, other than my staff and probably the committee staff, nobody in this body has looked at it-- 1,300 pages. It is going to get passed out through the body next week, and the vast majority of the Senators and their staffs will have never taken a look at it, at a time when we should be about building confidence not undermining it.

We have 1.2 million acres in one small area of Wyoming that in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s contained the greatest and largest and most powerful pressurized source of natural gas the country had ever seen. As a matter of fact, we didn't have the technology to handle it, so we capped it. It eliminates any additional leasing. It sets it up so those people who have a lease will have a lawsuit filed against them. It will never be developed. It will never be developed because the cost of fighting the

lawsuits will be greater than the benefit of developing the natural gas. The companies that developed that came from Oklahoma. We now have the technology to handle that. It is a proven reserve.

We have 92 new scenic rivers in this bill. Now, I am all for scenic rivers, but we should understand the consequences of a scenic river designation. What does it mean? There will be no power lines across it, there will be no transmission lines, there will be no natural gas pipelines, water pipelines, or slurry lines that can cross a scenic river. What we know, with our desire to use alternative energy, especially in terms of the Southwest for solar and in my part of the country on up through the wind corridor, is that we are going to have to develop transmission lines, probably up to 40,000 miles of transmission lines, and we are going to double the cost of developing those lines because we would not be able to cross a scenic river. There is a prohibition in this bill.

We will eliminate the ability to take the natural gas that is available in abundance in Alaska today, in proven known quantities, and the pipeline that is scheduled to come down to the greater 48 will be tripped up by these designations. Again, another way to shoot ourselves in the foot when energy independence ought to be part of our goal.

The people who want to do the things in these bills are highly motivated for good reasons, but the judgment is suspect at the time in which we find ourselves. We find ourselves dependent on energy and in a financial mess. Yet we are going to make both of those problems worse with this bill.

Today, in this country, we have 108 million acres of developed land. Now, that is cities, that is manufacturing sites, that is towns, and that is highways. That is all of it. We have 109 million acres right now of wilderness designation already, which is twice what was ever thought about being accomplished when the wilderness designation was first started in the 1950s and early 1960s. Then the Government owns another 656 million acres of land. So we are not only robbing the future from our children because we have been fiscally irresponsible, we are robbing their future potential to make decisions about independence and freedom in the future because we are going to be totally indebted in the 20 years that we transition from a carbon-based economy to a noncarbon-based economy. We are going to make that extremely painful, much more difficult, and extremely more expensive.

Let me talk about why the National Park Service is overburdened for a minute and the things we ought to be doing. We have in Hawaii the USS Arizona Memorial. Now, 1,117 Americans died on that ship. The visitors' center--and if you have ever been there, you go out on a boat to the visitors' center--is sinking. The maintenance backlog is about $33 million. What are we going to do? What should we be doing? Creating these new ones or should we take care of the memorial for the USS Arizona? Which one is a priority? Should we maintain what we have or should we do something and say we did it through a press release, even though we are probably not going to have the money to do much of this, and create a false sense of expectation with the American people?

The Gettysburg National Battlefield has a $29 million backlog; the Statue of Liberty Park, a $197 million backlog right now. Remember when Lee Iacocca helped to raise funds for the Statue of Liberty in 1976, and we did all that. That is the last time we have done any regular maintenance. So we have let it fall down. We haven't been responsible. We haven't put the money there. As a matter of fact, today President- elect Obama, in a press conference, asked for ideas as to how to spend money that will actually create jobs and create an investment. Well, I can tell you how I would spend the money. Let's fix up our parks, let's fix up The Mall, let's take care of the $29 million backlog we have on some of the greatest treasures we have in this country before we add to the maintenance headaches of the National Park Service by creating new National Parks. That is a way we could actually create some jobs and invest our money; things we are going to have to invest in someday anyway.

The Grand Canyon National Park has a $299 million backlog. These aren't my numbers, these are National Park Service numbers. And there is the National Mall, as I talked about earlier.

What is in this bill that doesn't make sense just from a commonsense standpoint, maybe something we should do at the right time? How about spending $5 million to compensate ranchers for losses from gray wolves that we reintroduced into the wild? We put them back in there, and now we are going to pay ranchers for the cattle they lost to them. We repopulated a species that is now overgrowing its habitat and coming onto private lands, and our answer to that is, well, we will just pay the losses.

Do we have the money to waste $5 million paying for cattle losses from wild wolves? We might at some point in time. I hardly think we have the money to do that right now. The ranchers aren't going broke. There is no question it is an irritation and a cost to them, but I am not sure the Federal Government ought to be responsible for the cost.

What about the coyotes in Oklahoma that kill our sheep and our chickens? Should we compensate the chicken farmers and the sheep farmers for the coyotes that kill their livestock?

How about $1 billion and counting on the San Joaqin River project to make sure we restore 500 salmon? You heard me right--$1 billion is going to be spent over the next 10 years, and then money after that, to make sure we restore at least 500 salmon. How does that fit with our priorities? It may be something that we ultimately ought to do. How is it that we should do that now? Why should we even be thinking about doing that? How does that fit with any air of common sense?

How about building a road to 800 residents, after we provided a hovercraft to get there? One hundred environmental groups are against building this road through a very pristine area. We do have access another way. Yet we are going to do that, and we are going to spend $2 million per mile over 17 miles, building a one-lane road that many times is not going to be accessible in the winter, through some of the greatest pristine areas that we have. Therefore, 100 environmental groups are adamantly opposed to including this in this bill. You can understand why they think that might not make sense for protecting such pristine land.

This is my favorite: $3.5 million to the city of St. Augustine, FL, to plan--just to plan--for a birthday party 16 years from now for the 450th birthday of St. Augustine, FL. Does that restore confidence in the Senate, that we would say we are going to spend $3.5 million on a city that has been having a birthday party every year? Yet we are going to put another $3.5 million into the kitty to plan for a big one? There is no doubt we should recognize the historic significance of the longest lived settlement in this country at 450 years. But the question is, in today's economic climate, is that something we should be doing? Who out there without a job today would agree that we should do such a thing?

How about spending a quarter of a million dollars to go down to the Virgin Islands to study whether Alexander Hamilton's old home down there ought to be made into a park? Is that a priority now? What would a quarter of a million dollars do for somebody who is unemployed right now? How many mortgages would it get people out from behind who are in arrears? How many people would not default if we could leverage $250,000 to them? We have our priorities messed up.

The reason there is a lack of confidence in the Congress, with an approval rating of 9 percent, is because it is deserved.

There is also $12 million for us to build a new greenhouse for orchids for the Arboretum. We may need to do that. There is no question we should preserve the things that mark our heritage. But is now the time to build a new greenhouse in Maryland to grow orchids? Is it the time? What can we do with that $12 million? Who could we help with that $12 million? Could we use it in a better, more efficient way so that the American people would benefit? If we are going to spend $12 million, couldn't we spend it in a better way?

My State has Route 66 all through it. We have all these tourism things that are in this bill. Now is not the time for

us to be working with grants to promote Route 66 in Oklahoma. Now is the time to be putting that money to work on something that is going to create a job or save a foreclosure or absolutely make a difference in somebody's life, not an aesthetic benefit of the past. We need to start thinking about the benefits of the future.

I talked about the Wyoming range. It will be disputed by the Wyoming Senators, but the fact that the Bureau of Land Management used the latest geologic data and their study uses one that is 2 years old and makes the assumption that all land in Wyoming is the same would refute some of my statistics. But all of the geological engineers in this country and all the oil and gas exploration would remind us of the tremendous loss we are going to achieve by cordoning all that off and not making it available.

I talked about the wilderness designations. I am not against, necessarily, new wilderness designations as long as we limit their impact on property rights. But we do not. As a matter of fact, they directly impact property rights. They directly limit individual property rights. So as we add wilderness areas and zoning requirements within them, we take away the right of the landowner because we fund a specialized group through the National Park Service to change the property rights to the disadvantage of the property owner. People who have no ownership in it will decide what the property's zoning rules will be because they will be funded by the Federal Government. If you are opposed to that, you are disadvantaged because the Government is going to send dollars to your opponent, so we attack property rights at the very basic level. Not only do we challenge them, we take your own money and support your opponent on what you can and cannot do with your own property.

I love scenic rivers. We have the Illinois River in Oklahoma. It is a beautiful, pristine river. It has had some tributary problems, but we actively worked and cleaned it up and it is markedly improving every day. It is a real pleasure.

Should every river in America be a scenic river? And, if it is, how are we going to cross them with utility lines, power transmission lines, natural gas lines, coal slurry lines, bridges, roads? How are we going to do that? We can't. Yet the goal of some is to make everything, every river, a scenic river. Now is not the time for us to do that because it will limit our ability to achieve greater energy independence.

Those are not just threats. A 2001 lawsuit was filed against the U.S. Forest Service for failure to protect wild and scenic rivers in Arizona because a transmission line was coming across a 30-yard segment of it. Guess what happened. We didn't build the transmission line, so power was not made available.

As we think about wind energy and solar energy, especially in the Southwest in the wind corridor, it will do us no good to put windmills out there if we do not have a way to send that energy somewhere else. Yet with this bill there are multiple instances, over 50 instances, where we are going to block our ability to send transmitted power to other areas of the country.

In 2002, on scenic rivers, the lawsuit was won that said within the collection territory of the Los Padres National Forest in California we will not ever permit oil, gas, or mineral development within the river corridor. What happens if we can drill from outside? What if we can send a line 20 miles from the outside? What we are doing is we are saying no matter what the technology you ever develop, no matter how you ever attempt to make us energy independent, it is never going to be OK; we are never going to allow it.

If you look at what this bill does in terms of geothermal--this is the potential geothermal source of energy. It is clean, renewable in this country. We markedly go after some of the most potent areas of geothermal availability in this bill. We say you can't use them. We can use geothermal--clean, alternative energy. But because we want to look good, because we want to say we did something, we changed that.

Just so we might all be informed about how much land the Government actually owns, as you can see in the Western States, in Alaska, the vast majority of the land is owned by the Government. But that is not nearly as significant as what is happening with this bill because large portions of what is not owned by the Government now is very difficult to develop because when we try to get a permit for extraction of minerals, geothermal, gas, coal, or oil, it is hit with lawsuit after lawsuit.

Now, in addition to these high percentages, nearly 50 percent, we are adding all these other things on top of it, the vast majority of which are moving to the west. It makes no common sense, no matter whether you are an avid global warming enthusiast or you are an energy explorer, if we want to stay warm in the winter, it doesn't make sense to anybody.

Mr. President, 29 percent of all the land in this country is owned by the Federal Government. We are markedly increasing that by 2.2 million acres in this bill. We are going to threaten property rights. We are going to use eminent domain. We are going to use very sophisticated and poised sleight-of-hand zoning requirements to change land that is not owned by the Federal Government--to change the ability of the owner of that land to use that land if we pass this bill.

There are about 40 of the bills in this bill that we don't have any problem with. They make sense; they don't cost a lot of money; they accomplish some of the things that are a priority. Let me spend a minute, if I might, just talking about the amendments we were going to offer had we had the ability to offer them. I note again, since July 16 the minority has had the opportunity to offer one amendment in this body, one amendment. In the greatest deliberative body in the world, the minority has had the opportunity to offer one amendment.

One amendment we wanted to offer that I thought made sense: ``No funds can be made available . . . to establish a new unit of the National Park System or National Wilderness Preservation System, a new National Heritage Area . . . new Wild and Scenic Rivers, new wilderness areas . . . until the Secretary of the Interior certifies that the maintenance backlog at the Statue of Liberty National Monument, Grand Canyon National Park, Yellowstone National Park, Glacier National Park, Gettysburg National Park, Antietam National Battlefield, the National Mall'' in Washington, are up to date.

Why wouldn't we want to take care of what we have now before we add to it?

The Grand Canyon cannot even keep its trails open right now, or employees, due to lack of funding. There are 10 million gallons of raw sewage in Yellowstone. The Pearl Harbor USS Arizona Memorial is sinking. The manager of the Glacier National Park declared his park bankrupt--the manager. His words: ``We are bankrupt.''

At Gettysburg the number of employees has gone down. Their ability to maintain that significant monument to the history of us coming back together through war, through the results of ending that war and the tremendous number of lives that were lost on that day, General Pickett's charge--the fact is, we are ignoring them. According to some, the National Mall has now become a national disgrace because it is not maintained. We are going to see some of the great difficulties with that when we swear in our next President, with the tremendous burden being placed on it.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, the delegate from DC, said we should be ashamed of what the average Mall visitor sees. It is not a priority. We made it politically expedient. We made looking good at home a priority. We have not taken care of our national treasures.

The second amendment we offered, having been through this crush of energy price escalation, what we did was to prohibit new restrictions on American exploration and production--new restrictions; have not changed any of the old ones; we just said: Let's not put any more roadblocks in the way right now until we have a cogent energy policy that does not put us at the mercy of the nations that would like to see us destroyed. That is all we said: Let's not hurt ourselves any worse.

But let me show you what occurs in this bill 19 times. Here is what it says:

Subject to valid existing rights, all Federal land within

this proposed area is withdrawn from all forms of entry,

appropriation or disposal under the public land laws (in

other words, we can never sell it) location, entry

and patent under the mining laws, or disposition under all

laws relating to mineral or geothermal leasing.

It says that 19 times. What we have done is we have completely excluded any ability to get any energy. The ability for us to solve our energy problems over the next 20 years is being tremendously hampered by this bill. That does not include the 2.2 million acres that are added to the wilderness area.

Amendment 3 to strike the Wyoming Range leasing withdrawal provision--if we can extract natural gas and oil and do it in a totally clean, environmentally friendly way and we know we have 300 million barrels of oil and 8.8 trillion cubic feet, probably closer to 15 trillion cubic feet of proven reserves now, why would we take that away? Why would we do that? Tell me how it makes sense to tell OPEC: Keep doing what you have been doing through the years because we know we have some oil, but we are never going to touch it. In the fields around this Wyoming Range, we know there are another 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Locking the resources away is not a partisan issue. My colleague from Louisiana, Senator Landrieu, claims this bill is moving us backward, not forward.

Amendment 4 was to strike the $1 billion and counting for 500 salmon.

Amendment 5 was to not spend $3.5 million on a birthday party for St. Augustine, FL, even though it is not directed at--Florida beat Oklahoma last night. It is kind of hard for me to offer that today thinking that is just revenge, but I wrote this long before we lost that game.

Cut the $200,000 for a tropical botanical garden in Hawaii. Should we be spending $200,000 on a tropical botanical garden right now? I mean, does it make sense to anybody in America, when we are going to have a $1.8 trillion deficit, that we just throw $200,000 out there for a botanical garden? Is that a priority? I am not suggesting that we abandon everything, but what I am suggesting is that we ought to be about priorities, and I cannot see that as a priority at this time.

How about a cave institute in New Mexico to receive unlimited Federal funding, an authorization that puts no limits on this funding. What happened is this used to be a Federal program, but it could not take private money. So they took it and made it to where it was a private program, hoping to get matching money from Federal grants. Well, they were not successful in getting matching money for Federal grants, so now we are going back and saying it is going to be a Federal program and it gets all the Federal money it wants. Is it a priority for us to have a cave institute right now? I do not think it is a priority.

An amendment to limit Federal employees from using eminent domain to take away the private property rights of American citizens. We either have a right or we do not. But the more we take away property rights, it is not going to be long before we lose other rights. Simple, straightforward amendment, vote it up or down, but at least let the American people see where you stand on property rights for them.

How about an amendment, very straightforward--the Federal Government does not know what it has and what it does not have. How about an annual report detailing the amount of Federal property the Federal Government owns and the cost of Government land ownership to taxpayers. As an aside, we do know the Federal Government is currently holding about $20 billion worth of property that is costing them about $4 billion a year to maintain that they do not want but we can't sell. And last year, property disposal legislation failed to go through this body, even though it costs us $4 billion a year. Common sense.

How about to make sure we can always have a hunting preserve in this country, to limit the restriction on hunting activities as far as the land use on Federal lands with reason, control. We have lots of Federal lands that are overpopulated with species that need to be thinned. Yet we limit the ability of sportsmen to address that.

There were several others. We do not expect to get all of those amendments or the rights for those. As a matter of fact, if the record is right, if you look at what the last 6 months have been, the minority will get one amendment over the next 6 months. We represent over half the population of this country in the greatest deliberative body in the world.

So how are we to rebuild confidence in this country? Is it by packaging 134 bills together and ramming them through because everybody has something in it? Even though some of them may be very much a priority, the rest of them do not have and do not pass the priority test. Is that what we are about? Is that going to build confidence in this country? Is that going to restore the American people's confidence that we are up to the task of attending to the very real and practical, severe needs of this country at this time? Is this something President- elect Obama would say: This is the first thing I want you to pass out of the Senate in terms of a priority. It would not even pass his smell test.

My hope is that we go forward, but that as we go forward, we do it in a way that the American people would like to see us do. The goal is not to delay, the goal is to make the point that we ought to have an option to amend and debate bills. These bills got here because they were trying to be passed without any debate, with no amendment, passed by a procedure called unanimous consent.

It is important that the American people know what that is. Unanimous consent is where a bill comes to both cloakrooms, whether it has gone through committee or not, and it is said, can we pass this bill? Well, the problem is, I read the bills and I put a test on them: Are they a priority? Are they a necessity? Are they something that lessens our debt? Are they within the role that has been granted to us under the enumerated powers of the Constitution as something we ought to be doing? If they are not, I am not trying to stop the bill; all I am saying is, bring it to the floor and let's have some debate and amendments on it. And what we have seen is that there is something wrong if you won't, in the dark of night, let bills go through that the American people never hear anything about. Well, the American people need to hear about it all. This stuff all needs to be online.

There needs to be 30 Senators here today debating this. Instead, we are not. And we are going to let status quo, poor priority, lead us down the path to where we do not have the courage to do what is necessary to fix what is wrong in our country. And this is symbolic of what is wrong, is that we do what is politically expedient rather than what is in the best long-term interests of our country.

I have already readily admitted there are several, maybe 60 bills I have no problem with; I think they are a priority. But when they are packaged together, that takes away property rights, that eliminates our ability to be independent in terms of energy in the future, and that blocks the ability to take alternative forms of energy and create transmission lines so that we can use it somewhere after we produce it. I am going to stand up every time--every time. As a Senator representing 3.8 million people from Oklahoma, that voice is going to be heard; it is not going to be stifled. It may not have an amendment, but it is going to be heard. This country is worth us fighting for. And this is not worth our priority at this time. At the dilatory state we find ourselves in, we ought to be about bigger and better things that really impact people both in the long run and short run and get us out of the problems we are in.

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

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

Mr. President, I would like to be recognized for a period of time. The majority leader has been very gracious to offer me an opportunity to have some discussions about some amendments that he is going to possibly allow on a bill that he is going to introduce this evening.

I wanted to take some time now rather than later so that we would not keep staff here, and that way we could be efficient with our time. I want to talk about several things. I want to preface it with a statement, that I have been very pleased to see a man I respect a great deal, even though not in office as of yet, but the President-elect, be very firm in the principles he outlined as he ran for President and now is about to be sworn into that office.

One of the themes that has characterized his campaign and has characterized him ever since I have known him has been the idea of hope and change. So I, like many other Americans, look forward in great anticipation to the leadership that will be brought forth in the next few weeks and what that means to the millions of Americans who are going to look to Washington this month with a level of hope and excitement that we have not seen in this country in decades.

While most of the attention is going to be focused on the White House, the institution at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, this Congress, will arguable have a greater role in determining whether President-elect Obama's invocation of change is remembered as an election slogan or a true new era in American politics. My hope and prayer is it is a new era.

While many commentators have noted, with some justification, the concepts such as hope and change were never defined much and were not given a specificity during the campaign, I believe the American people have already defined those concepts very clearly in their hearts and minds.

I believe what hope, change, and optimism represent to the average voter is very simple: It is a real expectation that Washington will be different. Voters have not undergone an ideological

shift nearly so much as they are demanding that Government be more competent, that we be more mature, that we be less corrupt, and that we be less selfish. That last part is one of the things that has driven us to do things that are not very good. The concept of self-promotion, the concept of promoting one's career at the expense of our country.

I believe what both parties in Congress must do, and do very quickly, is ask themselves the hard question of why Congress has a historic low approval rating of 9 percent. Why do we have an approval rating of 9 percent? That is according to a recent Rasmussen Poll.

Both parties are accustomed to analyzing what they and the other party did right or wrong in recent election cycles, but yet neither party has come to terms with the fundamental public rejection of how Congress as an institution has governed and behaved in recent decades.

In many respects the American people understand us far better than we understand ourselves. While politicians tend to believe the public is put off by ideologic debate, what alienates voters is the truly debilitating division in Congress between statesmen and those who view reelection as the ultimate goal.

Careerism is not driven by any set of ideas but by pure parochialism and the short-term pursuit of power for power's sake. The real division, then, that blocks progress and commonsense solutions is not between ideas or parties but between every Member's self-promoted interests.

The American people understand this intuitively, which is why Congress has had historic low approval ratings long before we entered this recession. What the public knows is that a Congress that debates ideas tends to develop the best solutions, while a Congress that is driven by careerism and parochialism builds bridges to nowhere and fails to conduct oversight over entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

In short, the American people can handle serious debate, but they cannot handle incompetence, corruption, stupidity, and self-interest put above that of the Nation. Congress's handling of an economic stimulus bill will no doubt be an early test. Although the policy may be suspect, Congress seems willing to try to avoid embarrassing the new President by turning the package into an orgy of parochial porkbarrel spending. He said today there will be no earmarks in the stimulus package.

Congress's real test, though, will come next and will be repeated hundreds of times over the next 4 years with each piece of legislation. So far Congress has signaled little desire for a long-term commitment to change. Some would ask why would I say that? I would say that because here in a little while this evening we are going to reintroduce a bill that nobody knows right now how many other bills it has in it-- that is going to be the first order of business of this Congress--that allocates $10 billion, some to some very worthy projects but tons of that money to projects that do not have a priority anywhere close to what we ought to be doing.

This is an omnibus lands bill that indulges the worst habits of a parochial Congress. The bill, which is a holdover from the last Congress, includes such things as a $3 million road to nowhere through a wildlife refuge, a $1 billion water project--$1 billion--designed to assure that 500 salmon will be repopulated. It does not take long to divide 500 salmon into $1 billion to see that what we have is $2 million a salmon. They are worth more than gold. There is $3.5 million to give to the City of St. Augustine, FL, so they can prepare a celebration 6 years from now to recognize their 450th birthday. I hardly see, in the midst of the economic times we face, how that can be a priority for the Nation as a whole. I know it is a priority from a parochial standpoint, but is it in the best interest of the Nation?

It has been claimed that this bill is noncontroversial, and it should pass essentially without amendment, without debate. However, it is to note that over 100 different organizations on both the left side of the political spectrum and the right side of the political spectrum are opposed to this bill because it is controversial, a point noted by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

The earmarks in this bill have angered many groups, as has the significant, anti-energy, more foreign dependence on oil programs that are in this bill. This bill contains a provision that will eliminate 8.8 trillion cubic feet of known natural gas reserves, proven reserves, today that we will not be able to take for our consumption. What that means is we are going to import 8.8 trillion feet of natural gas because we are going to say: You cannot have this.

It also contains 300 million barrels of proven oil that we are no longer going to take. We just went from $146 oil to $35 oil, $40 today. If we have learned anything, we ought to be about as much energy self- sufficiency as we can. The controversy over whether we get off fossil fuels is a debate for another time. But no one can deny the necessity of us discontinuing sending our fortunes to countries that are supplying us oil and are also ultimately our enemies.

The energy resources walled off by this bill will match the annual production levels of our two largest natural gas-producing States, Alaska and Texas. My worry about bringing this bill--and, again, I am thankful the majority leader has reached out that we might be able to offer amendments--is, what does this send as a signal to the American public? Here is what it sends. It says: There may be change in the White House, but there is absolutely no change in Congress. Why would we bring a bill that is going to spend $10 billion of our money--at least $9 billion of that is not a priority in terms of the priorities facing this Nation--why would we bring that to the floor as the first order of business of the 111th Congress? The only reason we could be bringing it to the floor is because it makes us look good at home with multiple parochial projects.

If our country has a failing that will cripple us forever, it is the fact that we have allowed parochialism, not the oath we saw all new Members and newly reelected Members take today, where we uphold the Constitution. What we do is, we uphold the future of our own political careers.

History is interesting. The 1994 Republican revolution unraveled not because they made a lot of big mistakes--some were made--but because Republicans made a ton of little mistakes they didn't realize they were making. The new and expanded majority will realize that with greater numbers comes a greater share of the responsibility and blame for whatever happens in this country. If we go back to that 9-percent approval rating, it has to do with this: Congress, we don't believe you are going to do at every turn, at every opportunity, what is in the best long-term interests for this Nation. And we are going to prove it. Because this bill ultimately will probably pass out of this Chamber and be passed, and we are going to spend, at a time when we are going to have a $1 trillion deficit this year, another $800 billion trying to stimulate the economy. We are going to say: Priority doesn't matter but parochialism does. Looking good at home matters more than the long-term interests of the country, matters more than the financial future of our grandchildren--my political career, my party, me, me, me.

The historical basis of our country is built on sacrifice. It is built on sacrifice by one generation for the generations that follow. Our political history used to be that as well. My worry, my concern is we can't live up to the hope and the change the President-elect has set before us. By bringing this bill to the floor as the first order of business in the 111th Congress, we have confirmed to the American public that business as usual is business as usual, that we don't recognize the severity of the situation we find ourselves in, that we are not going to change our habits, that we will continue to promote those things that promote us rather than promote the long-term good and benefit of the country. It is pure selfishness. It is saying what I want and what I need and my political future or my State has to come above the long-term interests and the best interests of this wonderful country.

The real challenge doesn't come from any of the parties. It comes from parochialism. The public has told Congress it is time to start acting in the best interest of the country rather than the best interest of our next election. The

sooner Congress realizes change requires a cultural shift in both parties, the sooner that change will come.

I would like to spend a moment outlining a few components of this bill. We have not actually gotten to see the bill, but I have been told by the majority leader that we have added, I think, 12 or 13 other bills to it. But from what we have known in the past, let me go through and explain to the American public what is in this bill.

The national parks today face a severe shortage of money to maintain them at their current level. It is about $9.8 billion. In this bill we add four new national parks. The U.S. Arizona Memorial in Hawaii is sinking. The visitors center is sinking. We haven't put the money in to repair it, but yet we are going to create more national parks that will further dilute the maintenance budget of the National Park Service so we can't even maintain what we have. We have a $700 million backlog just on The National Mall in Washington. We didn't address any of that in terms of the priority of fixing that. Yet we are going to add four new national parks.

We are going to add 10 new heritage areas. It is great for us to protect and think about the environment. But we never talk about how that impacts property rights, one of the rights given to us as our Nation was created. We are going to threaten that area. We are going to threaten through eminent domain. We are going to threaten through councils that will impact individual ownership of what you can do with your own property because you might be in proximity to a heritage area. We have 14 studies that would create or expand future national parks; in other words, 14 more. That is what we are funding in this bill. We don't have the money to take care of the parks we have today, but yet we are going to put into this and spend money to potentially create 14 more.

There are 17 provisions in this bill that will totally prohibit any exploration, oil extraction, coal extraction, natural gas extraction from 2.98 million acres in this country, many of which have proven reserves underlying. There are 53 rivers that are designated or portions of which are designated as scenic rivers. We have a great scenic river in Oklahoma called the Illinois. I am glad it is a scenic river. But with scenic river designation comes a trampling on the rights of people who are far away from it. We didn't change scenic rivers designation in light of our energy needs. Once a river is designated a scenic river and we need to move natural gas or a coal slurry or oil from point A to point B, we are totally prohibited from ever doing that on a scenic river. So it is another strike at any sort of increasing in our independence on energy because we are going to designate scenic rivers. Why not designate scenic rivers with an option to make sure we don't handcuff ourselves when it comes to energy?

There are 65 new Federal wilderness areas. Here is an important matter we came across as we studied this bill. In the United States today, right now, before this bill, there are 107 million acres of wilderness. All the developed land--cities, suburbs, towns--across the whole rest of the country is only 106 million acres. We are going to be adding to that and limiting our opportunity to the resources we have.

There are 1,082 pages in the bill. I understand it is now 1,200 pages. There are 1.2 million acres in Wyoming that are withdrawn from mineral leasing and exploration. There are 1.93 million acres of Federal wilderness land. There are 3 million additional acres withdrawn from leasing and energy exploration. There are 331 million barrels of oil that we know are there and we are never going to take. We are just going to help those who drive up our energy costs because we are going to know it is there but we can't touch it because we are going to make it off-limits. There are 592 spending and 15 new State and local water projects. There is nothing wrong with State and local water projects, as long as they are a priority, but these are earmarked, specific projects for specific Members. There is $10 billion of total spending money we don't have. We are going to borrow it.

There are 8.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that we know is there that we will never touch. What the Department of Interior tells us is there is much more there, but these are the proven reserves.

I will end my conversation, only to be continued in a more thorough manner as the bill actually comes to the floor by asking the American public: What would they hope we would do in terms of trying to change, trying to meet what they see as the problems in front of us? Would it be that we would be about passing things that are small but make us look good that we can't pay for or would it be that we should attend and address the pressing and also long-term needs of the country?

It is about trust. The reason we have a 9-percent approval rating is because we are not trusted. We are addicts. We are self-indulgent addicts over our power.

My query to the body and to the American people is, will you hold us accountable? You have to do an intervention with us, each one of us, every time we are home: Are you being a good steward with the limited dollars we have? Are you making choices that may not look good for you as a politician but are truly the best choice for the country? Are you putting yourself second and our country first? Are you acting as a statesman or are you acting as somebody who wants to get reelected?

The real paradox is, with trust comes confidence. With that confidence comes the involvement and support of the very people we actually do represent.

We have a choice. I hope the introduction of this bill does not portend that we will not take President-elect Obama's lead and offer the American people real hope, real change, that we will get away from our addicted self-indulgence to look good at home and start making the hard, tough decisions that will right our ship and put our country first. Anything less than that says the people who took their oath today and those of us who have taken it before, we violate it. We raise our hand and put one on the Bible and say we will uphold it, but then when it comes to the first tough choice, look good at home or do what is in the long-term best interests of the country, we swivel, we back down, and we opt for the short term, the self-aggrandizement, and the stroke on our own back. We are better than that. The people in this body are better than that.

My hope is we can prove to the American people over the next 6 to 9 months that we got the message, that it is about making the tough choices. It is about doing what is right in the long term. It is not about what makes us or our party look good; it is about what is best for the country as a whole.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I would raise objection to the filing of the bill at the desk, the Bingaman land package.

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