Floor Statements

Madam President, I had asked for this time to spend a few minutes talking about what has happened in the last few weeks. One of the things that is going on in our country is that we have a little bit of a crisis of confidence in our legislative bodies. Some of it is well deserved.

We have had a bill on the floor under the guise of ethics reform. The bill is a statute. It is not a rule. It is going to become law. But I think the American people should be on guard. I was one of two people who voted against this bill and for some very good reasons.

What the American people would like to see is transparency. They would like to see clarity. They would like to see sunshine. Some of the amendments to this bill made it much better; there is no question about that. But some of the things that happened along the way did not allow the American people to really know what is going on in terms of what needs to change. A lot of the amendments tonight were accepted only on the basis that they would preclude debate. Now it is Thursday night. The Senate is not in session tomorrow. And the question people have to ask is, why didn't we debate those amendments? Why didn't we want to debate those amendments? The reason we didn't want to debate those amendments is because they are going to be discarded as soon as we get to conference.

Let me talk about one of them because I believe it is important. We have had hundreds of stories over the last 2 years of Members of Congress who have used the earmark process to enhance the well-being of either members of their office staff's families, personal family members, and even in the House a couple of occasions where they helped themselves. I am thinking particularly about a $1.2 million road that was built for properties owned by the Member of Congress. That fact is, that should have been debated. The American people need to know what the problems are, and there needs to be sunshine. There needs to be transparency about what we do.

The question the American people ought to ask is: What is going to happen when this bill goes to conference and what is going to come out? And is all the rhetoric we heard on the floor truly going to be reflected in an ethics bill that will change behavior?

A lot of effort has been concentrated on lobbyists. Lobbyists aren't the problem. Members of Congress are the problem. And transparency solves that problem. So we are not going to have transparency anymore. We are going to say you can't take a meal from somebody, but you certainly can deliver on a couple-million-dollar earmark. And we are going to create a situation where we say we are going to expose it, but you shouldn't count on that happening until the final bill comes.

My faith and my hope is that we put everything we have done away and don't do any of the things that have been accepted by the Senate tonight because of fear of political consequences, but that we do what the American people want, and that is to be transparent in both our actions and our deeds. The way to clean up ethical problems in Congress is for the Members to be transparent about what they do. So if this bill were to come back and we pass it just as it is, we are going to go through all these hoops that will have been created, and we are going to make sure people don't come to the Senate to serve. We are going to have a ``gotcha'' system. That is what we just passed. Good, honorable people of integrity are going to make an innocent mistake, and they are going to be gotten. I am not talking about the things that were intentionally done that we have seen over the past 4 to 6 years from both parties. I am talking about good, honest people making an innocent mistake, and it is going to ruin them. Consequently, people are not going to come here. Only those who are shielded and armored, who are careerists and have enough money that no matter what happens, they can defend themselves with the trial lawyers they are going to need to defend themselves after we pass all these rules that are going to come.

I know this sounds a bit negative now that we have passed supposedly an ethics reform bill. But my warning to the American people and to this body is, we should measure that when we see the final product. And we should measure the final product against Senator DeMint's amendment for true transparency on earmarks, my amendment on true lack of ethical bias in terms of monetary gain for staff members' families or Members' families in terms of earmarks. My faith will be renewed if, in fact, we come out with a great ethics bill. I wait and remain to be convinced that that will be the case.

The final point I want to make is process. Why did we not want to debate in front of the American people the idea that it is unethical for somebody to gain monetarily, directly or indirectly, staff member or staff member's family, Member's family or Member, from an earmark? Why did we not want to debate that? That is a question the press ought to be asking. That is a question we all ought to be asking, as the conference comes back.

The way we solve the problems with ethics in the Senate is through complete and total transparency about what we do. And if we are not ashamed of what we are doing, we should not be ashamed of putting up what we are doing and how we are doing it.

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

I ask unanimous consent to ask the Senator from Arizona a question.

The question I have is, The distinguished Senator from West Virginia asked the question: How long and at what price? But that is a false choice. Because if we leave Iraq and we walk away, we are going to be fighting this battle again. So it is not about how long and at what price; it is, when are we going to have this battle again? I believe that is up for debate. What the American people lack is the understanding that if we walk out now, we are going to put young men and women

again at risk, at far greater numbers and at far greater cost in the future, as we empower the terrorists. I wonder if the Senator from Arizona may comment.

Mr. President, I don't think you can have a discussion on earmarks until you set the predicate for what is really going on. It is not dishonorable to want to help your home State. The vast majority of those things that are considered earmarks are not bad projects. They are not dark. They have a common good that most people would say would be adequate.

The question about earmarks is, What has evolved through the years and what have they become? I believe earmarks have been the gateway drug to the lack of control of the Federal budget. The proof of that is, look at who votes against appropriations bills. I will promise you, there won't be Senators in this body who have an earmark in a bill that will vote against the appropriations bill. What does that say? Does that mean everything in that bill was good; they agree with the bill?

What it means is, they have an earmark in the bill. And if they vote against it, the next time they want an earmark, they won't get it. So you have the coercion of using earmarks to control votes.

Our oath is to do what is in the best long-term interest of our country. No matter what our political philosophy, we are all Americans.

We can all agree about that. And whether we are liberal or conservative, we don't want any money wasted. But as we spend money on things that are earmarks that are not bad but definitely should not be a priority when we are fighting a war and have a gulf catastrophe and a budget deficit of $300 billion we are passing on to our children, we get the priorities all out of whack. Priorities are what the American people said they wanted us back on, and they wanted us back on it together.

The bill that is on the floor, as the Senator from South Carolina said, addresses only 5 percent of that problem--5 percent of the earmarks. The Congressional Research Service looked at that--12,318, of which 534 would fall under the bill that is on the floor--correction, 12,852 is the total and there are 12,318 that this bill would not apply to at all. It would have no application to it at all.

The other problem with earmarks is there has to be sunshine. Fixing the problem to make everybody think we fixed it versus really fixing it is what this bill does. It is a charade, as far as earmarks are concerned. There is nothing wrong with wanting an earmark or for me wanting to bring something to Oklahoma. I have chosen not to do that because I cannot see how Oklahoma can be helped with an earmark when we are borrowing $300 billion from our kids and grandkids. I cannot see how that priority can be greater when it undermines the future standard of living of our children and grandchildren. But to put this bill up without the House version--and even it doesn't go far enough because it doesn't list who the sponsor is until after it is passed. In other words, you don't know who the sponsor is until after the bills come through.

We need to be honest with the American people. The only way we are ever going to get our house in order fiscally is to have complete transparency on what we are doing, so they can see it. Today the President of the Senate and I passed a bill that will, after the fact, create transparency so that everybody will know where all the money went. But it does nothing before the fact. We need the discipline to control the spending and to not use this tool of earmarks as a coercive tool with which we get votes on appropriations bills that are spending more money than we have.

This last year, a subcommittee I chaired in the last Congress had 46 oversight hearings where we identified over $200 billion in discretionary waste, fraud, or duplication. We ought to be taking up those things. We ought to be eliminating that. We can do tremendous work.

The other thing that is important in the earmark discussion is that you don't have an earmark if it is authorized. When it is authorized, that means a committee of the Senate--a group of our peers--looked at it and said this is a priority and something that should be done; therefore, it is no longer an appropriations earmark because it has been approved by the committee of jurisdiction.

The best way to eliminate earmarks is to bring them into the sunlight, get them authorized, and allow Appropriations to fund them. That way, we have 100-percent sunshine and the American people know what we are doing, and we defend that in the public, open arena of committee hearings. We should not be afraid to do what is right, what is open, what is honest, and what is transparent for the American public. They deserve no less than that.

The earmark provision that is in the bill in the Senate that we are debating right now is cleaning the outside of the cup while the inside stays dirty. We should not let that happen. There is no doubt in my mind that Senator DeMint's amendment is going to lose.

So the question has to come to the American public, are you going to hold the Senate accountable for acting as though they are fixing something when they are not? Anybody who votes for this bill, with the language in it the way it is today, is winking and nodding to the American people and saying we fixed it. But we didn't. Everybody here knows it won't be fixed with the language as it sits today. So it is going to

require the American people to have great oversight over us to see who votes for this bill. If you are voting for this bill, you don't want to change the way business is done here; you want to leave it exactly the way it is and leave everything alone. So you want to tell everybody you fixed it when you didn't. That smacks of a lack of integrity in this body that belies its history.

I yield back my time.

Will the Senator yield for a moment?

Mr. President, I will make a point. There is nobody down here defending the other side.

I would love to have a debate on the basis of why the amendment that is in this substitute should not cover the other 95 percent of the earmarks. I ask the Senator from Illinois, what is the basis for only covering 5 percent of the earmarks in the bill.

Will the Senator yield?

I make the point, if you got better reporting on 5 percent and no reporting on 95 percent, you have nothing. That is the whole point. Before the Senator from Illinois came down, I said it is not dishonorable to ask for an earmark. Most of them are good projects. I made that point. But to not have 95 percent of the earmarks reported, whether strong or weak, and say we are going to report 5 percent of the earmarks and report them strongly is not cleaning anything up.

Mr. President, first, that is not an earmark program. It is not an earmark. Everybody knows it is not an earmark. It is the 95 percent that is in the report language that nobody knows about and on which we are not going to report.

The American people deserve transparency. The Senator is good. Senator Durbin is very good, and I understand debating with him is difficult, but he is not to the point. The point is, that is not an earmark. It is a great move to the side. That is not an earmark. Items authorized are not earmarks. That is the point I made before the Senator from Illinois came to the floor.

All we have to do to get rid of the earmark program is to authorize them in an authorizing committee. Let a group of our peers say they are good. But we don't want to do that. We want to continue to hide this 95 percent that is hidden in the report language that the American public isn't going to know about until an outside group or some Senator raises it to say: Look at this atrocious thing.

I would like to finish. The point being, let's not send a false message to the American public. This provision that is in this bill is a sham in terms of cleaning up earmarks, and if you are going to defend it, then you are going to have to defend it to the American public.

It will not eliminate 95 percent of the earmarks, it will not make them transparent, and they will never know until after the fact who did it, why, when, and what lobbyist got paid for it.

Mr. President, will the Senator yield?

I want to put in the Record this idea of Federal entity, non-Federal entity. Let me give my colleagues examples of Army Corps of Engineers' earmarks in report language:

Six hundred thousand dollars to study fish passage, Mud Mountain, WA;

Two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars to remove the sunken vessel State of Pennsylvania from a river in Delaware;

Five hundred thousand dollars for the collection of technical and environmental data to be used to evaluate potential rehabilitation of the St. Mary Storage Unit facilities, Milk River Project, MT;

Five million dollars for rural Idaho environmental infrastructure. Nowhere will you find in that bill what that is for. The American people ought to know what that is for. We ought to know what that is for.

One million and seventy-five thousand dollars for a reformulation study of Fire Island Inlet to Montauk Point, NY;

One hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the Teddy Roosevelt Environmental Education Center;

One million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the Sacred Falls demonstration project in Hawaii;

Two million dollars for the Desert Research Institute in Nevada.

None of those are authorized. Nobody will hold anybody accountable for those earmarks. Nobody will know it happened unless we bring it up on the floor, and then we would not have the power to vote because the coercive power of appropriations in this Congress is, if you don't vote for it, you won't get the next earmark you want; you will be excluded from helping your State on a legitimate earmark.

The American people better pay attention to the vote on tabling this amendment because anybody who votes to table this amendment wants to continue the status quo in Washington as far as earmarks.

Madam President, I want to spend a few minutes today to kind of summarize some of the events of the past year and kind of also to put the Senate on notice that what this election was about is us being good stewards with the taxpayers' money.

I appreciate the distinguished Senator from Louisiana. I happen to be the Senator who held that bill up in the wee hours of the morning. There were some real good reasons why I did that. It is a great example of the habits that we have to change. There is no question that levee system needs to be authorized, and it will be authorized this year. There is no question. But there was a drudging component that was added to that bill. Nobody knew what it was going to cost, at least $100 million. That portion had not cleared the committee, and it was important that we not have habits such as that, to authorize programs that we do not have any idea what they cost.

We have heard a lot of talk about bipartisanship. We can all be partisan for America. If you go to the Federal Government's Web site and go to the Comptroller General, David Walker, and you read what is there--I would encourage every American and every Senator to go read it--what you will find is we are on an absolute unsustainable course. And the problems are bad now. Madam President, we have a $260 billion deficit this year with ``Enron'' accounting statistics, about a $360 billion accounting deficit by real accounting statistics. That is what we are adding to the Nation's debt. That is what our kids get to pay back through a decreased standard of living. But I would encourage you to go read it. We cannot continue to do what Congresses over the last 5 years have done; that is, we cannot spend new money because there is no new money. So that means if we are going to authorize a new program, we need to make sure a couple things happen. One is we need to make sure it does not duplicate something that is already there. And if it does, we need to eliminate what it duplicates if, in fact, it is better because there is an opportunity cost of funding two programs that do the same thing. One of them does it better, so every dollar you spend on the one that does it less well costs us money in terms of the value for our children.

Let me give you a couple other examples, things where our rules kind of mess us up. Because of the budgetary rules, Federal buildings in this country are no longer owned by the Federal Government--new ones. Why is that? For any other business, any individual would, if they are going to lease a building, try to lease purchase it. Because of our accounting rules, we lease them. Because if we lease purchase, then the agency has to show the entire cost of the building in their budget that year.

Well, it does not make accounting sense. I happen to have a degree in accounting. It is crazy accounting. But what it does is force us to make bad financial choices on fixed assets for the Federal Government. We cannot get rid of the buildings that we don't want now. We spend $6 billion--that is billion with a ``b''--a year maintaining buildings the Federal Government does not want. That is $6 billion. The Pentagon spends $3 billion. That is a total of $9 billion.

So if we had the $9 billion, if we could get rid of the buildings we wanted to by streamlining that process, we could save $9 billion a year. Madam President, $9 billion would do a whole lot for the people of Louisiana as far as this levee system repair.

We know we can save about $30 billion every 5 years by having the buildings we acquire or lease become lease purchase because then the taxpayer gains from the real estate rise in value associated with those buildings. We have a lot to change in what we do. I am not a partisan Republican, but I am very partisan about the future of this country and what has to change to do that.

Some other examples I would want the American public to know that we could do something about tomorrow: We have an earned-income tax credit that has a 40-percent error rate on it. That means billions of dollars every year get paid to people who do not qualify for their earned- income tax credit, but we do not fix it. We have not fixed it. Shame on us. We have $350 billion a year that is owed in taxes to the Federal Government--that is what the tax gap is this year--that will not be collected.

As a matter of fact, last year, the IRS, through incompetency, was putting on board a new program. They threw away their old program. But the new program was not ready, so they do not have a way to go back and track the problem tax payments. That is going to cost us $50 billion, $60 billion in lost revenues--one stupid error after another.

We have a program to help people with food called food stamps, except we have an error rate there, where we give out $1.6 billion to people who are absolutely not eligible for that program every year. In this very short conversation of what we have talked about, we have talked about over $400 billion that we would have. We would not be running a deficit now if we did some things efficiently.

In the last 2 years, the subcommittee I chaired, along with Tom Carper, the Senator from Delaware, had 46 hearings oversighting Federal financial management. We came up with, either from waste, fraud or duplication--not counting the tax gap, not counting any of these other things I have talked about--$200 billion of fraudulent, wasteful or duplicative programs associated with the Federal Government.

What the American people ought to be asking us is, rather than creating new programs, fix the ones we have. Make them efficient. Eliminate the duplications.

I am planning, when I come back, to send a letter to my colleagues outlining what my procedures plan to be in terms of blocking new bills to the floor. I thought I would read it into the Record tonight so that if anybody has any disagreement with it, they would come speak with me.

First is for me to agree to a unanimous consent on legislation in the 110th Congress, the bill has to conform to the vision of the limited Federal Government set forth by the Constitution and our Founding Fathers. In other words, it has to be constitutional.

Second, if it creates or authorizes a new Federal program or activity, it must not duplicate an existing program or activity.

Third, if a bill authorizes new spending, it must be offset by reductions in real spending elsewhere.

If a program or activity currently receives funding from sources including, but not limited to, the Federal Government, the bill shall not increase the Federal Government's share of that spending.

Finally, if a bill establishes a new foundation, museum, cultural or historic site, or other entity that is not an agency or a department, the Federal funding should be limited to the initial start-up cost plus an endowment that can be added to through private funding.

The way we get out of the problems facing our country starting in 2012 is to endow the future rather than expand it. If we start endowing things--one of the former Presiding Officers, the Senator from Arkansas, had a plan to honor Bill Clinton's birthplace home. I am not against that at all. But the average cost to the American taxpayer for every President's birthplace home--and there are only 22 of them--is a million dollars a year. Divide that out for a minute. That is $3,000 a day to take care of a birthplace home. Most Americans would kind of like to have that to care for their home.

The answer to that is to create an endowment with a million dollars, set it up as a fund for the Bill Clinton birthplace home endowment. It can never be touched. People can give money to that, and they can care for that. The earnings off of that will be about $60,000 a year. That is about $200 a day, or about $5,800 a month. Most people in America-- as a matter of fact, the vast majority of people in America don't come close to spending that on maintaining their home in a year. So we can generously endow what needs to happen for the future and use the power of compound interest to help secure the future for our kids.

My hope is that this spirit of bipartisanship we are starting off with will lead us to do the things the American people want us to do, and that is to get control of this behemoth we call the Federal Government. We can do it if we work together and if we are partisan for our children, partisan for the future of our country, and if we will do the oversight. If our oversight is going to point at what President Bush did wrong rather than what we can do right to fix programs, eliminate inefficiencies and fraud and waste, we will do much more for the country.

I hope the words we have heard today will be acted on the entire 2 years of the 110th Congress. If they are and we follow these guidelines, we will see a surplus much sooner than 2012. We can do that but not without the hard work and dedication that says future generations are worth it, worth us doing what we need to do to make the difference. We could take care of every need of the people in Louisiana because we have tons of waste where we are spending in the wrong way, whether it is bridges to Alaska or railroads across Mississippi or financing defense contractors when insurance is going to pay their bill anyway; we could do it.

We have to stop playing the game and start thinking about the long term. My hand is out to work with anybody, whether on this side of the aisle or the other side, who wants to solve the fiscal problems facing this country. Then we can get about solving health care and retirement programs associated with Social Security and Medicare.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that S. Res. 19 be held at the desk.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, as a physician and a two-time cancer survivor, I believe that eliminating cancer should be among our Nation's highest priorities.

During my two decades practicing medicine, I have treated countless patients of all ages and backgrounds who were diagnosed with various forms of cancers. Many were successfully treated and are alive and healthy today. Others were not as fortunate. Sadly, most of these cases could have been treated if detected earlier. Nearly all could have been prevented.

As a physician, I know firsthand that both patients and health care providers are not properly informed about many symptoms and causes of cancer. I have long been disappointed that the U.S. Surgeon General and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC, have failed to take an effective leadership role to educate the American people with lifesaving information about the various forms of cancer and how to protect themselves. As a result, the American Cancer Society estimates that 1,399,790 men and women--720,280 men and 679,510 women--will be diagnosed with and 564,830 men and women will die of cancer of all sites in 2006. Countless others will require invasive treatment that will forever affect their lives.

Each of these individual lives represents a failure to protect the health of one of our sisters, daughters, brothers, sons, parents, neighbors, and friends.

One recent patient of mine, an 18-year-old girl, is an example. She was diagnosed with human papillomavirus, HPV, infection. HPV is the cause of over 99 percent of all cervical cancers and is a sexually transmitted disease.

To prevent the onset of invasive cervical cancer, a large portion of this young girl's cervix had to be removed. As a result she is less likely to be able to become pregnant in the future and more likely to have a premature infant if she does become pregnant. And despite already undergoing invasive treatment, she remains at risk for future complications and additional surgeries.

This girl and the others that I am caring for in my medical practice are the real faces of those affected by HPV and cervical cancer. What we are confronting is not an isolated epidemic.

About 24 million Americans are currently infected with HPV according to the National Cancer Institute and an estimated 5.5 million Americans become infected with HPV every year. With 4.6 million of these HPV infections acquired by those aged 15 to 24, HPV accounts for over half of all new sexually transmitted diseases among young Americans. On March 8, 2004, researchers from the Colorado Health Sciences Center reported that more than 30 percent of women in a recent study were found to be infected with a strain of HPV linked to cervical and anal cancer. In comparison, 18.7 percent of men carried HPV-16, one of 10 high-risk strains of the virus.

Over 1,350,000 women will have invasive procedures each year just to assess the status of their abnormal pap smears secondary to HPV. According to the American Cancer Society, every year over 12,000 new cases of invasive cervical cancer are diagnosed and more than 4,000 women die of the disease. And noninvasive cervical cancer is estimated to be four times as widespread as the invasive type. HPV is also associated with other forms of cancer and more than 1 million precancerous lesions that affect both women and men.

Few of my patients with HPV had ever heard of the virus and were unaware of its health risks including its

link to cancer. Many of my fellow physicians were not even aware of HPV and its symptoms.

In 2000, I authored legislation directing the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration--FDA--to take actions to educate the public with ``medically accurate information'' about HPV and cervical cancer. I was disappointed when groups that claimed to advocate for women's health, such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists--ACOG-- opposed my proposal and fought to keep the public in the dark about

Mr. President, I was asked to allow this bill to come up at this late hour in the Congress. This bill is going to pass. The goals of this bill are very worthy. As a practicing physician, and knowing the families whom I take care of and the family members they have, I know the burden that is placed on multitudes of people. When they do the better thing of keeping their loved ones in their own homes, in terms of quality of life, I have no argument with the intent and background of what is trying to be accomplished. But I want to make three points.

One is how this place operates. What we do at the end of the session is we try to run hundreds of bills through that very few people have thoroughly looked at, that drives all sorts of new spending, that does not get the privilege of the debate that the American people deserve on the priorities of how we spend their money. That needs to change. It is a terrible way to govern. It is inappropriate in the way we do it. It has more to do with the rules that we operate the Senate under than anything else. That ought to be changed. There is no question I am known for my desire to try to get our fiscal house in order. For example, this bill is great, but what the American people are never going to ask out of the almost $350 million that this bill authorizes, where is the money going to come from to pay for it? What priority is going to be decreased so that priority can be increased?

We have in the Social Security account a surplus this year. We have a $344 billion deficit. A lot of my friends would say that reflects the fact that we need to have pay-go and increase taxes. But during the last 2 years, I have held 49 hearings in the Federal Financial Subcommittee of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, where we have identified a pure $100 billion worth of waste, fraud or duplication in this Government, and no one wants to change that. It is easy for us to come out here and spend $300 million on a new program. But it is very hard for us to get together and do the hard work of eliminating the fraud, waste, and duplication.

There are two other programs that have money in them available for this, not the correct way, and not done as good as this bill does it. We haven't done anything in this bill to change those programs to redirect any of that money through. So now we are going to have three programs that have an impact in this area. Representative Ferguson has done a great job of bringing this up. But unless we change the culture of how we operate, we are going to enhance what we call the birth tax. When you are born today in this country, counting the unfunded liabilities for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, you are born having liabilities of $435,000 on you the day you are born. We are adding a little bit to that. We are adding a little bit more and a little bit more.

Until we get together and say we are going to review this Government and get rid of the waste, fraud, and abuse, we are going to care as much about the person who is born today as we care about those who need some respite care, legitimate rest from the care of parents of those people they love, we will do a great disservice. We are doing a great disservice in this country.

Two weekends ago, I delivered a 9 pound 4 ounce baby to a woman whom I had delivered a baby to before. I had very well controlled her gestational diabetes. She had delivered a 9-pound baby before that. I thought about the 2\1/2\ minutes it took me, from the time I decided I couldn't deliver a baby in a normal way for her. It took me 2\1/2\ minutes from the time of that crunch when there was no way to get a baby out, with a heartbeat of 50 beats per minute--which is about 40 percent of what it should be--we have a baby in trouble; it took me about 2\1/2\ minutes to go around and get that baby out of that momma. We saved that baby's life.

Now, the corollary is, I had warning signals. I had indications that said things aren't going right. And this body, this Congress, this Government is not paying attention to the warning signals. The baby is going to die. Our country is going to drown in debt.

The processes by which we operate include not paying attention to the waste, fraud, and abuse and not making the hard choices on priorities, not offsetting, not deauthorizing something else that is not working where there are billions of things that are not working, and adding another problem. We are adding to that.

As a Senate, we are not ill-intentioned; we just are not paying attention to the warning signs. We are not paying attention to the fetal monitor of our country and the future for the next generations. It is just as laudable to care as much about the next two or three generations that come down the road as we care for those who need our help today, except this bill doesn't do that.

This bill is going to go by voice vote--and I have allowed it; I will not even vote against it--but I wanted this time to make this statement.

What will follow this bill today is a tragedy. We are going to spend another $17.5 billion on the tax-extender package that is getting ready to come through this place. We are going to pick up the bills mining companies owe and we are going to charge that to the rest of the people in this country. We are going to overspend on lots of things. We are not going to cut doctor's fees--and I am a doctor--but we are not going to pay for it. We are going to pay for it through gimmicks, and we are going to tell everybody that we are doing great things. In fact, we are being dishonest.

There are two cultural problems that have to change: We have to quit authorizing new programs unless we deauthorize other programs, and we have to reach across the aisle and say that we need to review everything we have, and whatever is duplicative, let's get rid of it and save these costs. If one does not work as well, put the money in the other and save the money.

Let's get rid of the fraud. We are paying out $38 billion a year to things we should not be paying for right now, and that is an underestimate because we have only looked at 60 percent of the Government in terms of improper payments. We still have a law that is not being followed by 40 percent of the agencies. They are not reporting their improper payments. We had a Pentagon that paid $6 billion in the last 5 years for contractors for performance bonuses, and they did not come close to reaching the performance basis for the bonus. That is our fault. That is us. We are charged with the responsibility of doing what is necessary.

The final point I wish to make is that if we keep nibbling around the edges on health care, we are going to find ourself in the biggest jam in the world. We have two choices: We are going to either have government-run health care or we are going to control the costs by basically allocating it at end of life and telling people what they cannot have. That is how most other countries do it. Or we will fix health care. We spend 16.3 percent of our GDP on health care, and $2.2 trillion is what we will have spent at the end of this year. That is 16 percent of our GDP. The closest country in the world spends 11 percent of GDP on their health care, and they don't have a government-run health care program.

Fully $1 out of every $3 we spend on health care today does not go to help somebody get well or keep them healthy. Our prevention programs, which is the key to our success in solving our health care problems, are abysmal. They are wasteful. They are not effective. We talk about diabetes, we talk about obesity, but we are inept in any type of consensus as to where we can make a difference in prevention. We have to address that issue, and I believe this is a fix around the edge. We need a comprehensive fix and a look at health care in America. We need to do it knowing the motivation.

Most people are surprised to learn that out of that $2.2 billion we spend on health care every year, $152 million is spent on things that nobody needs except providers to protect themselves from lawsuits. Now, we need a good trial bar. We need to be held accountable. But it has gotten so far out of hand that we are adding to the birth tax.

I beg my colleagues and the American people who are listening to this, let's get our act together. Let's start not just authorizing, let's deauthorize before we authorize. Let's fix health care. Let's do oversight in a way that saves money for the future. If we have eliminated the waste, we have eliminated the fraud, we have eliminated the duplication in this Government, we have to go to the American people and say: Shouldn't we pay a little more taxes now rather than ask for this birth tax?

Remember, the birth tax is over $400,000 per baby right now. Every baby I deliver, the first thing I see is a beautiful young child, and then in the back of my mind I wonder, how are you ever going to get out of this mess we have left you?

I appreciate the concern and the intent of those supporting this bill. This bill has come to the Senate in the

wrong way. This bill should have had its authorization offset. This bill does address a very real need, but there are a lot of very real needs out there that we need to do that we cannot do and we cannot fund because we are not doing our job.

Our country is at a crossroad. The fetal monitoring alarm is on. The baby's heartbeat is low. It is time to do what is necessary. The debt burden cannot be swallowed, the unfunded liabilities cannot be handled. It is up to us to change that. Let's lower that birth tax. Let's get rid of that. Let's work together to do the things we can do to lessen that impact on the generations to come.

I reserve the remainder of my time.

I yield back the remainder of my time.

I rise for the purpose of engaging Senator McCain, who is managing H.R. 4766, in a colloquy over a certain aspect of the bill. Senator McCain, as the chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs, to which this bill has been referred, and as the bill's manager in the Senate, I would like to know if it is the intent of this legislation that the Administration for native Americans, in administering the provisions of this bill, require that grants for Native language survival schools requite parental permission for the student to participate in the program and also that the students participating in the program demonstrate adequate progress in English proficiency according to grade level?

Mr. President, first, I compliment my colleagues from North Dakota. They have described a very real problem in farm country. Western Oklahoma and north central Oklahoma have been plagued by drought. Much of the wheat crop could not be planted last year because there was no soil moisture in which to plant it. The problem they are describing is a very real problem. The emotional context in which they put it is a very true indication of the plight of some of the farmers from Oklahoma and throughout the country.

When you look at agriculture in our country, what we find is it is basically undercapitalized. If the average farm was about 1,800 acres, the average farmer could take 2 terrible crop years and still be OK, still have his assets, still have the ability to come back and earn again. We have great commodity prices right now. The problem is there were no crops to take advantage of those great product prices.

The idea that we ought to be about helping our farmers is a correct idea. I applaud both Senators from North Dakota for their persistence in bringing up this issue. As a matter of fact, I think this issue is so important to the real problems that are out there because I don't see how we can leave here on Friday, which everyone is planning on doing, and not address this issue.

There is a lot I disagree with in this bill. The Senators from North Dakota know that. I have expressed it. I am going to outline some of those.

If this election taught us anything, it is that the American taxpayers want us to put good value with what we do.

A couple of facts: This bill can be paid for. It is not. This amendment is not paid for. But it could be. As a matter of fact, I would bet that after this election we have a consensus within the Senate to pay for it. Let me give you some examples how we pay for it.

I know the Senator from North Dakota has another which I didn't think of, but I know several on this side would probably agree it is a great pay-for. There is $8.13 billion in unobligated balances in the Agriculture Department right now. That money could be used to pay for this, and then in the reappropriations process that we start in February we could come back through, recognizing that we are using $4.8 billion of that money to pay for this.

One of my problems with the Agriculture appropriations bill that this amendment is going to be attached to is there is $800 million worth of earmarks, most of which come out of the very services the farmers are dependent upon to grow a good crop. A lot of it comes out of ARS, the very thing we shouldn't be taking money out of, but yet we have $758 million worth of earmarks that aren't necessarily a priority for our country or the farm communities but are a priority in terms of the political benefits that it gives the Members of this body and the House.

This is a fine-print page of all the earmarks in this bill. Most of the American public, when they look at it, 50 percent of these projects they would have trouble stomaching saying this is a priority at this time. There is no attempt to eliminate the earmarks to pay for this, which would pay 20 percent of this Agriculture bill disaster amendment we have before us.

I would be happy to.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator. I reclaim the floor.

Let me talk again about some of the problems that are behind the bill as it is presently written. We are never going to have a crop insurance program in this country that will ever work if we keep bailing people out who fail to buy crop insurance. Granted, there is a change in this bill from what it was. It was 35 percent or 40 percent available to those who didn't buy crop insurance. Now we have cut it to 20. But we are still sending a signal that you don't have to buy crop insurance, because even if you do not, we are going to be there with the money. That is exactly the wrong signal. If we want to have a crop insurance program to work, we have to have the discipline to say if you choose not to buy it and we had this available to you, then in fact you are not going to get the benefit.

I am happy to.

Mr. President, reclaiming the floor again, the point is had we not given 45 percent before, many of these would have bought crop insurance. The very fact that we are going to go out and give money to people who had an opportunity to protect their losses and chose not to, we are sending a signal that we are going to get less participation in crop insurance, not more. What we want is a crop insurance program that will work and which has the incentive so that many farmers say, Uncle Sam isn't going to come; I have an opportunity to protect myself and I am going to buy it. Does it cost me something? Sure.

The second point I was going to make relates to the chart which the Senator from North Dakota showed which showed the amount of losses. What he didn't say is that farmers also had the opportunity to buy a much higher level of coverage which they chose not to do. But it is out there. Had they done this, their losses would have been far less than they are today. Economically, they have to make a decision. I am not against helping those who are in need today. But I think there are things which could perfect the amendment which I hope the Senators from North Dakota would consider. We have had two great production years in this country where net farm income has been as high as it has been except this last year. We are going to be calculating off a base of the highest that we had. That is number one.

Number two, there is nothing in this that looks at net assets of a farmer because farmers who in fact are capitalized to the degree that they can take a

tough year--we are going to pay them, too. The American people have kind of spoken in November. Use common sense. Give us value for our dollar. The very well-to-do farmer who is very well capitalized we are going to bail out as we are going to bail the guy who is not, and he is the one who doesn't need bailing out.

What I want to see us at some point go to in the future with our farm programs is how we increase the capital of the individual farmers where they are capitalized to the level where they can in fact hit a bump in the road and still make it; can in fact hit 20 bumps in the road, and we know what that is. I have the studies. It is a minimum of 1,800 acres and the capital to supply the equipment to farm such 1,800 acres.

The other thing in this bill is the duplication of programs that are already out there. That is $300 million to help small businesses who supply the farm community. That is what the Small Business Administration is all about. We are going to turn around and give $80,000 to small businesses. We have a program for that. Yet we are going to turn around and create another Government program that is going to say you didn't have to be a good businessman if there is a little bit of a dent in the crop year; all you have to do is come and be bailed out, too, instead of taking a program that we need to make better, that sends a signal to the farmers, saying we are going to help you when you need help, but you have to be responsible in terms of crop insurance. We will let the other branch of the Government that has these areas covered be made available and we will help nurture the staff there.

One other area that kind of drives me crazy with this amendment is we are adding staff to the Department of Agriculture. They have 95,000 employees. Not all of those are in agricultural production. They have several thousand contract employees, and we are going to add employees to implement this.

I tell you that from my visits around Oklahoma, there are more than enough people at FSA and all the different branches and all the different organizations associated with the Department of Agriculture to implement this now. We don't need to add people. What we need to do is get the money to the people who need it. And we can do that. All we have to do is have good management and good direction.

I abhor the fact that we steal money from ARS for earmarks to help us politically but hurt the very people that we say we want to help with this amendment.

I think it is also wrong to take money from AFS which deals with bovine encephalitis and bird flu. We are taking money and time away from that agency to pay for earmarks. That is wrong. We shouldn't be doing that. If we are going to have earmarks, let us take it from some place that is not going to undermine the very farmers we say we are trying to help.

We have a ton of cattle in Oklahoma, and I know we do all through the central Midwest and in the upper plains, that have been markedly harmed by the drought.

We need to be careful with the precedent we set here. We are slowly moving in a direction to make all production agriculture similar to what we have done with crop insurance agriculture. I think we need to have the patience to say how do we do this in a way that does not create another expectation of bailing someone.

The Senator from New Hampshire was very correct when he talked about what this bill is going to do in terms of busting the budget. I am going to be voting to sustain the point of order because I don't think we should be doing it that way.

I want to be very clear. That doesn't mean I think we should not be doing something to help farmers. I also will say very insistently that if this Congress goes home without addressing this issue on a freestanding bill for agriculture assistance, I think we will have let down the American people. I know we will have let down the American farmer and rancher.

I think we ought to consider looking at the adjournment resolution and mount an opposition to this if this issue is not addressed before we go home. I think we can work behind the scenes to pay for this. I think we can work behind the scenes to change it where we can build the support for it, and I think we can work behind the scenes to give something to the President that he can sign and start implementing the month of December into January, and farmers will know whether they are going to plant a corn crop in March or a wheat crop next fall if they haven't been able to plant one this year.

Certainly.

Mr. President, the overall point of all this is we can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way. The hard way is what the American people expect us to do--and the hard way is paying for this. The easy way is not to pay for it. The easy way is to walk out of here this Friday having maybe passed your amendment or not. It is not going to make any difference in terms of the farmers because it isn't going anywhere. We have already been told that. The hard way is to make the tough choices about the priority of the Government spending of this country and say the farmers ought to be prioritized at this point in time. We are going to do the hard work to make the cuts somewhere else to pay for it.

Let me make my point. I will yield in a minute.

What we are doing, if we pass this without offset, we are taking out the good old politician credit card saying we don't have the guts to do it the right way, we don't have the stamina to do it, we don't have the courage to do it. By the way, grandchildren, here you go. Back in 2006, we couldn't do the right thing, we didn't have the courage to do the right thing, and we are charging it to you. And besides charging it to you, we will charge the interest from the time now until you are 40 years of age, so you are paying 40 percent or 50 percent regular, middle-income-America taxes because that is the only way we will get out of this.

Three points, and then I am finished.

There are things that need to be changed in the bill that send the wrong message, especially on crop insurance. We will never get crop insurance fixed if we keep sending the message we are sending with this amendment.

No. 2, there are other organizations within the Federal Government designed to help small businesses. We ought to use them rather than create another one.

The third point, we ought to pay for it. We as a Congress do not have the courage to stand here and fight and say we are not going home until we have taken care of this problem for the farm community in America and done it right--not limiting payments but looking at payments as a percentage of your net assets rather than having a fixed dollar amount. We don't have the courage to do that for the American people.

That is what the American people rejected in this last election. They want Congress to stand up and fight courageously for the values they use every day in their homes and their jobs when they have to make decisions. They have to decide on priorities. We will walk out. There isn't going to be any aid for the farm community. Come back in February. When we do it again, it probably isn't going to get paid for--either the Agriculture bill, for $4 billion in the original Agriculture bill, or this one probably won't get paid for, and we will slip them a credit card and say: Timeout; we will not make the tough choices; we did not have the courage to fight for your future.

By the way, the exit polls at the last election show that 57 percent of Americans do not believe their kids will have it as good as we have it today. If we keep doing this, they won't. It is our obligation to start acting and doing what we say on the campaign trail. We are interested in securing the future for the next generations of this country.

I yield the floor.

I agree with the Senator. He knows my record. I have not voted to not pay for anything in this body. I don't believe we borrow the future of our children to take care of our present-day needs.

I am happy to yield.

Mr. President, I thank the Senators from North Dakota for their effort.

This bill coming to the floor, the underlying bill--not this amendment--the emergency money could have been offset when it came through the appropriation process, and it wasn't. It was just put in. We don't want to make the hard choices. We don't want to pay for them. That has to change in the future.

My hope is we will give some consideration because as things stand and look now, we are not going to have an emergency bill with which the agricultural community that has been so hurt by the drought this past year and year and a half is going to have something to hang their hat on come the first of the year. I look forward to working with the two Senators from North Dakota to try to accomplish that.

I yield the floor.

I ask unanimous consent to speak for 5 minutes.

Mr. President, first, I thank Senator Burr. Senator Burr and I served on the Commerce and Health committees in the House together. He also served on Intelligence in the House, and we have his expertise, his experience, and his tremendous insight into what needs to be done, and the risks.

I find it ironic that since we talk about all the issues that face our country in terms of risk, this is potentially one of the most deadly risks our country faces--not just from a natural occurrence such as bird flu but from the intentional use of manipulating biological, of manipulating viruses and bacteria. We know the intent of the people we are now fighting. It is to use fully any means at any time in any way to cause great disruption not only to the lives of Americans but on the economy of America.

The fact that someone would hold up this bill to give us the capability to direct resources to become prepared says one of two things: Either they don't believe there is a real threat either from Mother Nature or the leaders of the ``Islamo-fascist'' terrorists who want to attack us today or that they think we are prepared. And we are not prepared.

We heard Senator Gregg talk about the vaccine industry. We need a program to redevelop our capabilities. I am a practicing physician. What we do know is vaccine costs are higher today because we have no industry. We have a limited supply of vaccine manufacturers. We need research into vaccines at every area of every virus and every bacteria that could possibly be used against us, and then we need a way to get that out and a way to utilize it. We need research into new antiviral drugs for many of the viruses that could be posed as a biological weapon against this country.

I find it ironic, kind of like last night, we are trying to do something for victims of HIV, and those who want to object will not come to the floor and object; they want to hide in secrecy. They do not want to say what is really wrong. What they want to do is stop the process, hold up the process, and not accept the responsibility. There is no one in this Senate who holds up more things than I do, but everybody knows that I am the person doing it and they know why I do it.

This is within the responsibility of the Federal Government. It is within the priority of making a decision on where we spend money and what should be spent first. Protecting this country should be one of the No. 1 things we do. Protecting the lives of American citizens should be one of the No. 1 things we do.

To not come here and defend why we think this bill is not appropriate, to not come here and stand up and take credit for stopping prevention of accidents and terrorism in this country says a whole lot about the lack of transparency in this Senate. They should come to the Senate and say what is wrong and why they object. We should have a debate. If they want to object after that, let them do it. But to not come to the floor to make a formal objection as a courtesy to Senator Enzi, who does respect the rights of other Members of this Senate, it means those Members who will not come hide in the shadows, and the American people do not get to know what others might think is wrong with proceeding. That does an injustice to the country and to this Senate.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object.

I do not intend to object in the final analysis on this, but I think the American public needs to hear how this bill got here and the associated processes with it. I want to share my concerns over it. It will take me a few minutes to do that, but I think it is important that we do this.

Before I lift my objection to the authorization in this package, I think it is important to know that this obligates the American people for $1.5 billion. The majority leader originally sought consent for this package in May and again in July. After carefully reviewing the package, considering the oath that I took in January of 2005, I could not give that consent.

I immediately sat down with the chairman of the Energy Committee. I outlined in detail my concerns with him. And I am committed by putting my objections in writing, and I did so.

I ask unanimous consent that the letter be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I will repeat today what I said in person and in writing. It authorizes $1.5 billion spending with not one offset and zero consideration for prioritization of how we spend money in this country.

Mr. President, I will try again, reserving my right to object. I will finish this statement one way or the other; otherwise, I will object.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous-consent after the unanimous-consent on this bill that I be allowed 15 minutes to speak on this bill.

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

Mr. President, hopefully, I will not take all that time. I think the American people need to pay attention to what we have just done. The Energy bill, which was actually 41 bills wrapped into one, that we agreed to through unanimous consent, is going to cost the American taxpayer $1.5 billion.

The real question is, in light of where we find ourselves--fighting the war, trying to help the people in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, and running in excess of a $300 billion real deficit this year--should we be spending money on these priorities? A real problem in Washington is getting Congress to make tough decisions about what is a priority.

I will spend a few minutes outlining what is in the bill because the American people have no idea what was in the bill. The first thing is $500,000 to study lighthouses in Michigan for tourism. Tourism is already a $16 billion industry in Michigan. There is nothing in the Constitution that would say that is a Federal responsibility. We will do it anyway.

Indiana Dunes Visitor Center, $1.2 million to establish a building, construct a theater and a bookstore. Is that a priority right now when we are spending our grandkids' money? We are going to build a bookstore and create a visitor center now when we cannot even pay for the war that we are fighting and we are charging that to our children?

There are new national heritage designations. We have a backlog of over $4 billion in repairs to the National Parks we have today. We cannot even take care of the parks we have today, and we are going to create 10 new national heritage centers, spending over $100 million to do so.

This bothers me on several fronts. Most important, it isn't a priority. It isn't something we ought to be spending money on right now. We are getting ready to do it. We already have 30 national heritage centers. We are going to delete the resources that are going to those by adding 10 more.

Finally, the problem with national heritage areas is they undermine property rights because the money is used to change zoning laws to back the people who have property rights around the national heritages. We are using Federal dollars to create national heritage areas that will undermine individual property rights. That is wrong.

The other thing that is in this bill is a study to assess creating four more national heritages.

The process is broken under which we bring bills such as this to the Senate, at a time when we cannot afford to pay what we are doing today. We spent a ton of our time on appropriations. After what I was told through all this process, after having written a letter raising objections, meeting with the committee, meeting with our leadership, we had a leadership meeting this week which basically said: If you don't let all of these packages of spending of low priority and no priority go through, the Senate will come to a standstill and we will see everything else blocked by the minority.

I believe we ought to be making choices about the right priorities for our country. It is not that heritage areas are wrong. It is that we cannot afford them. We are going to spend money on things we cannot afford and borrow the money from our children and our grandchildren to pay for things that we have to do.

It is cheating our children and our grandchildren. It also is beneath the dignity of this Senate.

This process has to be fixed. We cannot continue to authorize, authorize, and authorize more spending without doing the hard work, looking at what we have authorized that is not working, is inefficient, or is duplicated. But we continue to do it, and I will continue to stand up for the next 4 years and raise this issue every time.

This is not a Democratic or Republican issue. This is an American issue that this Senate does not want to address. We seem to be blinded by the fact that we can just spend and authorize all the money we want and to have no impact. We do not authorize unless we expect it to get spent.

With this bill, through the chairman working with us, he agreed to deauthorize over $150 million. That is a start. But other bills that come to the Senate that have new spending in the future ought to meet a test; that is, have we looked at everything else in that area? Is it working well? Are we spending the money wisely? Are we spending it efficiently? Are there programs that are not working that we ought to deauthorize so we can afford to authorize this as a better priority?

We are not doing that in this country. That is something the American people deserve to have done rather than to hang our children and grandchildren out to dry with debt.

This year, 8 percent of our budget is for interest. In 2035, 29 years from now, 25 percent of our budget is going to be interest. That is $1 trillion. We spent $200 billion this year on interest because we will not be frugal with the American taxpayers' money. There is over $200 billion worth of fraud, waste, and abuse in the Government programs we have today, and we will not go and fix it. Instead, we will spend another $1.5 million because that is easy to do. It sounds good at home, but we will not do what is necessary to secure the financial future of this country.

The notice I am placing today is there is a precedent established with this bill. If you want to authorize new programs and you want this Senator not to object or to debate them on the floor, there better be deauthorizations of programs of that committee's jurisdiction before they can expect my vote on a unanimous consent agreement to spend into the future and to undermine the future of the next generation of Americans.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, it is my understanding this is the minority's time. Senator Byrd is coming to the floor, and they graciously granted me time to talk.

I wish to address a couple of issues that were raised by the Senator from New York as to the accuracies of the claims that have been made. I think it is real important.

I don't doubt for a minute that she genuinely cares for everybody who has HIV in this country. I think she does. I think her perspective on the challenges that face us as a nation in terms of finances is different from mine, and I will grant her that as well. But some of the claims made are not really accurate.

I ask unanimous consent to print in the Record an article from the New

York Times stating specifically money was spent on walking dogs for HIV/AIDS patients, art classes, tickets to Broadway shows, free legal services, haircuts, things that other people can't do in any other place other than New York and California.

Mr. President, another key fact: New York State alone spends $25 million a year just on administration of their Ryan White title I funds. That is more money on administration than 38 other States combined, 38 other States spend total on all of it.

The Senator from New York showed a chart on AIDS cases and spending. Well, she was right. It was about AIDS cases, but it wasn't about AIDS and HIV-infected individuals. When you look at it in terms of those infected with HIV rather than AIDS cases and when you look at AIDS cases, AIDS cases are based on those who have had AIDS in the past and those who have AIDS today but does not reflect the epidemic.

I also ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record an article on the housing and rooming in New York for people who are no longer alive but for which they paid for a number of months, a large number of people, where money was wasted.

Mr. President, it is disingenuous to use AIDS cases alone to make comparisons. The reason for that is because this is an epidemic. And thanks to the wonderful presence of modern-day medicines, medicines are preventing people who have HIV from ever contracting the fullblown AIDS syndrome.

The whole idea behind the bill that Senators Enzi and Kennedy have offered and that has passed the House with over 300 votes is to have the money follow the epidemic. That is what this bill does. There are small declines in the amount of money per person in New York so that marked increases in funds are available for those in the nonmetropolitan areas throughout the South.

We know the face of the epidemic is changing. That epidemic says that we ought to be caring for them. The Senator's answer is just spend more money. But last year, when I offered an amendment to add $60 million to the ADAP by cutting pork projects, she voted against it. So you can come to the floor and claim you are for spending more money, but if you don't want to cut out a Japanese garden which is for a Federal Government building which was $60 million so you can put $60 million into lifesaving drugs, some would claim that is not real support for more money.

The final point I wish to make is that last year, New York received over $1.4 billion in earmarks, earmarks that aren't a priority, earmarks that aren't necessarily needed in a time of war. There was no offer to cut back on the earmarks for the State of New York to pay for greater care for AIDS patients. Some want to have it both ways: earmarks in the bill that are going to come back to us this November for New York, $600,000 for exhibits, $500,000 for New York City. We have to get a hold of priorities. Is HIV/AIDS a priority? Yes. And can we put more money into it? Yes. But we ought to be making the tough choices.

So I would say to my colleague that I have great respect for her desire to make sure everybody is cared for, but I also have a desire to make sure our children are cared for. And we need to pass this bill. It is a fair bill in the long term. We will work hard to make sure the moneys are there. We will work hard.

A final point. This new bill directs that 75 percent of the money ought to go to treatment. Less than 50 percent of the money in New York goes for treatment. Fifty percent goes for other things. So we have people living in South Carolina, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and in other States who are now on a drug waiting list who can't get treatment, and we are quibbling about $300 in other programs--not treatment--other programs these people won't ever have any access to, but yet they can't get drugs. Is it a geographical disagreement? Yes. Everybody who is talking on this is for taking care of this problem. This is a great way. This bill is a good start.

Here is the other problem. If we don't pass this bill before October 1, lots of people in New York and in other States will be hurt because of the legislation in the previous Ryan White Act in terms of forcing the redistribution of this. It is my hope we can work this out.

I appreciate the Senator's sentiments in terms of her caring for those with HIV, but I know, in fact, what has been offered and worked and gotten through the House is a good approach that takes a little bit from New York, takes a little bit from San Francisco, and gives lifesaving drugs. It doesn't take any lifesaving drugs away from New York or San Francisco or California but gives lifesaving drugs to the people who don't have them today. We ought to be about doing that.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank the leader for working with me on getting the requirements of what we need to do to get control of our spending in this country. I also want to thank the House leadership for their commitment in attempting to do that.

I had threatened to object to the unanimous consent request that we pass this bill. That is not a desire or something I want to do. But what I do want to do is make sure the money we spend actually goes for Defense. And we had, in both the appropriations bill and in the authorization bill, by a vote of 96 to 1 in this body, that even though we do not report earmarks in the Senate, we do not label them, we do not say who put them, we did have an agreement--with amendments in both those bills--that we will allow the Pentagon to report to the American public on the status of those earmarks and back to us as a Congress whether or not they met the mission of the Defense Department because about 40 percent of them do not. It is all about transparency, the American people seeing where we are spending our money.

I appreciate the leaders both here and in the House agreeing to bring this amendment--which was offered and accepted and passed here; and what was thrown out of the conferences--up in the lame-duck session. And given that commitment from both the House leadership and the Senate leadership, I will not object to this bill.

I will tell people, other than the earmarks that are in this bill, this is a needed bill, and a lot of the earmarks are appropriate and needed. But the American people ought to be seeing where we are spending the money, and they cannot. This amendment would have allowed them to see that.

The agreement of, hopefully, bringing this back, so the American people can actually know where money is spent, I appreciate the leader's help in accomplishing that.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Alaska for all his hard work and dedication on defense in this country and the hard work he put forward. This bill undoubtedly will pass this body, and probably unanimously. I will note that there were several things I have a criticism of in the bill and things I would like to have seen in it, but they are not there. But I also note that we are having trouble maintaining Abrams fighting vehicles, maintaining tanks.

As we look at this bill, the $70 billion we are going to have for the war, that is an emergency and it is appropriate, there is no question about it. What is not appropriate in this bill--and this body passed 96 to 1--is the fact that we agreed in this body that whatever the earmarks were in the bill, there ought to be a scorecard on them, on whether the earmarks met the mission of the Defense Department.

There are going to be a lot of earmarks that are good, but a lot of them are stinky. There are 2,000 earmarks in the bill directed by Members of Congress--somewhere around $8 billion--and a large portion of those don't have anything to do with the mission of the Defense Department, and they have everything to do with us failing to do the things we should do in terms of prioritizing and making the hard decisions in this country.

I am going to vote for the bill because of its importance for our country. But in this bill, you don't know who did the earmarks. They are very cleverly written. You cannot find out exactly what contractor they are going to. You don't know who is responsible. They are not listed. That is OK if we want to do things that way, but it is not OK if you are going to do that and not at least assess the effect of the earmarks.

We passed in this Chamber, 96 to 1, that we would, in fact, ask the Defense Department to assist in how effective the earmarks are in accomplishing their mission. My disappointment is, that is not in the bill. If out of that $5 billion to $8 billion worth of earmarks, $2 billion or $3 billion is waste, think what we could have done for the defense of this country. Think what we could have done for those who are depending on us and we cannot fully supply their needs, whether it is early childhood education, Head Start, or the AIDS drug assistance program, just to name a few.

We will try again next year. We will try to get the earmarks published, out in the open, and into the sunlight, so the American people can see what we are directing, to whom we are directing it, and who is doing the directing. I will be back on every bill until we come clean with the American people on the political games we are playing with earmarks. We either need to have the agencies say what they are doing with them and whether they meet their mission or we need to be upfront on who is doing what, why, and what for.

I appreciate the hard work of the chairman and Senator Inouye in terms of bringing this bill to the floor. More importantly, I appreciate those who dedicate their lives to this country by becoming a part of our Armed Services and setting an example we could very well learn from in this body when it comes to earmarks just by following their example of service, courage, and integrity.

With that, I yield the floor.

Will the chairman yield for a question?

Mr. President, it really strikes me strange, when we are talking about protecting money from States that already have full treatment programs, and people are dying across this country because there is inequity in the funding for those States. If that is the basis for an objection, that is an obscene objection.

We are talking about people dying who have no access to medicines, who have no access to treatment, while we have--let me get to the specifics--while we have in New York alone, last year--the city of New York spent $9 million on hotel rooms averaging $329 a night to house people. They spent money, $2.2 million, on people who were dead, paying for rented rooms they weren't even in. And we are talking about objecting to fair treatment and access to care for people who have none now because we don't want to see the fluff associated with other programs decline.

The President has asked us to pass this bill. On October 1, lots of changes take place. They are going to impact lots of people in lots of States.

I find it unconscionable that somebody would have somebody object for them rather than to come down and defend their objection. If you object to making sure African-American women across this country have access to lifesaving drugs, you ought to come to the floor and say you object to that because that is what an objection means for this bill starting October 1. There is already a lack. There are people dying in three States right now because they have waiting lists for drugs for HIV for people who have no other resources to take care of themselves.

Last year I offered an amendment on this floor, fully paid for and offset, for $60 million for additional ADAP funds that would have taken care of the very people who are going to suffer from this bill, and the very same Senators who are blocking this bill voted against those funds for those people who have no treatment today. There is something very wrong in the Senate when the leaders of the charge for this bill, with the exception of Senator Kennedy who has done miraculous work with Senator Enzi--the leaders in the charge for getting this bill and making sure everybody has equal access to care for HIV in this country are four conservative Senators.

We ought to ask a question about that. Why are we down here fighting for this? We believe in equal treatment. We believe in equal access. Where are the people who claim all the time to defend that? Why aren't they here on the floor of the Senate?

I want to make a couple of other points. The Labor-HHS bill that we are going to be voting on this fall has $1 billion in earmarks in it; $1 billion in earmarks. Most of it has zero, in comparison to saving somebody's life, like ADAP drugs and access to treatment if you are infected with HIV and you don't have any access to care whatsoever. We don't see anybody volunteering to give up their earmarks.

Here is a stack of earmarks for New York State alone, last year in excess of $1.5 billion--over 600 earmarks. Nobody volunteered to give up the earmarks, the special projects that politicians get benefits from that sometimes do good and sometimes don't do good--nobody offered to give those up to pay for this loss. We want to continue to do what we are doing, having the privileges and prerogatives of a Senator or a Congressman to grease the skids of our own reelection with an earmark, but we will not give some of that up to make sure somebody in a State that is not having access, who is going to die in the next 3 months, has access to lifesaving drugs.

That is an incrimination on this process. It is an incrimination on this body. Shame on us if we allow this to continue to be held up.

New York State carried over $27 million. The Department of HHS--here is another. This past weekend, HHS spent $400,000 sending people--78 employees--to Hollywood, FL, of which 2 out of the 3 days didn't have anything to do with the conference. It was a party. As a matter of fact, as a quote from the New York Times states, at the last AIDS conference in Toronto, 78 HHS employees went, and as the New York Times said, this was a star-studied rock concert, a circus-like atmosphere that made it seem more like a convention and social gathering than a scientific meeting. For these and other reasons a number of leading scientists have stopped attending and some supporters claimed the quality of the presentations have declined at recent conferences.

We can find more money. We can find money from earmarks. We can find money from conferences. We can find money from waste, fraud, and abuse. What we cannot find is the integrity to treat everybody equally in this country because we want to protect the parochial interests of our city or our State. That is wrong.

It is wrong that they are not down here defending that immoral position. I challenge them to come down and defend it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, by objecting to moving this bill, we need to look at the real lives that are getting ready to be harmed. Not only is the funding for the program going to be cut to the poorest of the poor by the formula in the preexisting Ryan White Act, but also the money for New York and California is going to be cut. The New York delegation, for example, argues that updating the formulas is devastating their State's infrastructure. A closer look reveals that the impact on New York, like other States with large urban areas, is not so great.

The national average funding per AIDS case in 2006 was $1,613. New York's average was $2,122--33 percent more than the national average. Under the corrected funding formulas, the national average in 2007 would be $1,793; New York's would still be higher at $2,107, just 5 percent less than the State currently has, so people who are getting no treatment now, especially minority women where this disease has ravaged and is growing at a larger proportion, do not have access to any care.

What we are really saying is to avoid a 5-percent cut, we are going to eliminate access for large numbers of minority women in this country who are infected with this virus and have no access to drugs, have no access to treatment today because the dollars have not followed the epidemic.

The political response to this, even though it might be parochial, is wrong for this country. It is wrong for those who have no benefit today to continue to be denied benefits because some group might lose a small percentage when, in fact, a very large number of people are going to be benefited by the new Ryan White fund.

We need to be very careful. The last Ryan White law was very specific in what is getting ready to happen. The number of people waiting for drugs is going to shoot through the ceiling if we do not pass the bill because of the funding formula that was in there to force us to pass a bill.

What we have said is we are going to object on parochial interests, a 4- or 5-percent cut, but the reason we are going to object, we do not care that other people are going to have no care, no treatment, no drugs, no access, so what we are really doing is we are not taking away any significant care, but we are markedly reducing an opportunity for life for those who are the least able to care for themselves.

Just a couple of other examples. The New York Times noted that out of this $2,107, we have dog-walking paid for through AIDS funds, we have candlelight dinners paid for for AIDS recipients--this at the same time an African-American woman in Atlanta, in Greensboro, or in Tulsa cannot get the lifesaving drugs she needs for tomorrow, the drugs that will save her life, allowing her to continue to be a mother.

There have been a lot of people who have worked very hard to get Ryan White reauthorized. I thank them personally for that. It diminishes the Senate when we think of the parochial and not the whole.

The long-term former funding for Ryan White was based on AIDS cases. The new funding is based on HIV and AIDS cases. This new funding in this new bill says that 75 percent of the money has to go to treatment--we have never had that before--to really make a difference in people's lives.

I am disappointed that we are not going to be able to do this bill, but my disappointment is nothing compared to the people who aren't going to get care, who aren't going to have a future, who aren't going to have a life if this is not changed. I thank the chairman for his hard work. I thank the Senator from North Carolina for his work and Senator Jeff Sessions, as well. This is a disease which is moving hard and heavy to minority communities, to the South. If we do not recognize that they ought to have equal rights for treatment and care, there is something wrong with us.

I yield the floor.