Floor Statements

Mr. President, I thank the chairman of the Judiciary Committee for stating that the debate we are having on this bill isn't really about the bill. The debate is about the process.

We had an election in November, and one of the things outlined by that was that Americans are concerned with excessive spending. There are some big facts that face us. Our judiciary is not nearly as at risk as our children and grandchildren are from the lack of cogent and disciplined spending by this body.

The reason we are at the place we are today is because I believe, and the vast majority of Americans agree with me, that we have to have priorities in how we spend our money. For us to be good stewards of the American taxpayers' dollars, we ought to establish priorities. This bill is a priority. I support the concepts behind the bill, and I will go through them in a minute. But what should be a greater priority for us is that we offer our children and grandchildren the same opportunities, the same freedoms, and the same liberties we enjoy.

The way the Senate works is something I believe needs to be changed, and I am willing to stand out here on every bill that comes to this floor to do exactly the same thing as I am going to do today. Here is the little problem that nobody--or very few in the Senate--wants to address. We react and create a good piece of legislation. This is a good piece of legislation. But we don't do the other half of our job, and the other half of our job is to get rid of the things that aren't working well.

Assume for a minute that every bill we authorize every year is done in a manner that says everything else in the Federal Government is working well. First of all, you ask the average citizen, and they would say: No, that isn't quite right. You go down, and everybody has a different complaint. But the fact is, we continue to authorize, we continue to authorize, and we continue to authorize, but we never go back and look at what isn't working and deauthorize.

My complaint with this bill isn't with the Senator from Pennsylvania. He was very cooperative in trying to address my desires for us to deauthorize certain things that either have excess monies or programs that aren't efficient or aren't working as they were intended to. However, when approaching the chairman of the committee, he refused to even consider the idea that

we ought to deauthorize something that isn't working in order to create this thing we all know is needed. It is a good piece of legislation, and we ought to pass it, and we will pass it. But the point that needs to be made to the American people, a point they agree with, is that authorizing a new piece of legislation is only half of our job. As a matter of fact, it shouldn't even be half. We ought to spend three- quarters of our time looking at what we are doing already that is authorized and making sure it is working efficiently. I don't think anybody in their right mind would disagree with that.

We, in my subcommittee in the 109th Congress, along with Tom Carper, held 49 oversight hearings on the Federal Government. What we found is that of the discretionary budget, the non-Medicare, non-Social Security, non-Medicaid budget, $1 in every $5 we spend is either wasted, abused, defrauded, or duplicated. It hardly seems fair to a middle-income taxpayer out there, who only yesterday paid their taxes and got hit with an extra $1,500 or $2,000 under the AMT, that they would have to pay that extra money at a time when we are allowing $1 out of every $5 to be wastefully spent, misspent, abused, or defrauded.

So the idea behind what I sent to all of my fellow Senators at the beginning of the year--and the Senator from Vermont knows very well why I objected to coming to the floor without a motion to proceed, without a cloture on that; it is because he represents what I think has to be changed--that we have to be responsible stewards of the American taxpayers' dollars, and we are not.

The idea is to change the culture of how we work. How do we do that? Well, we don't do it by continuing to pass new authorizations without ever looking at what could be deauthorized to pay for what we are authorizing anew. What we do is we fail the test of being good stewards to the very people we represent. As I said, Senator Specter, the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, was very cooperative in trying to find those offsets. I think he basically agrees with my contention that we ought to be about doing good things, but we also ought to be about getting rid of the things that aren't working.

It saddens me to think that all through this 110th Congress, I am going to be doing this on every new authorization that comes out here if my colleagues don't believe we ought to be changing the way we work. It is a simple request. It is easy to find the offsets. As the Senator from Pennsylvania knows, we had offsets for this bill in terms of deauthorizations. They weren't acceptable to the chairman because he disagrees with the underlying fundamental premise of what I believe is an absolute obligation for us in terms of being good stewards.

At the beginning of this Congress, I sent a letter to every Member of this body, and I outlined some principles under which I was going to work in this Congress. I am dedicated to those principles, and it doesn't have anything to do with me or anything to do with the parties. I don't care who is in the majority or who is in the minority.

It has to do with our future. That is what this is about. This is about fighting for our future and having a long- range vision rather than a short-term vision of putting out a fire somewhere.

The principles I outlined said that I would put a hold--and, by the way, the chairman this morning said there was an anonymous hold. That is not true. I very eloquently and directly communicated my hold on this bill. And the letter I sent to everybody in the Senate at the beginning of this Congress directed that I would be the one holding the bills. I said this:

If a bill creates or authorizes a new Federal program or activity, it must not duplicate an existing program or activity without deauthorizing the existing program. That is No. 1. And several bills I had last year were duplications.

No. 2 is, if a bill authorizes new spending, it must be offset by reductions in real authorized spending elsewhere. How are we ever going to control our deficit? And we do not have, as the administration said, a $170 billion deficit. Our real deficit, what we actually added to the debt last year, what we actually added to our children's debt, was about $340 billion. So when we are adding $340 billion every year to our kids' and grandkids' debt, isn't it incumbent upon us to do the necessary things to make sure that doesn't happen in the future? Well, one of the ways to do that is to look at programs which aren't working and are not effective and which do not need authorization.

What happens in the Senate is that the appropriators decide what will get spent and what won't get spent. But the authorizing committee, the committee that is charged with that area, never deauthorizes anything. So we have this continuing mounting of authorization, with limited dollars to go for it, which never forces real priorities or a debate over the priorities by the authorizing committees.

The third point I made is that if a program or activity currently receives funding from sources other than the Federal Government--i.e., a match--then we shouldn't increase the role of the Federal Government in terms of increasing the percentage the Federal Government pays. Take our $340 billion deficit. Every State, save one, has a surplus. They did last year, and they will this year. So if States have surpluses and we have a deficit, we shouldn't increase our role. We shouldn't be doing that.

Finally, if we create a new museum or some new cultural program, then we ought to endow it rather than set it up for its continuing cost. We should use the power of compound interest to help us save money in the future. If we really think something is important enough to invest in, we should endow that and use the power of compound interest with the idea that the endowment will earn enough money to take care of that program in the future rather than passing that new program off to our kids.

Four very simple things that I ask.

I also stated in that letter that if I thought something was unconstitutional, then I would object to it, also. However, that doesn't apply in this instance. There is a legitimate role for us here. This is a good piece of legislation. But it does lack one of the criteria under which I stated I would try to hold bills up. I have no intention of filibustering this bill. I have no intention of making it difficult to pass the bill. I have every intention to make it an issue with the American people that we are not doing our job and that we are better than that. We are better than that. The people in this body care. The question is, Do we care enough to put the elbow grease into doing what is necessary to preserve the future? I believe we do care. I believe we can, and I believe, with persistence--and the chairman and the ranking member know that if there is anything I am about, it is about being persistent--if it requires this type of structure in terms of bringing bills to the floor, then I am happy to oblige the Senate in that to continue to make the point.

Almost 2 years ago, maybe more than 2 years ago, the infamous bridge to nowhere was brought to light, which bought about the changes we are seeing in earmarks. It was one example, which really wasn't a fair example to the Senator who had that, but nevertheless it characterized and became the caricature for the bad habits we have in Congress.

My hope is that the American people will look at the commonsense approach I am trying to propose for us as we authorize new programs and say: That makes sense. Why would you continue funding things that don't work? Why would you continue authorizations for programs that aren't effective? Why would you continue authorizations for programs that are duplicative? Where one works good and one not so good, why shouldn't we put money into something that works good rather than not quite so good?

So the question is not whether we should have court security. Of course we should. The question is not whether this bill should pass. It should. The question is, How do we address this fact?

Every child who is born in this country today, every one of them, has a birth tax on them. It is now at $453,000 a child.

People say: How do you get that?

You take the $70 trillion in unfunded liabilities that we are going to transfer to this next 200 million children, and you can see what they are liable for.

Take 10 percent interest. If you took a 10-percent interest rate on $453,000,

simple interest, to pay the interest on the debt, to cover what we are leaving to our children and grandchildren, is $45,300 a year.

The greatest moral question in our country today is not the war in Iraq, it is not who marries whom, it is not abortion, it is not child abuse, it is stealing the opportunity and the heritage this country has given us and taking that away from our children and grandchildren.

I know the Senator from Vermont is not happy with me for doing this. He believes it is fruitless. But it is the very real difference between he and I. I believe there is plenty in the Federal Government that is not working right that we ought to be about fixing, and one of the ways we do that is by forcing ourselves, before we do a new program, to look at the old programs and see what is wrong with them and clean them up. You can debate that. You can object to it. But the fact is, the vast majority of Americans agree with that.

We are going to be going through this multiple times this year until we get to the fact that we are doing what our oath tells us to do. That oath is to the Constitution. We cannot fulfill that oath if we continue to waste money on ineffective programs and authorize programs that are not accomplishing their goals. It is an oath that we violate, an oath to the Constitution but, more important, it is an oath we violate to the very people who sent us here.

Every dollar we waste today is a dollar that is not going to reduce that $453,000 for our children and grandchildren. One of the greatest joys I have in life today is that I have four grandchildren, each one of them unique, and the great pleasure of seeing your children through your grandchildren and reliving memories. That is always couched in the idea of what can I do to make sure the future is fair and a great opportunity is made available to them and all their peers throughout this country, no matter where they come from, what family they come from. Shouldn't they all have the same opportunities?

If you read what David Walker, the Comptroller General of the United States, has to say--and all you have to do is go on the Web site of the Government Accountability Office--what you find is we are on an unsustainable course. It is not what Tom Coburn says, it is what the head of the Government Accountability Office says. Things have to change. Every day we wait to change them costs us money and makes it more painful when we get around to changing them.

I plan, in a moment, on offering to proceed to the bill. We are out here today because the vision that was created for us, and the heritage that was created for us, is at risk. It is at risk because we do not want to change our culture. We don't want to be responsible. We want to pass but not oversee. We want to do the easy but not the hard. The hard is the thing that is going to secure the future for our children and our grandchildren.

It is easy for us to pass a port security bill. It is bipartisan. It is hard for us to do the very real work of making sure every penny, of the American taxpayers' dollars is spent in an efficient way, that it is not wasted.

Mr. President, if you think $1 in $5 of the discretionary budget of this country should not be wasted, if you think the Congress ought to be about looking at everything and saying, is it working, ought to be about getting rid of the $200 billion of waste, fraud, abuse, and duplication that is in our Federal Government today, then there is no way you could disagree with the principles I outlined to all the Senators in this body. Yet we find ourselves here at this point in time because the chairman of the Judiciary Committee refuses to agree with the premise that we owe it to our children and grandchildren. That is basically it because I am not about to do that. We do not believe that is necessary.

Something has to change if we are going to give our children and our grandchildren the benefits and the opportunity we have all experienced. I think that is worth taking some time on the floor, pushing the envelope to raise the awareness of the American people. I know I can't change this body through persuasion, through words. But what does change this body is the American people. The American people are the ones who send us here. If they will act, if they will put pressure on, then we will do what we are supposed to do. It is a shame we have to work it that way, but this last election proved that. It proved when we are not doing what we are supposed to be doing, the American people awaken, and they change who has the power, who has the representation.

What I am calling for is let's do that for the American people. Let's do it ahead of time. Let's not make them force a change, let's do what we were sent up to do.

With that I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, I make a motion to proceed to the bill.

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

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and that amendment No. 891 be called up for its consideration.

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

Mr. President, this is a very simple amendment. It says: it is the sense of the Senate that we should not create new spending programs when we have to borrow money to pay for them; that, in fact, we ought to create priorities, that the priorities ought to be the same type of priorities that everybody in this country has to face every day with their own personal budget, that they cannot go out and use their credit card without having a consequence.

This is a very simple amendment. I wish to read it thoroughly so everybody understands what the amendment says. It says the following:

The Senate finds that--

(1) the national debt of the United States of America now

exceeds $8,500,000,000,000;

(2) each United States citizen's share of this debt--

from the oldest to the youngest--

is approximately $29,183;

(3) every [penny] that the United States Government borrows

and adds to this debt is money [that will be borrowed] from

future generations of Americans and from important programs,

including Social Security and Medicare on which our senior

citizens depend for their retirement security;

It also states:

(4) the power of the purse belongs to Congress;

(5) Congress authorizes and appropriates all Federal

discretionary spending;

(6) for too long, Congress has simply borrowed more and

more money to pay for new spending, while Americans want

Congress to live within its means, using the same set of

common sense rules and restraints [every American faces]

everyday; because in the real world, families cannot follow

Congress's example and must make difficult decisions and set

priorities on how to spend their limited financial resources.

. . .

Mr. President, I am happy to yield for a question.

Absolutely. I agree with that.

This is a sense of the Senate. I would be happy for us not to borrow money. We had $200 billion a year in waste, fraud, abuse, and duplication outlined by the Federal Financial Management Subcommittee last year. Appropriators refused to look at that, ways to fund it. Mr. President, $200 billion--we could spend $100 billion on the war and $100 billion to lower the deficit. I would be very happy to apply this to everything we do. Every American has to do exactly the same thing with their own budget every day.

The Senator makes a great point. The realistic fact is, we decreased the Federal debt $2 billion under the entire Clinton administration. Mr. President, $2 billion. One year we had a true surplus--a true surplus. That was the extent of it. And since then, and before then, we have borrowed the future of our children away.

To continue, this resolution states:

(7) it is irresponsible for Congress to authorize new

spending for programs that will result in borrowing from

Social Security. . . .

I say to Social Security recipients, we borrowed $140 billion, last year, from Social Security to pay for things we were not willing to either trim down, make more efficient or eliminate in duplicative programs.

We also are borrowing from foreign governments. That is affecting our financial status. But most importantly, we are borrowing from future generations of Americans.

The amendment states:

(b) . . . It is the sense of the Senate that Congress has a

moral obligation to offset the cost of new government

programs, initiatives, and authorizations.

It is very simple. A resolution has no impact of law. It says: We agree, here are the rules under which we ought to operate. It does not bind anybody. It says, if we are going to create new programs, we either ought to find a way where we do not borrow to pay for them or we ought to offset them by eliminating ineffective programs.

In 2001, as the Senator rightly noted, the Federal debt per person in this country was $21,000. It has risen almost $10,000 since 2001. A lot of people are quick to dismiss that figure, say it does not matter, we only need to worry about the debt and the deficits as compared to the economic growth in the size of our economy. A better rule of thumb is how Government growth compares to the growth of wages and earnings. Last fiscal year alone, the real Federal deficit increased in excess of $300 billion--a debt our children and grandchildren will repay. So $7.2 billion was spent each day, or $84,000 was spent per second--per second. If regular Americans must tighten their belts to live within their means, the Federal Government should do the same instead of authorizing new spending without offsetting similar spending.

Last year's interest costs alone were 8 percent of the total Federal budget. In contrast, the average American spends about 5 percent of their income as a percentage of their interest costs. The Federal Government spent $226 billion on interest costs alone. According to the Government Accountability Office, by the year 2030, interest will consume 25 percent--25 percent--of the Federal debt.

So why do I bring this resolution to the floor? I bring the resolution to the floor to make the point that when we authorize new programs, we ought to find the money to pay for them and we ought to reduce programs that aren't effective. We ought to look at the programs that aren't accomplishing what we want them to, we ought to eliminate duplicate programs where one works well and one doesn't work quite so well and put the money into the one that works well so we get good value for our dollars, and we ought to change the habits under which we work so we can all accomplish what we would like to see.

I would like to see middle-income wages rise in this country at a rate faster than they rise for the wealthy

class. I would like to see opportunity enhanced in this country. I would like to see a balanced budget so we don't steal opportunity from our children and our grandchildren. I don't think most people disagree with that.

The reason we are out here debating this is I had a simple request: Let's just find some deauthorization amendments so that when we bring this new and very needed bill to the floor--and I agree and I think everybody on the Judiciary Committee agrees this is a good bill; it is going to pass--shouldn't we make some hard choices, just like every family makes? Instead, we choose not to. We decide we will pass a new bill. We will add $40 million a year to the cost to run the Government, but we won't deauthorize anything that is out there that is not working effectively. We won't fix the improper payments that are going on in this country to the tune of about $40 billion--that is billion with a ``b.'' That is a thousand times more in improper payments than this bill costs. We won't do the hard work that is necessary.

I am happy to yield to the Senator. By the way, I enjoyed the Senator's speech on Darfur, and as the Senator from Illinois knows, I agree with him very much. I thank him for his efforts on the genocide that is now occurring in Darfur.

None.

I am happy to answer it.

No, it is not.

Mr. President, reclaiming the floor, here is what it is about. The Senator from Illinois is a great advocate for those who are less fortunate in this country. That is what this is about. It is about changing the habits of the Senate.

I understand the appropriations process. I understand the authorization process. Changing the habits says we are not going to authorize new programs until we have done our homework on the programs that aren't effective. That is the whole purpose of this amendment.

I understand the Senator's consternation with my desire. I understand that most people inside Washington disagree. But I also understand that most people outside of Washington say that if you increase spending-- authorized spending, not appropriated spending but authorized spending--$40 million and never look at what you can deauthorize, whenever we get to a surplus or when we get to a balanced budget, we are going to spend more money. We are not going to make the hard choices. That is exactly what happens. We can disagree with that but, in fact, that is how we got an $8.9 trillion deficit. That is how we ran a $300 billion-plus deficit this year. It is the process. It is the process where we have decided that authorization has minimal power to influence in this body and that appropriations has all power.

My point in making us debate this resolution on this bill and bringing it up is to say: Let's start the process where we start looking, as our oath charges us to do, at what doesn't work. Let's bring a bill that authorizes something that is very good and bring a bill that deauthorizes something that might get funding even though it is not effective.

I will give an example: the COPS Program. It is a very good program. It helps a lot of cities. Why shouldn't it be competitively bid? Why shouldn't the cities with the most need get the help with their police force rather than the cities whose Members put an earmark in for the COPS Program, and any money that doesn't go to true need comes back to the Federal Treasury? Why wouldn't we do that? Because that is hard work. Because we might alienate one group as we do what is best for everybody in America.

I understand the resistance to my efforts in challenging the way we operate in the Senate, and I understand the opposition to my techniques and methods in trying to accomplish that. However, as the Senator from Illinois knows, if I am a champion for anything, I am a champion for making sure we don't waste one penny anywhere. The best way to do that is to start having good habits in how we arrange what we are going to spend.

The fact is, it is very easy to find offsets in authorization because we have three times as much authorized as we actually spend. So the Senator's point is exactly true, but it doesn't direct us down to the problem. If we get in the habit of making the decision we are going to look at the programs that don't work, we are going to deauthorize the programs that don't work, guess what we will do. We eventually might get rid of the one $1 of every $5 on the discretionary side today that is either waste, fraud, abuse, or duplication--$1 in $5. No one in this body blows 20 percent of their personal budget on stuff that doesn't mean anything or have any return. Yet in the discretionary budget, everything except Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, that is exactly what we do. It is exactly what we do. So why would we not say: Let's change. Let's fulfill an obligation to two generations from us now. I know what I am doing today isn't going to have a great impact on the next appropriations bill or the next one after that or the one after that, but 5 years from now, it might have an impact.

The point is, let's live like everybody else out there. Let's not take the credit card and not look at the things we really should be looking at. Let's do some extra work. Let's try to accomplish what is best for everybody in this country, no matter what their economic station in life, no matter what their background, no matter what their position is. They all have a limited budget. They have to make choices. They have to make choices, and they have to prioritize things. The Senate doesn't; they just authorize another bill and never deauthorize anything else.

Mr. President, with that, I yield the floor and ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question?

Under your premise, only bills that are authorized get funded, correct?

Except you are wrong. Last year, $220 billion of unauthorized programs were appropriated.

If I may--will the Senator yield to me? I am happy to yield back in a moment.

Let's carry your analogy a little further. What has really happened is you give your son $200, but the mandate is--you are going to spend $100 on a broken iPod or a used iPod, and you have $100 to buy down towards a good one, but you mandate that you spend $100 on the bad one. That is the analogy. That is why we ought to deauthorize programs that aren't working. That is why we ought to oversight aggressively every area of the Federal Government.

Let me take one other exception, and then I will be happy to yield back to the Senator.

I love it. I love to debate the Senator from Illinois.

I take a different tact, and the Senator knows that. I look at the oath I took when I came to the Senate. It didn't say ``Oklahoma'' in it; the Senator's didn't say ``Illinois.'' What the oath says is to defend the Constitution of the United States and do what is best for the country as a whole and in the long term.

Now, the Senator--and I admire him greatly--admitted that he plays the game the way it is played. I am telling him that the American people are ready for the game to be played a different way--a totally different way. Part of that is looking at the authority under which we allow money to be spent and recognizing that if we are going to authorize something new, given the jam we are in, all you have to do is talk to David Walker and look at what is going to happen in the next two generations. Don't we have an obligation to look at the programs that are not authorized?

Would the Senator answer this question: When was the last time he saw a program deauthorized in this body?

Mr. President, reclaiming the floor, if I might, the thing that strikes me is the Senator is a wonderful debater, except when he says the appropriators appropriating money on an authorized program--that is great, except the American public needs to know that 22 percent of what we appropriate has never been authorized. Never.

So the fact is, we say authorization means something, but it means nothing as far as the appropriations process goes. The real point of this debate is how do we grab hold of this problem, this behemoth of a problem that will face our children and grandchildren in the next 20 to 25 years, and do it in a way that will give us the greatest opportunity for them?

My idea--and obviously many people disagree with it--is I think we ought to start looking at every program. We ought to ask a couple of questions: Can we measure its effectiveness? Is there a metric on it that says this program is supposed to do this? Is there a metric there so we can measure it? I am of the mind to say that if you cannot measure something, you cannot manage it. Ninety percent of the programs have no metric in the Federal Government, so we don't know if they are working.

No. 2, is it a program that is still needed? We don't ever look at the authorizing level. The Senator would have us defer everything to appropriations, and that is what we actually do because 20 percent of what we appropriate is not authorized and everything we authorize isn't appropriated. So, obviously, authorizations are meaningless. So what we should do is eliminate authorizing committees and just have appropriations committees and we will all be on appropriations committees.

Third, we should ask, is this still a legitimate function of the Federal Government? When we ran a $300 billion-plus true deficit last year and every State, save one, had big surpluses, should we not ask the question: If we are doing things that really are not the Federal Government's role to do, and we have a deficit and the States have a surplus, should we not let them do it without our fingers taking 15 percent of the money as we send it back?

As a matter of fact, I did just that on the last 9/11 bill, and the Senator from Illinois voted against it. I voted to sunset it. I actually offered the amendment that said we should sunset it and look at it in 5 years, and the Senator from Illinois disagreed. He thought, no, we should not do that. This Senator must admit that he does have a constructive suggestion. I just wish he had voted that way when we had the amendment up.

My amendment did not sunset the whole Department of Homeland Security. It was the grants process.

It is made up of how we dole money out to the States rather than looking at the best interests of the country and looking at the risk base for national security and homeland security. I am basically for a true pay-go that says the options are two. One option said the only option is, if we won't cut spending, we will raise taxes. That is a pay-more, not a pay-go. It is pay more.

I am proud of those votes. I had consternation over it because I want to try to hold to those things. But the pay-go as outlined two times in the language was a vote for pay-more.

Will the Senator agree with me that there is waste, fraud, and abuse in the duplication of the Federal Government.

Will the Senator agree that since we had a $300 billion- plus deficit last year--$200 billion-plus if we weren't in the war in Iraq--if we took that off the table, would it not make sense for us to try to get rid of the waste, fraud, duplication, and abuse?

It doesn't include the war. Let me finish my point.

It was in there, but say we were not in the war and we were still down to $200 billion--let's take that off the table. Say we have a $200 billion deficit, and we can demonstrate from our subcommittee hearings $200 billion a year in waste, fraud, and abuse. Yet we did nothing about it. We did nothing.

I have enjoyed my debate with the Senator from Illinois. I ask that we vote on the question at hand. I thank him for his kindness.

As long as it is not a pay-more amendment.

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

Mr. President, I have an amendment in my hand by Senator John Ensign. I will send it to the desk. I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and to have this called up.

Mr. President, I appreciate the opportunity to speak on this issue. It is very interesting. The American people should hear what has just gone on here.

What we have heard is rhetoric without responsibility. There is no question that by moving, as Senator DeMint has, we finally got the Appropriations Committee to endorse what was passed in the ethics legislation. However, after the ethics legislation was passed, I spoke on the floor. I was the last person to speak on the floor late that evening. I made the statement--and it is now proving to be true--that it was ethics reform in name only, no substance.

We now hear an argument that says: We should not pass the most significant portion of the ethics bill in a stand-alone process so that we can, in fact, do what the American people want, which is transparency in this Government.

It is interesting, if you know how this place operates, that if in fact you have an earmark reform on appropriations only, and no earmark reform on an authorization, you have no earmark reform because once something is authorized in an authorizing bill through an earmark, it no longer will apply to the appropriations bill. So we will have the same thing going on. The reason we are seeing an objection to earmark reform is because we truly, in the majority of cases, don't want earmark reform. What we are doing is, we are doing it--talk about piecemeal--only in one area. What we will do is, there won't be an earmark on an appropriations bill. What we will do is authorize them now. Since we won't apply the earmark rule to authorization bills, the American public will once again be hoodwinked. They won't know whose financial interest it is nor who it will benefit.

The problem with ethics in Washington isn't the lobbyists, isn't the campaign contributions, it is the Members of Congress. Until that changes, until the American people demand accountability--what we just heard was a flimsy excuse for not accepting this into the rules of the Senate. We voted on it. The American people deserve it. It is a sham.

I again ask unanimous consent that the Rules Committee be discharged from further consideration, and the Senate now proceed to S. 123; further that the resolution be agreed to and the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

Will the Senator yield?

Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. President, I object.

I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for the next 10 minutes.

Mr. President, it is very important we not leave the debate on earmarks. What we saw was an issue about the integrity of Congress which Senator DeMint and myself have been championing. There are only 4 Members of the Senate who don't offer earmarks, 4 out of 100 who don't play the game of earmarks. It is important that the American people know that if we are going to have earmarks, it ought to be clearly identified. We ought to know who is benefiting, who is getting the money, who is sponsoring the money, and what the outcome will be. It is great that the Appropriations Committee has just stated that they are going to voluntarily accede to the rules we passed 98 to 0, except there is one small problem with that; the fact is, there is no enforcement of the rules available to Senators when they violate that very point, which means they may follow that, but if, in fact, they do not, we have no course of action with which to raise a point of order when they do not.

I wish to go back to something the esteemed Senator from Illinois said, which is, we have gotten what we want. No, we have not. We have not gotten it until the American people get the transparency they need about how the Congress operates. If you eliminate earmarks in appropriations but do not eliminate earmarks in authorizations, what is authorized as an earmark will come to the appropriation as not an earmark because it is then authorized, so we will play the same game but one step further back.

I am disappointed at the leadership, that they would block what the American people so fully want. And the idea we have to conference what should be a Senate rule, when the House has already passed a rule--they operate under the very same thing Senator DeMint has asked for--all we have to do is agree we will, in fact, abide by those rules by accepting that as a rule of the Senate. Anything less than that is political Washington doublespeak which the American people are tired of.

There should not be one earmark, one special favor, one indication of anything done at any level--authorization or appropriations--the American people are not fully aware of as to who has the vetted interest and who will be the benefactor and what the motivations might be in association with that.

So the fact the majority objects to incorporating what we obviously, supposedly, all agreed to--or was it the fact that people voted for it because the people wanted us to and now we will not carry it out? What it does, by not adopting this rule, Senator DeMint's rule, is we undermine again the integrity of this body.

The American people deserve transparency. The American people should have transparency. The only way we can truly be held accountable by the American people is if they can see everything that is going on.

To deny this rule, to deny the fact we are going to operate in the open, to deny the fact we are going to be held accountable is exactly what the American people are sick of.

I remind my colleagues we do not have a higher favorability rating than the President at this time, whom we are so quick to impugn, and the reason we do not is the very reason we saw in the objection placed on this rule, this resolution. To me, it is a sad day in the Senate because we are playing games again with the American people. I said, after we passed the ethics bill, it will be a long time until we see anything. It will be a long time. It has already been a long time. Why hasn't it been conferenced? There have been 80 days to conference an ethics bill. There has not been the first step. There has not been the naming of conferees. There has not been the first step to move forward toward that.

The American people should surmise--and correctly--the Congress still wants to work in the shadows, they still do not want to have transparency; therefore, they still do not want to be held accountable by the American people.

I thank you for the time and yield back, and I will offer no objection to the request of the Senator from West Virginia to accept amendments on the Intelligence authorization bill.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I listened with interest to the Senator from New York. As a practicing physician and somebody who has delivered over 4,000 children, I cared for both toddlers and young adults with type 1 diabetes. There is nobody who doesn't want to see that disease fixed. The problem is, we shouldn't promise things we don't know are accurate.

What we do know is that yesterday on CNN, an article was released from JAMA showing the treatment of 13 young Brazilians who had type 1 diabetes who are now free from using exogenous insulin. They are on no medicine whatsoever and their sugar is totally controlled. That is one step going forward in all the areas of medicine.

The other comment I will make before I make my final points is, if you talk to anybody in the area of research on Alzheimer's-- Alzheimer's, and we heard it time and time again, is a devastating disease for individuals who have it, and it is a devastating disease for families who care for their loved ones with it--I don't know of anybody in embryonic stem cell research or in research in medicine by themselves who has great hopes for a cure of Alzheimer's with embryonic stem cells. We have heard that claim time and time again. It is not a great hope for Alzheimer's. There is hope. There is beta secretase, which is an enzyme that causes Alzheimer's to be laid down. There are great medicines coming forward. Some are in trials in primates right now that tend to stop Alzheimer's in its tracks.

We ought not to be promising things we don't know or are not realistic in terms of Alzheimer's. That is the case.

I want to sum up where we are, the differences between the two bills. One bill, S. 5, has lots of positives in it. We hear it is not going to destroy any other embryos, there is going to be a grandfather of the embryos that have been created since. We heard the Senator from New York say something different. We heard the Senator from California yesterday talk about the 400,000 embryos that are frozen today, of which only 2.8 percent are available and less than that number--so less than 250 lines--could totally be created out of all the embryos that are available in this country today.

The answers are kind of sleight of hand. To have an effective embryonic stem cell program, other than what is provided in S. 30, means we are going to use Federal taxpayer dollars, indirectly or directly, to destroy embryos. You can say you are not, but the fact is that will happen.

What are the positives of S. 30? The positives of S. 30 are that it looks at everything. It looks at all the new and upcoming methods. One is altered nuclear transfer. No. 1, you don't destroy any embryo, you don't create an embryo, but yet you get identical cells to what an embryonic stem cell would be, totally pluripotent, totally capable of doing everything an embryonic stem cell can do.

Why is there resistance to that? Why would there be any resistance to that? There shouldn't be.

The second point is what we call germ cell pluripotent stem cells. Those are made from the testes and ovaries of us, each of us, and we can have treatments designed for ourselves. Every tissue type in the body has now been produced from germ cell pluripotent stem cells, either ovarian or testicular, again, applying the same pluripotent stem cells you get from an embryo, but you never destroy a life.

My friend from Minnesota, one of the coauthors of this bill, makes a great point. Whatever happens at the end of the day--right now this glass of water represents what is happening on embryonic stem cell research with Government funds in this country. There is a whole lot of other research going on with embryonic stem cells outside the Government. It has not dead stopped. As a matter of fact, it is advancing forcefully without Government money. But this represents what is there. If S. 5 is passed out of this body and the House, this is what we will see next year: the same amount, because this bill is going to be vetoed.

However, if S. 30 is passed, what we will see is this much research, a doubling of the research next year. So one says help people play the political game when we know it is going to be

vetoed. S. 30 says let's do something real. Let's give an answer to the hope. Let's double it up and let's do it in a way that is an ethically good way.

The final point I wish to make is to anybody who wants us to do embryonic stem cell research, anybody who has a family member with a chronic disease, anybody who has a child with diabetes, anybody who has any need that has hope coming from ``embryonic stem cell research,'' the question I put forward to them is this: If we can show you the science is going to give us exactly the same results with never destroying an embryo, what would your choice be--destroy an embryo and get the results or do not destroy an embryo and go one of the multitude other ways to accomplish exactly the same purpose?

That is the real question that is facing this body. That is the question the American people ask. The science is 2 to 3 years ahead of the debate in this body today.

A lot of times my colleagues accuse me of not making much sense on the floor when I talk about these issues because it is a medical issue, it is a scientific issue. I am a doctor. I understand the science, so I tend to not use the words as plainly as I should. But the ethical question still arises: Do you want a doubling of the research to go forward and answer the very human need that is out there or do you want to play the political game and have exactly what we have today?

I say to Senator Harkin, that is what will happen if S. 5 goes through. It is going to be vetoed. It will not be overridden in the House. Or we can have S. 30 that does as much or more than S. 5 and we will see a difference for the American people.

The hope my colleagues talk about will be realized when S. 30 gets passed, when S. 30 gets signed. The President has said he will sign it. It makes available everything we will need and still accomplishes the same goals but does it twice as fast. That is the real question: Do we want to play politics with this issue? Do we want to say somebody's legitimate position of valuing life, that they have an illegitimate position because they value life at the expense of somebody with chronic disease, or can they value life, come with an answer that actually accomplishes the same purpose in a better timeframe with better results with S. 30? That is the real question for us.

I understand the political game we are playing. I understand the diseases. But when you read the basic raw research that is going forward today, we are not even close to what is happening, we are not even talking about what is happening out there.

Final point. Make sure you understand that if you believe in embryonic stem cell research as a viable ethical alternative, you also have to believe in cloning because the only way you will get a treatment that is good for you without rejection, without rejecting the very treatment that is being given to you, is for you to clone yourself. That is the dirty little secret nobody wants to talk about in this debate because once we accomplish with true embryonic stem cells versus altered nuclear transfer, any treatment will require antirejection drugs or you having to clone yourself.

The language is very specific. There is no cloning as far as implanting into a uterus, but it doesn't mean you don't clone yourself and destroy yourself to meet a need for you.

It is a very complicated ethical issue about which we ought to be very clear. It is not just destroying embryos. It is going the next step now to have an effect from that treatment.

I believe there will be good treatments come out of embryonic stem cell research. I don't have any doubt about that. I believe exactly those same treatments will come and be better from altered nuclear transfer, from dedifferentiation, which is a term that says you take a cell that is more mature and dedifferentiate it back to a pluripotent cell, or from germ cells, either ovarian or testicular.

We can accomplish the desires of everybody who is hurting in our country today who has a hope and do it in a realistic way with S. 30 that will deliver the goods, deliver taxpayers' dollars to make a difference. S. 5 will deliver nothing, nothing for at least 2 years, because this President won't sign it.

So the consequence and the question that comes back to us is: Are we going to do something that is meaningful or are we going to play the political game that in the long term has no meaning, at least for the next 2 years?

I yield back my time to the Senator from Georgia.

Mr. President, I thank my colleagues for this bill. Senator Coleman and Senator Isakson have put a great deal of time into this bill, and I am pleased to work with them in bringing about this formulation. If I am not already a cosponsor, I ask unanimous consent to be added as a cosponsor.

Unlike many in the Chamber, I am a scientist. I am a physician. I have delivered, at last count, somewhere over 4,000 babies. I understand embryology. I understand the science of molecular biology. This debate is going to come down to a couple of moral questions. There are really two moral questions that this country has to answer. I will talk about those, and then I will talk about a few other things that most people don't want to admit to or discuss, issues surrounding this topic.

The first moral issue is, do we have the capability to destroy life in the name of saving life? That is what we are talking about with embryonic stem cells. We selectively snuff out a life so that we can potentially have a treatment in the future. That is the first great moral question. I have seen the various early stages and then every other stage through pregnancy what that life potential is. It is not to be taken lightly, this step of ignoring life or neutralizing life under the proxy of saying we are going to benefit someone.

We have heard many people talk about the promise of embryonic stem cells. They do yield promise for us. However, it is a long way off. But we need to be careful with this step in the direction of destroying life in the name of saving life.

I thought Senator Isakson did a very good job of explaining embryos that no longer grow. They have quit dividing. They won't be frozen. They won't be implanted. They, in fact, will be discarded. But they still have tremendous value for us for research. As he noted, 5 of the 21 lines presently being researched, and 3 of the 10 lines that presently have no problems whatsoever came from dead embryos, embryos that still have live cells but won't divide again unless induced to do so, and then won't divide into an embryo.

This is a big question for us because how we answer this question today is going to say a lot about the decisions we make in the future. One of the things we are going to hear about is the tremendous amount of excess embryos around. Here is a RAND study report that disputes that. Here is a scientific research organization that looked at the availability of excess embryos and in fact says the claims are not supported by the facts.

I ask unanimous consent to print this in the Record.

The second question we have to ask ourselves is, if you are a mother of a juvenile diabetic, a 2- or 3-year-old, or you are the wife of a Parkinson's patient or the caregiver of somebody with a spinal cord injury, if we told you that in fact we can do everything to produce a cure, to give you the exact same opportunity for a cure without ever destroying the first embryo, which would your choice be? Would your choice be to destroy that embryo or to do it in a nondestructive way getting exactly the same results?

That is where the science is today. That is going to be disputed. But the false hopes that have been created that that is the only way that we can find these cures is nothing but hogwash, scientifically proven hogwash.

The fact is, we don't know what is going to come from embryonic stem cells. We know a lot that will come from other treatments. I just shared with Senator Coleman, we will have a treatment for juvenile diabetes within 5 years, but it won't come from stem cells. It is going to come from the tobacco plant. That is very new research. It has been repeated in mice. It is working. We will have that cure. That is going to get funded, and it will be produced long before anything else that comes to an actual cure.

By the way, autologous stem cells, cells taken from yourself, have already cured five juvenile diabetics by taking the cells from a tube inside the pancreas and growing those cells, regenerating beta cells, and reimplanting those into children who have juvenile diabetes, who are off insulin today. So there are lots of opportunities.

The second moral question that Americans need to ask themselves, as do Members of this body, is if we can do everything without destroying the first embryo, why do we want to destroy embryos? Because it is easy? Because it is convenient? Because we are locked in a mantra that says this is the only way. Think for a minute about what else is going on. We now produce almost every cell type that man has from germ cells, research done in this country, proven in Germany, in Japan, another source of stem cells. Didn't destroy the first embryo, but we have it. Altered nuclear transfer, assisted reprogramming, which you heard Senator Coleman talk about, has not been done in humans yet because it hasn't been funded. The fact is, it has been done in mice. You sit and think, what can happen.

When we heard that these were theories by the Senator from Iowa, going to the Moon was a theory, but we did it. The fact is, there are lots of other theories on how to treat disease out there that we are going to be accomplishing that aren't going to have anything to do with stem cells.

It is important that we don't take our eye off the ball. This is a very key moral question that has to be answered. It has to be answered by all the disease groups out there. If, in fact, we can supply the same product in the same timeline with the same results, why would we want to destroy an embryo? If we could do it in an ethically, morally correct way, why would we do it in an ethically less correct way?

Then there is the little problem that you never hear talked about with stem cells. The only way a stem cell therapy is ever going to work without antirejection drugs, the only way it is ever going to work is if you clone yourself. They don't want to talk about that right now. But for a treatment to happen that will keep you free from rejecting that stem cell, that treatment, that set of cells that is not purely yours will mean anybody who gets a treatment from an embryonically derived stem cell will be on antirejection drugs the rest of their life, which has multiple complications. The solution to that--they don't want to talk about it--is you have to clone yourself. So now we are into cloning ourselves and then destroying ourselves so we can have a treatment for ourselves? That is the dirty little secret that nobody with embryonic stem cells wants to talk about.

The interesting answer to that is altered nuclear transfer, oocyte- assisted reprogramming, which has none of those problems because you use one of your cells into an egg, reprogram it to produce pluripotent cells that never produce an embryo. Nobody wants to talk about the real scientific issue of the problems of a treatment for a disease that we have no treatments for yet, that is well down the road, and the big kicker that will come is, what if we get a treatment and then we try to give it and everybody is going to have to be on an antirejection drug. Everybody knows somebody who has had a transplant. Ask them how they like taking their drugs. They like taking them because they have a new liver or heart or kidney, but if they could not take those drugs and have it, they would much rather have that.

So we set up a false choice. The false choice is, embryonic stem cells or nothing. That is not a real choice for this country.

I believe America is a great land, made up of good people. If we answer this second moral question, if we can do this, and we can, through multiple ways, why would we destroy the first embryo? We do not have to destroy the first embryo.

I think we ought to be considering the moral questions, but also the facts that are going to come about as a result of this fascination and hope for a cure. I have had mothers of juvenile diabetics in my office. I have had family members of Alzheimer's patients. I have had a Parkinson's patient plead with me to do this. When I explain to them what is on the horizon, when I explain to them what the potentials are, all of a sudden this hope that has no substance to it yet whatsoever does not have near the meaning as all the other things that are going on that do have meaning.

So we need to refocus on the real search, the real potential that is in front of our country and answer this best, most important moral question: Do we steal life from the innocent to potentially give life to the maimed or the injured or diseased, or do we, in fact, do it in a way that never steals life and accomplishes the same goal?

That is the real question before the Senate. S. 30 does that. S. 5 does not. That is the division. One says: To heck with the ethics, to heck with the problems associated with it, to heck with the rejection, to heck with the antirejection drugs, to heck with the idea we cannot clone ourselves, we want to go this way only.

S. 30 allows all the options, all the accomplishments, all the potential without violating the first ethical clause. That is the question America needs to ask itself in this debate. We can give to all those who are desirous of all these needed benefits of cure and treatment, and we can do it in an ethically responsible manner that will send us down the right road for this country, not the wrong road.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I have been listening to the debate on this bill from my office. I have written down some of the miraculous statements that have been made on the floor of the Senate, and I thought I would resubmit some of them with some constructive criticism.

Seventy-eight stem cell lines are no longer useful. That is not accurate. All stem cell lines are contaminated with mouse feeder cells. Not true, either. The policy does not work. Not true. Research on stem cells under the present cannot go forward. I would remind the body that stem cells, embryonic stem cells are being researched every day in this country with private money. This is about using Federal dollars to destroy embryos; it is not about blocking embryonic stem cell research.

The statement was made by the Senator from California that these are embryos that would already be destroyed. Now that is not accurate at all. Only S. 5 embraces all forms of stem cell research. S. 30 embraces every form of stem cell research, including embryonic stem cells, but it makes the correct distinction of taking a nonviable embryo that is still viable for embryonic stem cells but not viable to create a human and uses those instead of the true potential-for-life embryos. There would be no limitation on the numbers of these.

If we go to a fertility clinic today where embryos are created, what we see is a range of embryos in terms of their quality. Then they are graded. Some are implantable. Some are frozen. Some have quit dividing. Those that quit dividing but are not dead but don't have the potential are the ones S. 30 will allow to be used for embryonic stem cells. It bypasses the ethical dilemma we have and still gives us embryonic stem cell research.

It was just released by the Journal of the American Medical Association and was on CNN, 13 young people from the ages of 14 to 31, now living in Brazil, who had type 1 diabetes were treated with their own immune cells given back to them, and they now live without insulin. That was released today. It didn't have anything to do with an embryonic stem cell.

Someone during the debate said: We all know embryonic stem cells hold the most potential. I believe the Presiding Officer now in the chair said that. That is not true. They don't hold the most potential. They hold great research potential, but what we ought to be interested in is therapeutics. How do we treat diseases? How do we accomplish therapies to do the most good for the most people?

What we are going to find out is, there will be some potential from embryonic stem cells. But if I had a child with diabetes, I would want it fixed as soon as I could, not 10 or 15 years from now. The fact is, we have all these treatments that are coming about. I am convinced, as much as I am alive and standing here today, that within 10 years new onset type 1 diabetics will be cured within 2 months of the onset of their disease. That is going to happen. We are going to see that. We will see tremendous treatments for that, whether from germ cell lines, embryonic stem cell lines that are harvested correctly and ethically, and other treatments, including autologous or their own stem cells used to treat the body.

I introduced into the Record the RAND study on the available embryos. We had it quoted today, there are 400,000 of them out there. That is not true. It is more like 13,000 available. So when we have this exaggerated claim that 400,000 embryos are waiting to be destroyed for embryonic stem cell research, that is not true.

I am happy to yield.

That is correct.

There is no question it happens every day. One of the things we have seen in our State is, we sometimes overfertilize eggs and create too many. But when it comes down to the individual couple who says: We are going to try this implantation, we are going to save these, then if they have a child, they may want to have another child, so that many of these are saved in reserve for that family. To say there are 400,000 when, in fact, there are probably less than 13,000 that could be available, if you look at the other side of that, how many nongrowing, nonviable embryos are available today? Fifty to seventy to one hundred thousand of the stage 3 embryos that can be used for embryonic stem cell that doesn't violate the ethical dilemma we face today. So the reason I put the RAND study in there is so the Record will show the facts, not the desire of a Member of the Senate to overstate the case. The fact is, there are less than 13,000 available. The fact is, level 3 embryos, there are 100,000 available. Nobody talks about that. In fact, 3 of the 10 that are the best lines right now running came from exactly that source. So we know that is the potential.

Let me continue. We had the statement: Science without ethics is like a ship without a rudder. That is true. Therefore, when we start destroying life, where is our rudder? When we start marginalizing the weakest and the most vulnerable in our society to say we are going to do something good somewhere when, in fact, the science doesn't show that yet, where is our rudder? That is what S. 30 does. S. 30 gives an ethical option for every need we have in the scientific community to accomplish everything the scientific community wants to accomplish. There are no limitations in S. 30.

The Senator from Minnesota has made the point, President Bush is going to veto S. 5. He has already said he is going to veto it. So a year from now, where do we want to be in terms of stem cell research? Do we want to have more embryonic stem cell lines and do we want to have more embryonic stem cell lines the NIH can use money to research on? The answer is, yes, we do. There is one way to do that. That is S. 30. S. 30 allows that. I am convinced, as an obstetrician and as a scientist, that 10 years from now we won't use embryos whatsoever to produce stem cells. We will use embryonic stem cells to help us research genetics and drug treatments for difficult diseases that we already have, and we will use other methods to produce cell lines that will give us cures to disease.

I ask unanimous consent to print in the Record the recent announcement of the article in JAMA on CNN, ``Type 1 diabetics live without insulin in stem cell experiment.''

There are two ethical questions America has to answer. One is, is it OK to destroy life with the potential of helping cure maladies--we haven't seen it yet--with the potential, the hope to cure maladies? In the midst of that ethical question, is it OK to destroy that life when you could do the same thing without destroying life by using class 3 embryos? That is the first ethical dilemma. The second ethical dilemma we face as a nation and as citizens of this country and as Members of this body is, if in fact it is true there are other ways to get to the exact same goal of treatments--we all want to fulfill the hopes and the desires, whether they are paraplegics, quadriplegics, diabetics, Parkinson's or others, all these tremendous diseases that we know we are going to be able to eventually find a cure for--if we can do that without ever having to destroy the first embryo, wouldn't we all rather go that way? That is what S. 30 offers. S. 30 offers an opportunity to accomplish exactly the same thing without destroying the first life. How we answer that question is going to say a lot about our country.

My hope is a year from now we are standing on this floor and seeing all this promise come true, whether it be altered nuclear transfer, whether it be germ cell, which I happen to believe is going to be another great option in terms of multipotent and pluripotent stem cells, that we will see the fruits and the wisdom of the Senate that passes a bill, S. 30, which actually makes a difference. S. 5 isn't going to make any difference. It is going to get vetoed. It is not going to do anything to help us except create a political posture that the President has said he will not bow to. He is not going to sign it. He is going to veto it, and the House will not override it. So the question is, if you want to give hope, if you want to promote a potential for treatment and cures for all these strong and tough diseases families are facing and individual patients are facing, the way to do that is to make sure S. 30 becomes law. It will, in fact, be the thing that makes the difference. S. 5 won't. S. 5 is going to get vetoed, and we will be back here doing the same thing next year and the next year and the next year.

The point is, let's do what we can today, and S. 30 accomplishes that.

I thank the Senator and yield the floor.

A shade over 4,000.

I wanted to add one other thing. When the American people think about stem cells and potential treatments, the thing that is never talked to them about is the idea of tissue rejection. There isn't going to be an embryonic stem cell that produces a cell that can be used in any human without the use of antirejection drugs. The only way you can get around that is to clone yourself. The only way you can get around it totally, without any rejection whatsoever, is to be a female and clone yourself, because cells have these wonderful little engines in them called mitochondria. They have separate DNA. That DNA of the cloned egg will be accomplished as a part of that.

So this idea we think we are going to have this great answer, even once we get to treatments--treatments that use embryonic stem cells rather than altered nuclear transfer, or oocyte-assisted reprogramming--those cells will all have to have accompanying with them, all those treatments, anti-rejection drugs.

If you know anybody who has had any type of organ transplant, ask them how it is to take those drugs. The only way you do that is, we come to the next ethical dilemma: Is it OK for you to clone yourself, then destroy that life you have cloned so you can take part of that for you? All those ethical dilemmas are gone in altered nuclear transfer because now you are inserting stem cells from your own body. They are your own cells. There is no rejection.

In this study in Brazil I just put in the Record, there is no rejection because they are using their own cells. They have eliminated the ability of their body to destroy their islet cells in their pancreas and have done that with their own cells. There is no rejection so they are not on any medicines. They are not on insulin anymore because they are now producing insulin.

So the fact is, we should make sure we understand if and when--and there is no guarantee the ``when'' is going to come--we have embryonic stem cell treatments, those are going to be accompanied by antirejection treatments as well. However, if you use your own cells for the same treatment--we heard Senator Brownback talk about the numerous studies that are ongoing now with autologous or self-giving reparations from your own body--there is no rejection issue.

So it is easy for us to talk, and it is easy for us to offer hope, but we need to make sure when we talk about that hope, when we talk about embryonic stem cells, we are balancing it with a realism that we are not off treatment, even though we offer a cure, because now we have a treatment to make sure the cure works. So it is a step that is positive, but it is not the panacea that has been described on this floor today.

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

Mr. President, under the previous order, I believe I have several amendments pending. I rise to discuss those with my colleagues. I will call up several of them as I go along.

It is important for the American public to know what is going on. If we go back to 2003, what we can see is a major growth in emergency spending. Why is that important? It is important because emergency spending is totally outside the budget parameters on which the Senate works. Emergency spending doesn't count against any total cap on what our spending will be. It doesn't count against the budget deficit, and it doesn't count against the budget rules. We merely spend the money outside of any rules of control, and we charge it. We take a credit card and we say: Kaching, grandchildren, you are up.

As my colleagues can see from this chart, from 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, to 2007, as the bill before us today, we see an average of over $100 billion a year, about $110 to $115 billion a year outside of a $3 trillion budget. So no taxpayer dollars presently are going to go to pay for any of this. What we are going to do is ask the Treasury to issue bonds and notes. Guess who will be redeeming those notes. Our grandchildren. Who is at fault in all this? Partly the administration because part of this funding has been for a war that should have been budgeted through the Defense appropriations bill. That will happen next year. But the fact is, we can take $80 billion out of this across the year and apply it to the war.

What about the other $30 billion every year on average that doesn't have anything to do with the war and doesn't have anything to do with an emergency? Remember, this is supposedly emergency spending. How long have we been in this war? Four years. There is nothing emergency about it. We know the spending. It should go through the regular process. Our budget rules define ``emergency'' as something unforeseen, unexpected. We have to question the intellectual honesty of our body when the $18.7 billion that is added on to the defense request in this bill is deemed an emergency.

The first amendment I will talk about is $100 million that is an emergency to fund increased security at the conventions, both in Minneapolis-St. Paul and in Denver. We have known we were going to have conventions every 4 years for a long time. Never before have we funded the security required for these conventions out of an emergency bill. So in essence, what we are going to do is we are going to have two big parties and we are going to send the bill for those parties to our grandkids.

The first amendment I have actually eliminates that $100 million. We have plenty of time under the regular appropriations process with which to supply the money within the budget guidelines. Every billion we spend outside of the budget guidelines means that is another billion which is going to be spent inside, which means we are actually doubling the spending. Something that should have been inside, now we are going to spend outside of the budget. We are going to charge it to our children, and then we are going to spend more money.

How did we get where we are? The important thing to look at as to how we got where we are is to look at what has happened to Defense appropriations every year. There is a requirement that is asked for from the Pentagon in the budget. It is within our budget numbers. What happens when it comes out of here? What happens is, it gets underfunded intentionally. Why does it get underfunded intentionally? So that we can create, in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007, additional spending inside the budget, and then we come back and get the actual defense needs in an emergency. It is a shell game that is being played on the American public that says: We are going to underfund what we know we need in defense. Then we know there is going to be an emergency supplemental, and we will make up for that when the emergency supplemental comes. But because we underfunded defense, we can therefore spend the money somewhere else outside of the budget. It is a game that we continue to play that is unfair to the American public.

Amendment No. 648

I call up amendment 648.

Amendment No. 648 removes $100 million. This is not about

being against security for people who are going to attend the conventions. It is ironic that the decisions which are made at the conventions will have already been made probably in February or March. But we are going to charge the American taxpayers $100 million for security outside of the budget. Who are we really charging? We are charging our grandkids. This has never before happened. Always before, if we funded money for convention sites, we have done it within the budget. So it isn't an emergency, and it is markedly unethical to take money that should be inside our budget and place it outside and ask our grandchildren to pay for us to all have a party in August and September.

H.R. 4613, the fiscal year Department of Defense appropriations bill, provided $50 million for discretionary grants for this same purpose associated with the 2004 nominating conventions. We did that in the 2005 bill. We did it within the budget. We have done it before.

Let's talk about the criteria of what is an emergency: necessary, essential, and vital, plus sudden, quickly coming into being, not building up over time, an urgent, pressing, compelling need requiring immediate action, subject to unforeseen, totally unpredictable and unanticipated, not permanent and temporary nature. There is no question the funding for the conventions for the Democratic and Republican parties does not meet any of those criteria. Yet here it is in the bill. Why do we find it in this bill? So we don't have to spend the money inside the budget limitations that are placed on Congress. Here is $100 million outside of that budget limitation that we are then going to spend, another $100 million, because we have not paid for this one, and we should have paid for it within the budget.

This isn't sudden. It is not urgent. It is not pressing. It does not require immediate action, is not unforeseen, not unpredictable, and it was not unanticipated. There have been nominating conventions since 1832. The year 2008 will be the second Presidential election since the 9/11 terrorist attack. There is no question that increased security is required. But this is the first time we have said it is an emergency. It is like saying we don't know the census is coming in 2010. We will have an emergency supplemental for the census. As a matter of fact, we have done that before. The war on terror is an emergency. Having a party for politicians and their political parties doesn't qualify.

We are going to have a vote on this amendment. I expect to lose the vote. But I also expect the American people will ask: Why in the world would we be doing this? Why would we violate their good will by playing games for the political parties? Why would we do that? It comes back to the point of where we are in the Senate, why are we addressing this legislation? Why is there $18.7 billion worth of additional items added to this bill other than to fund the Defense Department?

We will hear all sorts of answers: We need it. We didn't do it. We have emergency agricultural appropriations in this bill.

Actually, I believe there is an emergency in farm country, and we ought to be doing something about it. But we ought to be paying for it. I haven't yet talked to a farmer from Oklahoma who thinks his grandchildren ought to be paying for us to do an emergency supplemental in terms of agriculture. They believe we ought to find it within.

The fact is, Senator Carper and I held 49 hearings in the last Congress and discovered over $200 billion of waste, fraud, abuse, or duplication within the discretionary budget. That is within $1 trillion, 20 percent. Most Americans probably believe that. The problem is, most politicians don't have the nerve to challenge where that spending is because there is an interest group that wants it spent. There is an interest group, and it is us. It is self-serving that we are going to spend $100 million on increased security for the conventions and not pay for it and spend that money inside the budget on something else. Probably the greatest moral question is, Are we going to have a party on our unborn next generation?

They are going to be the ones who pay back this $100 million. It is not going to be $100 million when they pay it back; it will probably be $500 million or $600 million by the time we get to paying it back with the compound interest.

What would this $100 million do if we were not spending it on security at party conventions? It would buy 31,797 sets of body armor. It would uparmor 658 humvees. It would uparmor 529 ambulances, medic carriers for the guys who are helping our guys in the field.

Instead, we are going to use a bill, intended to cover the cost of winning the war, to protect our national security, fight the war on terrorism, to add $100 million to our national debt that already exceeds $8.7 trillion. We added $1,000 to that debt last year for every man, woman, and child. We added $1,000. If you pass this bill-- ``emergency''--what we are going to do is add another $400 for every man, woman, and child in this country--the debt just for this bill. So it ought to be about real emergencies.

Federal funding also is already planned for the conventions. The Department of Justice did not request this $100 million. The administration budgeted $15 million for the Secret Service to provide the security at these conventions. Each convention has been designated as a national security, special security event, making security personnel eligible for other Federal tax dollars through grants to cover the expenses. Why are we doing it? There has not even been a security plan for which we are throwing $100 million at formalized for the conventions.

I believe if you are a young person in this country today, what we are doing on this bill, especially with this item, has to be heartbreaking. April 15 is coming up pretty soon. We all look at our pay stubs and see what we are paying in Federal taxes. What you do not see when you get that pay stub is how much additional you are going to owe at the end of the year because we were not responsible. We were not responsible with the taxpayers' money. Yet we play all these shell games of hiding money, underfunding defense so we can bring it back in a supplemental, so we can spend money elsewhere rather than making the tough choices.

Let's read about what was in the news after the last conventions. It is pretty interesting to know. One hundred million dollars of your money for the following: USA Today reported the convention featured more than 200 parties by corporations, lobbyists, trade groups, and other organizations. These were in addition to the high-dollar donor meals, golf tournaments, sporting events held during the convention week. Top sponsorship at these events can cost up to $250,000--golf tournaments, breakfast at Tiffany's, Yankee Stadium fundraisers, champagne and cigar celebration, baseball games.

We are going to spend $100 million of our grandkids' money to protect politicians while they have a party. To me, it is unconscionable. It is even more unconscionable to do it in this bill. There is nothing about this that is an emergency. There is nothing about this that was not foreseen. There is nothing about this that was not anticipated. This is a game.

The last election reminded us--my party--you cannot say one thing and do another, except that is what we are seeing with this bill.

Amendment No. 649

Mr. President, I wish also to spend some time on amendment No. 649. Over the last 5 years, the University of Vermont has received $400 million in earmarks for things for that university. In this bill is an earmark for $2 million. The first thing we said is we are not going to have earmarks that are not published: who put them in, who sponsored them, and what they are for. This is an emergency bill. There is no question we ought to honor former Senator Jeffords. There is no question we ought to do that. But in an emergency bill that is unpaid for, that does not have anything to do with fighting the war on terror, we are going to send another $2 million to a university that has gotten $400 million over the last 5 years? This is not a place for it. It is not the time for it. It is not the way to do it. Supposedly, we are free of earmarks, and yet here is an earmark for which we do not have the money. We are not going to be able to pay for it, even though the claim is this is offset. It is offset with student loan management money. That is how they have offset it to say it does not

cost any money. Which is more important? More students getting loans and effective management so more people get student loans or giving another $2 million to a university that has already gotten $400 million of the taxpayers' money? I do not think there is any question in the average American's mind in regard to that.

Let me read what the University of Vermont has gotten: year 2000, $54 million for 201 different programs; year 2001, $60 million; year 2002, $69 million; year 2003, $76 million for 249 different programs; year 2004, $70 million; year 2005, $68 million. There is a lot of money that has already gone up there, a lot of it borrowed.

At the present time, the University of Vermont has an endowment of $282,594,000. Now, the interest on that, at 6 percent, gives you about, oh, close to $15 million a year--just the interest off that endowment. I believe they have plenty of money to fund this chair to honor Senator Jeffords.

The endowment grew 16 percent last year. Its growth last year was 20 times the amount of this earmark. Again, it is not unanticipated, certainly not an emergency, certainly it is not something we have to do now.

Again, is it necessary? Essential? Is it not merely useful or beneficial? It is useful. It will be beneficial. Did the demand for this quickly come into being? No. It was part of an earmark in the Labor-HHS bill that was not included in last year's appropriations. Is it urgent, pressing, and compelling, requiring immediate action? No. Was it unforeseen or unpredictable or unanticipated? Is it temporary in nature? No. It is not temporary. It is the start of many years of giving $2 million a year on the same thing.

This project violates the Appropriations Committee's own earmark moratorium. On December 11, Chairman Byrd and Congressman Obey announced there would be no more congressional earmarks until the new rules were put in place to make the process more transparent and more accountable. Those rules are not in place. The transparency and accountability is not there. Yet we see an earmark.

Here is what the joint statement said:

We will place a moratorium on all earmarks until a reform

process is put in place. Earmarks included in this year's

House and Senate bills will be eligible for consideration in

the 2008 process subject to new standards for transparency

and accountability. We will work to restore an accountable,

above-board, transparent process for funding decisions and

put an end to the abuses that have harmed the credibility of

Congress.

More of the same. There is no end in sight. This earmark was previously included in the report language--not the law, in the report language--for the fiscal year 2007 Labor-HHS appropriations bill. That was on page 251 of that report. It is the first of the earmarks to be resurrected from last year.

I might say as an aside, the Congressional Research Service has refused to honor a request from myself and Senator DeMint to give us a list of the earmarks in the 2007 appropriations bills--a flat-out refusal. There is a lot of speculation as to why they do not want the American people to know what the earmarks were last year. Come 2008, we are going to get to find out them all under the Transparency and Accountability Act that myself and Senator Obama and several others cosponsored, which became law last year.

When we questioned the University of Vermont about this earmark, we asked: What were the estimated costs of the project long term? They could not give us an answer. Who was going to finance it after the program was established? They could not give us an answer. How will the Federal funding be expended? They could not tell us that. Did the university request the funding? We do not know the answer to that either. None of these questions have been answered by the University of Vermont.

This $2 million could be spent for our troops. It would buy 2,857 carbine rifles the National Guard presently does not have so they could conduct training. It would buy 4 mine-protected vehicles or 13 uparmored humvees.

Mr. President, I wish at this time, without giving up my right to the floor, to yield time to the Senator from Virginia.

Madam President, reclaiming my time, as the floor is under my control.

I would like to continue, since my time is going to be limited by what I will be allowed to discuss on my amendments in terms of total time, I wish to spend a minute talking about amendment 657. There is no question we have some critical needs among many of our agricultural suppliers in this country--needs that were unforeseen, needs that were unanticipated, needs that we should have addressed last year but didn't; needs that we should have addressed in the CR, but we were precluded from offering an amendment to offer a way to supply those needs. What this amendment does is it provides farm relief to both our production agriculture individuals, as well as our cattle, in a fiscally responsible manner.

I wish to give some quotes, before I go into the details, from last year's debate with Senator Conrad and Senator Dorgan. Here are the following quotes:

I am very much in sympathy with Senator Coburn on the

notion of paying for this. I appreciate very much--as the

Senator knows, I wish to pay for this all as well. We have a

way to do a pay-for, but I am precluded from doing so by the

rules. On the question of paying for it, I have complete

agreement with the Senator from Oklahoma. I wish the rules

permitted us to offer an amendment for pay-for. I don't have

disagreements about the issues of paying for it. I suggest we

do a unanimous consent. I would do a unanimous consent to pay

for it. These things ought to be paid for. We have hundreds

of billions of dollars come through here with hardly a blink,

none of it paid for. That ought to change. I am with the

Senator from Oklahoma. Let's try to change that.

The fact is this does not have a pay-for, not because Senator Conrad doesn't want it there or I don't want it there; it ought to be there.

Well, here is the chance to put those words into action. What this amendment does is strike all nonessential items in the farm title so the scarce resources we have can be maximized for crop and livestock disaster assistance. The language in this amendment leaves verbatim that language in the underlying bill. It requires, though, the underlying funding for the emergency in this bill to be paid for within existing funds at the Department of Agriculture. You are going to hear all this screaming: They can't do it. You know what. They have $8 billion in the bank right now unspent, unobligated; money that is sitting there from this last year and this year that they haven't spent. This total will come to $4.15 billion, $4.15 billion to take care of the real needs of the consumer, the production agriculture in this country that has had 3 years of drought, has had 3 years of floods, has had 3 years where they didn't produce a crop. Those who actually bought crop insurance are going under anyway. What it would not do is add the other $1 billion to the outside of that for special interests that aren't the heart of agriculture in this country and when we do that, we are going to pay for it.

How dare you take money from the Department of Agriculture. The Department of Agriculture is, if you compared it on size and budget, the sixth biggest business in the United States. There isn't a big business out there that if they had to scrimp, couldn't save 4 or 5 percent on their business. As a matter of fact, they do it every day. As soon as their stocks start getting low, they start trimming, becoming more efficient, better ideas, better efficiency, and they cut their costs. We can do that at the Department of Agriculture.

This body isn't about to vote for this amendment because they don't want to have that fight. They don't want to have the hard work of making the Department of Agriculture efficient and not allowing the waste, fraud, abuse, and duplication that goes on in the Department of Agriculture. The $1.6 billion of food stamp payments that are paid out to people who are ineligible every year, who are ineligible, who have plenty of money, yet they are getting food stamps. All the other programs that have waste, fraud, and abuse in them, we are not going to take the step and say: Department of Agriculture, take the money that you have now--you have almost $8 billion in the bank--work real hard, trim yourself about 2 or 3 percent, save the money and go out and do what is going to make a difference to the production of agriculture in this country. No, we are going to do what is easy when this amendment goes down.

What we are going to do is we are going to say: Grandkids, we didn't have the courage to do what was right in 2007. We didn't have the courage to look at the programs that weren't efficient. We didn't have the courage to challenge somebody when they were being wasteful. We didn't have the courage to find it within ourselves to not lessen your standard of living because we wanted our standard of living taken care of.

So what they are going to see is an extra $5 billion or $6 billion coming out of their pockets 20 and 30 years from now when we attempt to try to pay back this money, and they are going to wonder: What did we do? What were the standards under which we operated?

What was the character trait in us, as a body, that allowed us to not demand efficiency from an agency of the Federal Government and yet go the easy way and demand it out of the livelihood and opportunity of our grandchildren? That is what they are going to ask. What is the character flaw in that? Is it laziness? The Members of this body obviously care about this country. What is it? What is it that would not make them do the hard work of challenging the inefficiency that we all know is out there in the Federal Government and we all know is within the Department of Agriculture? Not that the Department of Agriculture employees aren't great. They are. They work hard. They are dedicated. But there is still enough money in the sixth largest corporation in America, the Department of Agriculture, to find $4.15 billion and bail out the guys and gals who need to be bailed out right now, just like we have tried to bail out Louisiana.

What is the character flaw? Is it self-centeredness? Is it laziness? Is it not willing to fight to make things better? Or is it so easy to put the credit card into the machine and say: I am not going to worry about tomorrow. I am going to think about the short run right now. Long term doesn't have any consequence to it. I am not going to consider that.

Now, what does this amendment get rid of? What it keeps is $2.09 billion in crop assistance and $1.64 billion in livestock assistance. What does it get rid of? It gets rid of individual earmarks for individual Senators. It gets rid of $40 million for the tree assistance program which includes Christmas trees, shrubs, nursery bushes. It gets rid of $30 million in administration for hiring additional Farm Service Agency personnel and computer upgrades. You tell me we can't find $30 million in the sixth largest corporation in this country to finally fix the computers? Sure we can. It will be hard, but we can do it. But it will never happen unless Congress asks for it to happen--demands that it happen. Once you start asking one agency to do that, it will be easy to ask the next agency to do that. Pretty soon, before you know it, Americans are starting to get good value for their money.

If, in fact--it is not ``if, in fact,'' it is actually a fact. Eighteen to twenty percent of all the discretionary funds spent by the U.S. Government are either waste, fraud, abuse or duplicative. Think about that. That means 20 cents out of every taxpayer dollar you pay in the discretionary side of the budget, one-third of the budget--the rest of it is Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security--is not efficiently managed, spent or directed for the purposes it was intended. So why would we not force this? We are going to hear it is impossible. You can't ask them to find it. I will guarantee, if they were a public company and their stock was tanking and they weren't doing well, they would hire a new CEO and, before you knew it, that would happen. The $4 billion would be made up through efficiency, innovation, and programmatic changes that directed the programs to the most needy at the best time, at the best efficiency, with the least cost and the greatest skill.

I thank the Chair.

Mr. President, the amendment we are considering says the agriculture supplemental we put forward is going to be paid for. The Agriculture Department is the sixth largest corporation in the United States, when you look at it. What it says is we ought to be able to use some of the $8 billion they have sitting in the pot now and we ought to be able to find a way to make them 3 percent more efficient so we can actually pay $4.1 billion to help in the agricultural emergency we have in this country.

It does not add it. We do not charge it to our grandchildren. We say we are going to be responsible, and we are going to take it out of the money that is in there now that is easily findable. We will actually pay for helping our farmers who need our help today.

It is the exact same language the appropriations bill has for both cattle producers and grain producers. It just says: Find it within the agency, pay for it, and we will do it.

This is simple. It is not an emergency. Eighteen months from now we are going to have the Presidential nominating conventions. In Atlanta, during the Olympics, for a month the entire security was $10 million. If we triple that amount for a month, you have $30 million. This bill allows $100 million for conventions and for decisions that are already going to be made prior to that so that the political parties can have a good time. Yet we are going to ask our children to pay for it. You are going to vote to ask your grandchildren to pay for a party you aren't having now, when the President already has $15 million in his budget for Secret Service for both of these conventions, which they feel is adequate at this time.

The question is not whether we should do it. If we are going to do it, we should do it inside the confines of the budget. Two, it is not an emergency. We have 18 months. We have plenty of appropriations bills to pay for this.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to call up amendments and set them aside. That way, they can be considered as called up. Senator Graham has graciously allowed me some of his time to do that. The amendment Nos. are 648, 649, 656, 657, 715, 717, and 718.

Mr. President, I call up six amendments en bloc: 648, 649, 656, 657, 717, and 718, and I ask that they be set aside after they are reported.

Mr. President, I understand that I am to be able to speak as in morning business for up to 1 hour.

I thank the Chair.

Mr. President, if you go out in our country and you ask, besides the war, what is on people's minds, the No. 1 topic you will hear about is health care. And what are the questions that you hear? Why can't I choose my own doctor? Why can't I pick my own health insurance plan? Why do my premiums increase every year but my benefits don't increase? Why do I have trouble understanding which benefits my health plan offers? Why does my employer get a tax break from my health care but I don't? Who can make the best health care decisions for my family, us in Washington, the insurance bureaucrats, other people, my employer, or how about me? How about me getting to make a decision about my health care?

There is no question America's health care is broken. It is not that we are getting bad care, it is that we pay a tremendous amount for what we get in our care. The estimates are anywhere from $1 out of every $3 to $1 out of every $4 we spend on health care doesn't go to help anybody get well in this country and doesn't go to help anybody prevent having an illness. That is $2.2 trillion, and it will be over $2.3 trillion this year.

When you see what happens--and these are not my numbers, by the way; these are Price Waterhouse numbers, a breakdown on health care dollars--what you see are some pretty interesting statistics. You see that when we go to spend $1 on health care, 35 percent of it goes to hospitals, 21 percent of it goes to doctors, 15 percent goes to prescription drugs, and 5 percent goes to equipment.

All the rest of that, the medical liability insurance--nobody realizes that is 10 percent. Ten cents out of every dollar we spend goes to medical liability. We are insuring against a problem in health care--10 percent. It costs us 6 percent to process the claims. One-half of all the claims filed against all the insurance companies in this country are denied because the people haven't met their deductible, and yet we keep sending the claims, keep spending the money.

One out of every three people who works in a hospital, one out of every three people who works in a doctor's office doesn't do anything to help anybody get well. Why is that?

It is because of the system we have set up. If you add this 10 percent for liability insurance, 6 percent for processing, 5 percent for marketing, 23 percent for the insurance industry profit--and I doubt seriously it is that low--what you come up with is 24 percent, as a minimum, that doesn't have anything to do with helping anybody get well.

Now, why is that? Why is it we have this system? It is because we have somebody besides the patient choosing what they will get in terms of health care. In Medicaid, it is your State. Oftentimes in Medicaid it is your State paying a very low rate, so now you get to choose from those who will accept the lowest rates. In Medicare, they tell you exactly what the price is. We spend all our time around here trying to change Medicare, because when we push on the balloon one way, something else pops out.

So whether it is the Deficit Reduction Act or some of the other things we have had, what we find is we cannot control this tiger because we have a bureaucratic maze that nobody understands. When we try to use price controls, when we try to limit expenditures, we end up losing control.

So what happens? Who makes your health care decisions? Either CMS, the Center for Medicare Services, in conjunction with your State, either for Medicare or Medicaid, your employer, or an insurance company.

Whatever happened to you making decisions about your health care, about which doctor, about which insurance policy, about which hospital you want to go to? And why is it that if you happen to be Medicaid, you get to choose less than somebody who doesn't happen to be Medicaid? Why is it we are treating in an unequal fashion those who are the poorest among us?

Why shouldn't we have the right to pick what insurance benefits are best for us? Why shouldn't we have the right to choose who is going to be our caregiver, whether it is a doctor, a nurse practitioner, a physician's assistant, a chiropractor, or an optometrist? Why shouldn't we get to choose that, rather than an insurance company or an employer deciding who we can or cannot see?

They also decide the price we are going to pay because we are trying to control all these costs. They are also going to decide which hospital we go to. But how is it that we have a system now where everybody except the patient gets to decide what happens to them in terms of their health care?

We can't afford the health care system we have today. For one thing, 16 percent of our GDP, the highest of any country in the world by 50 percent, is spent on health care. Although we have good health care, we don't have better health care than those countries that are spending less. We are spending 16.2 percent, or $2.3 trillion, per year on health care, so we should be 50 percent better off. We should have a 50-percent better life expectancy, 50 percent less heart disease, and 50 percent less cancer. Of the money we spend on health care, fully three-quarters of that is spent on five diseases.

Think about that: 75 cents out of every dollar that actually gets into health care, which is only 60 to 70 percent of the money we actually pay into health care, 75 cents of that goes for either heart disease, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, or cancer. Five diseases, most of which are readily preventable--not partially preventable but readily preventable--through increased prevention activities.

This Government this year will spend $20 billion on prevention in 12 different agencies, through 27 different programs, none of which are coordinated to try to maximize the education of the American people to what they need to know about their health care so they can make decisions on prevention. Consequently, we are very ineffective with prevention.

If you look down the road at what is coming in terms of Medicare and Medicaid, what you see is an unfunded liability of over $60 trillion-- $60 trillion--we are adding. This isn't about health care now. That $60 trillion that is getting ready to hit our kids and grandkids in terms of Medicaid and Medicare that we have promised for the future, that we have no way to pay for now, one of the great ways of lessening that number is to change what we do on prevention. Prevention is the key.

Grandma was right: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. As a matter of fact, it is said in 2070 $1 out of every $2 that Medicare spends, at our current rates, will be spent on diabetes--$1 of $2. So when you look at this Medicare number, with the vast majority of the baby boomers who are going to retire and then their generation is going to retire, $1 of every $2 that will be spent by Medicare will be spent on one disease only, which means we only have $1 to spend on all the rest of health care for seniors, plus any attempts at prevention and at early diagnosis or new and modern treatments. We can't continue without a coherent plan on health care.

The other problem that is facing us as a nation is right now we can't compete globally in many areas because of health care costs. When you compare GM and Toyota, there is a four times greater differential for what goes into a car made in this country by one of the Big Three versus what goes into a car made outside of this country by their competitors. So there is no way that we can, in fact, be competitive globally until we handle health care. There is no way we can handle Medicare and Medicaid until we change the health care system.

Myself and Richard Burr and several other Members of the Senate will be introducing a bill tomorrow that addresses every problem our health care system faces today, whether it is tort liability, and making sure people get awarded what they need when a mistake is made during the practice of medicine, or whether it is immunizations. The fact is, we have very few States where we have achieved 90-percent immunization.

We are going to address every problem we face, the liability that comes at us in the future through Medicaid and Medicare, the problems we face on liability, the problems on access, the inequality that somebody, because they happen to work at a very low-paying job, gets stamped with something on their forehead that says, you are of less value than somebody who happens to work someplace that has great insurance and a higher paying job.

Our bill changes all of that, and instead of going to the Department of Motor Vehicles to wait in line, we are talking about a health care system where you, the consumer, are No. 1. The government isn't No. 1, the doctor isn't No. 1, the hospital isn't No. 1, the drug company isn't No. 1, but you, the patient, become No. 1. You get to choose what insurance you want, you get to choose what kind of insurance you want, and you get to choose how much you will pay for it. We create a new insurance market where everybody gets to play by an even set of rules.

How do we do that? We do that by giving everybody the same advantage in this country when it comes to health care, and that is a refundable tax credit, $2,000 for every individual, or $5,000 for every family. What that means is, if you are earning about $120,000 a year or less in this country, you will gain in terms of your taxes off of this bill. If you are making $120,000 or less, what is going to happen is you are going to have the option of staying with your employer, if you like what they have, and that tax credit will be available to your employer. But if you decide you want something different, maybe it offers something you don't get covered today or doesn't cover a whole lot of things you think you need, you can take that tax credit and buy that insurance and save the difference in the money for your future health care. The Universal Health Care Choice and Access Act provides $2,000 for every one of the 45 million uninsured tomorrow, every one of them as an individual.

Now, what does that buy? People say: That won't buy much. Well, if you go to Kentucky and you happen to be 35 years of age, you can buy a $2,000 yearly deductible policy for $897 and have $1,300 or $1,100 left over between that and the deductible. If you try to buy that same policy in the Chair's State, it is almost $6,000 for that identical policy. Why? Because government has decided in New Jersey differently than what government has decided in Kentucky. Therefore, the cost of getting this minimal coverage, because of the mandates put on by government--not what a patient wants but by what government says patients should have--makes that unavailable in New Jersey.

How do we fix that? We allow people to buy insurance anywhere they want, just like they buy their auto insurance today; like they buy their homeowner's insurance. They can buy it from any company anywhere in America, as long as they have a registration with a State. We create a primary and a secondary location for that. So if you want to buy something that has a better price, that fits your needs, you have the capability to do that and put the difference into a health savings account, where you can use it for future health care needs, that you can use to apply to any deductible, or if you get enough money in it, you can bring it down to where, if you want to, you can have a zero deductible--if you want--but most people will not want to do that. We allow you to select a health plan that truly meets your family's needs, not what some Government bureaucrat says or some Senator says you must have. It is what you want. We allow individuals to choose what they want in terms of their health care.

What will that do in terms of the market? That is going to create innovation in the health care market all across this country. It is going to cause competition like crazy for the dollars. Once we truly have competition, which is something we do not have in health care today, which we tremendously need, then we are going to see a big change.

The other thing this does is it gives access for affordable health care for a ton of people who do not have it today. They get to choose their health care provider. The patient gets to choose who takes care of them. Not the Government, not their employer, not the Senate, not their State insurance commissioner, but they are going to get to choose who is going to take care of them. It is the right to choose who is going to care for you.

How do we do that for the States? We do not mandate anything for anyone. We do not say anybody has to do anything. But we create a lot of incentives. We tell the States that, if you want to, you can take your Medicaid funds and your disproportionate share funds and anybody who is Medicaid eligible, under the 133 percent of poverty level, you can take their $2,000, plus the Medicaid money, plus the DSH money, and you can help them buy an insurance policy in your State. If you want to stay with Medicaid, you can stay with Medicaid. There is no mandate from the Federal Government other than to get people into coverage.

You ask any government tomorrow if they would take $2,000 per eligible person in their Medicaid program, would they take a deal with them having the freedom to design what is best for their State? Every Governor will tell you yes. Every Governor will tell you yes. Why? Because now we are given the resources there to allow a Medicaid patient to be just like everybody else--a Senator, their mayor or somebody who works at the best factory in town. They have an option to not be discriminated against because they show a Medicaid card. Now they have an insurance card. People ask: What about the people who do not want to have insurance? We allow the States the opportunity to have a default mechanism. If the State of Tennessee--I see the Senator from Tennessee here. If the State of Tennessee wants to decide we will option, if we have people in our State who are going to be so irresponsible that they will not even buy themselves coverage and they have an opportunity to take tax money to do that, then we are going to create a default mechanism whereby the State of Tennessee--if you are a 25-year-old motorcycle rider and you don't want to buy insurance, they can take your tax credit and buy a high-deductible policy for you so when you go to the ER, all the rest of us don't have to pay all your costs. What is happening in our health care system is we keep transferring the costs so we have a rationale for jumping up the price because they are doing something for somebody else at a low price.

What the real facts are--and we never hear it--the real facts are, when you look at the hospitals out there, all--the vast majority of them--and this is a very key, important point--the vast majority are nonprofit entities. That means they pay no income taxes, they pay no payroll taxes. On order, the vast majority, and on average, offer 10 percent of their total billed care as indigent care.

But that is not a real number. The reason it is not a real number is because they bill the highest prices they have for that indigent care. If you look at the cost of that care, it would be far below that. I know in the State of Oklahoma, the hospitals there last year billed over $5 billion in revenue, made over $5 billion in profit, and out of that they billed another $400-some-odd million in care that was uncollectible to people who did not have insurance or couldn't pay. That was not really their cost. That was their billed price.

Remember, we give this nonprofit status to all these entities, this $500 million worth of profit in Oklahoma, for example, and they pay no taxes on that. They pay no real estate taxes. In essence, they offer about $100 million worth of charitable care.

What this bill does is it takes away all the cost shifting.

What are the other things we do? We incentivize high-risk pools. What about the person who gets a chronic illness and they say all of a sudden their insurance company drops them. We have incentivized so the insurance company is not going to do that. In every State we give a bonus if they set up a high-risk pool and then the high-risk pool is funded out of everybody who is insured in that State. So if you have an insurer insuring someone with complications from diabetes and they say we will drop this person because it is too costly, they go to the high- risk pool. Guess what. That insurance company is going to pay for them anyway. There is no benefit for them to drop them. There is all the benefit then for that insurance company to get busy and involved in managing the chronic disease, where we know we can eliminate complications, we can improve the quality of life, and we can also increase life expectancy by managing the chronic disease.

Here is what we do for Medicaid patients. They get a $2,000 check from the Federal Government plus from their State. They can go into whatever plan they want. If their State says we want to stay with Medicaid and take that in enhanced Medicaid, the State gets to do that. There is not a mandate in anything. What it says is: If you think a State Medicaid Program is better for your State, without choice, then you can do it. But all the rest of the States are going to say I think I would rather have our Medicaid patients have a true insurance, a real card where they have the same access, the same equality of access as anybody else.

All of a sudden you have everybody in the marketplace compete. They can stay in a State-run system. They get to save what they don't spend on their health care for future health care needs.

One of our problems is savings in this country. It is important. How do we fix our health care system? We know that, if we look at the liability costs that showed 10 percent of the health insurance dollar going for liability insurance, that is an underestimate. The American Hospital Association found, recently reestablished by another organization, I can't remember who, that repeated the study--what we know is each year, today, besides that 10 percent, providers order another 8 percent of the cost of health care for tests that patients do not need.

Why do they do that? They do that because they perceive they need to have everything on the books to defend themselves that they can have, so they fire a shotgun at it. We will get this test, this test, this test--knowing they don't need it but they operate under the ``what if'' scenario, this adversary system that we have.

Finally, we address liability. We give another percentage bonus to the States that will set up what is called a ``health court'' system. It is a real simple system. If you have a complaint against a provider, a hospital or a doctor, you can go to the health court. You don't have to go to the health court. But you can go to the health court and you can be seen in front of three lawyers, three doctors, and a judge who have their own expert witnesses. This judge is schooled in medical malpractice. They can make a decision for you right then.

If you accept the decision, then you give up your right to go to court. If you don't accept the decision, you can't ever come back to that court on that particular issue, but everything you do in court is admissible. We do not take away anybody's right to go to court. But what we do accomplish is making sure people get made whole quicker and cheaper--40 percent now doesn't go to the trial lawyer for you to get made whole.

There is no question we make mistakes in medicine every year. But why should we drag it out for 3 to 5 years, No. 1. Why should we pay 40 percent of whatever the ultimate award is to somebody who helped us accomplish that, where we can set up a system that will arbitrate that in front of a nonbiased group of peers, lawyers and doctors who say: Here is the right thing, here is the medical case, the legal case, let's make a decision and send it on.

What it does is it saves tons of money directly, but what will it do? As soon as you create confidence on the part of providers that they do not have to order this other 8 percent of tests, you are going to see that dropping about half. So we can gain 4 percent in this cost of health care by setting up health courts, by changing the dynamic under which we make sure people are made whole when something happens to them in the medical malpractice area.

Not every State has to do this. But if your State decides to do this, you get a 1-percent bonus on your Medicaid money--out of a large pool.

We have lots of ways in which we do not say we want the States to do this and now we are going to tell you how to do it. We are saying here are some ways we think you can also do it. Go figure out the best way for you, and by the way, if you do some of the things that we think will save some money, here is some extra money for you.

Ultimately, if we do not fix health care--everybody in this Chamber knows we are going to go the way of Western Europe and that is the following: We are going to decide that we are going to have a single- payer system run by the Government. As P.J. O'Rourke says: ``If you think medicine is expensive now, wait until it is free.''

We are going to control costs. We are going to do it the same way we are trying to control costs with CMS. What happens? What happens is we are going to start rationing care.

Let's take some real statistics. In England, diagnosis? Cancer. In England, if you get a diagnosis of cancer right now, the average starting time for your chemotherapy is 10 months after your diagnosis. Anybody here who wants that kind of medicine will vote against this bill. That is exactly what we get. We get rationing. What it means is people with great potential will not get the treatment in time to capture that great potential. What it means is great suffering. What it means is loss of innovation. What it means is a lack of available, fair access. It is everything in England in their health care system takes away all freedom.

It is also interesting to know this past year in Canada there was a lawsuit filed, which was won. What this individual said is the Canadian law says I can't go to anybody except a Canadian doctor who is owned and run by the Government. They challenged that. The Canadian supreme court ruled on the side of the patient: You ought to have the right and freedom to go wherever you want, to whomever you want if you are willing to pay the bill.

Paying the bill is the insurance part of this. If you want to be able to have that access, then you are going to want to be able to buy a policy that allows you to have it. If you don't want that access, you can buy a policy that says here is a straight HMO, here are the only four doctors you can go to, and here is the hospital you are going to get to go to.

We are talking about freedom in health care. How do we get to the bottom line, away from 16 percent of our GDP, down to 10 percent of our GDP? More importantly, how do we create a system that gives us better quality, at lower cost, with better value. That is what we are talking about.

I yield to the Senator from North Carolina.

People may be saying: Well, how do you know this will work? There is a great little company named MedEncentive. They have been running pilot programs all across the country. Let me explain what they do. They get doctors to agree to follow a certain set of protocols called best practices, and they sign up communities, municipalities, and their employees, and then they do a couple of things. They take them under coverage, and they reward the employee--i.e, the patient--if they will use those doctors.

What is unique about this system? One is, after the patient has finished their office visit with the doctor, they have a patient-doctor interactive form they fill out that says: The doctor wants me to take this medicine. I understand this. Here is the reason he wants me to take this. So they have to fill out the form to say they really understood.

The other thing is, on the professional side, the practitioner side, they agree to follow the best-practice model in how they treat these patients. That was actually developed by Vanderbilt, where they followed a best-practice guideline which helps them decide what to order, what not to order, what to do, what not to do in terms of what is best for that patient. They can get off if they choose to, if they think in their medical judgment that they need to.

What has been the result? The three published results that I know of, in all three communities, in the first year of operating this where there was this competitive model, best-practice quality outline, patient followup, because the insurance company is involved in making sure the patient does that--what happened to their health care costs? One down 18 percent, one declined 22 percent, and one declined 12 percent. Now, that is just in three. Each one of them had 300 or 400 patients and took all comers, chronic disease or not.

How did their costs go down? The costs went down for a lot of reasons. One is they were practicing not defensive medicine, they were practicing real medicine. They were not throwing tests at a patient because they were worried but because they had the background of the excellence of Vanderbilt University as a practice guideline at their defense.

So what we know is that in the various test models where true marketing, true competition, true transparency as far as price, true concern for the patients' well-being, not just at the office visit but thereafter, wellness and prevention were modified, what happens is costs go down.

That is just in three cities in Oklahoma. It has been done all across this country. But what we do know is that if we attack it in a nonbureaucratic way, but we allow competitive forces--which would you rather have, an insurance company that is invested to try to make your health better or one that just wants to make a dollar on you and turn on you?

So going back, let me just kind of summarize. The system we have today limits our ability to do what we as Americans do well; that is, discern value for what we have purchased--discern whether we get value for it, discern how to do it, and we discern that on an individual basis.

Our health care is not designed on an individual basis. In many places, we get one-size-fits-all; what the Government says you will have or what the State says you must have, you must buy this. I believe a lot of our problems have come because we have tried to micromanage it from Washington and from the statehouse. What we are talking about is giving freedom of choice, not just to patients and providers but to insurance industries.

Imagine the tremendous possibilities that will come into a market that says: This is a new day. I get to market all sorts of different things that might match up with different people. All of a sudden, now I will have to compete not only with people in my State but all across the country for the best plan that gives me the best value that meets my needs. Why would we not want that? We have that in every other

thing. Why would we not want to capture the best aspect of the American consumer, which is discernment?

Not long ago I was sitting with some friends and put forth the fact that I believe Americans are smart enough to know what they want in health care. The idea got pooh-poohed. I thought, how insulting. We can figure out what computer to buy and how much memory we want and how big a hard drive we want and whether we want a photo section on it or a print lab. We can figure out all of those things--as a matter of fact, our 10-year-old kids can figure that out--but we can't figure out how to buy health care. We are going to say to the American people: You are not sophisticated enough, you are not smart enough to know what is good for you or to know what you need. So, therefore, the Government is going to tell you what you need. That is what we have today, whether it is the Government or your employer or somewhere else.

This bill changes all that. This is a bill that will create transparency so you as a consumer can know what something is going to cost. It is going to create a situation where you can perceive whether you have value. It is going to create an incentive to save for health care for the future and an incentive for wellness, not just by what the insurance company will come to sell you but by the $20 billion that we are now spending, of which less than $2 or $3 billion makes any difference at all in somebody's health care. We are going to focus that on true prevention. We are going to direct that the HHS relook at every one of these programs and develop a model to where we educate the American people about the risk.

Let me give a personal story. I am a colon cancer survivor. What we do know is with good prevention and good screening, one out of every two people who are going to get colon cancer we can keep from getting it. Why wouldn't we do that? Why wouldn't we prevent half the colon cancer in this country? We don't have a good reason. One of the reasons is because we have an ineffective prevention program.

I am a small government person; I admit that. But there is a legitimate role for the Federal Government when it comes to teaching America about our health needs, prevention, and wellness. We have plenty of money to do it if we take the same money we have now and redirect it in a way that educates the American people. Innovation works. We know that. Competition works.

Take, for example, a year ago a 46-inch plasma TV cost $11,526. Today you can buy the same thing for $2,300. Next year you will be able to buy it for $1,400. The next year you will be able to buy it for $700. Why? Competition. Competition breeds quality and value, only if you have a market under which you can operate. We don't have that today in health care. Innovation also works in health care.

Look at Lasik. Here is a procedure that is not paid for by the Government. It is not paid for by any of the insurance industry. But if you are nearsighted and you want to be able to look far away, you can get that done. When it first started, it was $4,000 an eye. Now there are places you can get it done--the same piece of equipment, the same computer--for $500 an eye. Why won't that work? It will work in health care. It will work. Innovation will come as a result of that.

What happens when we innovate. What we get is better quality at a lower price and better value. I am hopeful that as the American people look at this, they will be reminded of a couple things. This is universal coverage. Everybody in America gets treated the same by the Federal Government when it comes to health care. Everybody in America is on equal footing as far as the Income Tax Code is concerned when you go to buy your health care. No longer do we advantage the very rich with $2,700 a year in tax benefit and the very poor with $100. We totally neutralize that and say: Everybody ought to be treated the same under the Tax Code for health care. It is universal coverage.

No. 2, it takes away discrimination. Because you are poor, because you don't have the ability to have a job that has insurance coverage today, and if, in fact, you are at 133 percent of poverty, why should you be discriminated against because you are on the Medicaid Program? This is no offense to any practicing professional out there because there are great professionals who are taking care of Medicaid patients. But if you look at the marketeering, the ones with the best doctors, as a rule, because Medicaid pays so low, do they have time to take care of Medicaid patients? No. What happens is, somehow they don't have time. So what we have done is discriminated down with Medicaid patients.

Why shouldn't a Medicaid patient get the best doctor every time, just like a Senator? Why shouldn't they have access to capability? Why should they be discriminated against by having a Medicaid stamp on their forehead? We are talking about universal access, equality of care, and personal freedom and choice. You get to decide what is best for you and your health care and your family.

By the way, when you get this money and you haven't spent it all, you get to save it for next year and the year after and the year after. You can buy what is best for you with that money.

This money also goes to retirees. If you retire at 60 and are not eligible for Medicare, you still get your tax credit. We don't discriminate against anybody. Everybody gets the tax credit.

The final thing I would say, it doesn't cost the American taxpayer one additional dollar in income tax. There will be no increased cost with this plan. Actually, we have tried to make it revenue neutral. My worry is that it will save us money. We have tried to make it where it does not. We have tried to make it the most generous thing we can to get the most coverage for everybody out there. Again, prevention first, free choice, freedom, and liberty. You get to decide who cares for you, what insurance, what hospital, and every American gets that. It is the Government not telling you what you must do but saying here is what you can do if you want.

I yield to the Senator from North Carolina if he has any additional comments.

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

Mr. President, the Senate is going to take up, tomorrow, in rather full detail, an emergency supplemental spending bill. I think it is real important, first, for the American people to know what an emergency supplemental bill is supposed to be. It is supposed to be about funding unforeseen problems we could not have anticipated in the regular appropriations process. For a very small amount of this bill, that may be true.

This bill is $121 billion of your grandchildren's and great- grandchildren's money. This bill does not have to stay within the budgetary limitations Congress sets on itself. This bill goes outside every rule we have in terms of controlling the budget, living within our means, and it says: Here is a credit card.

Now, by the way, on the way to funding the war in Iraq, the wisdom of the Senate has added--and it is $21 billion in the House--about $18.9 billion in a wish list. It is a Christmas tree. If each of us in our own personal lives ran our businesses or our households the way Congress is running the emergency supplemental process, we would do it for about 1 year. Then we would be going to bankruptcy court, and we would be losing the vast majority of our possessions because we would not have been deemed to be responsible with the assets we had.

There lies the problem. It is the culture of Congress that thinks we can put a hood over the American people's eyes so they will not know what we are about to do in the next 4 or 5 days in this Chamber. You are going to hear all the reasons in the world why somebody needs something, except it is never going to be held in contrast to the loss of the standard of living of our grandchildren. Yes, there are agricultural needs out there we should have funded a year ago.

The chairman of the Budget Committee said when he would get in power, when the Democrats would get in power, they were going to pay for it-- except here we have an emergency agriculture supplemental bill, a good portion of which is needed but it is not paid for. There is no offset anywhere else in the hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of waste in the discretionary side of the budget alone, to reduce something else so we can take care of those who need us now.

There is another aspect to this funding bill; that is, the politics that plays into it over the debate on the Iraq war. What we are seeing play out is a double-edged sword of how do we hurt the troops in the field by adding things to a supplemental bill to take care of them, when there has already been a threatened veto over the bill because it adds $18.9 billion more than what the President asked for to fund the war.

So as you listen, in the next 4 or 5 days, to the Senate debate this bill, there are a couple things you ought to pay attention to, and you ought to ask yourself the question: Where is the money coming from to pay for this bill? Where is the sacrifice from the generations today to do what the Members of this body want to do?

There is no sacrifice. We are not calling on anybody to sacrifice. What we are saying is: Those unborn, those young, those who are about to be born, and the children of those who are young, unborn or about to be born are the ones who are going to pay for it.

It portends a great moral question of our society today: How is it we can totally turn upside down the heritage of this country, the heritage of a country that has been built on the following premise: ``I am going to work hard. I am going to sacrifice. And I am going to serve so that my children and grandchildren get ahead''? Have we become such a selfish country that we do not care about the next two generations?

I think the Senate has spoken, at least the appropriators have spoken. They have said ``yes,'' it is OK to do things such as pay for the conventions, in August, of the Democratic and Republican Parties for the additional funds that will be needed for police enforcement with an emergency bill. Our grandchildren are not going to benefit from that. The political process today is. But we put it in this bill because it means if we put it in this bill, it will not be charged against the regular budget process. It is another way to spend more money. So let's move more things into the emergency category, so we do not have to be responsible when the rest of the appropriations bills come through the Senate.

Think about this: You have a grandchild sitting on your knee and you say: Yes, back in 2007, they had a party in Minneapolis and in Denver, and they charged it to you. You may get to go to college, you may not, but I just want you to know we had a good time at our conventions. How about $100 million for businesses that have under $15 million in revenue a year that have suffered some loss from a drought over the last 2 or 3 years. We already have several organizations within the Federal Government: Farm Service Agency, loan capabilities from the Department of Agriculture, the Small Business Administration. All are qualified to loan money to businesses that work in the agricultural area but, no, we set aside. We expanded the farm program with this bill to give $100 million to small businesses that have been hurt. If you are not connected to agriculture and you have been hurt, where is the bill to help you? Where does the precedent stop in terms of your small business?

What about the fact that gas prices rose and some auto dealers went out of business? Where is the $100 million for them? What about the fact that energy prices have gone up and small business profits all across the country have been severely damaged because if they are energy dependent, their costs have risen significantly? Where is the $100 million? Where does it stop? Where does it stop that we steal-- when do we stop stealing from our grandchildren?

There is also in this emergency provision $3.5 million for tours of the Capitol. An emergency, that we have to have the money now, otherwise we won't have tours in the Capitol? That isn't right, but that is what is in the bill: $3.5 million. Why? So we can have $3.5 million more to play with when we get inside the budget now that we are outside the budget.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the fact the administration isn't innocent in this either, because the war in Iraq is hardly an emergency. As a matter of fact, it is in its fourth year. The administration should know what they need. Rather than send a supplemental up here, it should be in the Defense appropriations bill. It should have been in the bill we passed this last year. But instead, even the administration is complicit.

Who is going to stand and speak for the future against the processes the Congress uses today to fund and grow the Government, not worrying about how we pay for it in the future? Will you? Will you challenge this process? Will you say enough is enough? Will you do your part as a citizen of this country to make a difference, to hold people accountable here, rather than let the continued culture--and I call it a culture which actually the majority party ran on. It is a culture of corruption. When you do for you and steal from those who are weak and have no access or ability to pay it, that is corruption. It is morally corrupt. It is a process by which we undermine the very foundation upon which our country has become strong. If we continue it, what we will see is a weakened nation.

We now have $70 trillion of unfunded liabilities for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Think about that for a minute. Go figure out how many zeroes are associated with $1 trillion. If you had everyone who was worth more than $1 billion in the world sell all of their assets tomorrow and give every bit of that to the U.S. Government, it wouldn't even pay the interest for 1 year. How is it we can be going down this road? How is it we can be turning our backs on the principles that made us great as a nation--the idea of personal responsibility even applied to Senators, and accountability, and transparency. We are going to hear a lot of stories about what is and isn't happening with this bill over the next 3 or 4 days, but the question I hope the American people will ask themselves is where is the money coming from? Where is the money coming from? If it is not in a pot somewhere and if it is not saved, somebody is going to have to pay for it.

This money is coming from the big Visa card of the Federal Government. We are going to ``cha-ching'' and we are going to say: Grandchildren, you have to pay for this war in Iraq, plus another $19 billion, because we don't have the courage to hold this Government accountable. We don't even have the courage to hold ourselves accountable. We don't have the courage to eliminate the duplication, the fraud, and the waste that accounts for over $200 billion every year in this $3 trillion budget. There is no courage here to face that. We can do oversight hearings, and we have done so. Senator Carper and myself did 46, more than any other committee of Congress, over the last 2 years. What we found was almost $200 billion of either duplicative programs, wasteful programs, or outright fraud. Yet where is the Congress offsetting those with this bill? No. It is too hard work. You might offend somebody. The next election is more important than the next generation. Being here is more important than doing what is the best thing for our Nation.

So I hope as we approach this bill, the American public will ask that question about where the sacrifice comes from to do this. Where does the sacrifice come from? Unfortunately, it is going to come from the next 2 generations. It is hard to identify what that means, but with $9 trillion of actual outstanding debt we have now and the $70 trillion of unfunded liability, it doesn't take a great imagination to understand how that might impact our children and grandchildren, with high interest rates, lack of ability to afford a college education, inability to own a home, buy a new car. All of those things are coming as we continue to steal the future from our children and our grandchildren. The big government credit card. It is only available because there is a lack of backbone and spine in the Congress to do what is necessary to give the American people true value from their Government. It is hard. A lot of people get upset. But I would much rather stand here and try to change it now than try to explain to my grandchildren why we didn't change it, why we didn't do that.

I have some hope the American people are starting to wake up to the budgetary gimmicks and processes the Congress uses. When they really awaken, what they are going to do is change who runs this place. It is going to be real citizen legislators. It is going to be people who care about the future more than they care about today. It is going to be people who care about a heritage that continues to be and create and hold forth the greatest experiment in freedom that has ever been. Without that change, as Will Durant said:

Great societies are never conquered from without until they

rot from within.

This is part of the rotting process we are going to see over the next 5 days in the Senate. If people summon courage, summon long-term viewpoint, summon sacrifice of giving up of themselves, whether it be position or power so we can create something better, the country will be all the better for that. If we don't, there won't be a headline that says: ``Grandchildren hurt by supplemental bill,'' but it doesn't mean they won't be. The fact is they will.

It is interesting the accounting that Washington uses. Last year the official number on the deficit was $175 billion, but the real number, the amount the debt went up, was $360 billion. If you are at home and you have a checkbook and you spend $175 more than you had in the checkbook, but at the end of the year you charged another $200 on top of it, you really spent it all, and you went into debt for that whole amount. But we don't do what national accounting standards say. We play a game. We take the Social Security money and we lessen the effect of what we are doing through Social Security and 30 some other trust funds such as the inland waterway trust fund and several others, and the retirement of the employees of the Federal Government that is not funded, and we add all that back and we make it look better than it is.

The idea behind a half lie is a whole truth, but it is not. A half truth is a whole lie.

So my hope is when we have this debate on this bill, this $121 billion bill, America will say: Wait a minute. Why aren't you paying for it? Why aren't you trimming some of the fat? Why aren't you trimming some of the problems? Why aren't you doing that? Because it is hard. That is not a good enough reason to undermine the future of this country.

Mr. President, I appreciate the opportunity to come and speak this evening and the staff staying here.

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

I object.

Mr. President, I rise today as the lead Republican sponsor of the Genocide Accountability Act of 2007. I thank my colleague, Senator Durbin, for introducing this important piece of legislation.

Senator Durbin serves as the chairman and I serve as the ranking member of the new Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law in the Senate Judiciary Committee. We held our first hearing, entitled ``Genocide and the Rule of Law,'' on February 5, 2007. There could not be a more appropriate way to begin examining the law as it relates to human rights than to determine what we can and must do to prevent and stop genocide. The United States is a signatory of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This convention provides that the contracting parties must ``undertake to prevent and to punish'' the crime of genocide. We have also passed a law implementing the Genocide Convention.

However, our hearing demonstrated that there are changes that need to be made in law and foreign policy to respond to the ongoing genocide in Sudan and to any genocide that may occur elsewhere in the future. Fortunately, two of these changes can be accomplished right now.

The first change can be accomplished through a bill Senators Durbin and Cornyn introduced last week, of which I am a cosponsor. That bill, the Sudan Divestment Authorization Act of 2007, will allow State and local governments to prohibit the investment of State assets in the Government of Sudan or companies with certain business relationships with Sudan, while the Government of Sudan is subject to sanctions under U.S. law. The second change can be accomplished through the bill we are introducing today, the Genocide Accountability Act of 2007. This act will ensure that our justice system has the authority to prosecute someone who has committed genocide if that person is found or brought into the United States.

Under current law, the United States can deny admission to and exclude aliens from the United States on human rights grounds. The Attorney General can also consider avenues for the prosecution of aliens who have committed certain crimes, including genocide. However, the Attorney General can only prosecute a perpetrator of genocide if he committed his crimes within the United States or is a U.S. national.

What does this mean? It means that if a person who plans or participates in the genocide occurring right now in Darfur travels to the United States on vacation, business, or even to live here for an extended period of time--as a refugee or student, for instance--a court in the United States cannot touch him. The best our justice system can do is deport him once his crime is discovered.

Without question, it may be more appropriate in some cases to extradite someone who commits genocide to his home country or turn him over to an international tribunal. However, there are also times when a person's home country may not be willing to prosecute him and there is no viable alternative for prosecution. In these cases, extraditing a criminal would be no different than setting him free. This bill will not force our justice system to prosecute those who commit genocide just because they are found on our soil--it simply gives us the option. Nonetheless, in America we are blessed with great resources and the most effective and just legal system in the world. With these blessings comes great responsibility. It is contrary to our system of justice to allow perpetrators of genocide to go free without fear of prosecution.

It simply makes no sense to withhold from our justice system the authority to prosecute someone who is found in the United States and who committed a crime as atrocious as genocide just because he is not American and did not commit the crime here. We have passed tough laws that ensure that we can prosecute anyone found in the United States who has committed terrorist acts or supports terrorism. We do not want to become a safe haven for terrorists, so I ask: Do we want to be a safe haven for those who have committed genocide? The answer should be clear.

Fundamentally, we must decide if genocide is a bad enough crime, no matter where it happens, that it warrants the same treatment as terrorism-related crimes. I deeply believe that it is, and that is why I am proud to cosponsor this bill today.

Mr. President, I rise today as the lead Republican sponsor of the Genocide Accountability Act of 2007. I thank my colleague, Senator Durbin, for introducing this important piece of legislation.

Senator Durbin serves as the chairman and I serve as the ranking member of the new Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law in the Senate Judiciary Committee. We held our first hearing, entitled ``Genocide and the Rule of Law,'' on February 5, 2007. There could not be a more appropriate way to begin examining the law as it relates to human rights than to determine what we can and must do to prevent and stop genocide. The United States is a signatory of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This convention provides that the contracting parties must ``undertake to prevent and to punish'' the crime of genocide. We have also passed a law implementing the Genocide Convention.

However, our hearing demonstrated that there are changes that need to be made in law and foreign policy to respond to the ongoing genocide in Sudan and to any genocide that may occur elsewhere in the future. Fortunately, two of these changes can be accomplished right now.

The first change can be accomplished through a bill Senators Durbin and Cornyn introduced last week, of which I am a cosponsor. That bill, the Sudan Divestment Authorization Act of 2007, will allow State and local governments to prohibit the investment of State assets in the Government of Sudan or companies with certain business relationships with Sudan, while the Government of Sudan is subject to sanctions under U.S. law. The second change can be accomplished through the bill we are introducing today, the Genocide Accountability Act of 2007. This act will ensure that our justice system has the authority to prosecute someone who has committed genocide if that person is found or brought into the United States.

Under current law, the United States can deny admission to and exclude aliens from the United States on human rights grounds. The Attorney General can also consider avenues for the prosecution of aliens who have committed certain crimes, including genocide. However, the Attorney General can only prosecute a perpetrator of genocide if he committed his crimes within the United States or is a U.S. national.

What does this mean? It means that if a person who plans or participates in the genocide occurring right now in Darfur travels to the United States on vacation, business, or even to live here for an extended period of time--as a refugee or student, for instance--a court in the United States cannot touch him. The best our justice system can do is deport him once his crime is discovered.

Without question, it may be more appropriate in some cases to extradite someone who commits genocide to his home country or turn him over to an international tribunal. However, there are also times when a person's home country may not be willing to prosecute him and there is no viable alternative for prosecution. In these cases, extraditing a criminal would be no different than setting him free. This bill will not force our justice system to prosecute those who commit genocide just because they are found on our soil--it simply gives us the option. Nonetheless, in America we are blessed with great resources and the most effective and just legal system in the world. With these blessings comes great responsibility. It is contrary to our system of justice to allow perpetrators of genocide to go free without fear of prosecution.

It simply makes no sense to withhold from our justice system the authority to prosecute someone who is found in the United States and who committed a crime as atrocious as genocide just because he is not American and did not commit the crime here. We have passed tough laws that ensure that we can prosecute anyone found in the United States who has committed terrorist acts or supports terrorism. We do not want to become a safe haven for terrorists, so I ask: Do we want to be a safe haven for those who have committed genocide? The answer should be clear.

Fundamentally, we must decide if genocide is a bad enough crime, no matter where it happens, that it warrants the same treatment as terrorism-related crimes. I deeply believe that it is, and that is why I am proud to cosponsor this bill today.

Mr. President, I ask the Presiding Officer to notify me when I have 5 minutes remaining of my time.

Mr. President, it is a curious thing that when we have hearings in the Senate, we find out problems and then offer real solutions that have teeth--as Senator Carper just said, to put them under the gun. Nobody wants to put them under the gun.

This amendment on improper payments gives the Department of Homeland Security 18 months to comply before any State will see any harm from this. The fact is, the States are not without some responsibility because some of the improper payments go to some grants that go in the State.

The American people need to ask: Is the Congress really serious about controlling spending? They are not. This amendment is not going to pass. All we are saying is: Here is a law they were supposed to be in compliance with in 2004. It says: If you are not going to be in compliance with it--they have not, they have not, they have not--we are saying, to be accountable, you have to be transparent, you have to have results. The results are complying with the Improper Payments Act.

We also think there ought to be competition for some of the grants. There is not in this bill. There ought to be a priority set. There ought to be responsiveness. There ought to be spending discipline.

As this amendment goes down--and it will--the Senators are going to reject the very idea of having accountability, the very thing they talk about with earmarks. The reason they cannot give up earmarks is because they cannot let the administration and the agencies manage the money.

But here is a tool to force Homeland Security to manage its money, to hold them accountable and say in 18 months from now, if you have not done the work every other agency of this Government is supposed to have done, then we are going to hold you accountable by cutting off the money. That is tough love. It is putting them under the gun. That is exactly what we need to do.

Do you know what will happen if my amendment is accepted and it comes through? Homeland Security will report its improper payments. But if we do not, I want you to think about what happens when you reject this amendment. What is the consequence for every other agency of the Federal Government to now not comply with the Improper Payments Act? There is no cost in not complying with the Improper Payments Act.

According to the GAO, the following portions of Homeland Security do not meet anywhere close the Improper Payments Act. That is the Customs and Border Protection, that is the Office of Grants and Training. They have not done a thing to be in compliance with this money.

Now, we can look the other way and we can say we are not going to enforce the law, but the next thing I am going to do, as a Senator--if we are not going to enforce the improper payments law, then let's get rid of it. The American people deserve to have the law enforced. It is a good law. It helps us hold the agencies accountable, the very thing that the $26 to $27 billion worth of earmarks says we cannot do.

Now we have an opportunity to do it, and we are going to vote against it. Why? Because we may put something at risk. Well, quality and results depend on us putting this at risk, to force this agency, FEMA, to come into compliance with a law that is on the books with which they have refused to comply.

Senator Carper mentioned the $40 billion of improper payments. That only represents 40 percent of the Federal Government. There is at least $100 billion of our money--the taxpayers' money--which is being paid out which should not be paid out, and probably $20 billion of it is in the Pentagon. We know the Department of Health and Human Services has not complied with the Improper Payments Act on Medicaid, and that is estimated somewhere between $20 billion and $30 billion. So we know of at least $100 billion.

I want you to think for a minute when you vote against this amendment what you tell every other agency in the Federal Government: There is no consequence whatsoever to not meeting the Improper Payments Act of 2002. There will be no consequence even though we are going to say you have not done it. Here is a way to do it, to force Homeland Security to be accountable and to recognize they have an obligation under the law to report and look at the risk factors.

Now, what does the Improper Payments Act ask agencies to do? Everything we would want done with our own money:

Perform a risk assessment. Is there a risk for improper payments? Homeland Security hasn't even done that.

Develop a statistically valid estimate of improper payments. In other words, go look at it and do a study to see is there potential that money is going out the door that should not go out the door.

Develop a corrective action plan.

Report the results of these activities to us, the Congress, the people's representatives.

By voting against this amendment, you are telling Homeland Security they don't have to comply, that there is no teeth; it will never be done. Why would the Governors Association oppose this? Because they are the monied interest groups that are going to get the money. In fact, some of the problems with the money is the responsibility of the Governors. If I were a Governor, I would not want you checking on my money. It is natural for them to oppose it. But it is normal for us to protect the taxpayers by saying that every agency ought to apply and respond to the law under improper payments. It is simple. We should ask that Homeland Security follow the law.

When you vote against this amendment, what you are telling Homeland Security, the Defense Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, and all of the other departments is that they don't have to comply because now we are going to be toothless and say there are no consequences whatsoever.

Some will say this puts these grants at risk. There are no grants at risk. There is $4.8 billion sitting in the queue right now that won't be spent for 18 months. This bill authorizes another $3.2 billion to follow after that.

If they cannot comply in 18 months, we need to stop and take a timeout and ask: Why can't you tell us where you are spending money that you should not be spending? Why can't you comply with the very simple things this act asks? Why can't they do a risk assessment in 18 months, develop a statistically valid estimate of where the problems are? They cannot do that in 18 months, develop a corrective action plan? They cannot do that in 18 months? They cannot report to us in 18 months?

To oppose this amendment says we don't care about improper payments. It is going to be like a lot of other laws on the books: we don't have standing; I, as a Senator, don't have any standing to sue the Federal Government to make it comply. The reason we won't have standing is because we don't have the courage to do what is right for the American taxpayers.

The last election had a lot to do with spending. This is going to be a vote to say whether we really meant what we said when we said we were going to start taking better care of the American taxpayers' dollars; that we were going to make the Government more accountable, more transparent and efficient. We are going to see a vote against this amendment, and the American people are going to get shortchanged once again because we don't have the courage to go up against the monied interests that get the grants and say we ought to at least have transparency.

There is another tool coming back called the Transparency and Accountability Act of 2006, and the American taxpayers are going to know whether improper payments are made. We are not going to do our job.

I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. President, how much time remains?

For the opposition?

Mr. President, let me address Senator Lieberman for a minute. The very thing he says he doesn't want to do now, we did exactly on the PATRIOT Act. Why would I want to sunset that? The American people would like to see every piece of legislation that we do that has to do with authorization and spending sunsetted. There are good reasons for that. We don't know what the terrorism situation will be in 5 years. We don't know all of the aspects of what we are dealing with. What we know is that 4 years from now, if this is sunsetted, we will be working on a new bill that is based on the realities of the world at that time.

Instead, what the opposition to this sunset amendment says is what we are doing now we know, without a doubt, is exactly what we need to do in 5 years from now in every area. I would put it to you that none of us knows exactly what we need to do 5 years from now. A sunset won't cause this to lapse. It will cause the Congress to act in year 4 to reauthorize the bill when it expires.

I have 5 minutes left. Let me talk about this. We should get reports on what we have done. We should report and react in a very commonsense way to what this bill has done over the next 4 or 5 years. We should review that. We should then reform what we are doing now so that it has better application and wiser use of resources, and then we should reauthorize.

To oppose sunsetting this speaks of an arrogance that is unbelievable of this body. We cannot know what we need to do 5 years from now in terms of homeland security. We don't know. It is an ever-changing situation. To imply that this will lapse--everybody here knows that is not the fact. We are not about to let it lapse. We are going to do what is necessary for our country.

This amendment tells us that we ought to relook at it because we don't have that kind of wisdom. If we think we do, we should not be here because that means we are going to be making a lot of mistakes. So I will go back to that. Let me go back.

Why would Homeland Security oppose the Improper Payments Act, as read by Senator Collins? Because they have not complied. They have no intention of ever complying. The one thing that the 9/11 Commission said that this Congress has not done is to have one committee responsible for oversight of Homeland Security. Senator Carper and I spent a lot of time last year, as did Senator Lieberman and Senator Collins in full committee, and we in our subcommittee, on Oversight of Homeland Security. We found a billion dollars wasted in Katrina. We found tons of improper payments in Homeland Security. We found that, in fact, there is no accountability. There is no accountability in the Department of Homeland Security.

The American public deserves to have the two amendments I have offered today. They deserve to force them to do what the law says on improper payments, and they deserve for us to make a reevaluation 4 years from now on what ought to be different. We ought to reassess what we are doing and reevaluate how we do it, and we ought to say we need to apply more resources to that problem. The American people deserve to know they are getting value for their money. Right now, they are not getting that in homeland security and in multiple areas because we cannot even find out.

So here we are crying that we cannot have earmarks because the agencies are going to run what they want to run. We have an opportunity to not let them run, and we are going to run against it. It is counterintuitive to me that we would be on both sides of this issue.

The fact is, the Federal Government is unaccountable in many ways, and the American people know that. On these two amendments, the American people are going to ask: How did they vote? And they are going to say, once again: What are they thinking? They are protecting the interests they have there now and putting at risk the interests of the next generation--because we don't do something simple like sunset a bill or make an agency comply with improper payments.

What would happen if there was a 1-month delay in grants? Nothing. But what would happen if we got the improper payment data from Homeland Security? Plenty. Then we could act on it and hold them accountable in the appropriations bills. Then we can do our jobs and do something about it.

I withhold the remainder of my time.

I inquire of the Chair how much time is remaining.

Mr. President, I hope the American people will look at these commonsense amendments and look at how their Senators vote. The one way to get things done is to put somebody in a bind. The fact is, this is the law. It is already the law, and we are saying we are going to put some teeth behind the law and make you do it.

I raise one final point. If my colleagues vote against this, what they are saying to every other agency is: There is no consequence to not reporting and doing what you are supposed to do under the Improper Payments Act of 2002. That is the signal we will be sending.

The American people want the signal the other way. With $100 billion of their tax money paid out the door, that is improper, most of it overpayments, and we are saying we are letting one of the biggest agencies of the Federal Government off the hook.

If my colleagues want to vote for that, that is fine, but I hope we are held accountable for that vote in the next election cycle when we claim we want the Government to be efficient, we claim we want it smaller, we claim we want to get good value for the American taxpayer value. These votes surely will not show that, if my colleagues vote against these two amendments.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, this is a real simple amendment. The improper payments law was passed in 2002. By 2004, all Government agencies were supposed to come under it. The Homeland Security Department has never filed, under the six major agencies, an improper payments report.

People will say: Well, this will cut off funding. No. 1, it would not cut off any funding for 18 months. No. 2, if you vote against this, you are sending a signal to every other agency that they do not have to comply with the improper payments law.

Mr. President, there is no question that unions have these rights for TSO agents. This is a commonsense approach. What is not common sense is to put in jeopardy every traveling American for the sake of paying back a raw political debt. That is what this debate is about. Do we jeopardize safety, do we jeopardize the flexibility, do we jeopardize the fine work that has come from an incentivized system that has very low turnover now compared to the rest of the industry, that has a bonus system for great performance, a performance-based system, to give them what they need and not jeopardize the traveling American public? The McCaskill amendment actually hurts our flexibility and our security.

As a matter of fact, we had a hearing after this bill was on the floor, wherein Mr. Hawley and Mr. Gage came before us and talked about union representation of the TSO officers. Very revealing statements were said, especially by Mr. Gage. When we raised concerns about flexibility during emergencies and complicated issues that required absolute flexibility to move people around at all times, it was the testimony of Mr. Hawley who said they have to plan, that they are in an emergency all the time, which means they have to have the flexibility all the time. Mr. Gage's response to that was: These are sometimes bogus emergency situations.

Well, the reason we have had such an effective airline screening program is because we call everything an emergency and plan for it as an emergency, so we never have an emergency.

This amendment will gut the flexibility of the TSA in doing the very thing we have asked them to do; that is, protect us and have an institution that is viable, responsive, and nimble to protect us, without having to have a shop steward ask them what we can do and when we can do it.

Now, the McCaskill amendment says we will let you do that in an emergency, but the fact is, we are in an emergency mode all the time. So whatever contract we might have signed is not going to have any bearing anyway. So the contrast for the American public on this vote-- and we know this is going to be a party-line vote. Even those Members who want to vote the other way have been told not to vote the other way. We know this is a party-line vote about paying back, so Mr. Gage and his associates can have 40,000 people a month pay $30 a month to put $12 million to $17 million in the coffers of the employees union. That is what this is about.

This is not about security for this country and flexibility with the TSA. I urge a vote against the McCaskill amendment and a vote for the Collins amendment.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, on rollcall vote 62, I voted ``yea'', it was my intention to vote ``nay''. I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to change my vote since it will not affect the outcome.

Mr. President, first of all, let me compliment the chairman and ranking member for their foresight in making sure we have the capability to have interoperability, with the wisdom of taking spectrum and putting it specifically for that.

I want to answer several of the questions that have been raised because they are somewhat peculiar to me.

But before I do that, Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Kyl be added as a cosponsor to this amendment.

Mr. President, I say to the Senator, I would also like to note that one of the members of your committee, who was instrumental in bringing this interoperability grant program to the floor, is also a cosponsor of my amendment, realizing we do not need both programs and that they need to be combined.

Now, what does DHS tell us about the present grant program? Here is what they tell us. And I say to the American public, you ask yourself if you want your Government to run this way. What they say is: We can meet the September 30 deadline, and we may be able to tell you who is going to get grants, but we are not going to be able to tell you, anywhere close, how much money they are going to get. So they can tell them who will get the grants because that is what the law says, but they will never have the capability, for several months thereafter, to know how much money they are going to get. So nobody is going to buy anything until the actual grants are going to be awarded.

Let's clear up the difference between the Departments of Commerce and Homeland Security. No. 1, Homeland Security has the authority for interoperable communications. I do not care where this grant program is, quite frankly. I do not care if it is at Homeland Security or at Commerce. I do not care. But what I do know is, out of that $1 billion, the only thing the Department of Commerce is going to keep is $12 million with which to use to announce the grants. That is what they have told us. So $988 million out of that--the rest of that money--is going to go for grants, administered by, controlled by, run by Homeland Security.

So if the problem with my amendment is that the money isn't going to get out there to do it, Homeland Security has already said the money isn't going to get out there to do it. Commerce has already said the money isn't going to get out there to do it. We know who will get money, but the money won't get out there regardless of what they have said, because they just came to an understanding of the agreement 3 weeks ago on administering this money.

I think it is very wise what the chairman and ranking member have done in terms of allocating resources. As a matter of fact, I applaud them for that. I think it is wise to dedicate resources to certain things when we sell spectrum. I would tell my colleagues most Americans would say: You are going to give grant money, but you don't know how much you are going to give and you are not going to give it on the basis of competition in allocation of those resources because you have a date to meet that doesn't fit with fiscal responsibility. It doesn't fit with the best outcome or the ability to follow up to see what happened with the money. So we do have a date in the law by which they have to do it. But how are they going to do it, because the date in there is wrong. They are liable to give the wrong people too much money and the right people not enough, because we are telling them what they have to do.

The second thing--let me put up a chart. These programs are identical, even though you claim they are not. Let me show my colleagues how they are identical. Under the PSIC grant programs, they are State and regional planning; under the DHS program, they are State and regional planning. Under the system design and engineering, PSIC; same thing under DHS. System procurement and installation; same thing under DHS. Technical assistance, the same. Implementing a strategic technology reserve is the only difference, but guess where it is made up. ``Other appropriate uses as determined by the administrator of FEMA.'' Do you think they are not going to put in that reserve there? They certainly are. They are going to do it.

So there is no difference in the grant programs whatsoever, other than the deadline, which isn't going to be followed anyway. Like I say, I don't care if this is at Homeland Security or Commerce, I would as soon it be at Commerce in terms of the spectrum.

But the fact is the American people shouldn't have to pay for the administration of two separate programs running parallel with two separate sets of requirements to Congress. We ought to get them together. We ought to figure out how we do it so we have one grant, and if, in fact, we need $4.3 billion. The problem is, we don't know how much money we need. We are throwing money at it.

The second question I would ask is if this program belongs at Commerce, why Commerce agreed to give 99.9 percent of it to FEMA and to the Department of Homeland Security. They don't think it belongs there.

The other point I would make in rebuttal to the Senator from Hawaii is this amendment doesn't decrease funding at all. This takes $3.3 billion and an amount greater than $1 billion and combines it so the same amount of money is there, except it is going to make the money be spent better. It is going to allow us the time to do it.

I agree we need to get money out to our primary responders. This isn't about trying to hold that up. I am not trying to do that. But the Department of Homeland Security has already said the money isn't going to go out by your day. There isn't one application right now at the Department of Homeland Security for this money. We all know how Washington works. They haven't even written the requirements for the grant applications yet, which will take another 90 to 120 days. So we have a laudable goal that is not going to be accomplished, and if it is going to be accomplished, it will be accomplished in a very inefficient and wasteful way, which the American people don't deserve.

I think this is a very good chance for us to talk about what is wrong with us in the Congress. We are working at cross purposes. We have one committee working here and one committee working here, rather than solving those problems for the best interests of our country. I want Hawaii to have everything it needs in terms of tsunami prevention, in terms of interoperability. I know there are special requirements in the State of Alaska because line of sight can't be used and much of our emergency frequencies require some of that. I believe we can take care of those problems and combine these grant programs in a way that the American taxpayer gets value, in a way where we can measure the accountability of what we do, in a way in which we can have transparency for the dollars we get in reauctioning the spectrum, and plus the other $3.4 billion that is going to come out in terms of appropriated funds for these other grant programs. The American people want that. They deserve that.

To me, this isn't about a turf battle of control. To me, this amendment is about common sense for the American public to combine two programs into one so we spend less money, and we don't duplicate things and we don't duplicate efforts.

I understand and appreciate very much the long service of Senator Inouye and Senator Stevens and their commitment to making sure these things are coming through. I am not trying to be a fly in the ointment to mess up what are very good-intended results, but I am a realist. The very things my colleagues have asked to happen in the Budget Act that was passed are not going to happen. Homeland Security has said that. So if those things aren't going to happen, and if the fears of what isn't going to happen can be allayed, can we not figure out a way to put these programs together where the American people get the best value, and also as a part of my amendment which says: Can we look to the private sector to not just give us interoperability in Hawaii among National Guard and first responders, but how about between California and Arizona, or Texas and Oklahoma, or Maryland and New York, if they need Maryland first responders there, which has not been addressed in any of the legislation that has been put forward. There is great technology out there. There are great companies out there that could do that.

Again, without desiring to interfere or upset, I believe the application of some pretty commonsense principles ought to be applied to these two grant programs. I am willing to discuss with the chairman and the ranking member how to do this a different way. I am raising it on the floor because I think the taxpayer is not getting good value, and I think we ought to talk about that.

The National Taxpayer Union endorses this amendment. The Citizens Against Government Waste endorses this amendment. Your very own committee member, who was one of the first people to say we should have auctioned spectrum for first responders, is a cosponsor of this amendment. So I am willing to defer to what the ranking member and the chairman of this committee want to do, but I think we ought to stick it out here until we can work a way for the American people to get better value, better clarity, better transparency, and better accountability for these funds.

I yield the floor.

First, let me sincerely apologize to the Senator from Hawaii if he took my words to mean that. I did not mean that. I referred to his words in terms of tsunami. I have no inference whatsoever that this has any parochial interest of either the Senator from Hawaii or the Senator from Alaska. But it is interesting that the debate doesn't ever come back to the fact of whether we have two programs; it is all about the money. The fact is the money will not get out there. Homeland Security has already said that.

Now, the reason the $350 million--not thousand--was chosen is because at the same time this happened, you are going to have another $1 billion come through in--the fiscal year is going to be over this year on September 30 of 2007. The worst problem that happens in our Federal Government today is the indiscriminate, rushed issuing of grants, of throwing money at something, rather than a measured response of grants.

These aren't competitive grants, I would remind the people who are listening to this debate. There is no competition for this money. You don't have to compete by saying you have a greater need than somebody else or you have a greater risk than somebody else. This is money that is going to go out, period. It is not based on competition for the greatest need or the greatest risk.

The last thing we need to be doing is having a grant program that is rushed so we are not making sure the money is well spent. In the last 2 years we have discovered $200 billion of waste, fraud, abuse, or duplication in the discretionary budget of the Federal Government--$200 billion. We would have enough money to pay for the war, pay for expanding the military in this country, and cutting our deficit in half if we would do our job in terms of eliminating duplication, fraud, abuse, and waste.

What this amendment is about is let's don't waste any of this $1 billion these two gentlemen have so wisely put for one great purpose.

So that is my intention today, I assure the Senators from Alaska and Hawaii. We all know how homeland security works. We have seen all too well some of the failings and lack of efficiency and lack of responsiveness in that agency. To now assume the other side of that, that that is going to happen overnight because we have mandated by law--if it does, it will be a very poor choice of the use of this money.

I thank the Senator from Hawaii and the Senator from Alaska for their debate on this issue. My goal was to have a debate about whether we should have two programs and whether we should waste money. It is not about the debate of whether we need to have 911 interoperability and the functionality that needs to be there in all the States. But we should look at the whole as well as the individual. I compliment them on finding a funding stream that doesn't add to our children's debt. Unfortunately, we have not done that in this bill with the other grants, which I think is a mistake.

My hope is we will be able to have a vote on this amendment before we go to cloture--or even after cloture--because it is germane, and we can defend the germaneness of this amendment.

With that, I yield the floor.