Floor Statements

I ask to speak in morning business.

Mr. President, I appreciate my colleague and his informed words. Much of what he has stated I agree with, but there is a significant difference. No. 1 is I was not in the Senate when Mr. Holder was confirmed. Given the facts that played out associated with pardons that President Clinton had, the look needs to be refreshed without any question because there is no question that Mr. Holder erred in his judgment and has essentially said so, in association with one Mr. Marc Rich, a fugitive.

I do not doubt Mr. Holder has a distinguished record. He is well qualified for lots of areas. I do not think it ought to be on the floor that we debate whether we have a hearing. But I can tell you that the information we have requested, both from the Clinton libraries and others, will not be available to us to peruse and to study. I may in fact in the long term end up voting for Mr. Holder, but I am not about to do anything less than a very thorough job.

I also remind my colleagues I was the first Republican Senator in the midst of the committee to call for the resignation of Attorney General Gonzales--rightly so. The position of Attorney General, although it is appointed by the President, is very different than all the rest of the appointments because he is for all of us, every citizen in this country, the chief law enforcement officer of this land. His loyalty is not to the President. His loyalty has to be to the Constitution. It has to be to the responsible bodies that guide this country, although if we in fact have hearings early, we will have to have additional hearings. We will not allow a vote to occur until we have thoroughly, to each member of the Judiciary Committee's satisfaction, had the record examined and had the questions answered that are going to need to be answered with regard to some of the events that have taken place late in the Clinton administration.

That is not to cast any aspersions on Mr. Holder. I think he is a fine man. But judgment is the key thing that is most important and there is a red flag. So if it is insisted that we go early, earlier than we are prepared so we can truly ask the questions we think the country would need us to ask, then I think we will have a difficult time ever moving that nomination.

That should not be the case. The fact is this gentleman deserves the best, the most thorough opportunity to explain himself in a way where people are asking proper questions, not improper questions. More important, the American people deserve for us to do our job. That means we have to be very well briefed, very well studied on the questions and circumstances about which we will apply them.

I will be happy to in a moment.

I have given positive comments to the press on Mr. Holder, so I am not necessarily someone in opposition. But I can tell you I am in opposition to not being in a position to do my job. It is going to be impossible, and I will tell my colleague that, with the schedule that has been set forth. I will not be able to be prepared at the time. I have one staff lawyer. For us to go through everything to my satisfaction, for me to fulfill my oath, that is not a possibility between now and January 9.

The other thing I would say is much of the information we have requested is not even going to be available to us until January 6. So it would be terrible to start the next Congress off having a fight about a fight. My hope is we can come to a compromise so we all feel very well prepared.

There is no intent to delay Mr. Holder's nomination. There is every intent to make sure we are prepared to thoroughly vet his qualifications of independence and judgment. It is not his qualifications as to whether he has the capability to fulfill the role. It is whether he will demonstrate the independence and the judgment with which to fulfill it.

As my colleague knows--he was at the hearing when I asked the Attorney General to resign--I am not a partisan. The President-elect who nominated this man I have a great deal of respect for. But I am going to do my job. If it means holding up a nomination until I get all the answers, then that is what I

will do. So there is no reason for us to do that by not accommodating the ranking member on this committee and setting the schedule with which the minority on that committee are not prepared to be prepared to answer that.

With that, I am happy to yield to my colleague.

Reclaiming my time----

I suggest we did a poor job with Attorney General Gonzales, that is No. 1. No. 2, I was not here then so I don't know whether we did or did not. Mukasey--the difference that would lie is there is a large red flag on one or two specific actions of this gentleman as he acted as assistant Attorney General. That requires good scrutiny.

I assure my colleague that does not mean, and I think he knows this-- I have not made a decision on this gentleman and I will not until we have gone through the hearing process. As I have said to the press, I am generally inclined to think he is very well qualified for this. But the question of judgment will require a lot of research on associated issues that have been outlined here.

So, to me, it is not a game I am playing. I think my colleagues in the Senate know I work very hard to stay informed and up to detail on every issue that is before us. I would say to my colleague, to me, I don't care what the time was ever. What I care about is do we do it right so we do not have a repeat.

I am sure my colleague knows he doesn't want us to have a repeat of making a mistake and not thoroughly vetting someone to the degree we should.

My hope is the Judiciary Committee in the next Congress operates very smoothly, that we stand on the principles that we spoke about as we went through this last year, and that we do not see the process of trying to slow down judicial appointments because it is a partisan issue.

He has my pledge that will never be anything I will pertain to or participate in. If somebody is qualified and they are this President's nominee and they are qualified after going through the Judiciary Committee and I believe they should be voted on, I intend to vote for them and not hold them up. But I think this is a very different instance. There are two specific problems that have to be very well vetted.

From what we have seen so far, the vast majority and minority have not met Mr. Holder. We are going to be asked to meet with him on the day before the committee hearing so we will not have had the time even after we meet with him to be able to cross-check what we have asked him against what facts we know because we will not have all the facts in, because we will not even have all the records from the Clinton library at that time.

I suggest we ought to start it off in more of a spirit of cooperation. My ranking member is of the learned opinion for the years that he has been here, and he is a proven expert in the law, that we need more time. We hope that request would be honored.

With that, I yield the floor.

Madam President, it is tremendously ironic that we are here today. It is ironic in the sense that as we ignore what the Constitution tells us, we embrace defeat, difficulty, and peril.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the full text of article I, section 8 of the Constitution be printed in the Record.

I also ask unanimous consent that the 10th amendment to the Constitution be printed in the Record at this time.

For those of you who are not familiar with those two portions of our Constitution, they are very clear. Article I, section 8 is the enumerated powers that are given to Congress. They are very specific. They are very direct. It tells us what we are to be dealing with and what we are not to be dealing with. It tells us the extent to which the Federal Government is to intervene in the lives of Americans.

The 10th amendment, on the other hand, says that whatever is not included, specifically listed right here in the enumerated powers, is totally and absolutely reserved for the rights of the States.

As a practicing physician, I compare where we are today to a physician who commits malpractice. We have a patient with cancer. They have a secondary pneumonia because of the cancer. We are going to treat the pneumonia. We are going to give the antibiotics, we are going to give something to lower the temperature, we are going to give something to suppress the cough, we are going to give something to thin the mucous, but we are not going to fix the cancer. We are going to ignore the cancer.

Let me tell you what the cancer is. The cancer is Congresses that, for years upon years, have totally ignored the Constitution of the United States and taken us to areas where we have no business being. There is no way you can justify, in the U.S. Constitution, that the country ought to be the source of mortgages for homeowners in this country. Yet Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac control 70 percent of the mortgages in this country.

I plan on voting for this bill. I support that we have to do something now. But how we got here is very important if we are going to fix things in the future. The fact is that, at the same time we are debating this very important issue, we have on the floor another violation of the enumerated powers, which is the Amtrak and Metro earmark fiasco. It is going to be very interesting to see the Members of this body as they vote to bail out the financial institutions in this country while at the same time they continue to commit the same error that got us there in the first place. There is no question Amtrak is going to get reauthorized. The American people are going to spend $2.3 billion subsidizing the riders on Amtrak in this country.

In 2006 we subsidized food on Amtrak to $100 billion--I think it is down to $70 million now--despite an explicit provision within the Amtrak bill that says they will never sell anything for less than its cost and they were to lose no money on food.

Where is the answer? The answer is there has been no oversight to make sure Amtrak doesn't lose money on food. We have ignored it. We have ignored the enumerated powers of the Constitution. We are now committing the same Federal error in a much smaller way on Amtrak as we did on housing. If anybody in America is mad about this situation, there is only one place they need to direct their anger and it is right in the Congress of the United States.

It is not specific Members, it is bad habits. We are not going to cut out the cancer. We are not going to give the radiation therapy. What we are going to do is we are going to continue to treat the symptoms rather than directly go after the cause that has created the greatest financial risk and peril this country has ever seen. We are not going after the cause.

The cause is get back within the bounds of the Constitution that very specifically says where we have business working and where we do not. Because we are out of those bounds, we have now put at risk every job in this country, the savings and retirement of people who worked for years, because we decided we would ignore the wisdom of our Founders and create systems that are outside the enumerated powers that were given to us because we know better.

We do not know better. It is obvious. There is no administration to blame. It is not the Clinton administration or the Bush administration's fault we are in this mess. Because if you say that, what you have to say is you did all the oversight, you had all the hearings, you knew what was going on and you didn't do anything about it. So either we didn't know or we did know and did nothing about it.

There is only one place to come to hold accountability and it is in this body. You are going to get to see tonight people continue to vote outside the bounds of the Constitution, as we reauthorize $2.3 billion of subsidies for Amtrak, and we do not hold Amtrak accountable. We are going to give $1.5 billion and the mother of all earmarks to Virginia and Maryland for a Metro system that the Federal employees use more than anybody, and we are subsidizing an additional $100 million through individual agencies to pay them to ride it. And we wonder why we have these problems.

It is very simple. We are committing malpractice. We are not living up to the oath we undertook when we became Members of this body. That oath says you will defend and uphold the Constitution. It doesn't say you will rewrite it because it pleases you politically. We are here today because of fatal errors on the part of Members of this body to do something that is totally outside the bounds of the wisdom and foresight our Founders gave us.

Those are tough words. But we are in tough times. If we do not get about withdrawing and getting back within the realms of the power granted to us, this is just the first in a very large roll of problems this country is going to face.

Madam President, how much time do I have?

Let me describe for a moment the problems that are coming if we get past this one. Here are the problems that are coming. We are on an unsustainable course. The unfunded liabilities for Medicare alone are $100 trillion. A child born today in this country faces $400,000 for taxes for things they will never get a benefit from--$400,000. Who in this country starting out even could absorb that debt, pay the interest on it, and ever hope to own a home or have a college education? Yet this body continues to spend more, authorize more, and create bigger and more intrusive Government, limiting the power of the great American experiment to, in fact, supply an increased standard of living.

We are in tough times, but they are going to get tougher until the American people hold this body accountable to live within the rules set out in a very wise, a very providential way that served this country well. We ignore this book, this Constitution, at our peril. We are reaping exactly what we have sown.

I yield the floor.

Reserving the right to object, first let me say to my colleague, I know he is dedicated to this cause. It is an important cause. I have four basic problems with what we are doing here.

We did negotiate this bill. I also expressed in public that I would not allow this bill to go unless we had a full debate on the Senate floor. That has never been in confusion.

I also stated if we were in fact to offset the authorizations in the bill with some of the wasteful spending that we have today--and I understand the contention by the Senator from Iowa, who is also an appropriator who does not believe this will lead to spending--if we do not believe it will lead to spending, why authorize it in the first place? It is a false hope.

The third point I would make is everything this bill wants to do can already be done, except name it after Christopher and Dana Reeve-- everything. So what I would like is a unanimous consent request, after rebuttal from the Senator from Iowa, that I be given 10 minutes to explain my objections to the bill in detail, and also to offer for the record a letter from Dr. Zerhouni, dated July 30 of this year, in which he adamantly opposes any disease-specific bills. He outlined specifically why they should not be there.

The final point I would make, we spend $5.9 billion on this right now. We should spend more, but we do not have the money to spend more because this Congress will not get rid of $300 billion worth of wasteful spending. We appropriate $300 billion that is pure waste every year. It is not that we do not have the money. It is not that this bill will spend the money. It is not that we cannot have this; it can happen right now under the leadership at NIH. It is the fact that the very problems we are faced with today in terms of the financial collapse of this country and the liquidity of this country is because we have gone down a road of fiscal irresponsibility.

On that basis, I will object and await Senator Harkin's rebuttal. I do congratulate him for his commitment and his dedication. I believe the people at NIH want to solve this as well as anybody else and they recognize that they already have the power to do this.

I will make one final comment. This bill could have come to the floor. We could have taken care of it in 2\1/2\ hours if we had debate and amendments. The majority leader refused to let this bill come to the floor.

It is important for the American people know what a hold is. A hold is saying: Let the bill come to the floor, but I don't want to pass it with my vote

unless I have an opportunity to debate it and amend it, and what has been done has precluded us on that.

We did a lot of negotiations on this. The one thing we couldn't get negotiated is offsetting the negotiating level. Everybody knows that is a nonstarter with me. That is the only way we establish fiscal discipline in this country.

Absolutely. In response to your question, the Emmett Till bill, we attempted to do that. It was passed in connection with other bills, and we believed, since we had assurances that the appropriators would in fact take care of that inside the Department of Justice, we did not have that in the bill but outside, the appropriators would take care of that and we wouldn't spend additional money.

No, I never had a hold on that.

Will the Senator yield for a moment?

What I can tell the Senator is I have held every bill that comes before this body that we have an objection to constitutionally, or from the Director of NIH, that does spend money that is already for them.

I will gladly deliver to the Senator a copy of his letter. You can read it. What he objects to is any disease-specific bill. The reason for that is very simple. There are over--let me give you the exact number. There are 12,161 subcategories of diseases. His principle is we ought to let the scientists decide the direction of the research, not Congress. Because if we decided on this and we set it up and a consortium will take it directly from the research--if we did that on everything, we would have the most misguided, misdirected, and wasteful expenditures on research you could imagine. He lists specifically the fact that we had 2,036 categories and over 12,000 subcategories, and philosophically he objects to all disease-specific bills.

It would be more than acceptable provided the bill comes to the floor and offsets the authorizations. The problem we have is that in the last year, in your subcommittee alone on appropriations, we had 398 million dollars' worth of earmarks outside of the authorization process. None of them were authorized.

Now you want to spend more money on programs that you want to authorize, but you will not take away the $398 million of earmarks that were never authorized. That is my whole point. Bring the bill to the floor, offset some spending somewhere else, and we will not even have to go to the floor. Just offset it; you can have the bill.

But the fact is, nobody wants to offset it. The intention is to spend this money. Even though we play the games, how did we get $9.6 trillion in debt? We got it playing this same game, saying: Here is $115 million; it does not cost anything. But that is really untrue because it does. If you authorize it, you are going to spend more money. We have grown 61 percent since 2001 in terms of discretionary spending in this country, and we are broke. And we have a financial crisis in front of us.

I am trying to stand and say, if you want to do something, get rid of some of the 300 billion dollars' worth of waste, which I consider 398 million dollars' worth of earmarks that were unauthorized waste. So it is easy to bring it up. Bring this bill without the authorizing money, put it in, you got it.

That is true.

We received assurances that it would be offset at the appropriations level.

In response to the Senator through the Chair, that is a rarity that occurs here. The fact is, the Federal Government is growing three times faster than the income of the people in this country. It is because we will not put our own financial house in order.

I want to do the best we can do for people with paralysis. I think we ought to get rid of some of the 380 billion dollars' worth of waste and double the money in NIH. That is what I think. But we will not, nobody can, including my colleague from Iowa. When I have offered amendments on the floor to get rid of wasteful spending, rarely, if ever, have you joined me to get rid of the wasteful spending. Instead, we have continued wasteful spending.

Just like we are going to talking about Amtrak. Amtrak has a $100 million subsidy. Nobody in this country,

other than us, would allow Amtrak to continue losing $100 million a year on food subsidies on the train. No airline does that. No bus company does that. But because we have a $2.6 billion subsidy, we think it is fine that we should subsidize people's food on the train.

I can give you a thousand examples of things that we should be doing that we are not. I am not opposed to the efforts that you want to try to accomplish. What I am saying is we need a discipline change in this Congress. The American people have had it with us. We are wasting money hand over foot. And it is not what you want to do is bad, I am for what you want to do, I am saying let's get some discipline and let's make some priority choices.

Every family out there has to choose among priorities. They have to make a hard choice on what is important and what is not.

This is important, yes. We have told your staff the moment this passed the committee that we were going to hold it on the Senate floor unless it was offset. That is not a new threat. That is not news to your staff. They have known that for a long time, and so does every Member of this body. In fact, you received a letter from me in January of 2007 that said very specifically: If you bring a bill to the floor that is not offset, that is going to spend new money, unless we are going to get it debated and offer amendments, we are going to object. So that is where we stand.

Well, we also stopped 10 billion dollars' worth of new authorizations this year. We also stopped $10 billion. There is no question the Emmett Till bill went through with the assurances. I am not 100 percent.

Absolutely not. I voted against it and proudly did so because we had $16.8 billion worth of earmarks in there that will be forced onto the American taxpayer that will never see the light of day. They were in the report language, and we put something in the bill that said you couldn't amend it. None of those are competitively bid; $16 billion worth of earmarks, none of them competitively bid. So what happens? Defense authorization, we got $16 billion that we probably could have bought for 10, but because we have a system that says we are not going to watch out for the taxpayer, we will not do it.

So what I would say to the Senator is, what you want to do is great. I am not against it. How you are doing it I am against. Unless we change how we do things here, until we start becoming responsible fiscally, there has to be somebody putting on the brakes. I don't want to be known as a Senator who blocks research, but in fact, as the doctor related, this can all be done, and they are probably doing it.

The Senator from Iowa voted for the reform of NIH. You proudly voted for the reform of NIH. Paralysis is a disease-specific category because it is based on a problem in terms of mobility. So it falls into a category.

I don't know whether he wants this specifically, but what I am saying to you is, if you will bring a bill with $115 million worth of offsets to the floor in terms of authorization, we will say yes tomorrow.

The point is, until we establish with the American people that we are going to be as wise with their money as they are with their money, then we have to do some changing.

I do not apologize at all for standing in the way of this bill on principle. Somebody has to say timeout in this country in terms of spending. A newborn child born this year faces $400,000 in unfunded liability. When you fund the $115 million and if you offset it with something else, something else will get offset. The average increase in this area has been about 7.5 percent per year. What is the name of all those children who aren't going to get to go to college, will not have a great opportunity economically for the future, because we won't live within our means?

The last time I knew, when the airlines made money, they paid taxes. So, in fact, they are contributing to all those things that were mentioned because they are taxed at one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. One of the reasons the airlines can't compete is because we have a tax rate that essentially is close to 50 percent by the time we add in State income taxes. So they participated in the development of all those programs. They are great advancements.

Let's finish this debate. Let's talk off the floor. I will gladly work with Senator Harkin to accomplish whatever he wants, but I will not break down on the letter I sent in January of 2007 that says I believe we have to change the way we operate. I know there is tremendous resistance to that in this body. I understand that. But the American people don't understand it. What they understand is they have to make hard choices. Either we mean to fund the $115 million or we are sending a charade to the people who want this bill passed. It is one or the other. The fact is, they have had a chance.

I will also put in the Record that in the last Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill, there was $105 million that Senator Harkin specifically put in for earmarks that he directed. That is real spending. That is enough to pay for the whole bill over 10 years.

The fact is, we have a major disagreement on specifics on how we control and how we change this country. I will fight for the taxpayer every time. I apologize to the Senator for some of my emotion. It is because I am thinking about the kids who are coming, not the political realm of today. I understand that we need to do more in NIH. I am on public record to take that to $60 billion. I will pay for it, easily pay for it. There is $80 billion worth of fraud in Medicare. What have we done about that? Nothing. We gutted the very program that cut spending for medical devices, durable medical equipment, the last bill through here. We had a way to save over $2 billion a year. We gutted it. The Senator voted for it. He voted to gut the $2 billion worth of savings.

So there are plenty of things we can do, but what we are not going to do anymore with my consent is to pass

bills that increase the liability for our children in the future, even when we do it for the sake of doing something good.

I yield the floor.

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

Madam President, I appreciate the unanimous consent request that allows me to spend a little bit of time on this bill. Before I get into the bill, I wish to answer the most senior Senator we have in terms of the President's request for flatlining a lot of DHS.

I happen to be on the Homeland Security Committee, and I can tell you, outside the Pentagon, there is no agency in the Government that has more waste, fraud, and abuse than the Department of Homeland Security. Any business manager or any family could quickly see that you could easily flatline it and make it much more efficient and do a good job for the taxpayers. So the motivation by flatlining is to try to generate some efficiency in the Department of Homeland Security.

I also wish to associate some of my words with the Senator from Mississippi on terms of process. We have a tremendous amount of money-- $643 billion--that this bill has. Here is the bill. It is another one of those thick bills we are going to send over. There are going to have to be technical corrections--we know that--in any big bill we do this way. But there is something fundamentally flawed, and it doesn't have anything to do with the bill; it has to do with the process.

We have an Appropriations Committee that does generally a very good job on most of these items, but what we have done is excluded the whole body from their input into making decisions about some $640 billion worth of spending. As far as the discretionary budget, it is about 65 percent of the total discretionary budget that we are going to pass, and it is not going to have any input except for 29 Members of this body--no input, no chance to change policy, no chance to put limitations, no chance to truly do what should be done. We have to ask the question: Why is that? Why is it that appropriations bills did not come through this body this year? I think the reason is, not because they didn't really want people to try to improve and perfect the legislation, it is that we didn't want any votes that might make some political party--one or the other, ours or the majority--to have a political advantage through a vote. That is a very terrible way for this body to descend into politics instead of policy. This bill contains tons of earmarks. Some are bright, some stink. Some, when the light of day is shone on them, the American people will actually gasp and say: Where was the common sense? How in the world are my children paying for us spending money like this?

I am concerned, not because of the present crisis we have in front of us. I think this body, by the time this weekend is completed, will have addressed that issue and started down the road. But what we are doing is treating a symptom of a disease Congress has, and that disease is lack of oversight to see how we are spending the money, lack of metrics to be able to measure the effectiveness of programs. We are highly resistant to holding administrative agencies accountable, and we are restricting the ability of individual Senators to offer positions for the body to consider. Not that they may be won, but that the whole country loses when we don't have the debate.

There are many egregious earmarks that are in this bill, and I will tell you I think our appropriations process this year is broken, that it doesn't serve the country well. There is no question we need to fund the agencies, but what we are doing is we are taking three agencies and we are funding them--we will not allow amendments or allow the body to work--but the rest of the agencies will run in a status quo until March 6. Now, let me give you an example of why that is bad.

I had the good pleasure of meeting with a couple of Oklahomans who happened to be traveling back here last Monday. They happen to work for the weather service. They are both acquisition officers for the weather service, and here is what happened to them last year--and it is going to happen again this year. They are going to get their final numbers sometime in late March. We will pass the information on for them as to what they are allowed to spend. They will have less than 3 months to contract and acquire everything for 12 months. They are telling me it is impossible for them to do a

good job; that there is no way they can be frugal, efficient, and get great value for the American public the way we are running the appropriations process.

Now, that has nothing to do with my colleague from Mississippi. His desire would have been to bring these bills to the floor, have them amended, have them voted on, and send them to the House. But a leadership decision was made that we could not do that.

Now, I want you to multiply these two gentlemen who were acquisition specialists in the weather service, multiply that across the whole Government, and what we have done is we have squeezed, into a 3-month period of time, acquisitions that normally take 6 to 9 months to do properly and efficiently and in a frugal way for the American taxpayers. Consequently, we are going to waste another 10 or 15 percent of the money in these appropriations bills.

Then, when it comes to the end of the year, if any money is left over, here is what they told me they have to do. They have to spend the money to make sure the Appropriations Committee will give them the money next year, even though they had trouble spending the money this year because we put a time constraint on them.

None of us would run our businesses, none of us would run our families that way. Yet we are telling the rest of the Federal Government--great employees whom we have--to do something that is impossible to do in an efficient and orderly manner.

There are a lot of things that have happened in the last 2 years in the way this Senate is run. I believe most of them were for political reasons. They were not intended to hurt the policy, but nevertheless the policy is tremendously damaged. It is my hope that come January, when we have a new leader in the White House, no matter who it is, he will recognize the severity of the appropriations process and its impact on waste in this country.

As I frequently do, I wish to raise again to the American public and this body the fact that the Government Accountability Office, the various inspectors general, the Congressional Research Service, and the Congressional Budget Office can specifically lay out for the American people at least $300 billion a year of spending that is either pure waste, fraud or total duplication. At a time when we are going to have a $600 billion accounting deficit--because you have to add what we are stealing from Social Security to what we spend to get what our real deficit is--does it make any sense that we would continue to have $300 billion worth of waste, fraud or abuse and duplication in these bills? There is not one attempt in this bill to eliminate that. Not one. Not one.

So as you think about your quarterly tax payments or you think about your paycheck stub and the taxes taken from you, your income tax and estimated payments, and you think about what we are not doing, you ought to be awfully dissatisfied as an American taxpayer. We have failed the test. We have failed the test. Why it is important is because what we have done is mortgaged the future hopes, freedom, and prosperity of our children and our grandchildren.

I am disappointed, to say the least, with the process. But I am more disappointed in the fact that we are going to earn a reputation that we have not done our jobs.

Serious concerns with the economy should turn the attention of Congress away from parochial interests toward national interests.

Congress has focused on parochial interests for far too long, spending more time securing earmarks than doing the business of the American people.

Our Nation faces an economic challenge today equal to any challenge we have previously faced and now requires our full attention.

The following snapshot of our economy should impress upon everyone the seriousness of the job ahead.

The national debt currently stands at over $9.58 trillion, the largest in world history.

This year's deficit, in real accounting terms, stands above $600 billion.

This year alone, taxpayers will spend more than $230 billion just to pay the interest on the national debt.

Since 2006, gas has risen from $2.24 per gallon to nearly $4 a gallon.

More Americans are out of work; the unemployment rate has increased from 4.9 percent in January to 6.1 percent in August.

In 2008, over 600,000 jobs have been lost.

According to USDA projections, the Consumer Price Index--CPI--for all food is forecast to increase 4.5 to 5.5 percent in 2008. For example, since 2006 the price of milk has increased approximately 16 percent.

According to Reuters news service, the total tab for government rescues and special loan facilities this year is more than $900 billion, not including the proposed $700 billion rescue of the financial markets in the Paulson plan.

Already this year, the Federal Government has taken drastic steps to stabilize the economy, all using taxpayer dollar. While several of these amounts may be fully repaid to taxpayer, they involve huge liabilities and expenditures:

$200 billion was authorized for use in rescuing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Treasury will inject up to $100 billion into each institution by purchasing preferred took to shore up their capital as needed;

$300 billion for the Federal Housing Administration to refinance failing mortgages into new reduced-principal loans with a Federal guarantee;

$4 billion in HUD grants to banks to help hem buy and repair homes abandoned due to mortgage foreclosures;

$85 billion loan from the Fed for AIG, which would give the Federal Government a 79.9 percent stake and avoid a bankruptcy filing for the embattled insurer;

At least $87 billion in repayments to JPMorgan Chase & Co. for providing financing to underpin trades with units of bankrupt investment bank Lehman Brothers;

$29 billion in financing from the Fed for JPMorgan Chase's Government-brokered buyout of Bear Stearns & Co. in March;

At least $200 billion of currently outstanding loans to banks issued through the Federal Reserve's Term Auction Facility, which was recently expanded to allow for longer loans of 84 days alongside the previous 28-day credits;

Starting last year, Social Security and Medicare projected expenditures exceed revenues. Over the next 75 years, this will cost $41 trillion in present value terms. Of that amount, $34 trillion is related to Medicare and $7 trillion to Social Security. By one account, the current unfunded liabilities of Medicare and Social Security are above $100 trillion.

If we think that the current economic troubles are a concern, wait until the bill comes due for all of the reckless spending Congress is engaging in today.

Members should focus like a laser on these issues rather than concentrate their efforts on political games and earmarks.

Instead of doing any of this, Congress is now planning to ram through an irresponsible continuing resolution to keep the Government operating during fiscal year 2009.

None of these issues are addressed in the bill but only compound the problems. Congress seems to have not learned its lesson.

The appropriations process is broken and excludes Members from considering serious issues.

The Senate is preparing to vote on an appropriations bill that will cost $634 billion, which will include funds for all of our national security agencies, disaster relief, and a continuing resolution for the 2009 fiscal year. Yet the text of the bill only came available late on Tuesday night, with no one having seen a word of it except for a few Democratic staff and Members in the House. Further still, a joint explanatory statement was released yesterday afternoon.

This must be what the House Appropriations Committee chairman meant when he said that the continuing resolution would be drafted in ``secret.''

The following is an excerpt from an article yesterday in Bloomberg News.

The plan outlined by Obey would give Republicans less than

24 hours to scrutinize legislation spending more than $600

billion on the Defense, homeland security and veterans'

affairs agencies including thousands of pet projects known as

earmarks.

Asked if the process has been secretive, Obey said:

``You're d**n right it has because if it's done in the public

it would never get done.'' He said he wanted to avoid his

colleagues' ``pontificating'' on the content of

the legislation, saying ``that's what politicians do when

this stuff is done in full view of the press.'' He said

``we've done this the old fashioned way by brokering

agreements in order to get things done and I make no apology

for it.''

It is easy to understand why the House Appropriations Chairman would want to conduct his business in secret, as one who received $51.5 million in earmarks for his district.

The one constitutional duty of the Congress is to pass legislation funding the operations of Government, and yet his duty has been entirely abandoned by the majority.

Congress is now less than 1 week away from the beginning of fiscal year 2009, and yet it has not passed one appropriations bill.

The only bill to receive a vote by either body is the Military Construction--Veterans Affairs appropriations bill that passed the House of Representatives.

No appropriations bills have even been brought to the floor of the Senate during the entire calendar year 2008 thus far--though the Senate is now expected to vote on three of the largest bills having had 36 hours to review the $634 billion in spending they contain.

The appropriations process should have begun long ago. It is unfair to taxpayers when Congress chooses to pass large legislation in the dark of night rather than debate them for all to see.

Congress now finds itself considering major national security legislation in one day under pressure of both a Government shutdown and delay on an important piece of economic legislation.

Had the majority leader taken action earlier this year, Members would be free to concentrate fully on the Treasury proposal. Instead, they are distracted by making sure that their earmarks and pork-barrel projects are in the CR.

The CR has been loaded down with billions of dollars in wasteful earmarks.

Despite having had only 1\1/2\ days to look over the bill, it is plain that there are a large number of highly questionable earmarks set to receive funding in 2009.

In just the three appropriations bills for the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Veterans Affairs/Military Construction, there are 2,627 earmarks worth $16.1 billion.

This means that without even funding the remaining nine appropriations bills, Congress has nearly reached the dollar value of all earmarks in fiscal year 2008.

According to Citizens Against Government Waste, there were 11,620 earmarks worth $17.2 billion for all 12 appropriations bills in 2008.

In fiscal year 2008, the average dollar amount of each earmark was $1.48 million.

In the continuing resolution before the Senate, the average dollar amount for each earmark is $6.1 million-- more than five times higher.

Every dollar that goes to an earmark in this bill is a dollar that will not go to important national security programs at the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense.

What kind of projects are receiving earmarked funds out our national security agencies in 2009?

$3.2 million for the High Altitude Airship--Senator Sherrod Brown. After spending millions to investigate and develop a blimp-based platform for ICBM surveillance, the Missile Defense Agency--MDA-- cancelled the program--called the High Altitude Airship--due to myriad capability limitations.

MDA did not request funding for the program for 2008. However, $2.5 million in earmarks in the 2008 Defense appropriations bill revived the cancelled program, despite the fact that no one else at the Pentagon had expressed interest.

After shopping the program around, Lockheed Martin managed to pass the program to Army Space and Missile Defense Command, which will now begin investigating if there is any utility for them with the program.

The project has been based in Akron, OH, funded by a $1 million earmark toward the program by Senator Brown, who has a long record in opposition to missile defense.

$2 million for Hibernation Genomics--Senator Ted Stevens. This earmark would provide funding to the University of Alaska for research into the hibernation genomics of Alaskan ground squirrels.

University of Alaska lobbyist, Martha Stewart--no relation--claims that the research into squirrel hibernation will one day help wounded soldiers in the battlefield.

According to Ms. Stewart, the university is well equipped to do the work. She insists: ``We have a number of ground squirrels that are in various stages of hibernation in Fairbanks.''

And $800,000 for the Columbia College Chicago Construct Program-- Senator Dick Durbin. Columbia College claims to be the ``Nation's largest private arts and media school in the Nation.'' It offers a wide selection of coursework in audio arts, dance, film, journalism, poetry, and radio. According to the school's annual report, it received $2.7 million in Federal grants during 2007 from the Department of Education, U.S. Army Research Laboratory, Corporation for National and Community Service, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Since 2000, Columbia College Chicago has received over $275 million in grants, cooperative agreements, and direct payments from the Federal Government.

And $800,000 for Partnership in Innovative Preparation for Educators and Students and the Space Education Consortium--Senator Wayne Allard and Senator Ken Salazar. The Space Education Consortium was created by the Air Force in 2004 as a partnership with the University of Colorado and others to promote science education for professionals as well as ``getting space technology and curriculum infused throughout the U.S. education system from kindergarten to post-graduate work.

``It is a chance to grow a cadre of space professionals from the launch pad to the stars,'' said Air Force General Lance Lord, commander of the Air Force Space Command.

A July 2008 report by the DOD Inspector General stated that this earmark was not consistent with the department's mission ``to provide the military forces needed to deter war and to protect the security of our country.''

And 24.5 million for the National Drug Intelligence Center-- Representative John Murtha. Every year, millions of dollars for our national defense are siphoned away from the military's budget to pay for a single program administered not by the Pentagon but by the Department of Justice.

This funding is directed to the National Drug Intelligence Center-- NDIC--which the Department of Justice has asked Congress to shut down.

The former director of NDIC even confessed to U.S. News, ``I recognized that a lot of [NDIC] reports were God-awful, poorly written, poorly researched, and, some cases, wrong.''

Another former director even admitted, ``I've never come to terms with the justification for the NDIC'' and ``the bottom line was that we had to actually search for a mission.''

According to an investigation by the Government Accountability Office, NDIC duplicates the activities of 19 drug intelligence centers that already existed.

Since 1992, the center has received over 500 million in federal funding.

$15 million for Waterbury Industrial Commons Redevelopment Initiative--Senator Joe Lieberman and Representative Chris Murphy. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, ``This would clean up a decades old munitions factory to be used as a city-owned industrial park.

The Fairfield Weekly reports that the State of Connecticut has turned down requests to fund this project--each year the Mayor of Waterbury ``makes the trip to Hartford seeking the money, and each year comes back empty handed.''

Why should the American taxpayer fund that which State of Connecticut will not provide funding?

And $4 million to the Go For Broke National Education Center. This earmark is aptly named in light of the fact that Congress is helping the Nation ``go broke.''

And $9.9 million for the U.S.S. Missouri Memorial Asociation. Visitors can go aboard the battleship from World War II that survived the attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

While preserving the Nation's history is important, this is not only something that could be funded privately, it is not a priority at this time.

And $1.6 million for New Electronic Warfare Specialists Through Advanced Research by Students Representative David Hobson.

And $4.5 million for the 2010 Olympics Coordination Center Senator Patty Murray and Representative Rick Larsen.

And $800,000 Pseudofoliculitis Barbae--PFB--Topical Treatment--this goes to ISW Group in St. Louis, MO--Senator Kit Bond.

There is $10 million for the Intrepid Museum Foundation.

And $4 million for the Nimitz Center.

And $1.2 million for the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute for International Affairs--Representative Berman.

And $10 million for the New Mexico State University Institute for Defense and Public Policy----Senator Jeff Bingaman.

I yield the floor.

I, too, believe that intellectual property is important to our country, businesses and individual rights holders. Illegal importation of counterfeit goods, such as pharmaceuticals, also threatens the health and safety of U.S. citizens. It is necessary for the Federal Government to protect and enforce intellectual property rights domestically and internationally. I believe we are on the way to achieving this goal with S. 3325, but we have to ensure that the agencies this bill tasks with enforcement of intellectual property rights are held responsible. All of us, including those in the intellectual property community, would have to agree that enforcement of intellectual property rights, even with passage of S. 3325, will only become a priority of the Federal Government if agencies, such as the Justice Department and FBI, are truly held accountable for achieving the goal of increased enforcement.

I am glad that the Senator from Vermont is making this commitment and am relying on his assurance of oversight of these programs so that our government is held responsible and informed decisions are made on how to responsibly allocate our scarce Federal dollars. Although the criteria we established in this legislation are necessary, they will neither have an effect on how the Justice Department and FBI prioritize and use the funds authorized under this bill, nor ensure grantees appropriately use Federal grant dollars, unless we make certain these agencies rigorously follow the standards we set forth in this legislation. If the Justice Department and FBI continue to receive Federal funding year after year without Congress questioning the contents of their required reports or grantees' use of funds, all of the efforts of those supporting this bill will be for naught, and we will not have succeeded in making IP enforcement a priority for this country.

I thank the Senator from Vermont and the Senator from Pennsylvania for their work on this bill. I recognize we have all made compromises along the way to ensure we pass the most effective enforcement legislation possible, while still maintaining our desire to hold Federal agencies, which spend taxpayer dollars, accountable for their actions so that this country's intellectual property rights holders are protected from counterfeiting and piracy.

Mr. President I support the overall goals of S. 3325, the PRO-IP Act, and believe that our country's intellectual property rights should be protected at home and abroad. However, I believe that Congress should make both realistic and fiscally responsible commitments in the legislation it passes.

Intellectual property is important to our country, businesses, and individual rights holders. Illegal importation of counterfeit goods, such as pharmaceuticals, also threatens the health and safety of U.S. citizens. It is necessary for the Federal Government to protect and enforce intellectual property rights domestically and internationally.

I believe we are on the way to achieving this goal with this legislation, but we have to ensure that the agencies this bill tasks with enforcement of intellectual property rights are held responsible. All of us, including the members of the intellectual property community, would have to agree that enforcement of intellectual property rights, even with passage of this legislation, will only become a priority of the Federal Government if agencies,

such as the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation, are truly held responsible for achieving the goal of increased enforcement.

I believe that the only way to ensure these agencies actually answer for their actions, and make intellectual property enforcement a priority, is through effective oversight by this Body. We have included in this bill two reporting requirements for the Justice Department and FBI that will make certain we know: (1) exactly what the agencies were doing before this bill was enacted to enforce intellectual property laws so that we may establish a performance baseline, and (2) what the agencies will be doing in the future as a result of this bill. We have also included other standards for State and local law enforcement agencies that will be receiving grants from the Justice Department, so that the grantees also have standards to meet in order to receive Federal funds.

These reports and standards, however, will neither have an effect on how these agencies prioritize and use the funds authorized under this bill, nor ensure grantees appropriately use Federal funds unless we make certain the criteria we set forth in this bill are met. If the Justice Department and FBI continue to receive funding year after year under this legislation without Congress questioning the contents of the reports they are required to submit, all of the efforts of those supporting this bill will be for naught, and we will not have succeeded in making intellectual property enforcement a priority for this country.

To be clear, I would prefer actual language in this bill stating that, if the Justice Department and FBI fail to submit their reports on time, any authorizations under title IV of this bill would be suspended until those reports are submitted. However, even though this language was not accepted, the Senator from Vermont has assured me that the Judiciary Committee will hold oversight hearings early each year so we may thoroughly question the contents of the reports required to be submitted by the Justice Department and FBI under title IV. It is my hope that the outcome of any oversight hearings in the Judiciary Committee related to the content of this bill will be effectively communicated to the Appropriations Committee so that the members of that committee will have detailed information to establish whether these agencies have complied with the requirements of S. 3325, and enable them to make informed decision on how to responsibly allocate our scarce Federal dollars.

I thank the Senator from Vermont and the Senator from Pennsylvania for their work on this bill. I recognize that we have all made compromises along the way to ensure we pass the most effective enforcement legislation possible, while still maintaining our desire to hold Federal agencies, which spend taxpayer dollars, accountable for their actions so that this country's intellectual property rights holders are protected from counterfeiting and piracy.

Madam President, reserving the right to object, I would tell the Senator from Wisconsin I agree with the purposes of this bill. At the beginning of the 109th Congress, I held two hearings on the west coast on the policy associated with our IPs. I am strongly supportive of what you are doing. However, there is a conflict presently in negotiations on this bill about metrics and oversight which has not been worked out.

My consternation is we are going to put $300 million plus into this program, but we are not going to force the Justice Department to tell us what they are doing with it. Until such time as there are some teeth to make the Justice Department do what we tell them to do and report to us what they are doing, I am going to have to regretfully object. So I therefore offer an objection.

Madam President, I wish to expand a minute on the purposes of this.

The American people should know we have a law called the improper payments law where every agency is supposed to report to Congress every year the amount of improper payments, both over and under, and how that affects their budgets and their goals. Less than 50 percent of the agencies file that report with Congress. The reason they don't is because we don't make them. We don't say: Your funding is contingent upon you following the law. So, regrettably, I objected to what Senator Kohl--I actually agree with the things we are doing in the bill, but we won't accomplish what we want to accomplish if we don't make the Justice Department report to us and have metrics to see that the money we are going to spend--not ours; actually, it is going to be the money of the next generation--is spent wisely and is effective in doing what we want to get done.

It is my hope before we leave here that we can work out a compromise. I have spoken with Senator Specter. I have not had a chance to visit with Senator Leahy. I intend to do that today. We have given in a lot of areas on this bill, especially the spending amounts.

I also note the Justice Department ended last year with $1.72 billion in unobligated balances. They are the only agency that gets to keep their money, and they get to decide--not us--what they are going to do with that $1.72 billion. So there is plenty of money in the Justice Department right now to do this program.

We have to decide whether we are going to put teeth in what we tell agencies to do. My hope is we will start doing that.

I was going to spend some time now talking about the continuing resolution. I am going to reserve that and try to come back at a different time and try to reach Senator Specter and Senator Leahy on this IP bill in the hopes we can get something worked out.

With that, I yield the floor and note that we would obviously be in recess.

I did.

Mr. President, I wanted to thank the majority leader and to spend a few minutes talking about an individual who was key to----

I thank my colleague from Florida for this short period of time to thank the majority leader for working in good faith on several of these bills.

There is a gentleman in this country by the name of Alvin Sykes. If you haven't met him, you should. He is what America is all about. He promised the mother of Emmett Till before she died that he would make sure there would be an investigation into the death of her son, her young son, as well as others who were never properly investigated to the extent they should have been.

We have wrangled a lot over this bill, and one of the reasons we have wrangled is because of the financial problem we find ourselves in today in this country. Begrudgingly, I have decided we could not, out of the waste of the Justice Department, get the Senate to concur that we should not spend additional money on it; that there is plenty of money. As a matter of fact, at the end of last year, there was $1.7 billion in unexpended funds and unobligated funds at the Justice Department. They also have a tremendous track record of waste in terms of conferences and of poor management. Moreover, they are the only agency of the Federal Government that, unlike every other agency, the unobligated balances do not automatically go back to the Treasury. They get to spend the money.

So we have again failed to do the fiscally responsible thing. But I decided last night this is one of those rare exceptions when I can't convince the body that we ought to be more frugal. We could have accomplished the same thing with the funds over there, but the greater call was to allow this bill to pass.

But I wanted to tell you something about America with this bill, and it has to do with Alvin Sykes. If you met him, you would immediately fall in love with him. He is poor as a church mouse. He has led this group with integrity. He has been an honest broker. He has not played the first political game with anybody in Washington. As a matter of fact, he has had games played on him and he has been manipulated. But the fact is he has held true to his belief and his commitment to the mother of Emmett Till. And because of that, we are going to see this bill come into fruition.

I think that speaks so well about our country; that one person has truly made a difference, and that one person is Alvin Sykes. I can't say enough about this individual. I can't say enough about his stamina, his integrity, his forthrightness, his determination. All of the qualities that have built this country this gentleman exhibited as he worked to keep a promise to the dying mother of Emmett Till. So I come to the floor now to sing his praises, to recognize him publicly for his tremendous efforts, and all those on his board have made in making this come to fruition.

I also wanted to spend a moment saying there is no reason why this body can't do something more aggressively in terms of protecting children in the midst of child pornography. We have the PROTECT Act, which cost $372 million, and which could easily be paid for, but we won't pay for it. The fact is, as the bill is written today, nothing will happen until a year from now with that bill, even if we pass it, because we are not going to appropriate funds for it.

It is going to be like the Adam Walsh Act. We promised everybody we would do it, but have barely funded it at all. However, we could make a big difference with that by combining the PROTECT Act with the SAFE Act. The Justice Department has reiterated there are no fourth amendment concerns. The House passed the bill 390 to 2, and yet we have resistance--for political reasons, not for policy reasons--in bringing forth that bill.

I also thank the Democratic staff, who have worked so hard to clean that bill up to eliminate the objections. It is my hope that before we leave here this week, we will do something. The reason the SAFE Act is important is because it will do something the moment it is signed into law. Internet service providers will have to start reporting to the Government, to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, child porn sites and the people who are utilizing them and putting them up. The PROTECT Act won't do any of that, but the SAFE Act will. So my hope is that through the rest of the remaining days of this session we can come together and put politics aside and truly make a difference.

I talked to a Congressman from North Carolina two nights ago and he said there are 250 fathers who are filming sexual acts with little children and putting it on the Internet. The way you stop that is have the Internet service providers start reporting that to the FBI. And the fact we won't do that--for political reasons, not policy reasons--is a pox on us. That is in North Carolina alone. And not to pick on North Carolina, because it is the same in many other States. But that is a fact, and we know it is happening in other places. This is something where we can make a difference, and my hope is we can work that out.

I thank again the Senator from Florida for this time, and 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 to be recognized for such time that I might consume in morning business.

Mr. President, I wish to spend a few minutes talking about a perspective that I think is lacking, and I hope we have an opportunity to gain. I was intrigued and interested as I listened to the senior Senator from New Hampshire explain to the American people what actually is going on in terms of our financial system. I don't believe there is anybody in the Congress, or anybody in the country, who is happy about where we are today: contemplating putting the Federal Government as the owner of a bunch of toxic assets that were accumulated on the basis of greed, poor policy, bad management, and bad regulation. I don't believe anybody is happy we are here. I don't believe the regulators are; I don't think Members of Congress are; I don't think people in this country are.

But from that, we can learn something. My worry is that we will not. I heard this morning the majority leader--and I have a great deal of respect for him--laying this all at the foot of President Bush. Presidents can do very little other than what we let them do. When we talk about the lack of oversight and regulation, the problem is, we were not watching the regulators, and our constitutional duty is that we should have been.

There is a lot of blame to go around--and it is not partisan-- Republicans and Democrats, the executive branch, even the judicial branch in some of their rulings that created some stupid consequences to things that were never intended by Congress.

But what we ought to learn, and what I think is most important is, if you are an American right now and you are worried, you have a great reason to be worried. It is not about some impending financial crash. What you should be worried about is the Congress is not listening.

Let me explain what I mean.

We are going to finish at the end of this year with over $10 trillion in debt. That is over $33,000 for every man, woman, and child. We are about to pass some type of system to salvage credit liquidity in this country that is going to cost another $2,000 to $3,000 per man, woman, and child in this country.

We are going to have a continuing resolution that comes to this body this evening or maybe tomorrow morning that continues to do the wrong things that got us into the mess in the first place.

The financial mess we are in is because confidence in the country and our response has been eroded. As I got on a plane to come back to Washington, I talked with a businessman from eastern Oklahoma who has a worldwide business. He talked about on August 20, he saw this tremendous worldwide drop in demand for his product. It didn't have anything to do with his product. It had everything to do with people now worried about if they should hang on to cash because the economics don't look good.

Whatever they do here, the No. 1 goal has to be reestablishing a confidence in this country that, yes, we can have an economy that works, we can rebuild faith in the financial institutions, and we can do that, best of all, by not repeating the mistakes we have made in the past.

To outline, the Defense appropriations bill has over $10 billion in it for airplanes the Air Force doesn't want. Think about that. There is $10 billion worth of airplanes in the Defense appropriations bill that is going to pass that they are going to have to buy that they neither want nor need. Why is that happening? Because we are putting local, parochial politics ahead of the best interests of the country.

We are going to buy some ships the Navy doesn't want. Same reason, different area of the country. But we are going to buy them because we are going to put a parochial benefit to a Member of Congress ahead of the best interests of the country.

There isn't a family out there who doesn't have to weekly or monthly make hard choices about how they spend their money. We, unfortunately, continue to make decisions on how we spend your children's money and your grandchildren's money on a parochial or political interest that benefits Members of Congress. That is what has to change.

If there is a lesson in what has happened to us in terms of the loss of confidence in the financial system in this country, all I have to say is Congress earned it. We created it. We expend 100 times more effort trying to create new programs and new ways of spending than we do managing the very Government you send us here to put under control.

I take the Constitution literally. It has a section in it called the enumerated powers. It is article II, section 8. It spells out exactly what the role of Congress is. If you look at how we got into this mess, every example of that goes back to the fact that Congress is violating what the Constitution says is our legitimate role, is doing something that is outside the legitimate role, and we rationalized it for the political benefits for either career politicians or party, one side of the aisle or the other. That is why Congress has a 9-percent approval rating, because we are more interested in us than we are the best interests of the country. And it shows.

We have the financial debacle in front of us today to prove it. Imagine what would have happened had Congress been aggressive in its oversight. Imagine what would have happened after the failed attempt 4 years ago to try to put the controls of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that we had a monthly hearing outlining the worsening--worsening--condition so we could have avoided this situation. Instead of us doing that, we did what was easy. We took the easy road, the wide road. We didn't do what our oath calls us to do.

I think we are going to see some very different behavior when it comes to us approaching the financial package that we are going to put together that will enable an economic recovery in this country. I believe you are going to see people vote for bills they basically don't like because it is in the best interest of the country. My hope is that when we do that, it would not be a one-time happening; that we will, in fact, move back to the position to take a decision on how we vote on something and not do a finger to the wind on how it looks back home or how it looks for our political career but, in fact, look at the U.S. Constitution and say: Does it square with that, and does it match our oath to do what is in the best interest of the country? When we get through with this exercise, as far as this economic recovery, I think the country can once again maybe start to have confidence in Congress; that we will, in fact, address the issue; that we will vote against our political best interests, but we will vote in the best interests of the American people.

Senator Gregg has outlined very eloquently what is happening, what has happened, what the response has been thus far, and what needs to be done in the future. If you have not heard him speak to this, I would suggest my colleagues listen to him. You can get it, what he spoke about this morning, before lunch, an understanding of what is necessary to reestablish confidence. It is not a time for politicians to win, it is a time for the American people to win. The only way they win is when we put them first and us second.

I will.

First of all, I thank the Senator for his comments, and to answer him: What we saw on the market today, we saw a period of time when there was zero interest on a 2-month T-bill. What that is saying is people have lost interest on anything other than a government security, and they are willing to give the Government their money for that security with no interest. That is fear talking. What we have to do is drive out fear. We have to drive back confidence.

So I believe, Senator Gregg, that we will see a bipartisan vote in the Senate and the sooner the better. Because every day we are not fixing this, it is costing jobs, it is costing the ability to promote new jobs in our economy, and it is costing savings for those people who are no longer working but living off retirement. So I feel this body is going to stand and do the right thing.

I have been impressed with Senator Schumer, Senator Jack Reed, whom I just saw. The questions he asked and the answers that were put forth by both Secretary Paulson and Chairman Bernanke yesterday, I thought, were right on the money. I don't think we are far apart. But even if we are not far apart, we have to be able to do what is right and we have to do it timely. We should not leave here. There should be no leaving and coming back until this is solved.

Our future depends on what we do and how fast we do it. That doesn't mean we should not do it right. It doesn't mean we shouldn't be thoughtful about what we do. But the degree and the magnitude of this problem is something I have never seen in my 60 years, and I doubt the Senator from New Hampshire has ever seen it. Very few people in the history of the world have ever seen the kind of risk this country is facing at this moment.

So it is important it have nothing to do with Republicans or Democrats; that it have nothing to do with the Presidential election; that it have nothing to do with anything except the best interest and the future of this country.

With that, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I spent 8\1/2\ hours yesterday trying to get back here, and I understand during a period of that time my name was mentioned rather prominently several times on the floor, which is fine. I know Senator Reid is going to come out in a little bit and offer some unanimous consent requests, which I am certainly open to considering, but we just got the language on those and so we will be looking at that. I will be objecting until I get a chance to see what changes have been made, and I look forward to working with Senator Reid.

But I think this whole debate about 35 bills and $10 billion is a great lesson for us. We stand right now as a nation on a fault line that has created a lack of confidence in the financial system in this country--and not just in this country but in the world as well. While we are facing what is being requested by the head of the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, and the administration--a task of trying to reestablish confidence and liquidity in our markets--we have failed to learn the lesson. The lesson is this: We cannot continue to indiscriminately create more Government without making the Government we have efficient.

Reserving the right to object, will the Senate majority leader yield for a question?

You sent over some 20 or 30 bills to our side. Is this one of those bills and has there been any change in what we have since our discussions?

Pending the time we get to review all of that, I will gladly accept a unanimous consent but, reserving the right to object, I will object at this time until I have a chance to look at the bills. They were given to us less than 20 minutes ago and we wish an opportunity to look at that. The majority leader has my word I will not object if that is the case.

Reserving the right to object, after looking at what was sent over this morning, if there was no change to it, I will not object. Pending that, I object at this time.