Floor Statements

As we approach the end of the year, Congress once again finds itself on a last-minute spending spree, approving billions of dollars of new spending with few questions asked, no amendments allowed, and little debate, discussion, or inspection permitted.

The U.S. national debt now exceeds $9.13 trillion. That means almost $30,000 in debt for each and every man, woman, and child in the United States. The U.S. debt is expanding by about $1.4 billion a day, or nearly $1 million a minute. The unfunded liability placed on a child born today is $400,000.

The ``Financial Report of the United States Government'' released this week found that the Federal deficit would be

nearly 70 percent higher than the $162.8 billion reported 2 months ago if the Government used the same accounting practices as private firms. Accounting for such liabilities as pensions and health care costs when they are incurred rather than when they are paid would have boosted the deficit to $275.5 billion, the report noted.

It is completely irresponsible for Congress to add to this debt that threatens the retirement security of our senior citizens and the economic prosperity of our children and grandchildren who will inherit the debt that results from the spending decisions Congress is making today.

The Omnibus appropriations bill, which combines the 11 unfinished appropriations bills to fund the Federal Government's operations in fiscal year 2008, provides approximately $515.7 billion in discretionary spending. The bill also adds approximately $11 billion in emergency spending, of which $3.7 billion is contingent emergency spending for veterans programs.

This bill was approved by the House of Representatives last night, and the Senate will vote on it today, even though it has only been available now for 36 hours. The bill is more than 3,400 pages, and I am fairly certain that not a single Member of either chamber of Congress, or anyone else, for that matter, has read it in its entirety. What is most shocking, however, is that the eagerness of Members of Congress to recess for the year and to satisfy the desire to secure pork projects has taken precedent over our responsibility to properly manage the Nation's finances and set national spending priorities.

While this bill does not provide the funding that is needed for our brave men and women in uniform fighting on the front lines in Iraq, it does contains over 9,000 special interest pork projects, known as ``earmarks.''

``An earmark Christmas, Lawmakers deck out omnibus with many a spending project,'' proclaims the front page of the Hill newspaper. ``Earmark Extravaganza, Nearly 9,000 Requests in Omnibus,'' exclaims the front page of Roll Call.

Nearly 300 of the earmarks in this bill costing over $800 million were air dropped into this bill during closed- door meetings not open to the public or most Members of Congress.

Among the thousands of earmarked projects tucked into this bill are:

$113,000 for rodent control in Alaska;

$213,000 for olive fruit fly research in France;

$1,645,000 for the City of Bastrop, LA. According to Bastrop Daily Enterprise, ``The money is officially earmarked for the purchase of bulletproof vests and body armor. Bulletproof vests only cost about $700-800, however, so $1.6 million would appear to be overkill.'' Police detective Curtis Stephenson agrees, conceding ``There's no way we'd need that kind of money just to put all our people in vests.'';

$200,000 for a Hunting and Fishing Museum in Pennsylvania;

$150,000 for a Louis Armstrong Museum in New York;

$700,000 for a bike trail in Minnesota;

$1,000,000 for river walk in Massachusetts;

$200,000 for a post office museum in downtown Las Vegas;

$1,000,000 for an earmark requested by a House Member who has been indicted on Federal charges of racketeering, money-laundering and soliciting bribes;

$824,000 for alternative salmon products;

$146,000 for an aquarium in South Carolina;

$1,000,000 for managing weeds in Idaho; and

$37,000 for the Lincoln Park Zoo in Illinois.

It is hard to argue that any of these are national priorities or more important than funding the troops in Iraq or worth increasing the national debt. Members of Congress have, however, learned to rationalize the practice of earmarking, but the truth is every earmark diverts funds away from more important national priorities.

I filed two amendments to this bill that would have demonstrated this point that I had hoped to offer but was blocked from doing so. These amendments would have given Congress the opportunity to choose between improving deficient roads and bridges and providing health care to women and children before steering funds toward special interest earmarks.

The first amendment, 3860, would have allowed the Department of Transportation to redirect earmarked funds to improve unsafe roads and bridges.

On August 1, 2007, the Interstate 35 West, I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, MN, collapsed during rush hour, killing 13 people and injuring another 123. This tragedy exposed both a nationwide problem of deficient bridges as well as misplaced priorities of Congress, which has focused more on funding earmarks than improving aging infrastructure.

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, one out of every eight bridges in our Nation is structurally deficient. Of the 597,340 bridges in the United States, 154,101 bridges are deficient. Yet, instead of addressing needed bridge maintenance, Congress has prioritized earmarks for politicians' pet projects, many which do not even involve roads or bridges.

The $286 billion, 5-year Transportation authorization bill approved by Congress in 2005, for example, included 6,373 earmarks, totaling $24 billion, including the infamous ``Bridge to Nowhere'' in Alaska.

An investigation by the inspector general of the Department of Transportation found that ``Many earmarked projects considered by the agencies as low priority are being funded over higher priority, non- earmarked projects.'' The IG notes that ``Funding these new low priority projects added to the already substantial backlog of replacement projects and caused [Federal Aviation Administration] to delay the planning of its higher priority replacement projects by at least 3 years.''

Earmarks have siphoned away tens of billions of dollars that could and should have been spent to upgrade deficient bridges or improve aging roads rather than being spent on politicians' pet projects.

The Senate has already rejected a similar amendment in September, and this bill shows once again that Congress is more interested in securing earmarks than securing our Nation's roads and bridges.

The second amendment, 3861, would have allowed the Department of Health and Human Services to redirect earmarked funds to the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant Program.

Congress has spent much of this year posturing about who cares most about providing health care for children and the uninsured. Yet Congress has failed to enact any reforms to expand health care access. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in this country there were 9.5 million children who lacked health insurance for at least part of last year, and over 17 million women are uninsured.

This amendment ensures that many of these uninsured women and children would receive services from the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant, which provides funding for urgent health needs for pregnant women, mothers, infants, children, and adolescents. It is shameful that Congress has diverted tens of millions of dollars in the health title of this bill towards special interest pork projects when millions of children and women do not have access to critical health care.

The Senate rejected a similar amendment in October, and this bill demonstrates once again that while Congress may talk about prioritizing children's health care, the real priority of Congress is its own special interest pork projects.

There are plenty of other examples in this bill of Congress's misplaced priorities. The bill, for example, terminates the Baby AIDS Program that provides resources to prevent perinatal HIV transmission and care for mothers with HIV, while ensuring that San Francisco receives funding for deceased AIDS patients. The bill provides another $100 million for the 2008 political party conventions. It allows the Department of Justice to again provide Federal financial support for groups linked to terrorism by removing the prohibition passed by the Senate in October.

Who know what other travesties are hidden within this 3,400 page omnibus spending bill that Congress is expected to pass without having time to read, review, or amend? Members of Congress may never know, and apparently few seem to care.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that the approval ratings of Congress have reached alltime historical lows.

Congress has ignored the needs of our troops in combat, the looming bankruptcy of Social Security and Medicare, and the nearly insurmountable national debt that threatens the future prosperity of our Nation while showing virtually no restraint on spending, especially for parochial pork projects.

Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 3854 and ask for its immediate consideration.

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

Mr. President, I don't disagree we have to take action to help those people who are in a bind now based on both the economics, as well as probably a pretty severe bubble that has occurred. The real fact is some people are going to lose their homes. I have agreed to this debate, not because I was trying to stop all of the FHA modernization, but because I am markedly concerned that in this component what we are doing has nothing to do with the crisis that we see today, but, in fact, will put the next two generations in obligation for a sum somewhere between $50 billion and $60 billion in terms of reverse mortgages.

Now, the question I would ask, which has not been asked, is where are the metrics to measure the market forces in reverse mortgages in this country? There are none. As a matter of fact, this bill looks at that by asking for a study. But the other intent of the bill is that we ask for a study, but we eliminate the cap which the study is supposed to help us determine.

There are some other concerns the American taxpayer should have, one of which is FHA has what is called a qualified audit. They have two material weaknesses we wouldn't accept from any other corporation in this country in which we would entrust our money or invest our assets. When they are audited, there are two material weaknesses in their ability to control what they are doing, measure what they are doing, and assess what they are doing. We ought to be concerned about that.

We are simply asking with this amendment that before we raise the cap on the noncritical area in the home mortgage market, we, in fact, study to know what we are doing. The idea for the study is great, but the study is going to have limited value if, in fact, we move all reverse mortgages to the Government. That is going to be the ultimate impact of this bill.

The crisis is in the mortgage industry, not the reverse mortgage industry. But we are applying and using that crisis to absolutely ensure that in the future, our children are going to be hooked for the guarantee for all of the reverse mortgages in this country. We are going to limit the private reinsurance equity reverse mortgage in this country by what we do.

I think the other thing we ought to think about as we do this is some ``what-ifs.'' What if we don't get a good handle on this subprime credit and the debt situation that is going on? What if we end up becoming the true guarantor of all of these loans? What if they get to the point where they can't be repaid? It is not going to be the Presiding Officer and me who are going to pay this; it is going to be the next couple of generations.

So this amendment is just designed for prudence. It says, if we are going to study this, let's study it and then make a decision. There is no credible source that says there is a shortage of access of credit for reverse mortgages in this country. It is not in the committee report. It is not in the report. So why are we doing this? Because it works and because people--we are doing it because that is the way everybody will go if you can get a Government-guaranteed loan. The banks make more money on it. It is easier--you evidently have to qualify, but conventional reverse mortgages will go out the window. So what have we done with that? We have shifted the risk for all of the reverse mortgages in this country to our kids. If that was where we had a crisis, then I would be in agreement that maybe we should go there, but that is not where it is.

What we are attempting to do with the FHA Modernization Act is to help those who are in a crisis now. Probably, had we done this 3 years ago, many of the people who are in subprime loans would have been in FHA, and we wouldn't see the extent of the crisis we have today.

So what I would ask is that our colleagues stop for a minute and say: Do we really want at this time to do this? I understand that I am going to be opposed on this by members of the Banking Committee, but I would ask them to show me the data that says there truly is a dent in this aspect of the reverse mortgage market.

Mr. President, I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. President, it is interesting. I will ask a couple of questions. Where is the study that shows the Federal Government ought to be in the reverse mortgage market? It is not there. Where is the study that shows what will happen to the private mortgage market? It is not there. So what we are doing is moving all reverse mortgages and the obligations thereof to our kids.

We ought to let private markets work some. We ought to create that ability. We are going to eliminate that ability. There is no question that reverse mortgages are advantageous for a lot of people. As you heard, there are going to be people preying on widows out there, saying: Here is the FHA, and I can sell you this annuity if you want to reverse mortgage your home. There is not going to be any balance on that.

So we are going to shift an entire industry, which should be private, with FHA reserve, for those who need it to help them, to the Government. The long-term consequence by the auditors' report is that it is going to be $45 billion that is going to get shifted to debt to our kids. That is the exposure there.

I am not against reverse mortgages. I am not against us trying to do everything we can in terms of the real crisis out there, which is associated with the subprime mortgages. This is a totally different category. What we are doing is expanding a program, unlimited. What if the GAO report comes back and says you should not do that, there is a market out there? Every banker in this country, if you give them an option of a conventional mortgage or an FHA-guaranteed mortgage, is going to go to the FHA. What will happen? There is a lower qualification for it. They make more money off of it. Consequently, we are going to direct a whole industry into a Government-backed program by what we are doing in this bill.

I am not even opposed to reverse mortgages through FHA. I am opposed to us overreacting and creating only one market, taking the private market totally out of it and putting our kids on the hook for it.

Nobody answered the questions about FHA in their audit. No large corporation would still be on the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, or any other exchange, if they had three significantly qualified areas to their financial statements. They have two of the three that are material weaknesses, inability to even watch the programs we have. We are going to ignore all that today. I understand that. We are going to ignore the fact that there are no metrics, no study to tell us what we are doing is right. But we are going to do it.

Somebody has to protect and think about the future. So this amendment is common sense. It says, wait--we can

wait a short period of time; it will not take GAO all that long. What is the pressure on this? The pressure is the money generation. We are going to collect $1.5 billion from these same elderly people in insurance, who are going to be scammed by people who will sell them annuities. So they are going to get less money out of their reverse mortgage than they would have gotten in the private sector. They are going to get less. And then we are going to say we did something.

I am surprised it has not been raised, but what we are doing is a credit card scam. We are being the credit card scam. We are going to enable people to get scammed. We don't know what we are doing. The study is important to do.

I will work with the authors of the bill to raise the cap somewhat, but to raise it unlimited, never to have a cap regardless of what the GAO report says? When are we going to come back and fix it? What if they say: You shouldn't be doing this; maybe this ought to be in the private market. There isn't a need for our children to take on the additional risk of these reverse mortgages.

What are we going to do? There is no mechanism for what we are doing in the FHA Modernization Act if that comes to fruition. The reason for the amendment is to pause and ask the question: Where are the metrics that say we need to do it? Where is the market failure that says the Federal Government ought to be doing it?

This was a pilot. We are now converting a pilot into a full-grown program. Shouldn't we know what we are doing? Shouldn't we assess whether there is a true market failure in reverse mortgages before we do this? No. 2, shouldn't we consider some of the safeguards for a lot of the people who are going to be taken advantage of through this program? Finally, No. 3, with our debt growing $1 million a minute, $1.3 billion a day--and every child now who is born in this country is inheriting $400,000 in unfunded liabilities--do we have an obligation to be maybe a little more prudent and say: Wait a minute, let's fix the subprime, but let's be more prudent on this issue until we really know what we are doing.

I understand it is a good idea. For me, it will be great when I retire. I probably will do a reverse mortgage. But we don't know what the markets are. We don't know where they are. And we don't know the 5- year future right now, especially given the subprime crisis in front of us, and we are going to add more to that?

What if somebody comes to their elderly mother and says: I want you to do a reverse mortgage on your home so I cannot default on my private one? Is that why we are doing this? Or what if somebody says: I want to sell you the best thing you ever had; I am going to give you an annuity. Sounds good. You have a home, you are an elderly female, no husband, and you buy it, only to find out later you could have bought an annuity that would have given you $300 or $400 more a month if you had been in the private market with checks and balances rather than be scammed.

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a summary of the independent auditors' report--Urbach Kahn & Werlin--from this past year on the Federal Housing Administration.

Mr. President, I remind my colleagues, the FHA has significant problems if they cannot pass an audit. That has not been addressed in this bill at all in terms of the audit defects FHA has.

I reserve the remainder of my time and ask how much time is remaining?

In my normal magnanimous state, I would normally be happy to do that and will do that.

Mr. President, how much time remains?

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to Senator Martinez in opposition to my amendment.

Mr. President, I yield the Senator an additional 1 minute.

Mr. President, I will note for my colleagues' benefit that I do not plan to ask for a recorded vote on this amendment. I also will not demand a recorded vote on the bill itself, so colleagues would not have to come to the floor.

Let me summarize. What we are trying to do with FHA modernization is good. We have a crisis. There is no crisis in reverse mortgages. As a matter of fact, there is not hardly any private sector anymore. The reverse mortgages that are growing, I would advise the Senator from Florida, are growing at 60 percent a year at FHA. That is not slow growth. If we take 60 percent a year over the next 10 years, instead of 109,000, we will have 800,000. So that is why GAO estimates that we are talking about $56 billion in new obligations that our kids are going to have to come up with if anything happens.

So, again, nobody has answered the question: Is there a crisis in reverse mortgages? There is not. Nobody has answered the question: Where are the metrics in terms of the marketplace, saying there is not adequate credit out there in the private marketplace, not guaranteed by our children? We are not going to guarantee it, our children are. Nobody has answered those two questions. And nobody has said: Here is what the data shows on the market now that we are going to do 130,000- plus, I believe, this year, and how does that impact with the total number of mortgages that are out there this year in the very difficult market that we find ourselves in with the tight credit.

So I would ask for a voice vote on this amendment, and then I will not object to a voice vote or a consent after that on the underlying bill.

Mr. President, I yield the remainder of my time.

Madam President, first of all, let me thank both the chairman

of the committee and Senator Warner, as well as Senator McCain, for their work for the people who defend this country. I also would be remiss if I did not thank their staffs. They have been highly cooperative with my staff as we looked through several items.

This is a large bill. It is an important bill. I intend to vote for it. But I have some heartburn, and I want to spend a few minutes talking about it.

Last year, the Defense Department contracted out $110 billion without the first competitive bid on either contracts or grants. When we considered this bill in this body, we approved a competitive bid amendment that would say: We are going to have competition for all of these. We have $5.6 billion worth of earmarks in this bill, of which none are competitive; there is another $12 billion of add-ons, of which none are competitive--just in what we have done.

There is a difference of opinion among a few of us with a vast majority of the others in terms of whether the President--whoever the administration is--gets to direct priorities versus us directing priorities. I understand that, and that is a fair debate.

Our position is that sometimes we know better. That may, in fact, be the case. But this body passed an amendment that said we are going to use competition on all these earmarks so that, in fact, the American people get value, they get a better product at a lower price. That, unfortunately, was taken out in conference. Senator McCain wholeheartedly supported that amendment on this floor.

Now, why would we take that out? What is it that would say we don't want to get the best value for our taxpayers' dollars when it comes to $100 billion worth of spending? Why is that? Why would we do that?

We had a very simple process. We said: If you have an earmark and it is something that needs to be done right now, all competitive requirements for that are waived. It does not apply to anything in the past. But for any new spending we earmark, we say: If it is not urgent or unique, then we ought to spread it out to find out how we get the best value for our money. We agreed to that. Then, when we got to conference, we did not hold it.

Why did we not hold it? Why is it we do not want to have the winner of competition of grants and contracts to be involved in getting better value for the American people? Could it be we want to protect someone? Could it be we do not want sunlight? The real answer is going to be that yesterday the Accountability and Transparency Web site that we passed went on line, and all of America is going to find out where all this money is going. On this Web site, it shows if it was a directed earmark without any competition whatsoever.

So why would we deny the American taxpayers now the ability to get far greater value than what they are going to get because we want to direct something somewhere? If we truly think it is the best thing--and it is not urgent and it is not unique--and we want to say we want to do it, good and dandy, but why wouldn't we want to do it at the best value, at the best price for the American taxpayer? So we end up where the American taxpayer is going to lose about $10 billion to $15 billion this year through inefficiency and the lack of competitive bidding on grants and contracts in the Defense authorization bill.

When I met with Tina Jones, the Comptroller, what we found out was that what we label at $5.9 billion in this bill is really closer to $17 billion when you really work it all out. We started discovering this when we asked the Department of Transportation to tell us what was the impact of their earmarks.

The other amendment I have offered that has not been accepted by this body--but should--is to do a study of our earmarks to see if we really get value, if they really do turn something profitable. Do they really give us something our military needs? What happens is this $110 billion should have only cost us $90 billion.

Now, what does the difference mean? It means buying thousands more MRAPs. It means buying more F-22s. But because we do not competitively bid and because the conference committee did not keep this amendment, the American taxpayer loses, our children lose. But, most importantly, the warfighter loses because if we waste dollars that could have gone to help them better, we disadvantage them in the job we have asked them to do for us.

So I am going to keep offering this. I am going to make a big deal about competition for getting Government contracts in this country, based on quality and price. I am going to keep offering the fact that we ought to assess what the effect of our earmarks is. Now, people bristle at that. But if we are right that we know better than the Pentagon and we know better than the generals and we know better than the procurement officers, we at least ought to look at the results of how we know best and see ``Did it turn out?'' instead of blindly continuing to do the same thing without the knowledge of the effect of what we did.

There are all sorts of other issues connected with this--parochial issues, campaign issues, political issues--that are connected to earmarks. But the most important issue that ought to be considered is the warfighter. The second issue that ought to be considered is our children. The fact is, we are hurting our children when we are not efficient and proper with the American taxpayers' money.

I do intend to vote for this bill. It is very important for our warfighters.

I do appreciate the chairman. I admire so much his relationship with all those on the Armed Services Committee, the collegiality under which he has worked on this legislation.

My admiration is not limited to the Members of the Senate; there is the staff. They have been tremendously cooperative with us.

But this is a great question we need to ask. We fail to uphold our oath when we don't spend money wisely. We fail the next generation. We fail the principle of liberty that we have a Defense Department for in the first place when we waste money.

I know there are a lot of other areas we can work on within the Defense Department, but before we have any credibility about working on the other money we waste, we ought to be sure we are clean in terms of what we do. So the fact we are not going to look at what the results were of the money that we directed, and that we are not going to have true competition for about $150 billion this next year of grants and contracts within the Defense Department says we are going to let down the warfighter, says we are going to let down the next generation. To me, my hope is in the future, we will embrace this transparency, this idea that we ought to get the best value for every dollar we spend for our Defense Department, and we ought to do it in a way that is transparent so the American people can see what we are doing.

I thank the Senator from Virginia for giving me this time. I thank the majority leader for creating an opportunity for us to at least have some time to discuss this bill. Discussions such as these are important to the American public. My challenge is to the chairman of this committee: Next year, let's make up for this. Let's truly put competition first. Let's get great value for our children and for our warfighters. We can do it. We won't stop anything that is needed now. We won't stop anything that is unique. But those things that are not pertinent to the here and now, that are going to come in the future, we ought to get great value for. We know we don't. The IG report said we don't. There is tons of information we have that says we are not getting great value.

With that, I yield the floor and thank my colleagues for giving me the time.

I will make certain it is placed in the Record.

I so ask unanimous consent.

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

Mr. President, under the cloture rules, I had an amendment for which now it looks like there is the opportunity to have a point of order raised against it, so I am not going to even call up the amendment. I will spend a few minutes talking about it. I know everybody wants to get out of town. I will spend some time talking about it, and I will take as short an amount of time as possible.

It was an amendment to eliminate things that are already being done in this country through the Agriculture Department. For example, specialty cheeses, they have grown by 15 to 20 percent per year. We have 16 different marketing agencies the Government, in one way or another, is already funding.

We spend $2.5 million a year in Wisconsin already through the Ag Department. We are going to spend $1.6 million with the Vermont cheese marketing program for artesian cheeses. Yet in this bill we are authorizing another program. This amendment was designed to take that out.

Also, this amendment deals with areas in terms of USDA loans for golf courses, for resorts, for entertainment complexes, to businesses that have nothing to do with agriculture, to businesses that have assets in excess of $60 billion apiece.

So the idea of the amendment was to, first of all, refine where we are loaning the taxpayers' money to businesses and, also, to look at the $1.6 billion the USDA has lost on $15 billion in the last 5 years on loan foreclosures to these types of areas and to redirect this into an area where we are getting better value for the taxpayers' money.

I am concerned we actually drafted this amendment, as the committee had asked us to do it, and now we find a point of order will be raised against it following the committee's recommendations.

So I appreciate the good work of Senator Harkin and Senator Chambliss on this bill and the way they have worked with us. My hope is we can get a final farm bill through conference and take care of the needs of this country.

I am somewhat depressed in the fact that there is a lot of wasteful spending we have put into this bill and we are not going to have an opportunity to amend that.

With that, I yield back the remainder of my time.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object. The Senator from Illinois had the opportunity to fund this program fully with an amendment he voted against that I offered on the Commerce-State-Justice bill. The fact is that the Bush administration has already started work on this; they have 30 active cases going now. The complaint was there wasn't enough money. I offered an amendment, which the Senator from Illinois--even the author in the Senate, Mr. Dodd, wasn't even here to vote for--to fund at a level greater than what this bill authorizes. Instead, we chose earmarks and pork instead of funding this bill. On the basis of that--I also agree that we ought to be about this.

I have no problem with that.

So on that basis, do we want to solve the crimes? Yes. Did they have an opportunity to fund that? Yes. They chose not to. The sponsors of the bill chose not to put the money in.

What they want is to play bait and switch. There is no question that these should be adequately funded. The Bush administration started on its own, initiated this program on its own in the Justice Department. They had an opportunity to vote for the money to fund this. They refused to do it--not an authorization, actual dollars. So on the basis of that, I object.

I object.

Mr. President, parliamentary inquiry: Under the rules of the Senate, when we ask for unanimous consent, as has just been asked, are we not saying we will not debate the bill, we will not offer the bill for amendments, and that we will take the bill as it is?

Which is not to debate the bill and not allow the bill to be amended. I will be happy to discuss my objections to the bill. They are small and deal with reverse mortgages, not conventional FHA, or the increased cap or the lower downpayment. I am working hard to try to resolve that so we do not hold up this bill.

I am happy to.

Yes.

I have no objection to that.

Mr. President, I object to both, and I will give my reasons why during our time.

Mr. President, this morning we have heard about a lot of good causes and a lot of good bills. But what we have been asked to do is to pass bills without any debate, without the opportunity to amend, and we just heard a Senator say we could agree to a UC and not have to vote on it. Agreeing to a UC is the same as voting yes. The fact is, we have had plenty of time to bring up all these bills, put them on the floor, debate them and have great debates so the American people become informed, and offer amendments.

I will say for many of these bills, I am the Senator objecting. Senator Harkin knows I am objecting to the two bills he just raised.

The point is, our debt is rising $1 million a minute. When you authorize $100 million for the Realtime Writers Act, what you are saying is, I intend to get the money out of the appropriations process to develop training for something that the market should already be inducing through increased wages. If in fact there is a shortage, why is the market not taking care of it? Is it because the pay is too low? Maybe the pay ought to be higher. Maybe people ought to go into it. Instead we are going to inject $100 million of American taxpayers' money into something that will be solved through the market. If it is not, then the pay is entirely too low and the market will eventually adjust to it. But to say we are going to authorize something with no intent to ever spend, that is not the intent of an authorization. The intent of an authorization is to spend more money.

At $1.3 billion a day, we are going into debt, and it is not our debt. We are transferring it to our children and our grandchildren. To come down here and want to authorize and spend and pass without debate and pass without amendment multitudes of bills with no debate is to say, in other words, take it or leave it. And if you want to amend it or you want to have a chance to vote on it, tough luck; we are going to do it without you. It is called ``UC.''

The fact is, we find ourselves $9 trillion in debt now. The fact is, our children are facing $79 trillion worth of unfunded mandates. It is time that we change the business in the Senate. To come down and claim you want to just authorize but not spend is a hoax because you would not be authorizing unless you do spend.

The other thing the American people ought to know is, out of the over $1 trillion in discretionary budget that we spend right now, $280 billion of it is not authorized. The appropriators totally ignore the authorizers. When it comes to appropriations, they appropriate whatever they want. So it doesn't have to be authorized to get it done. They will appropriate it if they want to do it. They don't pay any attention to authorization.

When we have $8 trillion worth of authorized programs now, to say we cannot eliminate some program that is not being funded to be able to make room for one that should be funded, and to say we should not have to do that, that doesn't pass the commonsense test with the American public.

I understand that is irritating and bristling to the way we have done things in the past. I apologize if at times I am irritable and irritating, but I think the future generations are worth it. I do not think we can continue doing business as usual. So we have seen an ALS bill come down. The CDC doesn't want the ALS bill, the registry, and the reason is they can already do it. If we are going to do an ALS bill, we ought to do it for all neurologic diseases in terms of a registry, not just one. What we have decided is a celebrity or an interest group can come and we will place a priority there. Regardless of what the science says, regardless of what the basic science and the pure science says in terms of guiding us where to go on diseases, we will just respond. We will create a new program, and we will tell NIH where they have to go, or CDC where they have to go when science doesn't guide them there.

If we are going to do that, if we really think as a body we ought to be going the disease-specific direction, then why don't we do it all? Why don't we say we will do the peer-reviewed science on all the programs at NIH? Since we are going to pick the ones that have a cause behind them, why don't we do them all. Why don't we let the lobbyists tell us which ones should be first? Of course, we wouldn't do that because we know the scientists at CDC and the scientists at NIH make decisions, not on popularity, not on politics, but on the raw science that will give us the best benefit for the most people.

We look good when we do those things. We do satisfy a yearning for those who are handicapped or paralyzed or have breast cancer or have colon cancer. But if we are going to do a registry for ALS, why aren't we doing one for diabetes? We aren't we doing one for multiple myeloma? Why? Why aren't we doing those things? If we are going to pick one, if we are going to do

a neurological disease, let's do it for all of them. It shows the shallowness of what we are trying to do. Our hearts are big, but we are not looking at the big picture.

The FHA we discussed. The component in the FHA that I object to is, we have a study in the FHA bill that the GAO is mandated to do on reverse mortgages. But at the same time, regardless of what the study shows, we lift the cap. All I have asked for from the authors of the bill is to keep the cap where it is until we get the GAO study back so we know what we are doing, rather than responding to a clamoring which we have no basis, in fact, to know is the accurate thing to do; otherwise, we wouldn't be asking for the study in the first place. It is a simple request.

Instead, we come to the Senate floor and try to make us, those who object, seem unreasonable when we say common sense would say if we have a study in the bill to tell us where to go, but we are already ignoring what the results of that study may or may not be, to question that we should not have a debate about that, that we should not have an ability to amend that, we should just blindly say yes, that is not what the Senate tradition is. This is a body that is supposed to be about debate.

In the past 31 days the Senate has been in session 15 days. We have had 10 votes in 15 days, and we have had 8 days without any votes at all. All these bills could have been on the floor and had accurate debate. I would have lost most of my amendments, based on the historical record of my amendments, but the American people would have benefited from the debate about those bills. Instead, we are made to look as if we don't care if we want to try to improve a bill because we will not agree to blindly accept a bill to go through. We are made to say we don't care about people who are losing their mortgages because we think there are some commonsense changes to a bill? That isn't quite right.

You hear the reference that people vote or the committee voted or that there wasn't an amendment. The fact is, on voice votes if you do not vote, you are not recorded because there is not a recorded vote. But that doesn't mean you agree to bring the bill to the floor. We all know that.

The fact is, and you have heard me say it many times in this body, if you are born today you inherit $400,000 worth of unfunded liabilities. There is a lot of things we do wrong on our side of the aisle, I will admit that, and have done wrong on our side of the aisle, both in the tenor of how we approach things and in how we characterize things. But the best way to right what we are doing wrong is start doing it right. The fact is, it is no legacy that we should leave to the next two generations that they are born into the world with a stone around their neck. The culture and methodology the Senate--I asked the President of the Senate a moment ago: What does unanimous consent mean when we bring up these bills? It is the rules of the Senate, I was told. The rules of the Senate are, you get no opportunity to amend.

I ask unanimous consent for an additional 3 minutes for me.

You get no opportunity to debate, you get no opportunity to amend, you have no opportunity to vote. So, if you truly object to a bill or a component of a bill you are told: Stuff it. What you think about it doesn't matter, let alone the very real loss of the American people not hearing a full debate about these issues.

We have plenty of time to debate them. We have quorum calls much too much. We should have two or three bills on the floor at the same time. I am willing to debate and lose, but I am not willing to give consent I disagree with and imply to the people I represent, in my oath to the Constitution, that it doesn't matter. It does matter. It matters immensely.

The future is at risk. We are on an unsustainable course, and we are seeing some of that played out in the mortgage market today. We are seeing some of that played out with the value of the dollar today. We are seeing some of that played out in the confidence of the American people, not only in the future and what they see, but in how they view us. We do, in fact, have an obligation to secure the future, and we do, in fact, have an obligation to make tough choices, priorities. Those priorities ought to be framed in the light of what the everyday American family has to do to frame their priorities.

Instead, what we have the habit of is not making any priorities at all because we take it all. We don't choose. We choose to do it all, knowing that the consequences of that choice bear on two generations from us. We will long be gone, but the legacy we leave will deny the very essence of this country. The essence of this country is one generation sacrificing for the future, for the next. The legacy we are leaving is exactly the opposite.

So I beg some patience on the part of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle that, in fact, if we disagree on a bill going by UC, it doesn't necessarily mean we disagree with the intent. It does mean that we think it can be improved or we think it can be held more accountable or, as the case of the SBA bills I am holding now, one of them is atrocious in terms of the money it is losing for the American people. Yet we are supposed to agree with those bills without amending or voting or debating.

I will be back to talk later in our time, and at the present time I yield.

Absolutely. There is no question. I thank you for covering for me in that regard.

Mr. President, we are 2 days away from the expiration of the continuing resolution--our second one. We had difficulty as a party when we were in the majority with getting the bills done on time. It is difficult to move things through this body. That is not necessarily always the majority's fault, but it requires that we work together. One way to take the pressure--the crash pressure in coming up against a point where everybody ends up losing is to have an automatic CR so we don't have that problem. There has been a bill offered that says if we cannot get our work done, there is an automatic CR, that the Government continues to run at the rate it was, or at the lower of the Senate- or House-passed bills. It takes us away from the idea of playing chicken and protects the American people and those employed by the Federal Government. I think it is common sense. It is something we ought to do. It takes the pressure off both sides so we are not running down to the end and looking at bills that nobody knows what is in them, thereby doing a grave injustice to the rest of the American people. I think it is an idea whose time has come.

On the basis of that, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 2070, the Government shutdown prevention bill. I ask unanimous consent that the bill be read the third time and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and that any statements relating to the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, that tells us something. That tells us we are going to get a bill that none of us knows what is in it because we are going to run it up against a deadline--the deadline was September 30, we know that. We need a way to relieve the pressure. This bill relieves it; otherwise, we are going to do a great and harmful injustice to the American people.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I wanted to speak for a few minutes on the Gregg amendment simply because I have unique personal experience with it. I am now somewhere close or over having delivered 4,000 children. The last one was an 8 pound, 9 ounce healthy baby, no problems that we know of. I also just signed a check to pay for my malpractice insurance,

which next year will come to about $3,000 per baby I deliver--$3,000 per baby, per case. Now, that is excessive because I don't deliver that many babies anymore. But on average, it is $300 to $400 to $500 for every baby that is delivered in this country in terms of malpractice insurance.

Why is it important to fix this problem, not just for OB/GYNs but for all doctors? Well, there are a couple of reasons. The cost of defensive medicine today on the basis of the litigious aspect of medical malpractice causes us to spend $600 per person per year on tests nobody needs, except the doctor needs to be able to say he went the extra mile in case they get sued. That comes to about $150 billion a year of tests that were ordered. That doesn't include the cost of the malpractice insurance, which the year before last in Oklahoma rose 98 percent--a 1- year rise. There are significant problems with the tort system in Oklahoma that show the excessive costs. But more importantly, what about the women and children? The heck with the money. What about the women and children? What happens?

Well, we know we are not filling the spots for the OB/GYN residencies in this country anymore because you can't afford to pay the loans and get a job and earn enough and then pay for your malpractice to be able to pay off your loan and make a living. So people are opting not to go into obstetrics and gynecology. Why do they do that and what is the result of that? The result is we have fewer trained specialists to actually offer care. Who suffers the most--women in the large cities or women in the smaller rural cities? The reason this is offered on this bill is because it has tremendous direct application to the women who live in rural America. Access is denied. We are now talking an hour, 2- hour, 3-hour drives for OB care in Oklahoma because we don't have the available people who will do this service.

There are two other points I want to make as we consider this, thinking only about the women and children. One is that because of the tort system we have, if you are a woman who has a C-section--not because you can't physically deliver a baby, but because you had a sign that your baby may be in trouble--the next time you come to have a baby, there is an almost 80-percent chance that you could deliver that baby naturally, without having to undergo surgery. But because of the litigious environment, we now have hospitals all across the country that forbid vaginal delivery after cesarean section--not because it is that unsafe but because the risks associated with the procedure in terms of the legal consequences make it financially not a risk that hospitals want to take, let alone whether the doctor is capable of doing it and managing that patient at all.

So what does that mean? It means we expose women to a major surgical procedure, not because they need it but because the trial bar has forced them to do it. We are now making decisions not based on medical indications; we are making decisions based on legal implications. That is the wrong way to practice medicine.

Finally, the third point I will make is as we see this shortage of available obstetrical care in the rural areas, we say: We are going to give you care, but then we give you somebody who is great in terms of caring for you, and has some knowledge, and has some capability, but isn't a fully trained physician. We give you a nurse-midwife. But if you get in trouble, you are still going to have to have somebody come in. Well, what do we know about that? What we know is that time makes a significant amount of difference when we have a baby in trouble. So what we are going to do is we are going to continue to increase the costs of complicated deliveries, with children who get injured, when the whole goal of the tort bar in the first place was trying to prevent that, because we don't intercept and we don't interrupt a process that could have made a major difference in that child's life.

In my hospital, you can't deliver a baby unless you have the ability to do an operative procedure to handle every complication of obstetrics. But that is not true around the country anymore because we have decided we are going to do it in a less cost-efficient way.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 3 additional minutes.

I am happy with that.

So our point is this: This isn't a perfect bill to be talking about this issue, but it truly has impact to our agricultural communities. They are the ones who live in the rural areas. What we have done is we have moved away from the ball where we now practice legal medicine, rather than medicine. We are offering a care that is not as good as what it could have been. We are putting women through procedures that they don't have to go through with a tremendous increase in cost, all because we can't say there ought to be some type of limitation so we can rebuild the medical structure.

If we really believe in women and children, we will grant the same equality in the rural areas that we grant around the rest of this country by making sure they have competent, well-qualified, certified obstetricians and gynecologists to take care of them at this great time of their life.

I yield the floor.

First of all, I would like to take just a moment--we had an amendment No. 3530 which I think the committee has agreed to accept and will come to later, but I wanted to spend a moment talking about it.

Over the last 20 years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has paid out $1.1 billion to dead farmers. Forty percent of them have been dead over 7 years; 19 percent of them have been dead over 11 years. Yet they continued to pay them. I very much appreciate the chairman and ranking member for their consideration.

What this will do is to make USDA go back and say: If you haven't gotten your estate settled in 2 years, you have to be talking to us rather than us continuing to make farm payments to people who are no longer alive. I appreciate their acceptance of that amendment.

Amendment No. 3632

I wish to set aside the pending amendment and call up amendment No. 3632.

Thank you, Mr. President. This is a fairly straightforward amendment. It fits with a lot of things they have done in this bill. This is about the EQIP program. This is about environmental capacity to save in terms of runoff, decrease load streams, and do a lot of things in terms of the environment, and the basic goals behind it are good. This amendment is very simple. All it says is that you ought to be a real farmer to get EQIP money.

You ought to get two-thirds of your money from agriculture before you are eligible for getting this money. Why is that a problem? The problem is that our real farmers are not getting the vast majority of the money; it is our nonfarmers. If you buy 160 acres, what the marketing guy says is: I have a way for you to refence this land and build a new pond, and it will increase the value and you can turn around and sell it, except the American taxpayers pay for 40 percent of the improvements on it. You never have to run a head of cattle on it; you never have to raise a crop on it. You can just invest in the land and qualify. That is not the intended purpose for EQIP or why we created it. I believe EQIP funds ought to go for what they are intended. What this does is take the doctor who is play-farming or play-ranching and using American taxpayer money to improve the value of his land so he can turn around in a year and a half and sell it and make money. It doesn't save us anything in terms of the intended purpose of EQIP.

All this says is that if you are a real farmer and you get two-thirds of your income from farming, agriculture, this would not apply to you. But if you are gaming the system, gaming EQIP to advantage yourself, and not as a person in production agriculture but as an investor in land or as a speculator in

land, you ought not to be able to use these moneys to increase the value. Fencing hardly improves the environment. Yet we spend money out of EQIP for farms and ranches that are small and are not owned by real farmers but gentlemen farmers who don't produce anything. Yet they go out and have fun on some land they own and they qualify. We ought not to be paying for that with American taxpayer money. It is straightforward. It says you ought to be a real farmer before we allow EQIP money to be used to improve the environmental conditions on your farm.

There is a marked increase in the demand for these EQIP dollars. We see pivots. We can markedly decrease water consumption if we have modern pivots. We help farmers to put them in. We use less water, get less runoff, and do more no-till farming. So the demand for the dollars associated with EQIP, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, was designed for working farms and working ranches, not for the weekend farmer.

The Environmental Quality Incentive Program emerged as the most important USDA program providing financial assistance for conservation on working farms and ranches and is measured by the number of participants and acres under contract--the largest financial assistance conservation program in all of USDA. Yet we have real farmers and ranchers who cannot get enough help to make a difference when it comes to the environment.

I want real farmers who are really in it to produce agriculture to have this money available, and I don't want the American taxpayers paying for somebody else who has the money to do it already but is using their money to enhance the value of their property, and they are not real farmers, not real ranchers, they are not a vegetable farmer, they are not in production agriculture, they are not an orchard farmer, they are not in timber, but, in fact, they own 40 acres of timber, and therefore they qualify even though it is purely an investment and they have no intent to harvest a crop, but they are utilizing taxpayer money.

I reserve the remainder of my time.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

If 72 percent of the people getting EQIP money today would not get the money, that means 72 percent of the people who are getting EQIP today get less than 66 percent of the money from agriculture. That is an even bigger problem. In fact, three quarters of the people who are eligible aren't primarily getting the vast majority of their income from agriculture. Yet we are sending three quarters of the money to those people. I see that as an even bigger problem.

Would the chairman work with me to try to figure out a way to exclude those who are advantaging themselves and have no intention of working into an agriculture position as a lifestyle or as a primary vocation? Would he agree to work with me so we might come to a point where we can define the difference between those who are primarily interested in agriculture and building a young farm and excluding those who are using the American taxpayer money to improve the quality of their land so they can turn around and sell it?

Will the chairman yield for another question?

Would the Senator think a certification as to intent by people who apply for EQIP that their primary vocation is either now or is intended to be agriculture would be a way in which we might accomplish the goal? I am willing to withdraw this amendment if we can work on that.

I don't want the small farmer to be excluded, but I think the amount of money going to nonfarmers is a lot greater than you think it is. It is not going to real farmers who have real needs and the vast majority of the acres where we are going to make the biggest difference on the environment. I ask if he would work with me between now and the time the bill comes out of conference to see if we cannot address that, and if he would do so, as well as the ranking member, I will ask unanimous consent to withdraw this amendment.

I think we can work that out.

Amendment No. 3632, withdrawn

I ask unanimous consent to withdraw my amendment, and I will work with the chairman and ranking member on this issue.

Mr. President, what is the pending business before the Senate? Is there a unanimous consent request as far as further amendments?

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

Under the consent order, is it possible that a modification to the amendment be sent to the desk?

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to send to the desk a modification to my amendment No. 3807, as discussed with the chairman and ranking member.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I object to the unanimous consent agreement to pass S. 2338, the FHA modernization bill.

The Senate has twice attempted to pass a complex and critical mortgage reform bill without the opportunity for debate or amendment. I certainly understand the importance of this issue, which is why I believe the bill must be afforded time for proper scrutiny and debate by the Senate. It is naive, irresponsible and reckless for the Senate to claim it can fix this national challenge by rubberstamping our approval for this legislation without the opportunity to improve the bill through amendments.

More importantly, however, this bill is not the proper response to the housing crisis. This bill increases the availability of government- backed mortgages, adding a liability to the taxpayer of $1.6 billion in government-backed loans. This bill greatly increases the loan limit which the government may insure, while simultaneously decreasing the down payment requirement for borrowers. This only makes taxpayers liable for billions of dollars in loans that may default. The solution to the mortgage crisis is fewer risky loans, not more.

Proponents of the legislation have argued that this bill is a low- risk way for the government to prevent future subprime foreclosures. However, this bill only creates more opportunities for borrowers to receive government-backed loans, increasing the liability on American citizens, but not preventing the possibility of delinquency or default.

According to a recent analysis by the Wall Street Journal, many subprime borrowers are not delinquent because they cannot afford increasing adjustable rates, but because they cannot afford their initial rates in the first place. The Wall Street Journal states:

It is true that many subprime borrowers were sold a toxic

mortgage by unscrupulous mortgage brokers. However, the

primary reason for the spike in subprime delinquencies so far

is that many subprime borrowers have taken on more debt than

they can pay back using any reasonable interest rate.

It would be unconscionable to shift this burden on to the Federal Government, especially at a time when our national debt stands well over $9.1 trillion, or $30,132 per citizen.

Sixty-one economists from universities and think-tanks from across America released an open letter to the U.S. Congress advising against ``excessive new regulations or federal interventions'' to deal with credit repricing in the subprime mortgage market. The letter warns: ``Legislation to create new underwriting standards will reduce competition and restrict consumer access to credit. Additionally, efforts to bail out or shore up lending institutions create a moral hazard that would slow the adjustments required in the marketplace. . . . These [bail out] proposals would fundamentally alter the workings of the mortgage market, leaving consumers with fewer choices when seeking to buy a home and potentially increasing taxpayer exposure for bad loans.''

The American people agree that making government-backed loans more available is not the right response. According to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of the National Taxpayers Union, NTU, when asked which statement most closely reflects their views of allowing Federal agencies to increase the size of the loans they can insure and reduce downpayment requirements, 66 percent of respondents answered that ``these proposals are nothing more than a taxpayer-funded bailout of banks and lenders that provided and profited from these risky loans.'' Furthermore, 60 percent of respondents said taxpayers would be most negatively affected if the government were to bail out the subprime mortgage market.

I do believe the Senate should debate this issue, and examine what can be done to keep borrowers from defaulting and ensure that Americans are able to stay in their homes. I believe lenders must take responsibility for their loans, including full disclosure about the terms of the agreement and the possibility of default, and borrowers must be responsible for the agreement into which they enter. Mortgage brokers, real estate agents and other lenders should be transparent with their lending conditions and must be accountable for full disclosure to borrowers. However, I do not believe it is the job of the government to bail out default mortgages and loans and it is not the proper role of the government to insure loans with taxpayer dollars.

Mr. President, I object and will take my morning hour time to explain why.

Mr. President, I say to the Senator from Oregon, I look forward to looking at the bill he just introduced. I, too, am very concerned. We

had a hearing yesterday in the Homeland Security Oversight Subcommittee on credit card bills. There was some very revealing information. I think the Senator is addressing a problem we need to look at on the Senate floor. I will look at his legislation, and hopefully I will be able to cosponsor it with him.

Mr. President, let me, first of all, take a minute to talk about this bill for which unanimous consent was just requested. I think it is important in light of what the majority leader just said. Here we have a bill for which unanimous consent was requested. The American people need to understand what it means to get unanimous consent. It means all of us agree to it. It does not need to be further amended, it does not need to be changed, and it should be passed without ever having a vote on it.

This bill has a section in it that so far has lost over $3.5 billion of your money doing venture capital investing by the Small Business Administration. The OMB analysis says there is absolutely no need for this venture capital investment, especially because of the fact it has lost such a great amount of money. And venture capital investing itself is a highly risky business that requires tremendously acute knowledge and people of great acumen in terms of investing, and they lose lots of money investing.

The last thing we ought to be doing at the end of a session is passing a bill without vetting it, without debating it, without talking about the problems that are in the bill. This portion of the bill, the portion that is the Small Business Venture Capital Act, if anything, should come out of this bill. We should not reauthorize something that has lost already in excess of $3 billion, and something for which we do not get to look at the results until 10 years after it happens.

The last thing we ought to be doing is investing the American people's money in venture capital when we cannot pay for the things we need to be paying for that the American people are dependent on. I look forward to working with Senator Kerry. I have had a good relationship with him. We will sit down and talk about this bill. But I think it highlights what we need to be doing and not spending time in quorum calls but spending time debating bills.

I also want to spend a minute on this issue. I think the American people ought to be asking us about this. Here we sit, and we have one appropriations bill passed for the year that started October 1. I think I am correct. Other than the THUD bill, there has been no objection raised by the minority to proceeding to any of the appropriations bills. As a matter of fact, the choice was made not to bring up the appropriations bills in a timely manner and debate them because of the choice it was not a priority.

I do recall the tremendous criticism we rightly received for what happened last year in the appropriations process. What is going to happen? I am happy to be here for Christmas to do the business we should have already done. But let me lay out what will happen, and then let me also give a warning. At the end of sessions, what happens is we get the request to pass all sorts of legislation--much like this bill to which I just objected. Committees do good work on legislation. But a bill that has passed committee has to be agreed to by a majority of the Senators to be able to become law.

When we do unanimous consents, that means we are going to let it pass without looking at it, without amending it, and without voting on it. Well, at the end of the year, the time pressure comes. Everybody wants to get something passed. So what happens is we do a poor job of legislating because we do not look at it. We do not amend it. We do not have a debate so the American people can know about it. We just pass it.

I sent a letter to all of my colleagues today outlining and reinforcing four statements I made at the first of this year. I will object to any bill coming forward by unanimous consent at the end of the session unless it meets the requirements I laid out. That means no new authorizations unless you deauthorize something else. We are not going to grow the Government any more when we cannot pay for the Government we have. No. 2, it has to be constitutional. It has to be a true duty of the Federal Government, not an obligation of the State governments that we are going to stand up for, when they have a $6 billion to $7 billion surplus. Easily, when you look at any combination of any 10 States, they have an over $36 billion surplus totally, and we are running, in real numbers--non-Enron accounting but real numbers--a $250 billion surplus.

I am not going to allow--unless we want to put it on the Senate floor, unless we want to debate it--I am not going to allow us to pass bills at the end of the session by unanimous consent. So if you have a bill that you want to try to pass by unanimous consent, I would suggest we sit down and talk about it now, not 2 weeks from tomorrow but now. If they come in the last week, we will not have the time to look at them. So not agreeing to unanimously consider the bill as passed will be the standard fare.

Now, let's talk about the appropriations process. What we have is $23 billion more than what we agreed we are going to pass in total for the appropriations bills, not counting the emergency things we have already done that we have charged to our grandchildren. As the game is played in Washington, what will come is the pressure of chicken. We are going to play chicken because we chose not to do the appropriations bills at the appropriate time, and lots of Members have lots of earmarks in bills.

So they do not want us to continue to fund where we are. They want us to have an omnibus bill where we can have all these earmarks, about $26 billion worth of earmarks, so we can look good at home--not competitively bid, not based on priorities but based on our political priorities individually as Senators. We are going to spend about $23 billion more than what we said we are going to spend. That $23 billion is almost $300 billion over the next 10 years. And we are fighting about $80 billion on an AMT fix for 1 year. But we are not concentrating on the fact we are going to institute $300 billion worth of more spending.

I will remind my colleagues again, we do not have to raise taxes. We can eliminate the AMT. What we do not want to do, and what we fail to do, is get rid of the waste, fraud, abuse, and duplication that numbers in excess of $250 billion every year--every year--because we will not do the hard work of oversight.

So we are going to line up, and we are going to get a package from the House, and we are going to get a chance to vote on it, and the President has already said he is going to veto it if it has this excess number and all these earmarks in it. I would think this would be better than playing chicken: Why don't we live within our means like every family has to? That $250 billion comes to 20 percent of everything we spend in the discretionary budget. If you ask homeowners and families who are having a lot of pressure now, would they dare waste 20 percent of their budget, would they dare not look and reconsider how they are spending their money when it comes to their family budget, they would not. Yet we continuously refuse to do the hard work of oversight. We do not want to offend anybody. In the process we are offending the next two generations. My hope is we don't end up here at Christmas, but I was dead serious when I took my oath. I am going to defend the Constitution and I am going to work to make sure bills that are outside of that Constitution don't pass this body. I am going to defend my obligation to the next two generations and the heritage this country was built on--one generation sacrificing for the next--so future opportunity is there. I am going to do everything in my power to not let $23 billion of extra spending go through this Senate at the end of the year. Now, I may not be successful in that, but at the end of the day, I am going to sleep real well knowing I am fulfilling my oath, knowing that I know what the Constitution says. When we get outside the bounds of the Constitution, in terms of Federal responsibility, what we do is we say in name we are helping somebody and we are charging it to our grandchildren and undermining the very opportunity we all experience.

My hope is we can come together during this season and say: Let's get it right. Let's not spend a bunch of extra money. Let's put it back. We could be facing some pretty severe economic times in this country in terms of how things look, especially people who were sold homes and mortgages they didn't qualify for and now are struggling. How are we going to address that? How are we going to help them through that? How are we going to accomplish that which empowers people, not Government? We need to be working on those things. We do not need to be spending the extra money now that we may, in fact, need to spend later. We may, in fact, need to borrow money later. So we should be doing the job right the first time, staying within our means, doing what is necessary, even though it offends people who might not get something from the Federal Government through an earmark.

I believe the people of the Senate are great people. I believe, ultimately, they want what is great for this country. I know all of those who have children and grandchildren wish and hope for the very best for their lives and to experience the kind of opportunities we have had. But I wish to tell my colleagues it is at risk. It is not a small risk, it is a great risk. Mr. President, 2012 is coming fast; 2012, that day when the baby boomers are taking both Social Security and Medicare, when we start down this road of $79 trillion worth of unfunded mandates. How can we be trusted to fix those problems when we can't even live within our own budget?

I said before, about a year and a half ago on this floor, that there is a rumble in America and it is real. The American people are sick and tired of the partisan games we play. They don't want to see Republicans pointing their fingers at Democrats. They don't want to see Democrats pointing their fingers at Republicans. What they want us to do is the job of governing within our means.

Our problem is we have difficulty identifying what is most important: Our political careers or the future of the country. What gets in front of us too often is how do we look good at home rather than how do we look good in the future so we secure the promise America stands for. My hope is we will work together.

One final comment on the farm bill. We need a farm bill, but we don't need a farm bill that continues to have programs that wealthy people who aren't real farmers take advantage of--people who aren't farmers, yet suck the money out of the farm program. Twenty percent of our farmers produce 80 percent of our goods, but a large portion of the farm program goes to gentlemen farmers--doctors, lawyers, who happen to own a small acreage and then suck the programs dry for their own benefit for things they could very well afford to pay for. So the farm bill isn't going to go forward until we have an open amendment process.

I agree with the majority leader. We shouldn't have all of these votes that aren't necessarily related to the farm bill, but we should certainly fix the crop insurance program. We should certainly mandate that if you are getting a government benefit as a farmer, you ought to be a farmer. You shouldn't be an investor who is investing in making money off the hard-earned tax dollars of middle-class America. That is what too much of the farm program is. We shouldn't be setting about saying that if we are going to incentivize to get greater production, and then all of a sudden if somebody is successful at it, then you can't do it anymore. If an incentive is put in place to work, then let's make it work. We haven't done that with ethanol. We haven't said you can only produce so much ethanol. So if an incentive works, we ought to use it. But we ought to make sure the people getting those incentives are real farmers.

Again, I thank the Chair for his indulgence and I yield back the remainder of my time.

Mr. President, I do object. I would like to make a statement on this after the majority leader finishes his request. Maybe I can do that in morning business.

I do want to say how much I appreciate both the ranking member and the chairman of the Small Business Committee for their thoughtfulness toward our veterans. We have some things to work out, and hopefully we can get this done in December.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Absolutely.