Floor Statements

Mr. President, I have sat here and listened and I have some outline notes from which to speak, but I am not sure we should. The very thing we are talking about is what America wants to spit out, in terms of their elected representatives. The Senate has an obligation to offer advice and consent. There is no question judges are important. That is why you are here, seeing a demonstration from the minority today, of judicial committee members, because we know it is important. It is important across the country because making law from the bench is something that is the antithesis of what most freedom-loving Americans want. The idea that we want to have judges who know their role, know the role of interpreting law rather than making law, is something with which the vast majority of Americans agree.

But I am struck by the fact that gamesmanship is taking place--not just in terms of the majority but also the minority. We are in a game now. How do we move this? How do we leverage this? How do we force it?

My disheartenment comes from the fact--why are we here in the first place? Why did we get here, when we know what the role of the Senate is in terms of advice and consent.

My hope is we do not see a devolution to parliamentary maneuvering, to raise the issue above where it should be.

I am reminded of the fact that the majority had problems with four of President Bush's nominees, starting in January. He withdrew those. In a gesture of good will, he withdraw four nominees who were not--although they were well qualified, they were not acceptable to movement down the road. Now we have highly qualified judges in districts that are judicial emergencies that get actually slandered by the chairman of the committee about supposedly an anti-Catholic statement--when they are Catholic in their faith. So we offer criticism to somebody and never offer them a venue in which to defend themselves.

That is not what America expects of this body. That is not what it expects of the Judiciary Committee. My hope is the majority leader will say: There is a deal to be struck here. Let's do what we can so we don't spend our time on the business of creating wedge issues that don't further the best interests of this country. Give President Bush five or six more, seven or eight more district court nominees, all of which are qualified, bring them to the floor. Let's get it done so it doesn't interfere with other important work. It is time for the Senate to make good on promises. It is time for it to reciprocate for what President Bush did in terms of withdrawing the four nominations. My hope is we will think about what is in the best long-term interest of the country and not the next election.

I thank the Chair.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I have listened patiently to what has been said. One of the things that has to be stated, if we want to change the rules of the Senate, that is fine, but it is important for the American people to know what a unanimous consent request is. This bill contains 26 separate pieces of legislation where on over four dozen of them we have had no objection whatsoever, ever. Not one time have we raised any objection. But a unanimous consent request says, No. 1, you agree with the legislation. No. 2, you don't think it should be amended. No. 3, you don't think the Senate ought to vote on it. We have a major difference of opinion about what priorities are and what they should be.

I heard the distinguished Senator from New Mexico talk about frustration. Who is watching out for the frustration a child born today, encompassing $400,000 of unfunded liabilities, is going to have when that bill comes due? Where is the worry about the frustration for future generations? People say this is noncontroversial. Let me tell you, it is controversial when you are talking about infringing on the property rights of people without their permission. That is controversial. We have a difference of opinion on that. We think heritage areas and the disclaiming of heritage area has no impact on property rights.

That is absolutely untrue. It does impact. Property rights are a real right guaranteed in this country. We are going to set up boards that will influence, with the money we give them, private property use and utilization without an equal influence by the private property owners. We do have a difference of opinion.

At the end of this fiscal year, September 30, the accrued actual debt on the books for this country will become $10 trillion. We are going to add $3,000--2,800 and some odd dollars--per man, woman, and child at the end of this year to the debt. People say it is noncontroversial. Four dozen of these are noncontroversial. But this idea that we have to authorize, it is either a wink and a nod, or we are totally dishonest with the American people. If we are authorizing it, we intend to spend the money. We wouldn't be authorizing it if we didn't intend to spend the money. My objections are not that we do the right things for protecting our parks or creating the right environments in our forests and ensuring that the great treasures of our country are not protected. I want to make sure they are available. But to claim, when we have a $9 billion deficit in terms of backlogged work in our parks right now, as documented by the U.S. Park Service, $9 billion of work that needs to get done that we can't get done, to say this isn't going to have any impact on it, it is going to have an impact. It is going to delay the maintenance on the very things we say we treasure. So what have we done? What are we doing?

We are having a discussion about a small area that supposedly doesn't cost much money. It hasn't been scored, but those things in it that have been scored, it is over $350 million per year, a third of a billion dollars. What are we talking about? This debate is about whether we face up to the priorities in front of us as a nation. It is not about being against parks. It is not about being against the process. It is about making sure somebody in this body is standing up thinking about the future finances of this country and what we are going to do to our children. This is another example of what I believe--and I know I am in the minority--is a misplaced priority. How do we justify it, when we own, as the Senator from New Mexico said, 30 percent--I thought it was 38.5 percent--of all the land in the country? When we are not taking care of the land we have, how do we justify adding more land? We added 90 million acres to Federal Government property in the last 8 years. That is 90 million acres that are taken off the property rolls of communities and States. We take it away. We control it, and then we don't take care of it. But now we are adding more. We are doing it more.

Let's talk about some of the issues. This is a noncontroversial bill is what we have heard. How about $2 million of our kids' money to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Robert Fulton and the Claremont? At a time when this year we are going to borrow $600 billion, we are going to spend $2 million on a celebration? Why don't we celebrate the fact that we are going to put our kids in debt more? That is what we should be celebrating, if we are so proud of this. How about $2 million to create a commission to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the voyage of the Champlain. Do we have $2 million to throw away? We are going to throw that away on something that is not important, considering where we are in this Nation and the debt and the heritage we are going to leave our children. You bet we have a difference of opinion.

The American people want us to start thinking in the long term, not the short term. Do we look good if we have done all these bills back home? You bet. We wink and nod and say: We are doing it. Either we are going to appropriate the money or we were dishonest with them in the first place. We are going to spend the money. How do we walk out of here and say: We got you what you wanted? We do not really intend to spend the money--unless we really do intend to spend the money, so then it really does make a difference, and we cannot maintain what we have.

There was a very wise historian, his name was Alexander Tytler. This is attributed to him. I am not sure it is really his, but the words were spoken. They are not mine, but it is very apropos for where we are, not just on this

issue; I am not a voice of frustration just on this issue. My colleagues know that. I think it is time for us to start thinking about the long-term in this country and not the short-term politically expedience that says we look good at home.

Here is what Tytler said: A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits--we got you done what you want done at home; whether we can afford it or not does not matter, but we got it done--with the result that a democracy always collapses due to loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.

That is the history of the world. We are contributing to our own demise as we think short-term political expediency so we can look good at home, so we can satisfy demands at home.

Will Durant said:

A great civilization is [never] conquered from without

until it has destroyed itself [from] within.

We have now $79 trillion worth of unfunded liabilities that we are getting ready to lay on our kids and grandkids, and we are not thinking a thing about probably $1 billion with this bill of new additional expenditures for next year, if it gets appropriated. It is the price of doing business in Washington. We do not have that luxury anymore. We do not have the luxury of mortgaging the future of our children anymore.

Why is the dollar at a historic low right now? Is it because we are in a slowdown or a recession? Is that it? No. It does not have anything to do with it. It has to do with the world confidence in our ability to repay our debt and the debt the rest of the world sees coming to us, which comes out to, if you were born today, $400,000 over your lifetime. Now, how many of us have children or grandchildren who could absorb just the interest on $400,000? A few, but most of us could not do that.

So this debate is a philosophical debate. I am not worried about being a source of frustration in the Senate. I am worried about the future of our country, and if I create some scrapes and bruises on my way to wake us up to what the American people want us to do--which is think long-term, fix the structural problems, and quit pandering back to our individual desires in the State--this Congress has become a parochial Congress. It is more important to do what is right for your State than it is for what is right for the country. How dare us. That has nothing to do with our oath. None of us has our State mentioned in the oath we take when we accept this office.

So we are about to pass 62 pieces of legislation, none of which had a hearing until after they passed out of the committee--17 hearings post coming out of the committee. As to saying we have to meet this because it is bipartisan, it is a bipartisan failure to think about the future of this country and what is in the long-term best interests of the country, as we satisfy looking good at home to ensure our next election is put ahead of the next generation of this country.

I am not going to participate in that. I am going to continue to work to make sure any piece of legislation that comes to this floor is thinking about the long-term, not the short-term. If that creates ill will among my colleagues, I apologize in advance. I would much rather be remembered as somebody who was interested in protecting the future of our children than playing nice in the Senate. As Phil Gramm said: I didn't come here to make friends, and I haven't been disappointed.

The real fact is, what did we all come here for? We all came here with that in mind, to do what is best in the long-term interests of our country. It is important for us to be reminded when we are not doing that. There can be a difference of opinion about priorities. There cannot be a difference of opinion about the amount of trouble we are in. There is no difference of opinion in terms of trouble. It does not matter how we got here. The fact is, we are here. We are in trouble.

How is it that we put a delegate for an island territory in this bill that has 60,000 residents that we are going to put $5.6 million into over the next 3 years? That we are going to create another delegate-- what does that have to do with natural resources and lands? How did that get in here?

We have added an intermodal transportation center in Trenton, ME. It authorizes the Federal Government to pay 40 percent of it, no matter what it costs. There is no limitation that this will be a competitively bid contract. No matter what it costs, we are on the hook for 40 percent of whatever it costs. And we are on the hook for 85 percent of what it will cost to run it thereafter. The only problem is, there are three other visitor centers within walking distance of this one. But we wanted to do it.

I could go on and on and on. The fact is, this debate is not about process. It may be to you, but it is not to me. This debate, for me, is whether we are going to change our behavior at every point to start thinking about the long-term future of this country.

I have the greatest respect for Chairman Bingaman. He has been an absolute gentleman to me in every way in every dealing. But we have a philosophical difference. He is charged to move bills out, to get things done. Most of them that have no cost he will readily agree I have had no objection to. He knows that. We have not tried to block those. But they are combined with the other bills because they know that is a force to create the votes, to get things that might be somewhat more controversial spending. That is his job. I understand that.

I have no ill will toward anyone. What I have an ill will for--and when I leave the Senate, what I will take to my grave--is not being good enough to convince us to do what we swore an oath to do, and that is to think long-term, think what is best for our country, not what is best for our State; think what is best for our children, not what is best for us; think what is best for our country, not what is best for our party; think what is best for America. We are losing. Consequently, we see it happening in our country.

So it is time to really clarify what this debate is about. It is really not about a lands bill; it is about the philosophy where we continue to work and run like a loose barge in the Mississippi River that does not have a tug associated with it. Are we going to do that? Because that is what is happening.

One amendment I am going to be offering just says we ought to know what things cost. How much land do we have and how much does it cost to have it? We are going to have it objected to, not because it is not common sense but because we are afraid the whole package might not get accepted if something common sense is in it like knowing how much our land costs us, knowing how much land we have, having an inventory, and making a judgment, a metric about what we are doing. Nobody is thinking the big picture. We are thinking the political picture. So here is the amendment. It is not going to go anywhere, most likely, but it absolutely makes common sense that we would do that, that we would know all the properties we own.

We have another amendment that is going to say that citizens have to give their approval when somebody comes onto their land who does not own their land--just basic property rights saying: If somebody is going to set up a heritage area, they ought to get permission to come onto private land, if it is your land and somebody is coming on it. We take that right away in heritage areas. It is gone. They do not have to do it. It is a commonsense amendment that says if you own land, you ought to have the right that is guaranteed you under the Constitution to have your land protected. It is your land.

We have so much unwanted property where all the land agencies want a way to get rid of it, but yet they cannot. They cannot. They do not even have the money to get rid of it. So there is an amendment that says: Let's take 1 percent of the cost of this bill and allow the different agencies to get rid of the excess properties they have. It is not complicated.

The other thing is, we are going to offer an amendment requiring that citizens within a national heritage area are informed of the designation before it happens. If we are going to pass a law that is going to impact somebody's private property, shouldn't we tell them ahead of time? Shouldn't they have notice? Shouldn't they have the

rights guaranteed to them under the Constitution?

I have spoken enough, but I think under the guise of the lands bill I have explained the real problem. There is a difference of philosophy. I will not stop fighting until we start thinking about the long-term problems facing this country.

I will not stop objecting to spending money that we know we intend to spend. We are just playing the game that: Oh, it is not an appropriation. Well, almost 30 percent of the appropriations are not authorized. So you cannot have it both ways. A third of the money we appropriate under the appropriations process is not authorized to begin with. So authorizations actually do not mean anything, do they? Or do they? Yes, they do, because they are not going to get appropriated, or they are, and if they are, we ought to be talking about real money that is going to be spent.

I want to talk for a minute about the backlogs in our parks because I think if the American people knew it, they would not stand for it until we did something. The National Park Service faces, right now, a $9 billion backlog. That is their number. That is not Tom Coburn's number. That is their number, a $9 billion backlog. With this legislation, they are going to take on more responsibility with no increased funds, which means the backlog is going to grow.

The Facilities Management Division of the National Park Service reveals there are at least 10 States where National Park Service maintenance backlogs exceed $100 million per park--$100 million per park. Twenty States have facilities with deferred maintenance exceeding $50 million. That does not include road maintenance, which is far higher. None of these numbers include the road maintenance we have not supplied the money for either.

They maintain 1,466 buildings built before 1900 but do not have the money to maintain them. They have 4,975 buildings constructed before 1950 but do not have the money to maintain them. They have 2,500 fixed assets--2,500 fixed assets--they do not want but this committee will not create a way for them to get rid of. They are still spending money on 2,500 facilities--2,500 different buildings--that they do not want, that they spend money on every year, that they are not using, but they have to keep it up.

The National Park Service has 31 sites in California alone. They have a State backlog, in California parks alone, of $584 million, exclusive of any roadwork. California is home to many of our treasures: Yosemite, Golden Gate, Sequoia.

New York national parks: They face a $347 million backlog--$347 million--home to Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty. The Statue of Liberty has a maintenance backlog of $185 million, work that needs to be done on it. We are not doing it.

National parks in Wyoming: a $205 million maintenance backlog. That is Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Devils Tower. Yellowstone has a $130 million backlog. It is one of our great treasured western assets. Everybody who visits there has total enjoyment from it, and yet it has a $130 million backlog which we have not addressed.

There are no increased authorizations for maintenance backlogs. Glacier National Park in Montana, a backlog of $400 million; Washington, DC, home to our monuments, a $371-million maintenance backlog; New Mexico, $41 million; Arizona, $192 million. The National Parks Conservation Association said this: The average budget shortfall among 100 park units is 32 percent. In other words, we are supplying two-thirds of what they need to maintain their parks adequately, and with this bill we are going to be adding to all that and other lands other things they are going to have to be doing because of this bill, but we are not going to address the real needs.

Each of the new projects in this bill will siphon funds away one way or the other, directly or indirectly, from these important projects. Are we good stewards if we add things to be stewards of when we are not caring for the things we have already?

There was a wise man who once said: He who is faithful with small things will be faithful with big things. I would surmise and put forward to this body that we have not been good stewards with what we have already. Yet we are going to add to them.

Amendment No. 4522

Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 4522, and I ask unanimous consent that it be read and that Mr. McCain be added as a cosponsor of that amendment.

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

Mr. President, this is a straightforward amendment. It requires an annual report of the Federal Government detailing the amount of property the Federal Government owns and the cost of Government and landownership to taxpayers.

This is just a small chart that shows the amount of land the Federal Government owns. As my colleagues can see, two-thirds of the Western United States is owned by the Federal Government in one form or another. It recognizes all of the core land, the parkland, the forest land, the heritage areas that are not--it doesn't recognize the heritage areas that we don't own, but it does recognize all the land holdings. Nobody has a metric on what we own. Not any one agency knows what we own in total, nor does anybody know

what it costs us to own it, nor does anybody know what it costs the communities for us to own it because it has been taken off the tax rolls.

Each year, the Office of Management and Budget would be required to issue a public report detailing Federal landownership. The report would specifically include the total amount of land in the United States and the percentage that is owned by the Federal Government; the percentage of all U.S. property that is controlled by the Federal Government--not necessarily owned, but controlled--the total cost of operating and maintaining Federal real property, including land, buildings and structures; a list of all Federal property that is unused and vacant-- because why should we continue to maintain properties that are unused and vacant--including all buildings and structures; and the estimated cost of the maintenance backlog at each Federal agency with regard to their land holdings.

What this will do is give the taxpayers some transparency about the real nature of what we are doing. We are going down an alley blindly. We don't know what the cost is. We don't know what the total is. We certainly don't know what we are creating when we add more to it when we don't know the metrics on what we have already.

One of the things we need is greater accountability on the maintenance. It is strange to me that we can do what we are doing with this bill and not already know this information. Why would we not know what our total land holdings are and what their costs are? There are no requirements under current law to require public disclosure of the amount of land controlled by the Federal Government or the cost of such occupation to the taxpayers. There was an Executive order issued in 2004 that would require some of it to become publicly available, but what this amendment says is it all should be. It is an inventory. Every other organization, including the States, know what they own, and they know the cost to manage what they own. It is called management accountability. Transparency is the thing that leads to accountability.

When the President directly required the Office of Management and Budget to release a high-level report giving a picture of property ownership between 2004 and 2005, the Government decided to stop releasing the information on public domain lands. Wonder why that is. What happened is 90 percent of the lands aren't reported. So this amendment would legally require the Government to release information on all land it owns, how much it costs to maintain, and require the Government to track the growth of Federal landownership around the country.

This isn't hard to do. Once you have the database, all you do is add and subtract. The first year it will be tough. Every year after that it would not be hard at all. It is a computer program.

Governments track the property that individuals own. The Government therefore should disclose the same information about the land holdings that it has. The Government knows what land we own. Why shouldn't the American people know what land the Government owns? It is just common sense. If we want to manage our resources and manage our properties, then we have to know what it is and what it costs, but we don't. We don't use zero-based budgeting. Whatever they spent last year, they just ask for more. At the end of the year, if it is not all spent, they make sure they spend it; otherwise, they are liable to get a cut. So we are not putting the money in based on what we know the need is; we are putting the money in based on a historical record that is obviously failing to maintain our national parks.

I will discontinue with any further debate on this amendment and yield to the chairman of the committee. I would just say commonsense knowledge about what we own and what it costs us is something the American taxpayer ought to have, and to vote against this for some reason because we can't goes back to the same philosophical argument. We are going to have the short-term excuse for the long-term problem, and we are never going to get out of this hole.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, would my colleague yield for just a moment so I may respond?

I want the chairman of the committee to know that we worked very closely with OMB as we developed this amendment. This is not a significant cost because they have been gathering this data to a certain extent already. I would gladly take a second-degree amendment to offset any sensitive

data that might be incurred so it would not be made available.

There is no question there is some cost to it, but the yearly cost is minimal, and OMB has already stated that. The cost of establishing it, yes, I agree, it would be hard. But what my colleague has said is we really don't want to manage all of the properties because we don't want to know. That is the important thing, that we can't directly manage them unless we do that.

So I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I think we will finish well before 2:15. That is my hope. So if we are looking at votes, I hope they will have some notice about that time. I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and bring up my amendment No. 4521, and I ask unanimous consent that Senator McCain be added as a cosponsor of the amendment.

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

Mr. President, the American Farm Bureau and American farmers and ranchers had endorsed all of these amendments at an earlier time. I assume they would again, because it is the same language that was used in the past. Today, the National Taxpayers' Union endorsed these as commonsense freedoms for us.

This amendment is pretty straightforward. It says that if the Government wants to take your land, you ought to be able to say, yes, I agree or you ought to be able to say no. What this bill does is it authorizes the Federal Government--they can still acquire new lands, but if it is going to have an impact on your land--not their land but your land--the citizens ought to get a vote on it. It is called real transparency in government and real participatory democracy.

A lot of Americans are concerned about the excessive Government influence over their land. We can say they are not, but they are. People in my State of Oklahoma, in New Mexico, New York, and every other State have great concerns about property rights. This amendment is intended to address those concerns. It simply requires the citizens affected by Federal Government land grabs, or heritage areas, or others where we are talking about private lands being impacted, to have a vote, to have a say in the matter. It authorizes the Departments of Agriculture and Interior to continue to acquire land by purchase or exchange. It will not affect that.

The amendment would only apply to situations involving Federal eminent domain, when the Government takes property without the consent of the owner, or State and local governments cede private land to the Federal Government. The decision to cede property to the Federal Government may be voluntary by the State and local governments, but such a decision impacts the whole community. So all residents of an area, therefore, should have a voice in the decision to turn over public property that is controlled by bureaucrats in DC.

Do you realize that in all of our Western States, any single bureaucrat has more control in that State than the Governor of the State, where they own the majority of the land? Their implied power is greater than the highest elected official in the State. What they say goes, because it is the Federal Government. So whether it is a park ranger or forest ranger or manager of a forest or the BLM, what they say has more power than what the chief executive of any of those States says. When we look at this, we are saying if the Federal Government is going to take something by eminent domain, the people it will impact should get a chance to say yea or nay.

This goes back to the concept that we have a real right to own and hold property in this country. That is something many countries don't offer their citizens. We ought to be about protecting it at every level.

This amendment would involve local residents in Government decisions about their neighborhoods and communities. Sam Adams profoundly questioned, ``What liberty can there be where property is taken away without consent?'' What liberty is there when your property is taken away without consent or impacted without your consent or your zoning ordinance, because some bureaucracy from Washington funded through a heritage area decided what the zoning ordinances are going to be and has millions of dollars to move it, to your detriment, the private owner of property. What liberty is there when property rights are taken away? This amendment ensures both liberty and consent. It is very straightforward. It doesn't affect Federal transportation projects, national defense, or homeland security.

Delegating property decisions is not unusual. Eminent domain has been exercised through both legislation and legislative delegation. It is usually delegated to another government body. But the power may be delegated to private corporations, as we saw in Connecticut, such as public utilities, railroads, and bridge companies.

This amendment will delegate the final decision to the property holders who are being impacted--real property rights. If we agree as a majority, it happens; if we disagree, it doesn't.

The Supreme Court has approved the widespread use of the power of eminent domain in conjunction with private companies to facilitate urban renewal, for low-cost housing, for deteriorated housing, and the promotion of values, as well as economic development. In Berman v. Parker, a unanimous Court observed:

The concept of the public welfare is broad and inclusive.

The values it represents are spiritual as well as physical,

aesthetic, as well as monetary. It is within the power of the

legislature to determine that the community should be

beautiful as well as healthy, spacious, as well as clean,

well-balanced, as well as carefully patrolled.

This ever-expanding government power essentially allows Congress and unelected bureaucrats for any reason to take private property from citizens with little, if any, recourse. What liberty when property rights are not preserved?

This amendment is designed to provide some check on the ever-growing expansion on private property rights within this country.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am going to try to move this debate forward. I see the Senator from Washington. Does she have debate on a specific amendment or comments on the bill?

Mr. President, we are going to try to get through our time agreement. I have two more amendments, if that is agreeable with the Senator from Washington.

I will make one comment on what the Senator from New Mexico said. What I heard him say is there is something wrong with people deciding it. The real concept of our country is we get to decide, and we have bastardized that by saying the Federal Government knows best.

I believe the people out there kind of know how things impact them. I think a plebiscite about what we are doing would be something that almost every American would welcome.

Will there be problems with it? You bet. Democracy is messy, but it is free. Giving them the right to have that answer and to vote, that is something that was guaranteed in the Constitution before we had an activist court that took it away. This is about putting it back.

Amendment No. 4520

I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and amendment No. 4520 be called up, and I ask unanimous consent that Senator McCain be added as a cosponsor.

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

Mr. President, this is another straightforward, what I believe most Americans would agree with, commonsense amendment. It says citizens within a national heritage area are informed of the designation and that governing officials must receive permission to enter private property. It is simple.

If I am in a heritage area, what happens often now is those who are empowered by the heritage area stake and survey your land, do all these things without your permission to enter your land--your land, not their land, your land. What we do is we broadly give the ability to violate property rights through the heritage area laws so people can access private property without permission. If I am wrong about that, then this amendment would cause absolutely no harm. But the fact is, I am right about it.

This amendment reestablishes the right of private property owners to control who goes on their land, when they go on their land, and what they are doing with their land. It reaffirms that if you have ownership, it is your land, and it does not take that right of a property owner away because it happens to be in a heritage area.

More and more heritage area designations are being made with little knowledge of the landowners involved. S. 2739 establishes three new heritage areas and extends the authorization and funding of several existing national heritage areas.

There is no requirement for the Federal Government to notify the individual within the area of its designation or its meaning. If we are going to have national heritage areas--and I agree at points they are great--do we not have an obligation to tell the landowner their land is getting ready to be subjected to all the parameters associated with a national heritage area? Do we not have the right and the obligation to ensure their property rights are protected as they are brought into a national heritage area?

I believe the Constitution says we ought to do this, we ought to restore what was already there. What is liberty without the rights of property?

I yield back the remainder of my time on this amendment.

Mr. President, in response, I wish to take a moment and read what three experts say about what the Senator from New Mexico said.

James Burling, principal property rights attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation:

The so-called protections for private property are largely

symbolic; so long as regulators can browbeat landowners into

becoming ``willing sellers'' we will continue to see the

erosion of fee simple property ownership in rural America.

With the influx of federal funding, the regulatory pressure

on landowners to sell will, in many cases, be insurmountable.

The legacy we will leave to future generations will not be

the preservation of our history, but the preservation of a

facade masquerading as our history subverted by the erosion

of the rights that animated our history for the first two

centuries of the Republic.

Joe Waldo, president of the Virginia property rights law firm Waldo and Lyle, said this:

The bill before Congress has nothing to do with a

``heritage trail'' but will result in a ``trail of tears''

for those least able to stand up for their property rights.

This is no more than an effort to overreach by the federal

Government with regulations that will restrict homeowners,

farmers and small business people in the use of their

property.

I ask unanimous consent, because of time limitations, to have printed in the Record the rest of these comments.

Mr. President, here is what I would say in response to the chairman's comment. It is not unreasonable to have somebody who does not own your land, has no real business on your land, ask permission to come on your land. That is an absolute subrogation of the rights guaranteed under the Constitution which we are now embracing and say it is fine to not have to get permission. That is not what comes with property rights under the Constitution. If our defense is we do not believe in the Constitution and the rights of private property rights, then I would say we are misguided in what we are doing.

This is a simple way of saying, if we are going to have heritage areas and if I am a private property owner in a heritage area and you want to come on my property and survey, you ought to have to get my permission. You should not be able to come on my land without permission to do so.

The fact is, example after example--and I will submit additionally an article from the Nation magazine on examples of exactly what happens in heritage areas to private property rights. It is called ``An Ugly Heritage.'' I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record this article.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and amendment No. 4519 be the pending business. I also ask unanimous consent that Senator McCain be added as a cosponsor.

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

Mr. President, I will try to do this fairly quickly because I know we are under a time constraint. Amendment No. 4519 requires 1 percent of the----

I will be happy to yield.

Senator McCain.

Senator McCain contacted me and asked me, requested to be a cosponsor of my amendments.

All four of these amendments, yes.

Mr. President, this amendment requires 1 percent of the new spending authorized in this bill to be used to dispose of excess, unused, and unneeded Federal property to offset some of the cost of the bill.

What we know is we have a tremendous backlog in our parks. We have a tremendous backlog in almost every land ownership we have. We have tremendous maintenance needs in the Forest Service and tremendous maintenance needs in BLM. We are suffering to care for what we have.

All this amendment says is take 1 percent--they listed 6,500 different

items they want to get rid of--and use the money to help them get rid of them so they do not continue to spend money maintaining what they don't want and don't need. At a minimum, this bill authorizes $380 million of new spending, which only represents a fraction when we actually see what will happen. We will track this. My staff will track the actual spending that comes out of this bill in terms of appropriations so we will have it for historical reference. My amendment says to take 1 percent for use to get rid of these items and then take them away. When we have gotten rid of the excess items, we would not use the money to do that and that money will go to maintain the public parks we all value so much. It will help offset the hundreds of millions of dollars of new spending in the 2,000 property assets that in the Park Service alone have been slated for disposal but cannot be sold off solely due to the lack of funding to get rid of them.

So all this does is it directs some authorization and says: Park Service, take these 2,000 things, here is some money, get rid of them-- the things you want to get rid of. And everybody agrees we should get rid of them. They haven't because they don't have the money because they have to go through all these various steps under the Federal Government's property rights legislation. But we say to them: Here is the money, so you don't continue to spend money on that, and instead you continue to spend money against this $9 billion backlog in our national parks.

What this does is it allows them to get rid of assets they no longer need. This gives them a way and the funds to do that. It allows them to truly dispose of what they want to dispose of.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, how much time do I have?

Mr. President, I will speak a minute or two, and then I will yield the Senator from Washington 5 minutes.

We actually have a time agreement on the vote, so I am happy to yield the Senator some of my time, is what I am trying do, so I end up finishing. Is there a certain amount of time you need?

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter from the Congressional Budget Office dated January 31, 2008.

Mr. President, this letter shows a cost of $320 million for these bills over the next 5 years. So this is the Congressional Budget Office. This isn't my paper, this is theirs.

I will spend a few minutes, and then I will yield back my time because I know people want to get to some votes.

Absolutely.

Assuming appropriation. Yes, it does.

If it is not appropriated. But we are not passing these bills under the assumption they are not going to be appropriated. We are passing these bills under the assumption they will be appropriated.

As a matter of fact, the promise is made as we pass this. And either it is a hollow promise you are sending back home so you can say, yes, I did this, and lie to your constituents, or we are going to appropriate the money. It is one or the other. So either we are dishonest with whom we are telling we are doing something for or we absolutely intend to appropriate it. There isn't any other option.

I will finish up by saying this. Obviously, the senior Senator from New Mexico did not hear my earlier comments. We are in tremendous economic straits in the long term. This debate is not about the lands bill. It is about will we change the philosophy, will we honor our oath, and will we start doing what is right in the long term for those who come after us. The heritage we have embraced in this country is one of sacrifice--one generation sacrifices so the next has opportunity. If we keep doing this without regard--we don't know how much we are spending; we don't know how much the monthly costs are; we are not taking care of the parks as we should because we do not have an idea; we have a hodgepodge; we have a barge floating down the river without a tug on it--we are going to make the problem worse. I will remind my colleagues, the true accounting of this year's estimate is a $607 billion deficit. That is over $2,000 for every man, woman and child in this country. Every child born today in this country inherits an unobligated obligation they will have to pay, that they got no benefit from, of $400,000.

Am I frustrating the Senators from New Mexico? You bet. Are our children worth it? You bet. I am not going to stop. I am going to stand and say we are going to think long term, we are going to start protecting property rights, we are going to start thinking about our children, and we are not going to give up because we get lectured because we are not doing it the way we have always done it. The way we have always done it has us bankrupt. It is time for a change. Republicans and Democrats alike, our children are worth it.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent we vote on the amendments in the order in which they were presented.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that we yield back all time on all amendments so our colleagues who have planes and things they want to do can get them.

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

I ask unanimous consent the pending amendment be set aside and call up amendment No. 4400.

I thank the chairman. I understand they desire no further votes on this amendment.

I ask to speak on the subject matter of my amendment, knowing that it will not get a vote--which is disturbing on such an issue as the one we have in front of us.

We are talking about housing. For years we have spent a tremendous amount of money on homelessness in this country. What this amendment would do, frankly, is help us know what to do on homelessness. It would cause us to take an in-depth look at our current state of homelessness in hopes of providing constructive solutions to that problem.

We have spent billions of dollars every year for Federal housing programs, but homelessness rates have remained constant for decades. In other words, it doesn't matter how much money we have spent, we have not seen a decline in homelessness. We ought to be about asking the question: What is wrong? We continue to spend more money. Yet we make no impact on the rate of homelessness.

A number of reviews have found Federal housing programs are ineffective and misspend too much money on nonhousing assistance, are not sufficiently

allocated or distributed, and are subject to tens of millions of dollars of waste and fraud. The waste and fraud actually has been documented. HUD's ability to effectively carry out its mission is so impaired that these shortcomings should be addressed if we ever hope to eliminate homelessness in our country.

In the past year alone the inspector general of the department found nearly $1 billion--let me restate that--one thousand million dollars in waste in HUD alone. That is their own inspector general. There is nothing in this bill that addresses this issue.

This amendment was designed for us to look at that. HUD also reported $1.5 billion, of which over 80 percent were overpayments in terms of improper payments.

The charge on the Congress is to manage the programs effectively. We have a bill before us, and we have an amendment that will help us do that. To me, it is disconcerting in the fact that we are not going to even take up and look at $2.25 billion worth of waste every year.

I have sympathies with the chairman and his ranking member in that they do not want other amendment votes. But this is an amendment we are going to see again. We are going to see it on an appropriations bill the next time we have one with anything to do with housing.

Here are the following criminal activities found at the Department of Housing and Urban Development: 2,684 arrests with the fraud, 1,338 indictments, and 1,055 convictions.

We are going to pass a housing bill, and we are not going to address these issues? We are not even going to vote on them, even though we have 1,055 convictions and 1,338 indictments on fraud and overpayment and corruption within the Department of Housing and Urban Development?

In efforts to remedy the housing problems, Congress has allocated $4 billion to HUD's community development block grants. One of the vehicles HUD uses to combat homelessness is this CDBG program. An OMB analysis determined that the CDBG grants were ineffective in accomplishing what they intended to accomplish.

The conclusion stated that major problems, including the lack of a clear purpose and an annual and long-term outcome measure--in other words, there is no metric to see if the money we are spending is doing any good. There is no requirement on us, either through this bill or any other bill, that there be a measurement to say we will spend money to help homelessness but look to see if that is effective. None of that is available. It is not available. Also, it was noted they did not target funds to the areas of greatest need. They went to the areas of greatest political influence, not the areas of greatest homelessness. And the inability to produce transparent information.

The whole idea behind this amendment would help HUD and Congress address those very issues. It also will help us know what to do about it, if we actually find them.

The average age of the world's democracies is 200 years. That is the average. They are not conquered. They die from within. They die over lose fiscal policy. Those are not my words. That is a paraphrase of the Scottish historian as he looked at the Athenian Empire and wrote about it about the time our country was being founded. I daresay I have great concerns for us as a free country when we will allow $2.25 billion a year to be defrauded out of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and then we will not allow an amendment that doesn't change it. It just says let's look at it and find out where it is and what we can do about it. We are not going to allow it on a housing bill.

It is interesting where we have come. We say we want to help the people who are in the midst of a housing emergency, in the midst of problems with their mortgages, in the midst of those who were either being gamed into a mortgage or stupidly going into a mortgage they couldn't afford, but at the same time we will not do the real work we are asked to do, which is to make sure the programs we do have, that are already authorized, already funded, are run efficiently. It is no wonder confidence in us is lacking.

Here is $2.25 billion that we could address in this bill toward a solution--toward finding out how we at least eliminate 70 or 80 percent of that, and we will not even allow an amendment to address that.

That is not a reflection on the chairman. I understand what he and the ranking member are trying to do to get this bill through. But this is not an amendment to which anybody should have any opposition. This is an amendment that should be accepted; to say, yes, we need to study this. We need to find it. Yet when we have asked for that it has been denied.

My only thought is, either we do not want to look at the fraud and we do not want to look at the overpayments or we think it is just fine.

That is what I am left with and that is what the American people are left with. Mr. President, $2.25 billion would do a lot to help a lot of people having trouble with their mortgages today. That $2.25 billion could come back in and, if directed in the proper way, could significantly increase the effort of holding onto the homes of 100,000 people. Yet we are not going to look at it.

There is no question we need to do more. Unfortunately, I am not going to be able to vote for this bill because we are going to give tax credit to builders who don't need to have a tax credit. We are going to give $4.5 billion more in CDBG block grant money that HUD already said hasn't been spent wisely to begin with. We already have $1 billion worth of fraud in it. I will not support the bill.

I do support the right of the chairman in managing the bill in the way he is managing it at the present time, but I also will say this amendment will be back--as it should--not just for us, and not, as it should, just for the taxpayers but the real taxpayers who are going to pay back this $2.25 billion, which is our kids.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, first of all, I am the individual who has a hold on that bill because I think we need to have real property reform, and there is a bill that is coming out of the Homeland Security Committee that is a bipartisan bill authored by Senator Carper, with the cosponsorship of both Senator Collins and Senator Lieberman, that has real property reform.

As the Senator knows, McKinney-Vento places a limitation on all Federal properties before they can ever be disposed of. So the real property reform needs to go through at the same time the McKinney-Vento bill goes through so that we reform both of those, so that we still protect the rights of the homeless in this country but at the same time enable the agencies of the Federal Government to dispose of them. We now have 22,000 pieces of property the Federal Government does not want but we can't get rid of. So the reason that is being held up is we are trying to get those to move together and in tandem so that we can fix both problems at the same time.

I would say this in response to the Senator. I understand how you have locked arms to move this bill, but what the American people are not going to understand is, if there is $2 billion worth of waste--and there is; the IG of HUD said it, there is no question about it, a billion dollars worth of fraud, a thousand convictions, another $1.2 billion in overpayments to supposed landlords. There is no reason not to fix that right now. It can be fixed with this bill. This bill is going to get passed, it is going to get signed. Move it and fix it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, 5 years ago, Africa was in crisis and in despair. HIV/AIDS was decimating whole communities. Some countries, such as Botswana, were literally on a path to extinction, with rates of HIV infection among pregnant women in some locations reaching as high as 40 and even 50 percent. In South Africa, while a third of pregnant woman were infected with the virus, the country's political leaders were actually denying that AIDS was caused by HIV infection, an ominous sign that little help was on the way for the over 4 million South Africans--over 10 percent of the population--dying of AIDS.

In 2003, if a woman in sub-Saharan Africa was infected with HIV, the familiar story was all too oft-repeated. She would very likely watch her husband die first, and then her youngest children would also become infected either at birth or through breastfeeding, as she languished under her own death sentence. Within a short time, her children would be orphans, left to fend for themselves in the streets and slums of Nairobi, or Soweto, often getting sick with their own HIV infections and dying alone, without food or shelter or medicine.

The sheer numbers at the time were staggering. The disease affected well over 20 million people in sub-Saharan Africa by the year 2000, roughly equivalent to the total number of American children under 6 years old. The problem seemed overwhelming, indeed hopeless.

What was the world doing to stop the carnage? Were there armies of doctors sweeping in with the miracle drugs that had been saving lives in America and other rich countries for nearly a decade? No. The U.S. was spending under $200 million a year on HIV/AIDS overseas, mostly on report-writing, some condom marketing, and ``capacity-building'' programs that never actually used any of the capacity supposedly built and that had no measurable impact on the devouring epidemic.

Treatment was the demand of most global health activists of the day. An indignant group gathered in South Africa in 2002. ``While a necessary component of the response to HIV/AIDS, prevention will never be enough,'' insisted Winston Zulu of the Network of Zambian People Living with HIV/AIDS (NZP+). ``When will the world wake up to the fact that the 16 million Africans that have already died of HIV/AIDS? This is only the beginning if we continue down the prevention-only path. This movement will make treatment, which we all know strengthens prevention efforts, our priority demand.'' Domestic and international chapters of ACT-UP and others were heckling U.S. officials at international health conferences, demanding antiretroviral treatment for people with HIV/AIDS in the developing world, especially in Africa.

And then something remarkable happened. On a cold January night in

Washington, DC, far from the overcrowded, underequipped clinics of Africa, an American president made a promise--a $15 billion promise to provide treatment to millions of Africans, within 5 years.

Anti-retroviral drugs can extend life for many years. And

the cost of those drugs has dropped from $12,000 a year to

under $300 a year--which places a tremendous possibility

within our grasp. Ladies and gentlemen, seldom has history

offered a greater opportunity to do so much for so

many...tonight I propose the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief--

a work of mercy beyond all current international efforts to

help the people of Africa. This comprehensive plan will

prevent 7 million new AIDS infections, treat at least 2

million people with life-extending drugs, and provide humane

care for millions of people suffering from AIDS, and for

children orphaned by AIDS.--President George W. Bush, State

of the Union Address, Jan. 28, 2003.

Glimmers of hope ignited around the world that night, as the U.S. policy against providing treatment in a foreign aid program came to an abrupt and inspiring end. The Congress took up the challenge, and passed a bill a few months later that was ground-breaking, a seismic shift in current policy and funding levels. The first and perhaps most dramatic policy shift was the statutory requirement that over half, a full 55 percent of all $15 billion of the program's funding be spent on life-saving medical treatment for people with HIV/AIDS.

People said it couldn't be done. The naysayers said that Africans would not be able to adhere to complex drug regimens. They said that there simply wasn't the capacity to absorb all those dollars and build new clinics and expand hospital wings. They said people wouldn't come from miles around to get tested and treated. We wouldn't be able to use mopeds and bicycles to deliver drugs to the rural hinterlands. There weren't enough doctors. There wasn't sufficient logistic ability to store so many drugs. These arguments are being repeated today. They were uninspired and uninformed in 2003 and they still are today. The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, PEPFAR, has proven them all wrong.

Since PEPFAR started, over 1.4 million people who would either be dead or dying today have received life-saving antiretroviral treatment. That's millions of children who didn't become orphans. Millions of parents who get to see their children grow up. Millions of moms whose babies were protected from infection. Countless communities across the plains and prairies, streets and slums of Africa and the Caribbean, where hope has taken a foothold. Where once stigma and despair kept people from even getting tested, people now come out by the thousands on HIV testing days in Kampala and elsewhere.

PEPFAR is a comprehensive program, investing heavily in prevention and care as well as treatment. However, the majority of the funds have been spent on treatment. The true nature of PEPFAR, the appeal of the program, the miracle that has raised millions from the dead is the program's commitment to life-saving anti- retroviral treatment. If you ask Africans what PEPFAR is, they'll tell you it's about AIDS treatment. It is the treatment component of PEPFAR that has made it the most successful U.S. humanitarian effort in history because it has literally saved the lives of millions, preserved families and communities, and rescued countless babies from being born with an AIDS death sentence.

Five years later, the American people stand at a crossroads. PEPFAR is expiring and the true test of our commitment to life-saving treatment is before us. We have a choice. Will we lose heart? Will we lose our focus? Will we allow a program that was ambitious, inspiring, targeted and tangibly and measurably effective at saving lives become diluted, vague, ill-defined and lose its life-saving impact? Will we allow partisanship and competing priorities and even some good intentions cloud and subvert the long-term success of PEPFAR? Will we turn PEPFAR into just another bloated, unmeasured and unmeasurable foreign aid program with no accountability and no real impact, a program that tries to do too much and accomplishes too little? As funding increases and rhetoric builds, will we, in this moment of testing, betray our historic commitment to Africa and the lives of millions of its inhabitants?

It is embarrassing to admit that we find ourselves on a direct path to that shameful outcome. The once loud and indignant voices demanding treatment for Africans have found other priorities, it would seem. Inexplicably and inexcusably, the House and Senate PEPFAR reauthorization bills, negotiated with the approval of the Administration, reverse what was undoubtedly the most important element of PEPFAR the requirement that the majority of funding be spent on HIV/ AIDS treatment. What's more, the bills more than triple PEPFAR funding, but only increase treatment targets by 50 percent. Despite their $50 billion price-tags, the House-passed bill and the Senate committee- reported bill would only add an additional one million people, of the many more millions in need, to the treatment rolls over the next five years. It seems that, after five years focusing on helping people with HIV/AIDS, the focus of the program under these proposed reauthorizations would shift to helping the foreign aid ``industrial complex'' of USAID contractors based in the U.S. and European capitals. The proposed reauthorization bills would prioritize literally every possible development cause except HIV diagnosis and treatment.

It is this glaring policy reversal that is the impetus for S. 2749, the ``Save Lives First Act of 2008.'' The bill reinstates the current policy requiring at least 55 percent of funding to go to life-saving medical treatment for people infected with HIV/AIDS. It also allocates a small percentage of funding for the critical diagnostic screening that must be ramped up dramatically if we are to locate and treat every infected person in the countries where PEPFAR operates. Finally, the bill acknowledges that every baby infected with HIV by her mother during birth or breastfeeding is a largely preventable tragedy that should be eliminated.

Although we have grave concerns about many other policies in the House and Senate reauthorization bills, including the prevention policy, the expansion of funding to rich countries, the ``mission creep'' that diverts funding from high-priority HIV/AIDS programs to lower-priority development programs, and others, we chose to focus in the Save Lives First Act on the critical problem of the House and Senate bills' betrayal of the President's and the 108th Congress' historic commitment to life-saving HIV/AIDS treatment.

There is no question that PEPFAR has been the most successful foreign aid program since the Marshall Plan. The structural reason for its success is that it approaches and addresses AIDS for what it is--a viral epidemic. Though much may have changed in the past four years, this simple fact has not, and will not, change.

Regardless of location, demography, mode of transmission, and so forth, the basic method of combating an epidemic, any epidemic, is the same: find the infected, provide them care, and help them prevent transmission to others. There are 33 million people living with HIV, and only they can prevent the transmission of the disease. If we find the people with HIV, we could not only treat them, but yes, prevent new infections as well. That's why treatment and testing are critical to prevention efforts. They are not the whole story--behavior change programs are needed--but diagnosis and treatment are two of the foundations of disease control. What's more, prevention through education is far less costly than treatment. Uganda's success in the 1990s proved that with the proper message and political leadership, behavior change that reduces transmission rates dramatically can be achieved fairly inexpensively. The current PEPFAR program and its original authorizing legislation are appropriately structured on this foundation of diagnosis, treatment and successful prevention.

So what are the mechanics of treating people? First, you must diagnose those who are infected. That is why this bill designates specific funding for performing rapid tests, and sets testing target goals. If we test 1 billion people over the next 5 years, we will discover the vast majority of all those living with HIV. However, experience shows that people will not get tested, no matter how much they may want to, without an incentive to know their status. It cannot be disputed that people

known to be HIV positive suffer enormous stigma and discrimination throughout the world, and therefore need an incentive strong enough to overcome this.

The incentive is treatment. If people know that, should they be found to be HIV positive, there is hope and health in their future, they will have an incentive to get tested. The promise of a longer and healthier life is necessary to overcome the stigma--and, in a self-reinforcing loop, the presence of treatment, and the effect of people literally returning from the dead, goes a long way to reduce HIV stigma. That is one of the reasons why the Save Lives First Act maintains the 55 percent allocation of PEPFAR funding for treatment, and seeks to increase the number of people treated proportionally to the increase in overall funding.

The AIDS drug nevirapine, which costs only $4 per treatment, can dramatically reduce the likelihood that a newborn will become infected with HIV. Yet a new U.N. report delivers the news that only a quarter of HIV-positive pregnant women in poorer countries are receiving the medication needed to prevent baby AIDS. Furthermore, the number of AIDS orphans in poorer countries continues to increase, and in sub-Saharan Africa an estimated 12.1 million children in 2007 had lost one or both parents to HIV.

By sticking to the fundamental disease control methods of testing and treatment, new infections are prevented. First, we have seen here in the U.S. that people who know their HIV status are less likely to engage in risky behavior--they seek to protect themselves and their partners. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the 25 percent of Americans who don't know their HIV status transmit 50-75 percent of new infections. What's more, a recent study has suggested that increased testing in the U.S. reduced infection. Further, people who are receiving treatment have less of the virus in them, and are less infectious. There is increasing evidence documenting this phenomenon. Behavior change programs targeted to the general population, most of whom are uninfected, may help reduce infection rates to a point, but it is hard to think of a more direct preventive measure than rendering an HIV positive person less infectious and less likely to infect others.

Therefore, claims that the bill does not address prevention are simply untrue. First, billions and billions of dollars not dedicated to treatment and testing are available for prevention in the House and Senate bills. After spending 55 percent of the $50 billion in the bills on lifesaving treatment, there will still be $27.5 billion left over from which prevention programs could be funded, dramatically more programs than under the current, $15 billion program. Second, and to an important extent, testing and treatment are part of an effective prevention approach.

In addition, some have claimed that the Save Lives First Act significantly increases costs, anywhere from $13-$17 billion. These claims miss the point of the Save Lives First Act--which is not to add to costs, but to prioritize how authorized funds are spent. As the attached treatment cost analysis shows, the total dollar amount for all drugs, test kits, and prevention-of-mother-to-child-transmission materials needed to meet the goals in the bill is just over $11 billion (using conservative assumptions about costs that are likely to be lower in reality due to government discounts). A reauthorization bill containing $50 billion plus numerous ``such sums'' authorities, such as the bills under current consideration in the House and Senate, would contain sufficient money to meet these goals as well as procure the infrastructure necessary to deliver these drugs and diagnostic tests. These costs are not added on top of the proposed reauthorization spending levels, as some have claimed. Rather, the Save Lives First Act takes the first 55 percent of all funding in any reauthorization bill-- whatever the ultimate amount of funding turns out to be--$30 billion, $50 billion or more (as is actually likely given the current appropriations frenzy in the Congress)--and directs it to treatment costs. If meeting the heroic targets in our bill--adding 5 million new people to treatment (in addition to the 2 million already in treatment), conducting a billion HIV tests, and saving babies from being infected by their moms--ends up costing more than 55 percent of PEPFAR funding, we challenge any critic to think of a better use of funds. However, as the attached chart demonstrates, there will be plenty of money in a $50 billion bill left for prevention and care after meeting the requirements of the Save Lives First Act.

The current alternative to this approach, as embodied by the House and Senate bills containing no money dedicated to testing and treatment--is that millions of people will die for lack of treatment. In addition, the vast majority of people with HIV will remain ignorant of their status, and will continue to unknowingly infect others, continuing the cycle that led to the devastating epidemic we now face. Letting people die, and keeping people ignorant of their status, is not the way to end this epidemic. We recognize this truth here in the U.S., where we spend 11 percent annually on prevention, but 67 percent on treatment out of a total budget of $23.3 billion spent on AIDS domestically.

Some have argued that a heroic American commitment to testing and treatment such as the targets in the Save Lives First Act will discourage other donors from supporting diagnosis and treatment. The truth is that other donors have yet to demonstrate substantial commitment to bilateral treatment programs. Most other donors prefer to fund treatment through their contributions to the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a multilateral organization affiliated with the United Nations, to which the U.S. is the largest (by far) contributor. That is what the Global Fund is for--to create efficiencies of scale and allow smaller donors to contribute to those more efficient programs rather than reinventing the wheel and starting up their own bilateral programs. When other donors do invest in bilateral efforts, it is almost always on the prevention side--funding needle exchanges for drug users, condom and ``empowerment'' programs for prostitutes, and other prevention efforts in Africa, Asia and eastern Europe, usually based on behavior change programs. This is all the more reason why one donor, the U.S., needs to focus on diagnosis and treatment--the rest of the donor community is not as committed to these programs compared to other approaches. But let's say that other donors want to support treatment--great! We welcome their participation. There is so much to do--between 7 and 8.4 million people still need treatment today. PEPFAR certainly can't treat everyone in a given year, and will have to rely on the efforts of others going forward, if we want to bring hope to everyone affected by this dreadful disease.

We are proud of PEPFAR and the millions of miracles it has created already in its first four years of operation. The American people can look at PEPFAR and, unlike what they'll find with most government programs, they can see measurable and tangible results in the faces of the millions saved and cared for with U.S. funding. PEPFAR isn't ``broken,'' and it doesn't require ``fixing'' in its reauthorization-- it's a stunning success. The burden of proof is on those who want to radically change PEPFAR policies, not on those of us who want to preserve them. We look forward to working with the President and House and Senate leaders to ensure that PEPFAR continues its successful, miraculous, life-saving track record.

Bertha, a 23-year-old PEPFAR treatment client in Tanzania speaks for millions when she says, ``If it is not these ARVs, I think I was dead long time ago because I use and I am still using these drugs. Now I can do anything. I'm healthy and I'm strong.''

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my endnotes and graph be printed in the Record.

Madam President, the only cost in this country that has risen faster than medical care has been college education. There is no shortage of student loan money under Government-guaranteed loans. We sent $77 billion to colleges and universities last year, half of them through earmarks.

The more money we send to universities, the higher the tuitions go. That is one of the reasons it is higher than it is today. According to the Secretary, in a study issued this last week, there is no shortage of available student loans among the federally backed Student Loan Guarantee Program. There is a slight shortage in the 10-percent private.

This amendment does not address or increase at all the availability that is already there. So we are not doing anything with this amendment other than spending the very money these kids are going to have to pay back. By borrowing now, they will have to pay it back two and threefold.

Mr. President, 40 percent of the money in the United Nations is absolutely wasted. They will not report transparency in anything they do. We know on their procurement it is at least 40 percent. We know 25 percent of the last peacekeeping operation was wasted through fraud. We should not send another penny to the United Nations until they become transparent with how they are spending the money they have now.

I urge my colleagues to vote in opposition.

Mr. President, how much time does the Senator from Utah have?

According to the agreement we had, that would put us until 7:25 when Senator Brown would be eligible to speak; is that right?

I thank the chair.

Mr. President, I am going to spend a little while tonight talking about the budget. I have listened to the budget debate all day, just like I did yesterday. I came in yesterday and listened to the debate. I have heard about tax increases and I have heard about spending and I have heard the things going back and forth. But what I did not hear was anything that had to do with this: This is the oath of a Senator. There are some interesting things. Let me read it first:

I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the

Constitution of the United States against all enemies,

foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and

allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely,

without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and

that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the

office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

The interesting thing about that oath is nowhere in that oath does it mention your State. There was, by design, never any intended part by our Founders that we would place parochialism ahead of our duty to this country. Yet where do we find ourselves today? With $9 trillion, almost $10 trillion, at the end of this fiscal year, in direct debt.

We have heard all sorts of numbers quoted today. The actual number for the obligated unpaid-for liabilities that our next generations will face is actually $79 trillion. It is interesting where that comes from because that comes from the retirement benefits for our service personnel, the retirement benefits for Federal employees, including people who work in this Chamber, Medicare payments, Medicaid payments, all the various trust funds we have set up through the years, such as the Inland Waterway Trust Fund, the trust funds associated with other distinct obligations in terms of infrastructure in this country. We are stealing all that money every year that is supposed to go to it. As a matter of fact, the budget deficit this year will be, in real accounting standards--not Enron accounting standards--$607 billion, of which about $160 billion of that is going to come from Social Security and about another $30 billion to $35 billion from all these other trust funds.

So when you hear a number that comes from Washington, I want us to be very suspect because we are much like the CEO at Enron, Ken Lay. We are not going to send you the real number. It is not because we do not intend to be honest; it is because we have sold out to parochialism.

Now, I want us to think about that for a minute. Later on, I am going to show some examples. I am going to go through $350 billion-plus worth of waste that occurs annually in this country. But how is it that we have $350 billion--by the way, it is not going to be disputable. There is going to be an absolute reference to either a GAO study, a CBO score, a congressional hearing or published reports that are out there. So it is not going to be Tom Coburn's estimate. It is going to be a factual basis of what is occurring in our country.

But how is it we got to the point where Members of Congress--both of the House and of the Senate--have all of a sudden forgotten what their oath is; that, in fact, their primary means is: How do I send more money home to my State? How is it that we have gotten to where we have $79 trillion in unfunded liabilities? We have $10 trillion in true debt, at the end of this fiscal year. We are going to have a $600 billion deficit--real deficit--this year, which we are going to obligate our children to pay for.

I would put forth: We forgot our oath. We forgot what it is about. Our State is not mentioned. When I am parochial for my State, there is no way I can live up to the oath I took when I came into this body. There is no way, if I am parochial for Oklahoma or Ohio, I can possibly make a decision that is in the long-term best interest of the country, when I am thinking about the best interest of my State in the short term.

So, consequently, what came about from that? Well, here is what we saw in terms of earmarks, the growth of earmarks and the growth of Government spending. Isn't it interesting, we have heard all the debate today about tax increases, but nobody, except Senator Brownback, talked about cutting spending. Here we have the earmarks in 2006. In 2007, there were another 11,800 earmarks. So it went to 12,000 earmarks. But the spending continues to rise. There is a correlation between earmarks and spending, and it is this: Earmarks are the gateway drug for overspending.

Let me explain how it works. If I want something for Oklahoma and I submit a request and the appropriators are kind enough to honor that request and I do not vote for the bill, regardless of whether I agree with the bill, the next time another appropriations bill comes up and I have a request, I will not get it. So all of a sudden my earmark blinds me on a parochial basis for what is best for Oklahoma, but I do not do what is best for the country. So you see this trend going up, and it continues to go up. If you had one for debt, you would see that. If you had one for unfunded liabilities, you would see the same thing.

Now, what did our Founders have to say:

Congress had not unlimited powers to provide for the

general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically

enumerated.

This is Thomas Jefferson, the founder of the Democratic Party. This is what he said:

As it was never meant they should provide for that welfare

but by the exercise of the enumerated powers.

Earmarks are not enumerated powers. The only power they are is how we find ways to get ourselves reelected. That is the power they are. Here is the founder of the modern Democratic Party who now chastises us with his words about what earmarks are.

Yet what do we do? We are going to have a vote. We are going to have a vote on this budget on a moratorium on earmarks. I am very thankful to Senator DeMint for bringing that up.

The argument about earmarks is over everywhere except in Washington. If you look at all the polling data throughout the country, in every State, it does not matter if you are Democrat or Republican or Independent, it is over. They have already decided the issue. Eighty- five percent of the people in this country say we should not be doing it. It does not have anything to do with age. It does not have anything to do with party. Do you know what it has to do with? Those people who are getting them and are well heeled and well connected to politicians, they are the ones who do not want the earmark party to be over. That ought to send a warning signal to the rest of Americans that there is something wrong with this process.

Here is what is wrong with the process:

[T]he principle of spending money to be paid by posterity,

under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a

large scale.

This is the same bright man who was very involved in the genesis of our country, talking to us from history about what is important on earmarks.

In 1996, there were less than 900 earmarks. How did we go--in 10 short years--from 3,000 to 15,000? What changed? The argument is: We have an obligation not to let the bureaucrats spend the money. Does that mean all the time before this, when they were much lower, we were not doing a good job? Or could it be that all of a sudden the political tool of earmarks became the soup du jour that politicians use to get themselves reelected and collect campaign money by accomplishing those things?

So I wish to spend a little time tonight talking about the unsustainable course we are on. International markets now doubt our ability to pay off our debt. Our AAA credit rating is in jeopardy. The dollar is declining. Medicare has hit a trigger for the first time in its history that signals we are dipping into general revenues at a rate that is unsustainable. By the way, Medicare was never intended to be paid for with funds from general revenue. Do we have a moral obligation as Members of Congress to do what every other family does in tough times and tighten our belts?

So what I am going to try to do tonight is lay out $388 billion worth of things the Congress could do tomorrow that would save us $388 billion.

Now, somebody may dispute the fact that if we totally changed the Tax Code to either a flat tax or a sales tax we might not have a tax gap-- the amount that is owed that is not paid--of $350 billion or $370 billion. We may only have one of $270 billion. I will admit that. So you can take an arrow at that. But the rest of it you cannot take an arrow at. All the rest of it is indisputable.

As a matter of fact, we had testimony before the Budget Committee and before the Finance Committee by the IRS that said if, in fact, you funded them properly, they could get between $30 billion and $40 billion of the tax gap back over a period of 5 years. We know for every $1 we give them in terms of enforcement, they get $3 to $4 back.

The problem in our country is overspending and wasteful spending. It is not undertaxation. It is a moral question whether we will ask the American people for more money when, in fact, we are terrible slobs with the way we control and manage the money they have today, where we are wasteful.

The American people would expect us to get rid of fraud, waste, and abuse before we raise their taxes. Calling for higher taxes is akin to saying you want a performance bonus for us. That is what it is saying. It is absurd to claim the Government is operating at peak efficiency and spending cannot be cut anywhere. But yet we do not see it. It is not just the Democratic budgets. It is the Republican budgets. I will give credit to President Bush. At least he has a park program and at least they have brought forward recommendations of getting rid of programs that absolutely are not functioning, absolutely do not come anywhere close to meeting the goals. Because they have special interests, they are protected by individual Senators. Blocking new spending is not about obstructionism. The real obstruction is wasteful spending and not going after the wasteful spending at a time when we are asking Americans, who are tightening their belts, to give more money to the Government. That is the real obstruction.

Looking for new ways to spend money is not our job. Our job is to conduct oversight and eliminate programs that are not working. We are not doing our oversight. As a matter of fact, the CRS did a study on oversight. If we put this sign right up here and we look at oversight hearings, what you will see is: As the earmarks have gone up, oversight has gone down. Do you know why? Because the only thing the Appropriations staff has time to do is to barely get the bill out and then manage all the earmarks. So where is the oversight to see what is working and what is not? It isn't there.

The other assumption with this budget is that we have a blank check-- and with Republican budgets, not just the majority's budgets--to spend money however we desire, however we choose. Well, that does not appear in the Constitution. We have totally thrown it away when it comes to spending. We have totally thrown it away under the concept of either the interstate commerce clause or the general welfare clause. We have decided that those do not mean anything, even though the significant Founders of our country believed they did.

So let's go back to the oath. Does the oath mean anything? I will ``defend the Constitution'' is what it says. Oh, that means I will twist it to make sure I can do parochial things that make me look good at home. Is that what it means? Can I fully represent and do what is best for our country when I am worried about doing what is best for my State and me? Which one is the more moral position?

James Madison, the father of our Constitution, was very clear on this point. He said:

With respect to the two words ``general welfare,'' I have

always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers

enumerated in the Constitution that are connected with it. To

take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a

metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which

there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its

creators.

In other words, when you are starting to fudge the deal, that is not what we intended, guys. When you are starting to play games with the Constitution, that is not what we intended. And he spoke it in anticipation so that he would be on record. And we would know what his record was about, what they intended about general welfare. The arguments we hear in defense of earmarks would be ridiculed by our Founders after they got over their nausea.

President Reagan criticized the 1987 highway bill because it had 152 earmarks. As a matter of fact, the one before that he vetoed and sent back, and it had even fewer than that. So this isn't an old phenomenon; this is a modern phenomenon. This is something modern that we need to change.

It is interesting that so many in this body seem more interested in adhering to the constitutional scholarship of Jack Abramoff rather than James Madison, much to our detriment. Why do you think we have between an 11 and 22 percent confidence rating from the American people about whether we are doing their business in the best interests of the country, rather than our business?

Another argument I hear often is that we know better than faceless bureaucrats. Yet if we don't like what an agency is doing, we don't have anyone to blame but ourselves. We have the power of the purse and the power of oversight. The problem is we only use the power of the purse to spend, not to restrict. The last time a rescission bill--and for those who don't know what that is, it is a bill that decreases rather than increases spending--went through Congress was 1995.

Overcoming our addiction to earmarks will help us confront the massive waste that is in the Federal budget. We have to do a top-down review of everything in this country if, in fact, we want to hold to the things that are really important, the things that are really worth our sacrifice, which is the next two generations.

Now, it is really interesting that the Government Accounting Office says that every family today is responsible for an unfunded liability of almost a half million dollars. If we think about what that means in terms of carrying that interest, paying your regular taxes and then carrying that--the other thing is if you divide the unfunded liability by the 200 million kids

who are going to come on between now and the next 75 years, what we are talking about is $400,000 per child; $400,000 per individual child who is born starting today and moving forward that we are going to add. Think about carrying the interest. Think about what will happen to them.

Now, let me put up a chart, and we will go through this for a minute. This has $383 billion--actually a more recent chart shows $385 billion--in annual expenditures that are wasted. I would like to spend a minute on that, but let me describe what it is. It is $3,000 for every American household in this country down the drain. It is a full 4-year scholarship for two-thirds of all of the college students in this country. It is enough money to buy a new home for 2 million Americans, based on the average price of a home. It is enough money to get the 2 million Americans who are facing foreclosure out of foreclosure and pay for their entire mortgage. That is what we are wasting in one year. It is enough money to pay for the health care of everybody in this country who is either underinsured or uninsured. All 47 million who are uninsured and the 35 million who are underinsured, we can pay for them, just by getting rid of this waste.

It is more than the gross domestic product of 85 percent of every country on Earth. How much we are wasting through fraud and abuse and waste is greater than 85 percent of the gross domestic product of every country on this Earth. It is more than the gross domestic product of 40 States in our Union. It is enough to meet the one campaign's annual goals to end extreme poverty over the next 10 years, over 10 times not enough. More importantly, it is enough to build 1,500 bridges to nowhere over every river in the world, times 10. That is how much money it is.

So what are the crises that we face? It is important that we put ourselves in the shoes of the typical American family in this time of tightening. What do they do? They reassess. They look for waste. Their debt is fixed. They try not to get additional debt. They try to spend less money. They try to conserve. They try to turn the thermostat down. They try to only drive when they have to drive. They try to buy cheaper foods. They don't buy the things they would like to buy. They buy and spend money only on bare necessities, if they can.

Well, a $607 billion deficit this year, a $10 trillion debt, and a $79 trillion unfunded liability ought to cause us to do the same thing, except we have only heard 1 percent in 2 days of debate talk about eliminating wasteful spending, and that was Senator Sam Brownback from Kansas.

In the short term, we will get through this economic slowdown. Hopefully, energy prices will become more affordable for us. But everybody knows in this body, whether we want to admit it or not, we are approaching the day of reckoning that we would not get through. As David Walker, who is the Comptroller General of the United States, a nonpartisan position, said: We are on an unsustainable course. It is absolutely unsustainable. The question is whether our kids are worth us making the hard choices.

Economists on the left and the right from groups ranging from the Brookings Institute to the Heritage Foundation recognize the course we are on. We hear all the time that the only problems are the mandatory programs: Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid. I am going to show tonight that it is not the only problem. It is a lot of the problem, there is no question about it. It is not just the demographics of it and the growth. There are a lot of management problems that we fail to address.

Each family's share, which I spoke about a minute ago, of the unfunded liabilities is over $450,000 right now. By 2040--and this is not my number, this is the Government Accounting Office--total Federal spending will have to be cut by 60 percent or we will have to double Federal income tax rates.

Now, we heard Senator Hatch talk about how 50 percent of the country now pays 97 percent of the taxes. What happens when we double our tax rates, or another question is, what happens when we don't have any Government programs except Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security? No military, no Department of Education, no NASA, no NIH, no CDC. All of those are gone in a very few short years. More importantly, in 2012, my generation starts heavily hitting Medicare and Social Security, the first baby boomers. What happens if we don't address that?

We would be wise to remember the words of Will Durant:

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it

has destroyed itself from within.

For the typical family sitting around the dinner table right now across America, the answer is obvious. It is time for some belt tightening. It is time for us to do the hard work of eliminating the duplication of wasteful programs. From their perspective, if they have to tighten their belt, we should too. It is not our money, it is theirs. Yet in this body we don't believe we have to live by the same set of rules. We have demonstrated that by our behavior. We like to pretend that we don't live in the world of credit ratings and scores. We ignore economic realities and look for ways to spend money on things that aren't necessary--they may be nice but aren't necessary--with little regard to how our decisions are going to affect our ability to pay for things we must pay for.

By arguing that Americans aren't taxed enough, Members of Congress are claiming that Government spending can't be cut any more in the budget because the Government is running so efficiently it deserves a raise. I don't think there is hardly anybody out in America's midsection, northeast, northwest, southeast, southwest, south central, who believes that. That is a fairy tale that is believed here, except we don't confront it.

Every year we have given Congress a performance bonus that has been adamantly unearned. Americans find this absurd. That is one of the reasons our approval rating is so low.

A question we should ask probably is, if our Nation's survival were at stake right now, would we be acting any differently? Would we have this budget, or the Republican budget, from 2006? Would those have been the budgets? No, they wouldn't have been. We would have been thinking long term. We would have been making the hard decisions. We would have said: Our country is worth us irritating some special interest group over some item that is no longer efficient or no longer effective. We wouldn't be worried about weighing the future of our children and our grandchildren against the special interests and monied of this country. We wouldn't worry about it.

Well, the fact is, the future is on the line, and if we don't act in the next couple of years, we are going to fall into Will Durant's trap, as we will have rotted inside our own excesses of politics, as we quietly didn't do the things that we could have done to fix the problems that are in front of this country.

It is called maintenance. It is like when you don't mow your grass or you don't pick up the trash in front of your yard. What happens is the value goes down, the pride goes down. Well, that is what has happened to us because myself and the vast majority of Americans believe overspending is a greater moral challenge than undertaxation.

I want to spend some time now going through what I call 2008, a waste odyssey. This waste odyssey is--I am going to be describing a few areas of Government, and I am going to go through them fairly fast so we can see it, and it will be on my Web site in the next week or so. But I am going to outline at least $385 billion, of which I will guarantee $355 billion of it cannot be legitimately challenged that is not waste; $355 billion annually that is wasted or defrauded from the taxpayers of this country, and we are doing nothing about it. This budget doesn't do anything about it; our appropriations oversight committees don't do anything about it. The committees don't make the amendments to do something about it. We do nothing about it. So we come back to that all-important oath. Mr. President, $385 billion listed, $383 billion on this one chart, $385 billion of which $355 billion nobody will be able to dispute.

(Mr. BROWN assumed the Chair.)

Here is what we know. Medicare fraud, out and out pure Medicare fraud. It is somewhere between $70 billion and $90 billion. I picked the middle, which is $80 billion. We have

testimony and studies and lots of data on that that will show us that at least $80 billion worth of Medicare money is being ripped off every year.

Let me give some examples. I will go through some. Here is one company that billed Medicare $170 million for HIV drugs. Do you know how much in HIV drugs they did? Less than a million. But they billed $170 million. There was $142 million for nonexistent delivery of supplies and parts and medical equipment--$142 million.

How about taking Medicare numbers from seniors and billing Medicare for prosthetic arms on people who already have two arms? That came to $1.4 billion last year. Think about that--$1.4 billion was billed to Medicare for prosthetic arms for people who don't need prosthetic arms.

How about 80 percent of the drugs billed across the entire United States for HIV under Medicare went to the State of Florida, which has less than 10 percent of the HIV patients who are eligible for Medicare. How is that possible? How about one wheelchair that got billed to Medicare? It was never sent, but they billed $5 million to Medicare through multiple billings. It is easy to add up to $80 billion.

I could go on. How about fake Medicare providers for the elderly, when they steal their number and send multiple bills to multiple locations throughout the country for the same Medicare patient. That is $10 billion in improper payments. The actual improper payments were $37 billion the year before last, and $27 billion last year and of that, $10 billion of it is unrecoverable. We paid too much or we paid the wrong person. That is $10 billion out the door, which is $250 per man, woman, and child in this country in improper payments on Medicare.

Medicaid is another one. There was $30 billion worth of fraud. It is higher than that; that is only the Federal Government's portion of it. It is easily documented, but we cannot document it because Medicaid doesn't file improper payments like the law says they are supposed to. Why? It is because we have not had the guts to put any teeth into forcing HHS to have improper payments. Last year, finally we got 6 months of improper payments on only direct payments to doctors. They found $13 billion worth of improper payments. We have a report that says there is probably $15 billion worth of fraud in Medicaid in New York City alone, of which the Federal Government's share would be about $8 billion to $9 billion.

How about the fact that we paid, in 10 States, over $30 million for payments for Medicaid services to people who are dead? Yes, we paid that. We have a great system that is working well. How about the fact that 65 percent of all Medicaid rehabilitative services are fraudulent? So of the rehab bills that are filed with Medicaid through CMS, 65 percent are fraudulent.

Why do we continue to let that happen? Where is the oversight? Ninety percent of New York Medicaid school-based service claims were illegitimate. Case management. CMS reports that in one State, 72.4 percent of the claims weren't valid in terms of Medicaid case management.

Then we have the infamous drug scandals with the drug companies that have been overbilling to the tune of a billion dollars.

How about Social Security disability fraud? We have that listed at $2.5 billion. What we know is the following: There is at least $6.5 billion in improper payments in Social Security disability. So we have paid them a much smaller percentage than we have on any other improper payment program throughout the Federal Government and said we will take a small percentage of that, less than 40 percent, which is normally 80 percent, and we will list it at $2.5 billion. It is coming out of Social Security every year--totally wrong--and that $2.5 billion could stay in the SSI program to fund people who were truly disabled. Yet we let $2.5 billion sneak out. Why? That is us. We have not done the oversight.

If you add up all of the rest of the improper payments in the Federal Government, you come to $55 billion. That is what is reported. But that doesn't include the 18 agencies of the Federal Government that don't even report improper payments, even though it is the law, which accounts for another $179 billion worth of spending. And if they are anywhere close to the rest of it, there is 5 to 10 percent of improper payments. So there is anywhere from $3 billion to $7 billion more in improper payments.

DOD performance awards. Here is what we have done. Over the last 3 years, the DOD paid out $8 billion on average a year to contractors for performance bonuses that didn't meet the performance requirements of their contract. Think about that--$8 billion a year. That is almost twice the total budget of my home State that we are paying for performance bonuses for contractors that don't meet the requirements of the contract, but we pay them anyway. Why do we allow that? Why do we allow that to happen?

How about DOD maintenance of unneeded properties? We have testimony and a report that shows they have 22,000 pieces of property they don't want. They are spending about $3 billion maintaining properties they don't want. But we put roadblocks in the way so they cannot get rid of them. Is that Americans' fault or is that something we should have addressed? We didn't do it. Consequently, we are going to throw out $3 billion more this year to maintain properties we should have sold 5 to 10 years ago.

We also know that within the Federal Government, outside of the DOD, we have another $18 billion worth of properties we cannot get rid of because we cannot go through the hundreds of hoops we have to be able to get rid of them. That is a one-time savings. That is not even on here. That is a one-time savings we would achieve if we had a real property reform that forced the bureaucracy to do what was best when it came to real property.

Going back to the performance bonuses, when GAO looked at it, they found no connection between the payment of performance bonuses at the Pentagon and performance--not just on this $8 billion they said was paid erroneously, but on the rest of it. I think we have an Armed Services Committee in the Senate. We certainly have a DOD Appropriations Committee in the Senate. You would think this might be one thing we wanted to do oversight on. Yet no oversight hearing has happened. Why is that? Why haven't we looked at how we are wasting this money?

How about no-bid contracts. This is my favorite. We have seen the problems between Boeing and Northrup-Grumman on a new tanker, a $35 billion new contract--except we know we have needed a new tanker for 12 years. We have had planning on that for 12 years. We are letting a cost-plus contract go through because we don't know what we want. Do we not think whoever won that contract ought to have to take some risk, development risk? Do we think the American taxpayer ought to pay that? We know we lose at least $5 billion a year across the Government in no- bid contracts. That is probably minor. That is a small estimate within the Pentagon. We have not even looked at all the other no-bid contracts throughout FEMA, which we know was tremendously wasteful during Katrina. We know that at least $3 billion of the money we spent during Katrina, from hearings we had on homeland security, was wasted. When the average price we pay to pick up debris from Katrina to the guy actually picking it up is $6 a yard, and we are paying the Corps of Engineers $32 a yard, there is a problem. The taxpayers are getting swindled by 500 percent. Yet we did that to the tune of billions of dollars after Katrina, with no management or oversight.

What we know is in homeland security--and especially from Congressmen Waxman and Davis in the House--32 Homeland Security Department contracts, worth a total of $34 billion in no-bid contracts, have experienced significant overcharges, wasteful spending, and mismanagement. Between 2003 and 2005, the no-bid contracts in the Department of Homeland Security increased by 739 percent. There is no management. We are allowing that to happen. When we argue that we cannot let the bureaucrats control it, when we say we have to do earmarks, but we don't do oversight, we are letting the bureaucrats control it. If there is $300 billion worth of waste, fraud, and abuse here, and our earmarks account for $18 billion, what price are we paying by not managing the Federal Government

and having oversight? We are not doing it.

Emergency spending, another one we won't be critical of ourselves. We put emergency spending in on the floor and add from $20 billion to $40 billion and call it an emergency, and none of it meets the definition of an emergency. We do that so we can go outside of the spending parameters that we have limited ourselves to either through pay-go or the budget. But it looks good at home--or does it? It looks good at home until we start talking about the waste, talking about the fraud, talking about the mismanagement, talking about the denial of our oath we took when we came here to uphold the Constitution. When we allow bureaucracies to waste money, when we don't have oversight of those bureaucracies, then in fact we have abandoned our oath.

It is interesting, in emergencies, up until recently, when we had emergency spending, we paid for it. In my home State of Oklahoma we had the Oklahoma City bombing, a tremendous tragedy. It was the first major internal terrorist act we had. All of the money that went toward restoration of that was paid for. We didn't borrow it from our grandchildren. Let me go back again. When we don't pay for things with emergency spending, we charge it to them. When we have a true emergency, which we might say we didn't plan for, that is one thing, but when we know what we are putting into the bill is not an emergency, we are saying they don't matter, we don't care. We care more about looking good and getting some constituent satisfied than thinking about the future of these kids.

How about other areas? How about crop insurance? Do you realize that for every dollar we pay out in crop insurance, we spend over $3 in administrative fees and underwriting to insurance companies? How is that a good deal? Regardless of where you are on the farm bill, why would we do that? That is at a rate of five times what the rest of the insurance industry earns.

Who has the sweet deal here? Who has the sweet deal? It is not these kids. They don't have a sweet deal, when we are paying three times more than we should to administer a crop insurance program and not requiring farmers to participate. That is the minimum we can save--$4 billion a year--by saying you can earn the same amount of money as everybody else in the casualty insurance business, and no more. No more sweet deals for crop insurance firms. But do we do it? No. I voted wrong on one of the amendments for it. It may have been the amendment of the person sitting in the chair. But we didn't do it.

One of my favorites is the United Nations. We sent $5.3 billion last year to the U.N. and we cannot get the State Department to tell us what our total was in 2007. That was 2006. By law, they are supposed to provide that, but they don't comply. The Foreign Relations Committee won't make them comply, and the Appropriations Committee won't do it, because we don't want to know how much we send. But the American people want to know. But the Secretary of State does not want to give it to us. Our committees will not force them to do it. What do we know about that, of the leaked documents that came out looking at how money is spent? What we know is on procurement and peacekeeping that at least 40 percent of the money that is spent is wasted. Think about that. At least 40 percent is influenced through people of influence and does not ever get to what it is supposed to be doing. It never gets into the peacekeeping field. Only 60 percent of the procurement money actually ever gets to where we want peacekeeping, and yet we don't do anything about it.

We have asked for transparency at the United Nations. This body voted 99 to 1 to condition last year's money on that transparency. It went to conference, and all of a sudden for some reason that was dropped. I wonder why that happened? We thought the United Nations owed us an explanation to tell us where they spent our $5.3 billion but, in our wisdom, we did not accede to that because it might have upset the U.N. Consequently, about $1 billion a year of what we send to the United Nations is pure waste--pure waste. It goes to fraud. It goes to buy off people. It goes to not accomplishing the goals.

If we look at what we are trying to do in Darfur and the new U.N. program over there in terms of sending an interdiction force, what we know is 40 percent of the money has been wasted. It has been scavenged. It has been taken away. It is not going to make a difference in somebody's life.

It is interesting, the U.N. peacekeeping budget this year will grow from $5 billion to $7 billion, a 40-percent growth in 1 year. And of the top five contributors to the U.N. budget, which is us, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, and Germany, all of our budgets are going to grow around 6 or 7 percent. But because we do not have any transparency, we do not have any management at the United Nations, we have a spoil system and we do not have the courage in our body to hold them accountable, we are going to throw $1 billion to $2 billion of our kids' money away.

Oh, I know, we shouldn't rock the boat at the United Nations. They are the people who care about freedom in the world. It is hard to see. If they care about freedom, transparency would be one of the No. 1 things they would assure themselves.

How about another $10-billion worth of savings? We have $64 billion worth of IT contracts going on right now; $27 billion of those are on the high-risk list. In other words, we routinely lose about 20 percent of our investments in ITs. They don't ever accomplish their goals. We spend the money, and we never get anything for it. Where is the management for that program? Where is the accountability for that? It is similar to the tanker program: Give me a cost-plus program, I don't know what I want now, but I know I want something, and I will tell you as we go what I want. And so the bills start adding up. So out of the $64 billion we spent last year, $27 billion of it is questionable we are ever getting anything out of it.

Take a conservative estimate of that, which is less than what we know historically the IT oversight from GAO has told us, and we are going to lose $10 billion on programs that were not asked for right, were not managed properly or we just flat did not get what we asked for and parted our ways and threw these kids' money away.

Then there is another $17.5 billion we can save from the National Flood Insurance Program. It was created in 1968 by Congress to prevent the need for future emergency spending for large floods. It was designed to be self-supporting, to pay back any debts with proceeds from ratepayers. But what happened was, on the way to the store, the politicians got in between them. So now we have a vast majority of properties that have been grandfathered in that historically have made claims. They were built before the NFIP construction standards, and they receive premium subsidies. In the wake of Katrina, we have a one- time savings of $17.5 billion that we could have had we had that program. But where are we? We now have Gulf Coast States lobbying us that we should increase that program, except the kids I showed the picture of are responsible for that.

The other item, and I challenge all my colleagues to start talking with Federal workers about where they can save money. If you ask them, every one of them says, yes, we can save money. As a matter of fact, we can save a lot of money, but nobody is asking. As a matter of fact, the system is, if we haven't spent the money by the 10th month, we are told to spend it, we are told to spend the money because we might not get enough money next year, and if we don't spend it, then it looks like we don't need it and, therefore, our budgets will be declined. In fact, out of the $1.36 trillion we are going to spend this year, we could save 5 percent easily, 5 percent efficiency. If we can save it, if the Federal employees, the thousands with whom I have talked, are right, why aren't we saving?

Let's go down through a few more, and then I will finish.

We know if we simplify the Tax Code, either change it to a flat tax or straight tax or a value-added tax--whichever one you want, it doesn't matter--what we know is if we did that, we could get significant savings. Let me tell you how.

One is we know compliance will be better. But we also know we have a $10 billion budget for employees at the IRS that if, in fact, we could create a simpler, fairer, straighter system--you

pick which kind, I don't care, value-added tax, whatever it is--that we would not need nearly that many employees and we would not spend $160 billion a year paying our taxes, which is what we pay other people outside the IRS.

We also know the IRS, for every dollar they spend investing in compliance, gets between $3 and $4 back. So somewhere between $50 billion and $100 billion out of the $370 billion that we don't get now, we can save. But we tend to want to use it for a political debate.

How about eliminating outdated and wasteful programs. Let me go through some of them. That is $18 billion. Science fiction weapons, $431 million, got nothing for it over the last 10 years, nothing for it, and we spent $431 million and got nothing.

The Coast Guard lengthened eight patrol boats through an earmark. It cost $100 million. They are all worthless now. We have to buy eight patrol boats. Somebody had a good idea.

How about excessive fuel costs? At minimum, $35 million a year, and what we know now looks like in Iraq another $12 million worth of fraud occurring in the fuel depots inside Baghdad. Another $40 million, $50 million on fuel.

How about improper travel payments at the Defense Department, $4 million a year? Security clearances--it costs us half a billion dollars a year to do security clearances because we are doing it in the Dark Ages when, in fact, for almost every other thing around this country we have developed modern systems, computer-aided IT to develop how fast and how often we can clear security items. Yet we spend half a billion, and it takes a year to get somebody cleared. We could cut that in half.

We had a wonderful earmark for polyester t-shirts for our marines. The only problem is, if their MRAP or humvee has a fire, it sticks to their skin. But we still spend $3 million on them.

How about a ferry to nowhere, 84 million bucks? We rejected the developmental boat proposed from a defense contractor in 2002, and the U.S. Navy was required to accept the project and the bid and deploy it to the seas for field engagement, even though it never proved economically worthwhile.

How about a James Bond boat, $4.5 million, three of them?

A high-altitude airship. The President knows something about this. The Missile Defense Agency did not request funding for this program. As a matter of fact, they said they canceled the program called the high- altitude airship because of capability limitations. Yet we continue to spend at least $1 million a year every year on that program because somebody wants it. Some constituent, some moneyed interest, somebody who might employ 20 or 30 people wants it. Somebody wants it, so we have to look good.

How about the American Embassy in Iraq, $592 million? We know a good 20 percent of it is pure waste. We have seen the fraud. We have seen the reports. We know what is going on there. Have we cut back the amount of money? Have we limited the amount of money on it? No. We offered an amendment and couldn't get it done.

How about USAID in Afghanistan, $5.68 billion spent for schools. In the first snow, the roofs collapsed on them. Did we do anything about it? No, we hired the contractor to do more stuff on a cost-plus basis.

How about hospital clinics that were supposedly built, except after we paid for them, the Afghanistan Government told us they didn't build them. How do we let that happen? That is us. That isn't the bureaucracy; that is us. We are letting it happen. We are allowing it.

We spend $20 billion on Federal AIDS programs and what we know is lots of it gets wasted. We know there is widespread deficiencies within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the HIV prevention program. Those are not my words; that is the HHS inspector general.

Two million dollars was embezzled at the San Juan AIDS Institute. NIH is spending $120 million right now on a vaccine program. The starter of that program and the major scientists who started it said it will not work, and they are not contributing, but we continue to spend $120 million on a program everybody in science knows is not going to work, but we are doing it.

By the way, we spent $300,000 or $400,000 on HIV Vaccine Awareness Day, and we don't even have a vaccine. It is important we spend it, but we cannot get rid of it because somebody objects.

AIDS housing, millions of dollars wasted.

Here is my favorite. How about $1 million paid to dead farmers? A billion, I am sorry, a billion dollars paid to dead farmers for their crops. They are dead. We are continuing to pay them, up to 15 years some of them. It is the only program you can continue to collect after you are dead, and yet we have an Agriculture Department that allows that to happen.

How about this--this is great--the National Park Service centennial celebration. We are going to spend $100 million in a time when our deficit is $607 billion, our debt $10 trillion, and our unfunded liabilities are $7 trillion, and we are going to spend $100 million to celebrate our national parks? That doesn't pass the smell test. Nobody is sitting around their dinner table tonight saying if we are ever in the kind of shape we are in, we ought to be doing that.

How about $100 million for the conventions that we did under emergency funding? We spent $100 million, everybody's money, for each city so we could have the conventions in Denver and Minneapolis.

The other interesting thing about the national parks is it doesn't turn 100 until 2016, 8 years from now, but we are going to spend the money.

How about a $30 billion subsidy to Amtrak? Amtrak started with a subsidy and was supposed to get better. We continue to not hold them accountable. How about a $244 million subsidy for food on Amtrak? Maybe we want to continue to have Amtrak. Maybe it is worth it to us to have a $1.5 billion subsidy every year on Amtrak. I would agree with that. Maybe that is the right priority. But should we be subsidizing a quarter of a million dollars a year for people's food on Amtrak? But we are.

Other items--essential air service to small communities that are within driving distance of another community, we are going to spend $110 million this year. How about the fact that we are going to pay Federal employees $250 million to ride the transit? Nobody else in this country gets paid to ride the transit. Nobody else gets their transit bills paid. But Federal employees, we are going to take a quarter of a billion dollars every year, and we are going to say to some of the best paid, best benefited workers in the country that we are going to give you a quarter of a billion dollars in subsidy so you will ride the transit. Well, economics will tell them to ride the transit. The American taxpayer shouldn't do that.

Well, I am wearing thin, I know, my colleagues, and so I will stop and enter into the Record the remaining 50 pages of examples I have of stupidity for which we are responsible. The real important thing to keep in mind, if you have been listening to this, is that we are on an unsustainable course, that, in fact, a child born today is going to inherit something different from what we did. We inherited opportunity. They are going to inherit debt. We inherited a leadership and a heritage that says you sacrifice for the next generation. They are going to inherit a legacy that says you kick the next generation in the teeth.

Everything I have outlined today is something we could have controlled, we as Members of the Senate, but we are so busy doing earmarks that we don't do any oversight. Now, what I just outlined to this body is what my staff has discovered in 3 years. Think what would happen if all of us were aggressively oversighting every agency of the Federal Government. Think how efficient it would be. Think how much waste wouldn't be there. Think about what a great deal we would be doing for these kids.

America expects us to tighten our belt. They expect us to do what they are having to do right now. They are tired of our wasteful spending, they are tired of our earmarks, and they are tired of our bridges to nowhere. We better listen. There is a rumble, and if we don't listen, it is our own fault that we will continue to decline in esteem in front of the American people. We will have well earned it.

So the next time somebody says they want to raise your taxes, ask them how

much of that they got rid of before they do it. We don't have a shortage of money. We have a shortage of courage. We have a shortage of character. We have a shortage of intensity to solve the real problems that are facing this country. And until we tackle this, we should not say one thing to anybody in this country about increased taxes. It is morally reprehensible, it violates our oath, and most of all, it does great damage to our country.

I ask unanimous consent that the examples that I referred to be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am going to spend a few minutes tonight on some observations. My hope is over the next couple of days to outline something that has never been done on the Senate floor before, and that is to discuss where we as a body fail. We are all the time telling the American people what we do great or how bad the other side is, but rarely do we take a look at ourselves and say: What is going on? What are the problems we face?

I had a great weekend this weekend in Oklahoma. Part of Oklahoma got snow, part of it had 65 degrees and Sun and no wind. But I had some experiences I want to share because I think they are pertinent and also poignant to the issue we are discussing.

I also note I have been listening to the debate all afternoon, and the debate is nothing but finger-pointing--one budget, the other budget, how bad somebody is, what somebody didn't do, what somebody wants to do. It strikes me that as I reflect on the people whom I saw this weekend and their hopes and dreams, most of this debate does not have anything to do with them. Most of this debate has to do with us, which is exactly the opposite reason of why we were sent here. What we have heard is a partisan debate, partisanship based on parties, not partisanship based on principles, not partisanship based on children, not partisanship based on the future, but who can twang it, who can manipulate it, who can create doubt and undermine someone else's position.

I traveled to Oklahoma City. My brother has been in the hospital for 16 days. He had a major operation called Whipple--it takes a long time to get over it--for pancreatic carcinoma. That is what they do the operation for. He has four kids and four grandkids and one on the way. I got to thinking, as he lay there with an NG tube in him and a feeding tube through his jejunum, what would he like for his kids? What would he like for us to be talking about for the future? Down the hall were a whole lot of other people just like him. He is 61 years old. He is not thinking about himself as he lays there in the hospital. He is thinking about what is the future for his grandkids.

I visited with one of my longest term friends this weekend. He is not thinking about himself right now. He is thinking about his grandkids. He has one and one on the way, going to be delivered this next weekend. He didn't mention one thing about himself. He mentioned about what the future was for his kids.

I think about the ladies whom I saw this morning in my medical office about to have babies. Their hopes and their dreams are about the generation that is to come, about how this miracle birth is going to take place over the next couple of weeks for both these ladies. One is named Natalie and one is named Brooke; one is a first-time mom, the other is a second-time mom. The things they are looking forward to with their children are totally dependent on whether we act as adults in this body.

I have just been struck at how far off the mark we are.

I think Kent Conrad is a great guy. I looked at what he did last year. He is a pretty fiscally conservative guy. Kent sponsored less than $20 billion worth of new spending over the next 5 years, total sponsorships. Many times in the last 3 or 4 years, we have had debates about how we handle the problems. The differences between us are not that great. What guides us, though, and what is destroying our country, I fear, is the fact that we are putting political parties and the benefits of the political budget ahead of the best interests of our kids.

One of the things I hope to do tomorrow is to outline for the American public and this body everything I found in the last 3 years in terms of waste on an annualized basis. I want my colleagues to hear that again. Everything I have found in terms of waste where we do not do it right, where we are wasting taxpayers' dollars every year, and I can conservatively, just on what I found and I can fully document--I want you to understand that, Mr. President; it is not Tom Coburn's opinion, it is the opinion of the GAO, the CBO, oversight committees, and other committees of Congress that are documenting what I am about to share.

What I am going to share tomorrow is how we fail because we are talking about a budget today--I told Kent Conrad, I am not out to game his budget. It will spend more money. That is not a whole lot different from what we have been doing. But how dare we spend another penny when I can document, and none of my colleagues can refute, $366 billion a year of waste or fraud, $366 billion a year. Let me explain what that means to the average consumer.

If you are at home today and you are in the 25-percent tax bracket in terms of income tax, what that means is that about 9 percent of the money you pay, we blow. So that is one-third, that is 9 out of the 28 percent, one-third of all the money you pay to the Federal Government, not counting your Social Security and Medicare taxes, but of your income taxes, one-third of it, we blow.

The interesting thing is that not since 1995 has the Congress done any rescission spending. Let me explain what that is. That is the Congress looks at our budget and says: Are there any areas where we can save money, where we are not doing well, where we can be more efficient, where we can improve things? We haven't had a rescission package since 1995. That is 13 years that we have not had a rescission package. There are lots of reasons for that, none of them good. It does not matter which party is in control. There has not been a rescission package for 13 years. So it is not about parties. It is not about gaming somebody because somebody is a Democrat or somebody is a Republican. Our problems in our Nation today are much more serious than partisanship. They are much greater than the beneficial effects of winning an election based on how you can make somebody else look lousy.

One of the important things I hope will come out as we go through this in the next couple of days is whether we really care about what is going to happen. We can look at the stock market--it has weak knees today; look at the price of commodities--it is rising. There is no secret we are in a time of economic weakness. Depression is described as two quarters successively. We are probably there. Nobody knows. Nobody has a crystal ball to know that. But the fact is, it is what we are leaving right now for these two, Brooke and Natalie's children who are going to be born in the next 3 weeks. What do we leave them? We are leaving them a gift, and the gift is debtor's prison.

Let me say that again. I don't say that lightly. We are leaving them a gift. According to the Government Accountability Office, if you are born tomorrow, you inherit $400,000 of unfunded liabilities. Does anybody know anybody who is working and struggling and making a middle- class income or even an upper income who is going to be able to afford that amount? Just paying the interest on it is $28,000 a year, and you have to absorb that by the time you get old enough to work. So we are talking about another $6,000 worth of interest before they start paying off any principal. So, in essence, the heritage through our incompetence, our bickering, our partisanship because we have to show somebody up, the heritage is every kid who is born, by the time they get a chance to work, is going to be accumulating about $1 million worth of debt. The question we have to ask ourselves is, What happens to them? What happens to the dream of a Brooke or a Natalie and their children? What is going to happen to them?

We are about this far from losing the triple-A credit rating on our country, on our bonds. At the same time, we see that in the last 8 years, the price of gold relative to the dollar is fourfold. What does that tell us? Is there a shortage of gold? No. Is there a fourfold increase in the demand for gold for industrial uses? No. It is a flight to safety because many people in the world do not believe we are going to be able to pay back the $79 trillion of unfunded liabilities we have left.

So as we come to a budget for the United States and we pass one-- which we will, probably--we do it absent the light of looking at $360 billion-plus that is wasted every year--$360 billion. People might say: What is that? It is pretty easy. How about Medicare fraud, $80 billion a year. How about Medicare improper payments? We pay people when they do not deserve to be paid--not fraud, just incompetency--$10 billion a year. There is $90 billion in one program. There is nothing in this budget that fixes that situation. There was nothing in the Republican budgets that fixed that. Why not? I know the answer to why not. The answer to why not is because we were too busy making political games, political strokes. We were too busy being partisan. The time for partisanship in our country is past. We may not believe that, but history is going to show it.

David Walker, the Comptroller General of the United States, one of the fairest, most openminded men I believe I have ever met in my life, on Wednesday is leaving that position. Why is he doing that? He has a guaranteed job until 2012, a great job, head of an agency that really is stellar in what it does in its performance. Why is he leaving that position? Because he is scared to death for our country because nobody is listening in positions of power. Nobody is paying attention to the unsustainable course on which we find ourselves. We are not. We haven't in the budget. We didn't in our budget. We are not. We don't on the supplementals that come through here to ``fund the war'' because we load up $20 billion to $30 billion more debt right on top of our kids.

We hear all these false numbers. Yes, I said false. The budget numbers are games. The President's numbers about the deficit are wrong. The Budget Committee's numbers about the deficit are wrong. They are not realistic. They do not take into account the fact that we are going to steal about $170 billion worth of Social Security money this year--I think $163 billion is the accurate number. We are going to write an IOU, and then we are not going to tell the American public that we increased the debt another $163 billion. We are just going to pass that along to our kids.

I have some little things for you to think about as we outline this. There is $2.5 billion a year in Social Security disability fraud. There is another $1 billion in improper payments. Think about this. Just $2.5 billion. Just $2.5 billion. Just 2,500 millions. Just 2,500 millions or 2,500,000 thousands. They are pretty hard numbers to get our hands on.

So anyhow, in the next few days, I am going to list out one by one, I am going to go through everything we have seen in the last 3 years that continues daily in this Federal Government that this body won't attack. When we offer amendments in this body, they are either accepted so they can be thrown out in conference when they actually do something, such as the census amendment that was in the Senate. We are now going to be asked for about $2 billion more for the census even though we have been saying all along there was a problem there. We ignored it, the House conferees with the Senate conferees ignored it, and now we are going to spend $2 billion more.

What we are going to do is outline thoroughly what just one office, just one Senate office, has found over 3 years, and it is all going to be fully documented, with footnotes, so you can see exactly where it came from. It is going to be indisputable.

Now ask yourself, if you are an American out there struggling to pay your gas and things are not looking great for the next 6 months for you, what would you think if all the Senators did that and we really did get rid of all the waste, fraud, and abuse in the Federal Government, or at least a meaningful component of it, and that we really probably could cut $600 billion out of our budget, which would mean we could either--if you wanted a bigger Government, you could do more, or if you wanted to pay fewer taxes, you could pay less? But most importantly, we could live up to the heritage that is ours, which is creating an opportunity for our children and our grandchildren in the future.

I am convinced that Americans aren't really asking for higher taxes. What they are asking for is smart spending, hard work by us to make sure what we spend is worth it. What they are asking for is no more earmarks. That is what 85 percent of them are asking for. And they are asking for no more bridges to nowhere and what it symbolizes in terms of excess, in terms of a lack of common sense or a lack of caring. I don't know which it is, but the fact is, we are on a collision course that is going to undermine the future of this country.

Will Durant, a historian, said that democracies never fail and are never collapsed from without until they have moral decay that causes the collapse from within. When we are spending the money of our grandchildren today and not doing anything about the waste we have in our budget, the question has to be asked: Are we already there? Have we already risen to the point where the political class, the political elites care so much about their positions--both

parties--that they are willing to throw the future of the next two generations of this great country under the bus?

The next year is critical for this Nation, as we see what happened today in the stock market, another lower earnings, as we see consumer confidence decline. Wouldn't it be nice if the Senate stood up to the challenge that is facing this country and did so without the first partisan word about parties and said: Let's fix it. Let's fix it.

I have had an ongoing study since I have been in Government to ask Federal employees this question, and I have never had a different answer. And the question is this: If you are a Federal employee, no matter where you work, what branch you work in, or what you do, if you had to, tomorrow, for the sake of our future, become 5 percent more efficient--in other words, not spend $1 out of $20--could you do it? Do you realize I have asked that question thousands of times, and I have never been told no. I have never been told no.

Well, if that is the case, why aren't we doing it, when we are going to have a $607 billion deficit? We are going to be at $10 trillion of debt at the end of this year. That is real debt. That doesn't talk about unfunded liabilities, which are $79 trillion. So we have $10 trillion worth of debt, $79 trillion under infinity, of unfunded liabilities, and we don't talk about that.

How is it that we find ourselves allowing such things as the military to continue to hang on to buildings they do not want to the tune of $2 billion to $3 billion a year just in maintenance costs? How is it that we have $18 billion worth of buildings we don't want but we can't sell because of the roadblocks we have put in the way to be able to sell them? How is it that the Pentagon pays performance bonuses of $8 billion a year to companies that don't meet the requirements of performance bonuses? How is it that we are allowing that to continue to happen? We have known of that for 3 years. Why is it happening?

By the way, what is the big stir right now? The big stir is Boeing didn't get the contract and Lockheed--or EADS did. Nobody is asking the right question on that. It doesn't matter who got the contract. It is a cost-plus contract. If we don't know what we want in a refueling tanker now after 8 years of studying it, we are never going to know. So a $35 billion contract is going to become a $45 billion contract, just like all the rest of them. Instead, we ought to be insisting, if you are doing business with the Federal Government and making money, you ought to take some risk. There ought to be no more cost-plus contracts on procurements like that. There ought to be none. Whoever has that contract ought to take part of the risk for the American people because they are having a great benefit in terms of the profits they are going to make.

So we have a lot in front of us. What is $350 billion in annual waste? What does that mean? Here is what it means. It means $3,000 for every family. That is what we are wasting. Three thousand dollars for every family in this country we are blowing, that we are throwing away because we care more about partisanship than we do the future. We care more about making the executive branch look bad than we do the future. We care more about our earmarks than we do the future.

There is a legitimate role for the Federal Government to have the Senate and the House direct spending. That is not the dispute. But the way you do it best is through oversight, not through earmarking. The way you do it best is to know exactly what is happening rather than earmarking it. The gateway drug to overspending since 1998 has been earmarks because when you earmark, you don't vote against bills. What happens is, the next time you earmark, the committee chairman comes up to you and says: You didn't vote for my bill last time. Sorry, I can't fill a thing. So we have this almost extortion-like process whereas earmarks are granted to you if you vote for a bill. You are not even looking at the total bill, you are looking at the earmarks.

Do our children deserve better? Are they worth our sacrifice? Is it really worth it for us to not necessarily get what we want if we can secure the future? I am having trouble knowing whether this body really believes that. We have outlined to appropriations committees, everybody has been sent a report of everything we have found in the last 3 years, and it has been essentially ignored because we are too interested in making sure we beat the path to looking good at home.

When you take an oath to be a U.S. Senator--and I don't think this is said often enough--there is nothing in that oath that says anything about your State. I am not here to represent the vital interests of Oklahoma. I was elected by Oklahomans to represent the vital interests of this country. And when I get confused about where my loyalties lie, our country suffers, and that is exactly what is happening to us right now.

We have gone from 600 earmarks in 1998 to a high of 14,870, almost 12,000 last year. What is going on? Where is the common sense? People from Vermont to Oklahoma to California to New Mexico to Montana, they know better. So the special interests of the few are being advantaged while we sacrifice those that come after us. Now, that is a firm indictment. But you can't continue to waste $360 billion a year, ignore oversight, not do anything about it, and then puff up and say-- Republican and Democrat--I am going to pass a budget and I am never going to look at any of that.

Well, that is exactly what my party has done. That is exactly what the party in charge today is doing. We are ignoring the very real fact that this Government needs hands-on management, it needs aggressive oversight, and it needs this $360 billion worth of waste eliminated in this budget. And if we pass this budget or any other budget--whether my party offered one or not, even the President's budget--if we pass any budget that doesn't take this into account, what we are doing is spitting all over the hopes and dreams of the youngest Americans in our country. We are saying: You don't count. We got ours, you will have to worry about getting yours. We will take, you will have to give. And, oh, by the way, we are sorry there is not going to be enough resources left for you to have a college education or to own a home or for us to defend ourselves or for you to have health care like many of us are going to have as we wander off at 65, knowing that you are going to be working hard through increased payroll taxes just to pay for the promises that we couldn't make efficient and that we overpromised.

So, Mr. President, I know I have carried on some tonight, but I think our problems are much more severe than what our behavior would deem. I think the degree of difficulty we find ourselves in today is directly attributable to our lack of courage.

We are more interested in not offending somebody than we are securing our kids' and grandkids' future. That is not something I want to be accused of. So I will take the ridicule of this body for being ``Doctor No,'' for saying: We are not going to spend more money on new things, we are not going to have more programs until we can pay for the programs we have.

And if it takes one person saying: I am not going to agree to pass bills under unanimous consent, I am not going to agree to not have the opportunity to amend them, then so be it.

The $3,000 per family per year is enough to make a difference, a big difference, in their future. I think Brooke's and Natalie's babies are worth it. I do not know about you all. I am ready to give up something. Most of all, I am willing to give up my seat in the Senate for doing what I think is right in the long term for our country.

If I do what is politically expedient and win reelection, what good is it if I have not fixed the very real problems that are facing our country? It is time for a gut check in this country. It is time for the American people to look at you, us, and say: Are you really doing for us, or are you really doing for you? My accusation is too often we do for us and not for the generations to come.

I will be back to outline in detail where this $360 million--billion; let me make sure everyone understands--$360 billion worth of waste, fraud, and abuse occurs every year in our budget, and we have done nothing. Let me say it again: We have done nothing about it.

How dare we talk about raising taxes. How dare we talk about anything except doing the business that should be at hand, which is being good stewards of our children's future.

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

Mr. President, first of all, I, too, want to express my respect for the Senator from Wisconsin. We have a lot of things on which we agree. This happens to be something on which we adamantly disagree. But I appreciate, as someone who pushes the limits in this body, his desire to have this debate because I think it is important.

We just heard the Senator from Michigan talk, and the statement would have been a fairly accurate reflection 2 years ago. But it has nothing to do, and it is not even anywhere close, to what is ongoing in Iraq today.

I think the case could have been made 2 years ago that Iraq was in a civil war. Nobody who has visited Iraq in the last 2 months can make that claim. It is not there. Outside of the Green Zone, I met with people whose daughters had been murdered by al-Qaida. I met with people whose father had been murdered. I met with both Sunni and Shia in the same village, in multiple villages, who had reconciled because they reject the terrorism of al-Qaida.

There is no question lots of mistakes have been made with the Iraq policy. But the claims under which we try to describe Iraq today in light of how it was 12 months ago are fictitious at best and damaging probably in terms of what the truth is.

Do we find ourselves in a very difficult situation? Absolutely. Is this an expensive war? Absolutely. Would we all like to not be where we are? I think almost everybody would agree to that. But probably the more important question for me is, where are we today compared to where we were 12 months ago, and have, in fact, the mistakes of the past been reflected in policies that have changed and bode for a greater future absent additional mistakes?

The desire of the Senator from Wisconsin to have us out in a way that limits our exposure is something that I would love to be able to see. But the practical nature of what he wants to accomplish could not be accomplished in less than 18 to 24 months. I mean, it could not happen. You go and talk to the military; it could not happen without us leaving tons of equipment.

But the point is, we should not dwell on that. The point is, did we make the necessary changes that can create an outcome that gives us an honorable exit from the situation, and does it leave a genocide behind? I firmly believe, having traveled--my trip prior to this one was 6 months before the surge. I want to tell you the difference is like night and day, everywhere I went. I duplicated places I went before.

So with the earnestness that the Senator from Wisconsin drives his position, we ought to reflect on what has been accomplished. I also find it very disingenuous to talk about the cost of this war by the person who sponsored more legislation and greater Government spending than anybody in this body in the 109th Congress, in the first session of this Congress.

The fact is, $349 billion worth of new spending was coauthored by the Senator from Michigan last year, $349 billion, the same Senator who voted to fund the bridge to nowhere.

I happen to agree we ought to be paying for the war. We ought to be paying for the war, and we could easily pay for the war by eliminating wasteful spending.

I would direct you to the Reader's Digest last month where they estimated $1 trillion we are missing in wasteful spending. That is an underestimate. So for us to make a claim of a fiscal nature, by the person who has cosponsored more spending than anybody in this body, and has voted against amendments to decrease wasteful spending, is somewhat less than genuine, I believe.

I think the other thing that needs to be said is we had a debate, and we actually funded the surge. It actually happened. We ought to be talking about what happened with that. To me, it is phenomenal, the difference. I will tell you, I am very--we lost a soldier from Ardmore, OK, a 19-year-old soldier killed by an IED.

How can it be that we can continue to do this unless we are doing it for the right reasons and the right cause? I believe if we walk away, no matter how we got there, rightly or wrongly, if we walk away, what I see happening, from my experience in Iraq in 1993 after the first gulf war and before this one, as a medical missionary, here is what I see happening: If we do what the Senator from Wisconsin wants us to do, and we effectively carry this out, I see an unstable northern Iraq. I see a war between Iran, Turkey, and Kurdistan. I see a marked civil war between Shia and Sunni, with involvement of the Sunni Triangle, Sunni crescent. I see a total destabilization of the Mideast. But beyond all of that, what I see is tremendous additional tragedy that we will have impacted onto the people of Iraq, and in the deaths of 500,000 to 1 million more people.

And the question ought to be: Do we have a moral obligation to fix what we started? The assessment of the Senator from Wisconsin is that we cannot fix it so therefore we ought to come home, we ought to get out, that it was a mistake to begin with; it does not matter what has happened in the past other than we learned from it.

The question is, what can we do about the future? I want to tell you, I do not buy everything the Pentagon says. I am pretty critical across their spending, across everything else. I accused them of lying to me on the training of Iraqi troops in 2006.

But when you see what has been transformed in the training of troops in Iraq, which is comparable to our training of our own troops over the same period of time, and what they have accomplished both in terms of synergism with both their equipment, their military leaders, and their troops, and they walk out of training as a Sunni and Shia together and you see that and you say we are going to walk away from that, we are not going to finish it, we are going to allow this thing to collapse-- and it will.

So then the question is, have we made another mistake in not fulfilling an obligation in something that we started? I do not believe we can do that. If we do that, I think the blood of every Iraqi that is displaced or dies after that is on us--not on the Taliban, not on al- Qaida, not on Shia extremists, not on Sunni extremists but on us.

We can win. We will win. We can. There is political progress all across the board, locally and at the regional and at the national government level. I would remind the Members of this body how long it took us to get a functioning government, a functioning government after our independence, one that was based on a constitution, one that was based on the rule of law. It was not smooth sailing. We did not do it in a short period of time. And we did not even get it right when it came to equal rights of individuals. We did not get it right. Yet we are frustrated with that.

I see a new day in Iraq. It is not over. It is dangerous, it is still very dangerous. But the progress, the improvement, the reconciliation between Shia and Sunni is unbelievable.

In province across province, the Shia, the Sunni awaking, the sons of Iraq phenomenon, the coordination of local governments across ethnic lines is in stark contrast with what was there a year and a half ago. Do we just abandon that? Think about the message it sends if we are not going to create a stable Iraq. What immediately do they do? They immediately start going to their own intrinsic ethnic corner. We divide. We send the Kurds one way, the

Shia one way, and the Sunni one way. We create a holocaust.

I want to say publicly I have had a lot of misgivings about what our country has done in the Middle East. But I have no misgivings at all at this time about the course we are on. The leadership of General Petraeus, the leadership of Ambassador Crocker, the leadership of the people within Iraq, sheikhs within small communities risking their lives every day to stand up and say: I will join hands with a Sunni, with the Shia. I am going to reject al-Qaida and we are going to get our lives back together--that is happening. That is a dynamic that is forcefully happening because people want peace.

This will eliminate that movement. This will create insecurity. This will drive people to their corners. This will drive people to extreme positions. In fact, what we have accomplished in the last 12 months will be denuded and neutered out to the point where we will have created a worse situation rather than a better one.

To the soldiers and families who have sacrificed so much in this war, I say thank you from my family. The real problem of the administration, the mistake they made, is we should all be sacrificing for this war, not just our military families. We have refused to do that as Members of the Senate by making sure that we pay for this war, by getting rid of things that are lower priorities, getting rid of things that are duplicative. We didn't do that. We said, we will charge it to our kids. We can't ruffle any feathers and make the hard choices.

The Senator from Michigan said: We do things based on value and priorities. That is baloney. We do things based on how we get reelected, with the exception of the Senator from Wisconsin, who is one of the most honorable men in this body. He never thinks about that issue. He thinks about what he thinks is right. But the way we do things around here is what is politically expedient, not what is right. For her to claim that that is how we do things, when we can't even get rid of billions of dollars in duplicative programs, $8 billion worth of buildings that the Pentagon wants to get rid of because it might ruffle some politician's feathers somewhere--we don't do things based on priority or on value. We do it on political expediency.

Again, I thank the troops and the families who are sacrificing. I am amazed at the progress that has been made, literally amazed. I believe we ought to honestly look at that before we walk a different direction. We ought to truly reassess where we are. It is a big price. I know it is. We have paid a big price in this endeavor. It is fair to question whether we should continue it. But it is not fair to not look at what has happened over the last 12 months in a realistic and open assessment that says, is there light at the end of the tunnel? I will tell you, there is. Individually, in talking to Shia and Sunni families while over there, outside of the Green Zone, walking among them without protection, seeing the hope in their eyes that finally things are going to get back to where they can take care of their families, move ahead with their goals and their personal lives, the leadership exhibited by our military, not just in leadership roles but all the way down to the private and what they are doing and how they are doing it and how they are carrying it out in Iraq, is something we can all be proud of. I don't think we should jeopardize what they are doing by voting for this bill. It is great for us to question. Sometimes we haven't done that well enough. But to ignore the reality of what is happening today in Iraq and the trend lines and the movement lines and the economic growth lines and the power lines and the oil production lines and the agreement among Shia and Sunni at all of these regional and provincial levels, to ignore that is a grave mistake on our part.

It is my hope that we don't carry forward with this idea. It is also my hope that we will truly recognize, not be blinded, not be sold a bill of goods. I am not suggesting that. We should ask the tough questions. But to deny the marked change, the tremendous progress, the tremendous freedom, the tremendous lifting of the burden on the Iraqi people that has happened in the last 12 months and not say that means something and not say that that means we are going absolutely in the right direction--we haven't won this war, but we certainly have them on the run. We certainly have the Iraqi people enamored with us to the point where we are not despised. We are welcome now in the vast majority of Iraq. In 95 percent of Iraq we are welcome because we are a liberator of them from al-Qaida, not from Saddam but from al-Qaida, the one who cut their 8-year-old daughter's head off because she looked at them wrong, the ruthlessness of radical Islam. That is what is at stake right now. We can differ in our approach on how we might battle that, but this is the heat sink right now. Iraq is the heat sink for al- Qaida. It is where they are, where they are coming.

We are winning. The Iraqi people are winning, and the Iraqi troops are winning. Let's not destroy that.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, first of all, let me thank the chairman and ranking member, Senator Murkowski, for their work on this effort.

Amendments Nos. 4024 through 4037 to Amendment No. 3899

Oklahoma is the No. 1 State in the country as far as tribal members. Indian health care is an issue on which we are struggling, and there are all sorts of components for it. I am going to ask unanimous consent now to bring up my amendments numbered 4024 through 4037 as if brought up individually and ask that each be set aside so they will be considered pending. I ask unanimous consent that be carried out at this time.

Far less than what I bring up.

Let me start by saying, improving the health care of Indians in this country is a widely supported goal. Senator Dorgan's heart is in the right place on this issue. He knows the problems we have, and he spent countless hours trying to get to this point with this bill. I do not want to be seen--I have told him, and I committed to him my goal is not to block his progress on this bill.

However, I believe this legislation as drafted does not fix the underlying problems. He and I have had several conversations about that. It does not fix rationing that is going on today. It does not fix waiting lines that are going on today. It does not fix the inferior quality that is being applied to a lot of Native Americans and Alaskans in this country. It does not fix any of those problems. In fact, it authorizes more services without making sure the money is there to follow it. The average Native American in this country has $2,100 per year spent on them.

Now, let's put that in perspective. The average veteran we take care of has $4,300. The average individual per person, per capita, expenditure in our country is $7,000. Yet we are going to pass a bill that does not fix anything. It does not fix the real problems about addressing the No. 1 problem which is, we are not sending enough dollars to meet the treaty obligations that we have with Native Americans. So really what this bill is, it is called the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, but it improves our position with tribes because we have done something, but it does not improve health care. It is not going to improve health care. It is going to increase the availability of services without the money, without the control, without the quality, without eliminating the waiting lines.

As a matter of fact, it is going to add to the waiting lines as I read this bill, as somebody who is somewhat experienced in medicine. Those who say a failure to reauthorize the Indian Health Care Improvement Act is a violation of our trust obligations are correct. However, I believe simply reauthorizing this system with minor modifications is an even greater violation of that commitment. It is a greater violation. Dozens of tribal leaders are not expressing enthusiasm for the current structure.

Chuck Grim, an Oklahoman, head of this service, knows what is broken. I have had lots of conversations with him. We know what is broken, we know how to fix it, but we have to be bold in how we go about fixing it. We are not bold in this. We are not changing it. We are not doing the structural changes that have to happen for us to live up to the commitment that we have made to Native Americans.

The myriad of problems facing Indian health care in Indian country are many of the same issues that are facing health care delivery throughout rural America. They are compounded, however, in this system by a system that refuses to recognize its own role in holding back health care delivery for Native Americans.

In designing health care reforms, markets work when they are allowed to. They lower the price of all goods and services, and they attract much needed outside investment. Many tribes in Oklahoma are at the forefront of new and innovative health care delivery systems. They are poised to become a model for delivery throughout the system.

Congress must ensure, however, that their efforts are not discouraged or stopped altogether by the current system. Furthermore, there is no good reason that forward-thinking tribal governments should not be prevented from developing market-driven health care centers of excellence that will attract researchers, physicians, and patients for cutting edge lifesaving treatments. We do not do that in this bill.

Furthermore, this legislation fails to focus on empowering individual tribal members. Individual patients tend to receive better care and more effective care when they are empowered to make their own health care decisions. Congress should explore ways to accomplish this objective and give tribal citizens a reason to invest in their own health. Long lines, bureaucratic headaches, and rationed substandard care completely disallow this sort of investment. That is what we have.

Our Chairman has been on the Senate floor multiple times showing how we are rationing care, how we have lines, how we do not give quality care, how we take contract health care--it runs out in 4 or 5 months. And so what happens? People who need care do not get it, and we have not fixed that in this bill. Yet we are calling this health care improvement.

The health care status of tribal members ranks below the general population. The Federal Government has been providing health care to tribal members for 175 years. The first time was to give them a smallpox vaccine in 1807. That is when we started Indian health care. And what we are doing today in comparison to what our treaty obligations are--in comparison, it is the same thing we are doing to the veterans when we tell the veterans: We are going to give you health care and do not give it. It is the same thing we tell schools: We are going to have an IDEA program and then not fund it. It is morally bankrupt legislation that does not meet the commitments that we say we have.

The Snyder Act of 1921 provided a broad and permanent authorization for Federal Indian programs, including--and this is an important thing--the conservation of health; in other words, the prevention of disease, which Chuck Grim was just starting to get into, but we do not have the funding to do it the way we need to do it. We know the manifestation of diabetes and addiction and hypertension and heart disease among our tribal members is higher than any other group in our country. Yet the conservation of health has not been exploited, the paradigm shift that has to happen in Native American care to where we go to prevention instead of treatment of disease. It is not in here. We are not doing it.

Last year, we spent $3.18 billion doing this. If we just funded it at the level we fund per capita veterans care, we should be funding $6.5 billion in Native American health care. That is just on a per capita basis, let alone any structural changes on how we might make preventative care, quality care, timely care, and compassionate care a part of Native American care. But we are not doing that. Indians in comparison with the general population are 6.5 times more likely to die from alcoholism. That is a disease we need to be preventing. That is a health care problem. They are six times more likely to die from tuberculosis, a preventable disease; three times more likely to die from diabetes, a controllable and now preventable disease, it is a preventable disease; 2.5 times more likely to die from an accident.

Now, how can we look those statistics in the face and say we have met our treaty obligations? We have failed. We have absolutely failed. Only 71 percent of Native Americans receive prenatal care. That means one out of four Native American moms who get pregnant do not have any prenatal care. We ought to be ashamed. We have failed. We have failed.

Eighteen percent of Native Americans who are pregnant smoke. That is twice the rate of others. Where is our prevention? Where is our education? Where is the priority on what we can do something about?

American Indians suffer from a great death rate from chronic liver disease and cirrhosis. It is 22.7 per 100,000. That is twice what it is for Whites and three times what it is for African Americans in this country. We know what causes it. We do not put the dollars there. We have not put in a streamlined prevention program.

My words are harsh. They are not intended for either the chairman or the ranking member. I passionately care that we meet our commitments, and so I do not want you to take the words I say as directed toward you because I know you care as well.

Where we have a difference is in the ``now.'' What do we do now rather than what do we do later? I think we should be doing it all now. I think we should radically change how we approach our obligations in Native American health care in this country.

Rationing plagues Indian Health Services. It is rationed care. That is

why it is not good care. That is why it is not consistent care. That is why it is not preventative care, because we don't have the resources. We haven't applied the resources to the need. Senator Dorgan has had numerous hearings. He has spoken on the floor about this rationing crisis. But if we don't radically change the system, if we don't change incentives in the system, improving the old will just bring more failure.

The job vacancy rate for dentists is 32 percent. They don't have 80 percent of the nurses they need. They don't have 85 percent of the optometrists, and they only have 86 percent of the doctors, based on the present system. I am proposing a better system with better care based on prevention, a paradigm that says it is a whole lot cheaper to prevent your illness than it is to treat it once you get it. It is common to hear in Indian Country--and I have heard the chairman say it--``don't get sick after June. Contract money is gone. If you get sick after June, nothing will happen. You will not get the referral to the center to take care of you because we don't have the money.

A quote from Dr. Charles Grim, who has been a stellar leader for the

Mr. President, will the chairman yield for a couple moments?

Mr. President, I wish to make a couple comments, and then I have to go to a markup.

You will find me an ally on appropriations if we have the courage to make priority choices on where we fund money. You know that. That has been my history. But we do not have extra money, so that means we have to take it from something else. My goal will be that we take from the waste we

all know is there and we put it to the commitments.

So I look forward to that debate. I think you are right. I think we need to up the ante, and we need to add the money. But there is plenty of money for us to go get, and I hope the chairman will help me go get it so we can put it there.

Thank you.

Mr. President, every amendment I have has something to do with this bill. They are all germane, not meant to delay. I am happy to vote for cloture right now to prove that I don't want to delay this bill. What I am going to ask is unanimous consent for the regular order and discuss my amendment No. 4034, after which I will ask for a vote. Then if the leadership wants to stack votes, I am fine with that.

This is a simple amendment. I know the chairman is critical of it because he thinks it is false in terms of its intent. During our budget debate, I plan on adding $2 billion to Indian health care. I also plan on making us make the tough decisions on where we take it from. We don't have extra money, so it is about priorities, about keeping commitments. I will be offering that when we get to the budget to make sure there is an extra $2 billion for Native American care, and then we will decide whether we think that is a priority as we vote on the budget and on the appropriations bills.

This is a straightforward amendment. This allows tribal members to get insurance. If they want to use the IHS service, great. But if they have to wait in line to wait in line to get care, maybe they can go somewhere else. Then we are keeping our commitment. If they know that the care for a certain type of disease is terrible at IHS, they can go where it is better. We are going to put the security of our promise in real terms, and we are going to put choice, the same thing every Member of this body has, and security in health care, into the hands of the Native Americans. That is what the amendment does. The reason it doesn't cost anything is because we are going to charge IHS for what it costs. We have designed the amendment. We are waiting to see what the budget chairman does with the budget and where we are going to find this $2 billion. But I promise you, we are going to get a chance to vote on my amendment to put in $2 billion. So it is not an empty promise.

One of the things we know that improves everything is competition. One of the ways to get rid of some of the waste that is in IHS and to put a priority back in is to start competing.

I am happy to.

It does not at this time. I will give a commitment to the chairman. Under our rules, when I want to take money away from something else, I have to deauthorize it. We don't have enough money in Indian health so we have to deauthorize something else. If we get it under the budget, I have every intention of making us make a choice. I will vote for an increased authorization at this point in

time right now for $2 billion. But I will also come back and say we have to find the money to pay for it.

I will happily vote for that. But what we have to do is deauthorize something else. I know you disagree with my thoughts on increased authorizations versus offsets. I believe we have a commitment. I believe we have a treaty obligation. I believe we have a moral obligation. But I also believe it has to be balanced with the obligation that Members of Congress refuse to do, which is to make judgments about priorities. An empty promise to authorize that is not offsetting some authorization somewhere else without coming around and doing it; tons of bills go through this place authorizing things so we can send a signal out there that we did something, knowing that we never intend to fund it.

Right now we have over $8 trillion a year in authorizations. It can't be hard to find $2 billion to deauthorize to increase the authorization for Indian health. We have to have a vote, and we have to decide what that is.

I will commit to the chairman, I will vote for that, as long as we are decreasing somewhere else. I am willing to go find where that is for the chairman. I will commit that I will offer an amendment to increase the spending for this in our budget. I also will commit that when the appropriations come through, although I may not vote for the whole appropriations bill because it is not going to just be for Indian health care, I will vote for amendments that will increase the amount of money that goes to Indian health care as long as it is within the budget. That is why I said my goal is to do that within the budget where we could have a debate about priorities.

I would like to reclaim my time if I might. The fact is, we appropriate $280 billion a year in stuff that is not authorized right now. So we will not have any problem appropriating this money if we don't authorize it. A quarter of the discretionary budget is not authorized right now. We will not have any problem with that. My amendment says, on the areas the Senator just described, to do it only if it is geographically feasible. I recognize there are some places where we have isolated reservations and we have IHS. I am willing to put the money behind it, but I also realize more of the same doesn't get it done. So if we double Indian health care money, we are still going to have an inefficient system that will deliver care at a lower level than what you can get in the private sector.

What I am saying with my amendment is, let's have both. We ought to do both. I am making a statement on the Senate floor--and the Senator will recognize, I believe, that I usually keep my word about coming back and doing what I say I will do--I will work to get the extra $2 billion, but an extra $2 billion in a broken system is not just money that is broken with IHS. I believe the chairman will agree. What I wanted to do is fix the system and increase the money, increase the choice and security that Native Americans are entitled to that all the rest of us have.

The fact is, if the only place a Native American can get care is IHS, that is not freedom. That is not the promise kept in its fullest bloom. It is saying, here is the only place you can get care. If the care happens to be great, super. But if the care happens to be average and they need better, they don't have that opportunity. If the care happens to be--and sometimes we know it is, like some of the cases the chairman has presented--when it is substandard and that is the only choice they have, that is not acceptable.

Let me finish my deal, and I will let you go and you can hammer me. I hope I can get you to come around. Maybe I would not get your vote. I know I will get your commitment to work toward it in the future. But I think just adding more money to IHS doesn't fix the problem. I described that earlier when I talked about 30 or 45 minutes. What this does is, it treats Native Americans like every other American. That is what this amendment does. It gives them choice. It gets them out of the prison we have placed them in that says: You only have one place you can go. And, by the way, if we run out of contract funds, even if you need to go somewhere else, you can't go.

Contract funds actually have run out on average in June. So for 5 months of the year, when we need to send Native Americans somewhere else, we don't have the money to do it. So who suffers?

Under this system, you would not run out of contract money because you bought an insurance policy. You have given them the average cost of an individual insurance cost with what we are spending now on care.

By the way, I have another amendment where we describe what an Indian is because, in my State, we have people who are \1/512\th stepping in front of a full blood. And most people don't think somebody that is \5/ 11\th out of \5/12\th ought to be getting full pay for their health care. And in fact, there are .12 of 1 percent Native blood. We call that light blood in Oklahoma. We have whole blood, mixed blood, and light blood in our State. It actually is very complicated because what is happening now, we have tribes that have quantums and say: If you are not a quarter or an eighth, you are not eligible. But under the IHS system, from some of the other tribes who have members who are \1/ 512\th, they come down to their area and they get into IHS. So here is somebody with \1/512\th taking Indian dollars away from somebody who is a quarter or somebody who is a full blood.

What we have said is: Tribes, you have to decide who is an Indian. We actually have some people who are a thousand and 24th that we are giving full blown care to in Oklahoma. They have access to care somewhere else, but they don't want to pay the deductible or the copay. So they step in line in front of a full blood. We have to change that. We have to fix that. We have to fix that because our obligation has to be to the person with the most and then come down. So if we really have restricted dollars, what we have to say is, if you are below a certain level, you have to contribute something. That is the other way that we solve this problem. That doesn't demean the heritage of our Native Americans.

What that says is, the reality is, in 2016 in this country, we are going to be cutting spending all over the place because that is the year interest rises through the roof. That is the year we run out of Social Security with which

to pay for Medicare. That is the year in which for the projected spending, based on revenues, based on growth even at 4 percent, we start running trillion-dollar deficits--trillion-dollar deficits.

Have we ever asked ourselves why gold is worth four times more against the American dollar than it was 10 years ago? Do you think it has anything to do with people thinking we cannot pay back our debt?

So this idea that we are going to have more money in the future to do more things is not going to be there. We need to come to the reality of the situation. We need to start making some of the hard choices. To me, keeping our commitment to Native Americans has to be set up now; otherwise, it is not going to happen, and the funding is not going to get increased between now and 2016. Other than what we do this year, it is going to be hard. The money is going to be hard to get, even if we get out of Iraq.

We are going to get notice today on what I have been working on for 2 years, talking to the Census Bureau about that they are going to be out of control and spend a whole lot more money. I am getting ready to get notice by the Secretary of Commerce--I have a meeting with him this afternoon--that there is going to be a close to $3 billion more pickup to do something we have to do because it has been totally mismanaged-- totally mismanaged. We have been having hearings for 2\1/2\ years on it, where they have been denying it, and now they are coming to say it has been mismanaged. They are coming to agree.

It is why oversight matters. Had we gotten some of the amendments through this body that we offered on the census, we would not be here. But, instead, we are going to spend $2 billion to $3 billion more because we did not pass the amendments offered based on oversight that we did in my committee.

The whole goal--I am not perfect. I am not right, necessarily, on how I want to do that. I will admit that to the chairman and ranking member. But I know more money does not solve the problem on this, and unless we create real freedom, real choice, and real health care security for Native Americans, we will never have an efficient IHS system, and we will never meet the commitments that we say we have.

So I will ask for the yeas and nays on this amendment. I will listen to the chairman. I do have a meeting at 2 o'clock I have to be at. Whenever the chairman would like to stack the votes, if we run others, I will be happy to work with whatever is his pleasure.

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

I ask that amendment be brought up, No. 4034 be made pending, and ask for the yeas and nays.

I inquire of the Chair, earlier this morning I made all my amendments pending.

Mr. President, I ask for the regular order on amendment No. 4034.

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

Madam President, this is a pretty simple amendment. What it says is we are going to give the Native Americans what we promised them in our treaties. We are going to give it to them in the same way we deliver security, choice, prosperity, and health care for Members of Congress. We are going to give them an insurance policy. In basics, I think my chairman agrees with it; he does not agree with the way we are doing it at this time. I understand that. What you all should know is three-quarters of the Native American population of this country lives in urban areas; it does not live on the reservation. That is three- quarters.

What this does is fulfill our commitment through giving them access to quality choice and care--not substandard care, not rationed care, but real care.

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

Madam President, I now ask unanimous consent that we have the regular order on Coburn amendment No. 4036.

Probably, Madam President, I will not use more than 30 minutes and probably less.

That is 30 minutes for me and none for you.

I do not have any problem with that.

Madam President, amendment No. 4036 is a real simple amendment. What it says is we are going to prioritize the funds that go into the Indian Health Service. We have had debate all day on whether we are improving Indian health care when we add services but do not add money, and we have not done the structural reforms that need to happen in the Indian Health Service.

We know the Indian Health Service is plagued by rationing on a life- and-limb basis. As to the quality of care we are offering in IHS, for some places it is great, but on average it is less than what we offer other people. Instead of fixing the problem with basic medical services, this bill includes new services. We are not funding the services we do now, and the services we are funding are not at the level they need to be in terms of their quality.

This bill expands the burden of IHS to fund things that in terms of priority are not as important, No. 1, but, more importantly, most have an eligibility avenue with which to get these services through some other Government program. So by supporting this amendment, you are not denying the four new services because they are already available, just not through the IHS.

This amendment would require funding go to what has already been promised to tribal members before we expand to new promises. In other words, before we add new services, let's make sure we are funding the services we are offering now and that we are funding them at a level of quality that is acceptable.

So this would say IHS would have to prioritize basic medical services before paying for new programs. We have talked a lot about the history on this. We know where our problems are. The chairman is trying to move in a direction to help solve some of the problems.

I disagree that we are making the major steps. I think we have to totally reform IHS. I have said that to the chairman. He knows the structural problems that are there. I think when we promise health care, we ought to give it.

We talked earlier today that one in every four Native American women have a baby without any prenatal care. The average number of visits for those who have prenatal care is half what the national average is. So just in prenatal care, in pediatrics, and diabetes we know we are behind the curve. Yet we are going to add new services in the bill that are already available in other ways.

We also know, as the chairman has said, that we spend half per capita on Native Americans than we do on prisoners. We spend less than half than we

do on veterans. We spend a third based on what we spend on Medicare. So we are obviously not there, and a lot of it is money. There is no question about it. But it is not all money. It is structural.

Obviously, that is the reason for my opposition to this bill because I think we have an opportunity to go much further to totally change the structure and quality and delivery and to get a lot of the bureaucracy out. I think we also need to add money. We need to do all three.

This amendment is designed to make IHS prioritize the money. So even though we authorize these programs--this does not eliminate the authorization--it just says you cannot effectively do it until you have funded adequately what you are already promising Native Americans.

What this bill will do, in my estimation, is drain resources available to basic core medical services. It is also going to do something else. Our tribes are getting to be pretty good businessmen. What it is going to do is, it is going to put into individual tribes businesses for these services.

So what is going to happen is, these services are going to be part of the tribal organization business complex but not part of the service, and so we are going to transfer funds outside IHS, transfer IHS moneys into tribal organizations with no guarantees that the money that was spent is going to come back into health care. So if we were to do this, what I would rather is these be IHS services only, rather than out for bid to be utilized that may be not at a competitive bid price so we enhance private profitability rather than tribal health care. So there is that other little problem. Again, if we make new promises, at a time when we are not funding the promises we have, we are not helping the Native American population.

This amendment is about priorities. It is not saying IHS cannot fund these new programs. It is just saying we need to focus on basic medical services first, such as prenatal care. When one in four Native Americans do not have prenatal care, and we are going to add long-term home health care, hospice, DME, and some of these other areas, when we are not taking care of the women who walk in and deliver without prenatal care, it does not make sense.

So I will put this amendment up. I am going to ask for the yeas and nays on amendment 4036. I appreciate the consideration of the chairman and his heart toward Native Americans. But a half promise fulfilled is a promise not kept, and that is where we are on health care. Making us prioritize--in some places we will be able to do this; where we have effective, efficient care, they will have the money to offer these services. In areas where we are not doing well, they should not be expanding into new services when they are not taking care of the services we have today.

So the flexibility is completely up to the IHS. Nothing limits it other than you have to meet the core basic medical needs first before you go into other areas.

With that, I yield the floor and await the response from my chairman. Then I will talk about the other amendment in a moment.

Madam President, I will be happy to.

Madam President, amendment No. 4032, which the chairman has graciously allowed me to discuss at this time, which I also would like to call up and have as the pending order of business under the regular order, is real simple. We do this in a lot of other places, but we do not do it in IHS.

I ask unanimous consent for that.

I thank the Chair.

This is a real straightforward amendment. It says if you are a tribal member and you have been the victim of rape or sexual assault, the right to have your assailant tested for HIV and AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases cannot be denied you. We have done this a lot of times. Most of us agree with that. We think it is the right thing to do when somebody is an assailant and we have people at risk, and not putting those Native Americans into a period of a year waiting or taking medicines they should not have to take because they do not know the status of the person who committed an assault on them.

So it is very straightforward. I will not spend a lot of time on it. I am not trying to inflame the issue. I think it is something Native Americans ought to have that every other American today has.

I yield back and intend to ask for the yeas and nays at the appropriate time.

Madam President, will the Senator from North Dakota yield?

Madam President, through the Chair, would the chairman agree a large portion of people who are eligible for Indian health care service today already have these services available to them through another Federal Government program?

A large portion of them are Medicaid eligible. As a matter of fact, 27 percent of the funds that go into IHS are people from Medicaid. If they are Medicaid eligible, then they

are eligible for every one of these programs. A large portion are Medicare eligible. A large portion of money that comes into IHS comes from Medicare, and they are also eligible under that. So the majority of our Native American population already have these services available to them under two other programs.

The other question I would ask through the Chair of the chairman is-- there are other clinics and IHS facilities, I believe, and please correct me, that are being run well and that will be able to utilize these services for that smaller portion of Native Americans because they will have the funds because they are meeting basic core medical needs now. My amendment doesn't take that away. It just says if you are in an IHS clinic and over half of them already have these services available through another government program, why would we add that when we are not taking care of the diabetes, the dialysis, and every other thing we have?

My question to the chairman is--I would love for him to consider that this is a better way to go rather than blanketly treating everybody the same and that we have to prioritize, and that by having IHS Directors make that priority--in different areas, that is true--in terms of what goes through the tribal government, what we will get is better care.

Madam President, I just want a few more minutes and then I am through.

The Senator from North Dakota makes a great point: that there are people who are using reservation-based IHS facilities who are essentially trapped. They are trapped. They don't get the option to go somewhere else. What this bill does--and in many of those instances, the core medical needs are not being met. What this bill does is makes sure the core medical needs are going to be met because we are going to add four new services for those people. So now they are trapped in a system that doesn't deliver the quality, doesn't deliver the service, and doesn't deliver the prevention, we are going to make it worse. We are going to make it worse because we are going to add services that are available to half of the Native American population right now through another Government program, and we are going to dilute the resources for the very people who are trapped on reservations.

But the very point is, three-quarters of Native Americans are in an urban area. They are not limited to that. They are not limited at all. They should have had the choice to be able to go wherever they wanted to go today. We turned that down. We had 29 people vote for that--or 28 people vote for that.

I know the chairman is going to work with me to try to get there someday. But that is when you give Native Americans their due and meet our commitments. When they have the same choice, the same security, the same health care that you and I have, then we will have met our commitment under our treaties, and not until then would we have met it.

I will yield.

Madam President, I would like to reclaim my time, if I might.

Madam President, I want to make a couple of points because what we have heard is a lot of negative today. I want to say how proud I am of the Cherokees, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, and the Creek in Oklahoma. I totally disagree with gaming. I think it undermines virtue. I think it is destroying a lot of society. But several of the tribes in my State have invested their dollars--not IHS dollars, their dollars--in health care, and they need to be recognized. Their facilities, most oftentimes, are fantastic, and their care is fantastic. So I don't want us to leave the debate without recognizing some of the vast improvements that where we have failed, the tribes have actually picked it up and supplied it, and that means shame on us because maybe there wouldn't be as much gaming if we were fulfilling the needs. Gaming is not without its societal consequences, regardless of how much we benefit in terms of dollars that come into the Treasury.

So I didn't want us to leave this without recognizing that we have lots of great performance in lots of great areas. We also have lots of great providers and doctors and workers in IHS, but we have some who aren't. We also have some who couldn't get a job anywhere else, some whom nobody else would hire. Yet we will hire them because we are so short, both on funds and needs. That ought not to be there either. If somebody is not competent to practice with the public, they shouldn't be competent to practice at IHS and the same at the VA and the same in our prisons and the same in other areas.

So it is my hope we will look straight forward. It is hard to run against your own chairman on amendments on a bill, and we intentionally did not put up these amendments at the request of the chairman when we were doing the markup on the Indian health care bill.

Again, I will state in finality, and then sit down, these ``improvements'' in many areas will offer some improvement but in many more areas will take away from core medical care that is offered to the very people who aren't getting adequate care today. So it ought to be flexible. It ought to be where the core medical needs are met, we are offering these, and whether or not we shouldn't be offering them because what we are doing is, we are taking that lady who is going to be on dialysis, and we could have prevented it because we are not doing the core medical things and we are looking at the wrong thing. We are taking a gal who has early diabetic neuropathy and we are going to condemn her to a life on dialysis or a kidney transplant, and most of them would not get kidney transplants. They are going to get hooked up to a machine for 8 hours a day because we are--but we are going to feel good about ourselves saying we now have hospice and long-term care, and all of these other things.

I think it is a mistake the way we have done that. It is my main opposition to the bill. I think we have an opportunity to rigorously and tremendously change the structure, the delivery of care. We have an opportunity to change the paradigm under which we treat Native Americans, to prevention. We have talked about suicide on all of the reservations. The chairman and many have been concerned about prevention of that. But we ought to be just as concerned about prevention of all of the other diseases and change the paradigm under which IHS works instead of more of the same.

So with that, I ask for the yeas and nays.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, this is a straightforward amendment that says when somebody has been abused or sexually assaulted, they have the right, postindictment, to have the person who assaulted them tested for HIV and sexually transmitted diseases. It is current law in many other areas, and I would appreciate your support.

Madam President, could the Chair explain the unanimous consent order under which we are operating?

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to be allotted 10 minutes to discuss the fiscal stimulus package.

Absolutely.

Madam President, we have heard a lot in the press, and we have certainly heard a lot from our own Finance Committee, and we have seen what the House passed in terms of the stimulus package.

I think, once again, in our hurry to address a problem, we have not asked: Are we fixing the right problem, the problem in connection with the House leadership passing a bill that will spend $150 billion. One of the first questions we ought to ask is, Where is that money coming from, the $150 billion? Nobody can dispute the fact that we are going to borrow that from our grandchildren; we are going to go to the markets and borrow the money to stimulate our economy. Nobody will dispute the fact that there is very little payback into the Treasury, in terms of tax collections, from this stimulus plan.

The facts as they are, we had an overheated housing boom. We can deny economic reality, but until we mark the market--the overinflated cost that has extended credit in our country--and recognize that is going to have to be paid for, we are not going to walk out of this slowdown we appear to be facing. The reality is that the model is the Japanese banking industry: When they refused to recognize the losses, what it did was impact their economy for 10 years. So the realities are that there has to be an economic price when we have an economic excess. Our job should be to make that as easy on our economy as we can, thinking about the future of our economy.

Now, all the options that have been presented, when scored in the long term, have very little beneficial effect for the economy other than the psychology we are putting through. The reason it is important to discuss alternatives is because there is a way, which is proven in economics, proven in capitalistic societies, in free market societies, where you can generate stimulus and revenue back to the Government so that, in fact, you solve the right problem, the real problem, and you don't bankrupt your children further, which is what we are going to do whether we pass the House bill or the Senate bill. We are going to steal $150 billion or $190 billion from our grandchildren. I think we ought to think twice about that. Do we really, as senior citizens, want to steal $600, to $800, to $1,200 from our grandchildren for us today? Do we want to do that? Is there another way in which we can stimulate our economy without stealing from our kids and ultimately putting the money back in so that our children don't have to pay for this stimulus package? There is. There are a lot of economic theories and experience in this country that prove that.

So let's talk some about what we should be doing that we are not. Instead, we are pandering to people, thinking they are going to get $600 or $800, and we don't have any idea other than to think a third of that money might have a stimulus effect, but it will have a negative effect in terms of what our kids have to pay back.

One thing we can do is create certainty about economic decisionmaking. We can extend the Bush tax cuts. We can extend them so people will continue to make positive decisions based on a tax rate they know is there rather than one they know is going to go away in 2 years, which will limit their investment.

Second, we can lower corporate tax rates. We now have the second highest corporate tax rates in the world. That hasn't been part of any discussion. We know that when we lower corporate tax rates, we see increased investment, which increases the tax revenues for the country, and we also see economic growth. So there is a positive there, but it is not complete. There is a cost associated with that, but at least there is some feedback. But we have not considered that.

We have not reduced the capital gains tax rate on corporations--the people who invest great sums of money on the basis of the fact that if there is a capital gain, if we were to lower that, they might invest more or they might recognize the gain they have today, consequently, even generating taxes. We can index capital gains for inflation. That creates a stable investment environment whereby business decisions will invest in capital, create jobs, which create salaries, which create income, which create tax revenue.

We can markedly advance--much more so than we have done in this bill--depreciation schedules if we want to have an impact. We could go to full expensing for capital equipment forever. We don't have to stop it now. What that would do is create investment in capital goods in this country, which would create jobs, which would raise wages, which would create incomes, which would create tax revenues for the country.

There are other things we can do besides just send money out the door. We can establish a repatriation window for corporate taxes overseas. The best way to not ever have to deal with this again is to have a corporate tax rate equivalent to what is going on in the rest of the world--have one at 25 percent instead of 35 percent so that we, in fact, are competitive worldwide, so that corporations don't refuse to bring income they have earned overseas back to this country because we have an excessive tax on it, so they decide not to do that.

Finally, what we can do is make the Small Business Administration work. Seven years ago, the impact of Government regulation on small business was less than $4,000. It is $7,400 per employee. That is the impact of the Federal Government. That is not the taxes you pay, that is the impact of the regulations in terms of the cost impounded onto small business by the Federal Government.

I will end with talking about the budget that was just submitted by the administration. We are going to spend probably $150 billion or $190 billion, and we are not going to pay for it. We are not going to reduce any of the wasteful spending, including the inappropriate payments in Medicare, and there is another $40 billion in fraud. Medicaid has $30 billion worth of fraud and another $7 billion in improper payments. Food stamps has $6 billion worth of improper payments, not counting the fraud.

There is nothing associated with fixing what is wrong with the Government so that the American people get value from it. We are going to throw money at a problem rather than secure the future for our children and grandchildren. We can do better. We ought to do better. We should not say we are just going to throw money at the problem.

Let's make long-term structural changes in the Tax Code that raise the opportunity for our children rather than lower it by putting debt on their shoulders. Let's make the long-term changes and tough choices of eliminating programs that aren't working

effectively, or let's refine programs that are wasteful, not efficient, and loaded with fraud. Let's eliminate the wasteful programs that account for $150 billion of money spent each year. Let's get rid of the $30 billion in waste at the Pentagon. Let's get rid of the $3 billion we spend every year maintaining buildings the Pentagon doesn't want. We don't have a way to get rid of them, but we don't have the courage to change the law.

There are all kinds of ways to save a couple hundred billion dollars a year, but it means you have to ruffle some feathers. It is time we do that and do the hard work, rather than the easy work.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak in terms of what I think is a long-term way to resolve this economic trough we appear to be facing. I am not confident we are going to do it the right way. I think we are going to do it the politically expedient way, which helps people get reelected but doesn't fix the real problem. To me, to my regret, that is a sad misnomer for this body.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, at the end of this week, Americans may find themselves at greater risk of a terrorist attack when the Protect America Act expires on February 1. On that date, we will be forced to revert to the antiquated 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to monitor the communications of suspected terrorists, unless this Congress moves quickly to make permanent changes to that law. It is therefore critical for Congress to enact permanent modernizations to FISA so that our intelligence officials will have every tool they need to monitor the communications of terrorists who seek to destroy the United States.

The consequences of allowing the Protect America Act to lapse could be deadly. The PAA was passed last August to modernize FISA so that the statute could do in practice what it was always intended to do--govern certain foreign intelligence surveillance activities directed at persons in the United States, without inadvertently burdening those activities directed at persons overseas. FISA, however, has not kept up with technological advances that have been made since 1978. As a result, prior to the PAA, intelligence officers were often forced to obtain a court order before beginning surveillance against a terrorist or other foreign target located in another country. This unnecessary and burdensome requirement caused U.S. intelligence agencies to lose about two-thirds of their ability to collect communications intelligence against al-Qaida.

Thankfully, the Protect America Act helped to close the inexcusable gap that left this country blind to the plans our enemies were making against us. As Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell said, the PAA has ``allowed us to obtain significant insight into terrorist planning.'' To allow such a vital antiterror tool to lapse at this time would be the ultimate dereliction of duty.

The United States must remain vigilant against a terror threat that is real and constant. The National Intelligence Estimate on ``The Terrorist Threat to the US Homeland,'' released just 6 months ago, concluded that this country will face a ``persistent and evolving'' terrorist threat over the next 3 years, particularly from Islamic terrorist groups and cells like al-Qaida. No person in America is unfamiliar with the capabilities and determination of such terrorist groups, and Americans trust us to make the right decisions to protect them and their children. Without making permanent changes to FISA to ensure the fast and effective intercept of foreign intelligence information, little else we do will matter.

Retroactive immunity is in the best interest of this Nation's security and must be included in FISA modernization, as it was in the Intelligence Committee bill. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to intercept international communications into and out of the United States of persons linked to al-Qaida or related terrorist organizations. The administration's obvious and stated purpose of this authorization was to ``establish an early warning system to detect and prevent another catastrophic terrorist attack on the United States.'' Therefore, the administration made requests for telecom companies to cooperate with its intelligence activities. The companies complied with the government's request for help, relying on written assurance from the executive branch that their actions were both necessary and legal.

Now these companies face multibillion dollar lawsuits challenging their actions. Such lawsuits not only create potentially staggering liability for the companies, they also create the risk that sensitive details about our intelligence sources and methods will be revealed through discovery. Moreover, failing to protect those who cooperate with the Government to thwart terrorist activity will undermine the willingness of others to cooperate in the future. A powerful op-ed authored last October by former Attorneys General Benjamin Civiletti, Dick Thornburgh, and William Webster, said it best:

The government alone cannot protect us from the threats we

face today. We must have the help of all our citizens. There

will be times when the lives of thousands of Americans will

depend on whether corporations such as airlines or banks are

willing to lend assistance. If we do not treat companies

fairly when they respond to assurances from the highest

levels of the government that their help is legal and

essential for saving lives, then we will be radically

reducing our society's capacity to defend itself.

Recognizing the gravity of the situation, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee voted 13 to 2 to include retroactive immunity in its bill. This overwhelming vote came after the committee reviewed the classified documents on which these companies relied. The committee ultimately concluded that the Government ``cannot obtain the intelligence it needs without assistance from [telecommunications] companies.''

Protecting the corporate good citizens who answered the call to assist our intelligence community during a time of great danger to this country is the right thing to do. Anything short of full immunity for those companies that, at the Government's request, on the written assurance that such action had been authorized by the President and deemed lawful, would undermine the security of the United States is simply unacceptable.

The carefully crafted, bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee bill protects privacy interests without undermining our intelligence community's ability to do its vitally important job. The bill was approved by a vote of 13 to 2 after careful consideration of complicated issues and classified documents. It will allow our intelligence professionals to continue collecting foreign intelligence against foreign targets located outside the United States without requiring prior court approval. This is consistent with the intent of the legislators who enacted FISA in 1978 and represents no change in the way that the NSA has always conducted foreign surveillance.

In so doing, the bill will also continue to protect the civil liberties of Americans in this country, surveillance of whom has always required prior court approval. Nothing we are considering in the Senate today would alter that. In the event that communication from a U.S. person is inadvertently intercepted, the intelligence community uses ``minimization procedures'' to suppress the data. The result is that the communication is never used or shared. These procedures have been used effectively for 30 years and will remain in place after permanent FISA changes are enacted.

Enacting permanent modernizations to FISA is one of the most important duties the Senate will undertake this year. We have known for 6 months that the Protect America Act would expire on February 1 and have no excuse for not getting this done correctly before that date. The stakes in this debate could not be higher. Although the details can be complicated, the basic issue is pretty simple. As Andy McCarthy said in a recent piece for the National Review Online, ``Osama bin Laden doesn't need to apply to a sharia court before blowing up an American embassy; the president shouldn't need to apply to a federal court to try to stop him.''

Unfortunately, I was unable to make it back to town in time for the two cloture votes that were held yesterday.

Had I been here, I would have voted for cloture on Rockefeller amendment No. 3911, the Intelligence Committee's FISA bill, and against cloture on Reid amendment No. 3918, to temporarily extend the Protect America Act.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, later today, Senator Schumer will bring up the Criminal Background Check Improvement Act, which is an important piece of legislation. When this bill was originally hotlined, we asked that it be held so that we could discuss the improvements to the bill.

This bill came out of the tragedy at Virginia Tech. It is important that the American people understand that what we are changing in this bill would not have prevented what happened at Virginia Tech. What happened to the individuals there was because the law we have on the books was not followed by the State of Virginia. They recognized that shortly thereafter and have made corrective action to it.

What is also important to note is that under the previous legislation we have had, over $400 million a year was authorized to help the States implement the programs so that somebody who is truly a danger to themselves or others or has been admitted to a mental institution and considered mentally defective--that is a term of the bureaucracy--is not allowed to purchase a gun. We all agree to that in this country. So when you don't follow the law, the laws don't work. Consequently, the families are suffering great grief at this time because the law wasn't followed.

Too often, the first reaction of Congress is to hurry up and pass a bill. There are and have been in this bill some good ideas. But there were some bad ideas. The idea of holding the bill to be able to work with those who are offering the bill to get improvements has come about. The principle is this: As we protect people from the dangers of weapons by withholding both criminals and those people who constitute a threat to themselves and others, we can't do that if we are going to step on the rights of those who have a right and who are not in that category.

I wish to take a moment to thank Senator Schumer for his hard work and Elliot of his staff for his hard work and to recognize my staff, Jane Treat and Brooke Bacak and others on my staff who worked through the last couple of months to improve this bill. We have come out to make sure those people, veterans in this country who go out and defend, with their lives, bodies, and their futures, our rights, aren't inappropriately losing their rights under this legislation.

It is interesting for the American people to know that at this time, if you are a veteran and you come home with a closed head injury and you resolve that, then, in fact, by the time you wake up and recover over a year or 2-year period, you will have lost all your rights to bear an arm to be able to go hunting, to be able to skeet shoot, to be able to hunt with your grandchildren, without any notification whatsoever that you have lost that right. That is the present law. That is what is happening.

We have 140,000 veterans with no history of mental deficiency, no history of being dangerous to themselves or others, who have lost, without notice, their right to go hunting, to skeet shoot, to have that kind of outing in this wonderful country of ours in a legal, protected sense. What this bill does is it attempts to address that by giving them an opportunity for relief. It mandates that, first of all, they are notified if that happens to them so that they know they are losing their rights. What a tragedy it would be if a veteran who lost his rights but doesn't know it becomes incarcerated under a felony for hunting with his grandson because it is illegal for him to own, handle, or transmit a weapon? That is not what we intended to do in this Congress some 10 years ago. Yet that is the real effect of what is happening.

Consequently, we are at a point now where we have agreed with the fact that we want to make sure--and we want to put the resources through this authorization--it covers those who could be a danger to themselves and others, and we are going to help the States implement this law, the law on the books, by authorizing significant sums to do this. It is not a new authorization; $400 million was authorized before, but the appropriators didn't appropriate it. They chose to make a higher priority. The most ever appropriated under this, I think, was $23 million a year.

So, in fact, what we want to do now is say we mean it, which means when it comes to appropriations time, this authorization will have no effect unless, in fact, we appropriate the money to the States to carry out this notification system. It is something we can and must do. It shows that when we work together to solve the problems and protect the future and honor the Constitution, the rights under the Constitution, we can do that if people of good faith and of good intent work together to solve that.

My compliments to Senator Schumer and his staff and Hendrik Van Der Vaart on my staff for the hours and hours we have put in to make sure this happened.

A couple other key points. Sometimes the bureaucracy delays whether or not you are on this list. So we have said that, at the end of the year, if they can't decide, it is going to be adjudicated that you cannot have a gun and you will have to prove that you can. That is fair enough, provided we create the means with which you can recover the cost of that adjudication. So if, in fact, you get to Federal court and you win your case that there is not anything wrong with you, the Federal Government is going to pay your lawyer's fees and return your rights--the rights given to everybody else in this country--return your wrongly denied rights back to you.

Therefore, we really, truly do give access to those who have been injured under this law and, at the same time, protect the rest of the American public from those who could be injured when we don't follow the law.

I also pay tribute to Congresswoman McCarthy. I served with her in the House. She has been dedicated to this issue for years. She suffered a terrible tragedy herself at the hands of somebody who was obviously deranged. This will mark a milestone for one of the things she wanted to accomplish during her service in the Congress.

It is my hope that others will not hold this bill. It is my hope that when it comes appropriations time, the moneys that are necessary to put the people who really are a danger to themselves and others on the national criminal background check, that they will get there, and that those who should not be there will not be there. So it is a balance, a balance for protection, but it is also a balance to preserve rights, especially for our veterans--the very people who continue to

protect our rights. They are going to be preserved.

Myself and Senator Schumer sent a letter to the ATF asking them to reconsider some of the wording in their ruling because it puts people in there who should not be. We are hopeful that they recognize that, and that they, because of a bipartisan query, do a rulemaking process that really directs this where it should be. When that happens, we will have finished everything we need to do, except get the dollars appropriated to implement this act.

Again, my hat is off to Senator Schumer and those who have worked tirelessly to get this done. It is with great appreciation for the manner in which it was handled, and it is my hope that we will pass this on and see the great accomplishments of protecting people from those who are a danger to themselves and others.

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

Mr. President, Senator Lott is true gentleman: agreeable, good-humored and kind in nature. When I think of Trent Lott, the words consensus and congeniality come to mind. These words come to mind because Trent has become one of the greatest mediators this body has ever seen, his ability to bring all parties on an issue to the table and when the negotiations are done, each person leaves with a smile on their face. Senator Lott's humor and affable personality made working with him a pleasure, even when a compromise could not be found and the time for negotiating was over, nobody would leave the table feeling alienated, or hurt they left with Trent still a friend and eager to work on the next solution.

Trent Lott's 34 years of service to his country as a Member of Congress will forever be remembered in chapters of our Nation's history and by his constituents of Mississippi. But the one who deserves just as much thanks and gratitude is his college sweetheart and wife Tricia. While Trent has been dedicated to his job and country for the past 34 years, he has been devoted to his family.

Senator Lott's congeniality could be attributed to his humble beginnings, southern upbringing, or a number of things, but no matter the reason he still remains a humble man with many friends and a man who is truly kind to others. As I have grown to know him through our work here in the Senate, I have seen that his kindness stretches beyond the walls of his duties on this floor and to all who encounter him. Trent always has a smile on his face and extends pleasantries to everyone he passes. Here in Washington, it is easy for one to be consumed by self-importance and it is easy to forget to treat others as we wish to be treated, but he never did. While in the lobby of another office, Senator Lott will have a candid conversation with the much overlooked staff manning the front desk or anyone in his path--he will go out of his way to make sure everyone is greeted with warm hello.

I have agreed with Senator Lott on many issues, and I have disagreed with him on many as well, but in each scenario we always ended with a handshake and a good laugh. This institution is losing a man who could bring people together and allow bitter enemies to lay down their swords.

This is a man who will be missed by many and I wish Senator Lott the best of luck as he retires from his years of political service.