Floor Statements

Mr. President, I am a longtime supporter of policies designed to open foreign markets to our Nation's exports through trade agreements. I have fought to break down barriers that many other countries have erected to block our exports and to create unfair advantages. The fact is that mutually beneficial trade agreements serve to improve farm income and create jobs here at home, and American consumers receive benefits as well, including lower prices and a greater variety of goods.

I supported the fast track procedure in the 1988 Trade Act. I voted for the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Uruguay Round GATT Agreement. However, trade agreements are not only about commercial transactions. Trade agreements also have major environmental impacts, and they have major implications for the legal rights and working conditions of laborers. All of these factors must be carefully considered in determining whether to support a given trade agreement.

Certainly, there are modest positives in this Peru Free Trade Agreement. The American Farm Bureau Federation has estimated that the agreement would generate a net increase in U.S. agricultural exports of more than $700 million annually once the agreement is fully implemented in 2025. I note, however, that, in today's dollars, that would represent only roughly one-half of 1 percent of current U.S. agricultural exports.

In addition, this agreement would level the playing field for the United States vis-a-vis other major agricultural exporters in South America. Both Brazil and Argentina enjoy preferential access into Peru's markets because of Peru's associate membership in Mercosur, and this FTA would make it easier for our products to compete with exports from Brazil and Argentina. However, I have always considered these country-by-country trade deals to be far less than ideal. It would be far better to negotiate a successful global trade agreement under the auspices of the World Trade Organization.

Despite these modest benefits, I believe that, on balance, the Peru Free Trade Agreement falls short. I am particularly concerned about the agreement's deficiencies with regard to fighting child labor.

As many of our colleagues know, I have been working to reduce abusive and exploitative child labor around the world for a decade and a half. I first introduced a bill on this issue in 1992. Over the years, I have worked hard to improve the labor provisions in various trade measures, concentrating particularly on abusive and exploitative child labor. I believe strongly that trade agreements should support and reinforce existing international child-labor standards, not undercut them. On this criterion, the Peru FTA falls short.

According to the best estimates by the International Labor Organization, ILO, there are at least 218 million child laborers between the ages of 5 and 17 in today's global economy. Of these 218

million child laborers, more than 100 million have never seen the inside of a classroom. An estimated 126 million children are working under the most hazardous circumstances in mines, in fishing operations and on plantations. These children are being robbed of their childhoods. Many are being denied an education. They are deprived of any hope for a brighter future. In the years ahead, they will grow up illiterate and exploited, and this will create a wellspring of future social conflict and strife, and even terrorism.

We have made progress in recent years by increasing funds for programs to rehabilitate child laborers through our contribution to the ILO's International Program for the Elimination of Child Labor. In 2000, I successfully amended the Trade and Development Act with a provision directing that no trade benefits under the Generalized System of Preferences, GSP, will be granted to any country that does not live up to its commitments to eliminate the worst forms of child labor. I required that the President submit a yearly report to Congress on the steps being taken by each GSP beneficiary country to carry out its commitments to end abusive and exploitative child labor.

I want to explain clearly to my colleagues what I mean when I refer to abusive and exploitative child labor. I am not talking about children who work part time after school or on weekends. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that. What I am referring to is the definition set out by ILO Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labor. This is not just a Western or a developed-world standard; it is a global standard that has been ratified by 163 countries. It was ratified by Peru in 1999. The United States was the third country in the world to ratify this convention.

It is true that we have made some modest progress in including labor protections in this Peru Free Trade Agreement. But we all know that labor protections in trade agreements mean nothing in the absence of political will to enforce them. I am also concerned that, on the very same day that the deal to include new labor provisions in the Peru FTA was announced, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said, ``We are encouraged by assurances that the labor provisions cannot be read to require compliance with ILO Conventions.'' Clearly, this statement sends a powerful message that the labor provisions in the Peru FTA should be ignored.

Under the Peru deal, the only party that can seek enforcement of labor violations in Peru is the U.S. administration. There is no mechanism for an outside party, such as a nongovernmental organization, to bring a complaint, as exists under the GSP. This would actually take us, and the world, a step backward when it comes to protecting children. That is right. This free-trade agreement with Peru, which replaces GSP provisions in governing trade between our two countries, will take us backward with respect to combating abusive and exploitative child labor.

Under the current U.S. GSP provisions, the President now must report to Congress annually regarding Peru's child labor practices. Under GSP, if Peru is not meeting the obligations that it undertook as a signatory to the ILO Convention 182, if it is not acting to eliminate the worst forms of child labor, then trade sanctions are imposed immediately to require enforcement in Peru of internationally recognized standards. This protects children. It also ensures that our workers will not be subjected to unfair competition from abusive and exploitative labor abroad. Unfortunately, under the Peru Free Trade Agreement, trade sanctions are not automatic.

I remind our colleagues that we voted 96 to 0 to include those protections, which I offered to GSP. It was a Harkin-Helms amendment, and it received unanimous, bipartisan support. None of us wanted to have those child labor protections undercut by our trade negotiators in an agreement with Peru or any other country but that is exactly what has happened. Now, because of fast-track rules which don't allow us to amend this legislation, we won't even be able to vote to restore the GSP protections in this agreement. If we vote for this trade agreement, we are voting to remove the protections that all of us who were here in 2000 voted to put in place.

On the matter of child labor, this Peru Free Trade Agreement takes us in the wrong direction. Abusive and exploitative child labor is wrong as a matter of principle. And it is also wrong as a practical matter. Our workers and our small businesses should not have to compete with abused and exploited child laborers abroad.

I am sorry to say that this is not an academic or rhetorical issue in the case of labor practices in Peru. Peru is far from the worst Government, even in our hemisphere, when it comes to meeting its international obligations to protect children from abusive and exploitative labor. I don't mean to single out Peru. But there is broad agreement among international observers--including our own Department of Labor, the Department of State, UNICEF and the International Labor Organization--that the problem of abusive child labor persists in that country. As many as 1.9 million Peruvian children between the ages of 6 and 17 are working rather than attending schools as they should. There are an estimated 150,000 child laborers in the capital city of Lima alone. The Government of Peru may be seeking to reduce the problem, as it should, but we should not be weakening our sole existing trade mechanism that allows us to monitor its progress. That is not the way forward for free and fair trade. And it is certainly not the way to lift up the Peruvian economy. Abusive child labor perpetuates the cycle of poverty across generations. No country has achieved broad-based economic prosperity on the backs of working and exploited children.

Mr. President, I appreciate that improvements were made to this agreement thanks to my Democratic colleagues in the House. But this remains a flawed agreement, one that we are not allowed to correct through amendments. I was eager to support an agreement promoting freer trade with Peru, but I cannot support a flawed agreement that takes a step backward from current law.

Mr. President, in a few days Stan Garnett will retire from the Food and Nutrition Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, after 35 years of tremendous service to people in our Nation and elsewhere in the world.

Stan's experience and dedication to fighting hunger and malnutrition extends beyond his 35 years with the Department of Agriculture. Following his graduation from college, Stan answered President Kennedy's call to service abroad and spent 2 years in the Peace Corps in the Philippines. Thereafter, he joined Catholic Relief Services and spent 6 years administering food assistance programs in Southeast Asia and in Africa under tremendously difficult circumstances. He often traveled by helicopter in battle zones in Vietnam to deliver food assistance to war refugees, and he also provided food aid in Nigeria during the tragic Biafran conflict.

Following his work overseas, Stan returned to the United States and joined the Food and Nutrition Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1971. Over the years, Stan held many different positions within the Food and Nutrition Service, the majority of them pertaining to legislative and regulatory policy in Federal child nutrition programs. Throughout his career, Stan served with accomplishment and, not surprisingly, continued a steady ascent in the ranks at the Food and Nutrition Service of the Department of Agriculture, eventually serving as the Director of Supplemental Food Programs and Director of the Child Nutrition Division.

Stan fulfilled those positions with great competence, but with integrity and humility as well. In 9 cases out of 10, Stan knows more about the issue at hand than anyone else in the room, but he never acts as if this is the case. Stan treats everyone equally--Members of Congress, members of his own staff, and the many people across the country who for so long have relied on Stan's expertise to help them operate child nutrition programs in their own communities. Stan is known by all who come in contact with him as a generous and caring administrator who is trusted by all.

After 35 years of Federal service, there is no question that Stan has certainly earned a much-deserved retirement. His absence will certainly be acutely felt, both within the Department of Agriculture and here in Congress. However, I have no doubt that one of Stan's biggest contributions is to leave child nutrition programs in the hands of capable colleagues who have benefited, as I have over the years, from his tremendous expertise, and who will ensure a smooth transition as new leadership assumes his responsibilities.

In so many respects, the Stan Garnett who will retire this year is strikingly similar to the Stan Garnett who took up President Kennedy's call to service by entering the Peace Corps as a young man. His commitment to ending hunger and to promoting the economic security and nutrition of low-income families is as strong today as it was as a bright-eyed college graduate. Just as important, he has imparted this same idealism and commitment to numerous young people who have had the privilege to work with him over the years. To those who question what a career in public service can accomplish, I ask only that they look to Stan's career. What they will see in him is not just 40 years of service, but a call to action. I have no doubt that, because of his incredible commitment, Stan is a remarkable inspiration and example of heeding this call to action and public service.

Mr. President, let me first respond to my friend from Georgia and for the benefit of all Senators make it quite clear that if we have cloture on the farm bill this morning, we will still be allowed to have up to 3 days, 3 full days of debate, 30 hours, and untold numbers of amendments. Every amendment that is relevant and germane to agriculture in the farm bill will be allowed to be offered and voted on. I wish to make that very clear.

Now, if a Senator wants votes on immigration, well then put it on some other bill. If he wants to vote on taxes, put it on some other bill. If they want to vote on whatever else they might want to bring up that is important, put it on another bill. Let's do what is needed for our farmers and ranchers and rural America and get the farm bill passed. That is what this cloture vote will do this morning.

Now, you know, we have a good, strong bipartisan bill. We came out of committee on a voice vote without one dissenting vote voiced--without one. We spent a day and a half--a record short time to my knowledge--in getting a farm bill through the committee.

Without losing my right to the floor, of course.

Mr. President, I ask that the preceding few minutes not come from my time.

Mr. President, the farm bill before us was laid down 10 days ago. Yet during that time we have been blocked from voting on any amendments--not one amendment in 10 days. So the majority leader has correctly filed a cloture motion in an effort to allow this body to offer, debate and vote on amendments and pass this vital legislation without further unreasonable delay. The cloture vote, I say to all, is pivotal, crucial as to whether we will have a new farm bill this year. Everyone knows it. Let me remind my colleagues of what is at stake, why it is so critically important that we put an end to the delay and move ahead.

The pending legislation stays within strict pay-go budget limits. Yet we provide good farm income protection; we promote new economic opportunities for farm and ranch families, especially in the area of energy production; and we help dairy farmers and especially the specialty crop producers all across America. There is more in this bill for specialty crops than any farm bill ever passed in the history of this country. The bill boosts economic growth, jobs, and quality of life in rural America with rural development money in the bill. It makes major new investments in conservation of our natural resources, to save soil, increase water quality, restore wetlands and wildlife habitat. A big part of this farm bill will allow low-income Americans to put a little more food on the family table and to improve the diets not only of our families but of our kids in school. We also have very strong provisions in this bill to help restore our national energy security by promoting biofuels, other renewable energy sources and rural energy initiatives.

These are just some of the highlights that are in this bill. There is much more in the farm bill to benefit rural America and all of our Nation. We have come too far with this bill, we have accomplished too much to let this vitally important bill languish and stall. In fact, at this point, the fate of this bill is in jeopardy--in jeopardy. That is why this cloture vote is so critical.

We are at a procedural impasse. We simply cannot obtain the necessary cooperation from the Republican leadership. They will not agree to a reasonable plan that we debate and deal with relevant, germane amendments so that we avoid having the farm bill even further sidetracked by becoming a Christmas tree of nongermane, nonrelevant amendments, far off the subject of dealing with the farm bill.

I tried--I tried to obtain consent to allow the Senate to debate and vote on amendments that Republicans themselves have filed and presumably wanted to offer, debate and vote on. I asked unanimous consent to bring them up, get a time limit, and vote on them. My request was rejected out of hand. We cannot even get consent to adopt over 50 amendments that have been agreed upon on both sides for a managers' amendment--50 that have been agreed upon. We cannot even get consent to adopt those. Now that shows you how unreasonable--how unreasonable this lack of cooperation has become.

I certainly hope the situation is not a deliberate and orchestrated attempt to stop the farm bill dead in its tracks, but I am beginning to wonder. There are enough rumors floating around. When rumors start coming from different sources, you know there may be something behind them. What I am hearing is that the White House has put out the word behind the scenes to stop this farm bill--stop it. Now, why is that? I began to wonder.

Well, keep in mind, the White House has issued a statement of policy threatening a veto of the farm bill as passed by the House. Then the White House issued a threat to veto the farm bill reported by the Senate Agriculture Committee. So that means if we pass the bill, if we go to conference, we will probably send the White House something they said they would veto.

I suspect some of the White House political people said: You cannot veto a farm bill. Do you want to lose all of rural America for the Republican Party next year? You cannot veto that farm bill. So perhaps instead it would be better if the bill never made it to the White House. Kill the bill here in the Senate. Kill it here.

I see the heavy hand of the White House behind what is going on here. I have worked very closely with Senator Chambliss. We have worked very hard to get to this point. We have worked very hard to get a bipartisan coalition together. But I detect something else interfering here: I detect the White House's heavy hand coming in, telling people what to do and what not to do.

The majority leader has done the appropriate thing by filing cloture. Now, let me again repeat, cloture does not cut off debate, and it does not cut off any relevant, germane amendment to the farm bill. As I said, if we vote for cloture this morning, we can have 3 days of debate, 10 hours a day. We can have 20 amendments or more debated and voted on, plus the 50 we have already agreed upon and others. Plus, every amendment that is relevant and germane is guaranteed an up-or- down vote at the end of cloture. No one will

be denied a vote on an amendment to the farm bill as long as it is relevant and germane. If someone wants to add a Christmas tree ornament dealing with immigration or foreign relations or the war in Iraq or something, yes, that amendment is out after cloture. They will not be able to offer that amendment. But that comes down to the question, do you want a farm bill or not? Do you want a farm bill or not? It is too important to allow a small minority or the White House--maybe people here are bowing to pressure from the White House--to hold it up indefinitely.

We are falling behind. If we get cloture, we can move ahead aggressively. We can come back after the Thanksgiving recess, spend about 2 or 3 days, 3 days on the farm bill, and it would pass the Senate. We can go to conference, work out our differences, and send the bill to the White House. That will not happen if we do not get cloture. If we do not get cloture, my friends, there may well not be any farm bill.

Now, who has a stake in this? I have a good number of letters here with many signatures. I ask unanimous consent to have them printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks.

Here is a letter with 11 groups telling us to move forward without further delay, everything from the American Farmland Trust and Audubon, to the National Wildlife Federation and the Izaak Walton League of America.

Here is another letter with 185 signatures urging the Senate to vote for cloture. Many of those signing the letter are antihunger and nutrition groups ranging from the America's Second Harvest to the Atlanta Community Food Bank, the Food Bank of North Alabama, the Food Bank of the Albemarle in North Carolina--food banks and others who fight hunger all over the country realize they need this farm bill. The National Association of State Departments of Agriculture, National Farmers Union, National Milk Producers Federation and many others-- again, 185 groups on this letter asking us to vote for cloture this morning.

Here is another letter--61 groups who wrote in late September calling for expedited action on the new farm bill. Well, that is what cloture is--expedited action. This letter is signed by groups from the American Farm Bureau Federation, to the American Soybean Association, to the National Association of Wheat Growers, the National Cotton Council, Pheasants Forever, and the School Nutrition Association, to name just a few. They want expedited action.

How much time do I have?

I urge all Senators to vote for cloture and let us get this critical farm bill passed, go to conference, send it to the White House, and get it signed before Christmas.

Exhibit 1

November 15, 2007.

Dear Senator: The undersigned conservation organizations

urge the Senate to move forward with consideration of the

farm bill without further delay but with full and fair

consideration of relevant amendments. We need a new and

improved conservation title, and extension of the 2002 Farm

Bill is not, in our view, an acceptable alternative. We

believe the bill reported by the Agriculture Committee makes

very important strides in addressing key conservation issues

and programs, but we also are united in the view that

important improvements to both policy and funding need to be

made on the floor. Therefore, we urge you to move as quickly

as possible to considering, amending, and passing a new farm

bill.

Sincerely,

American Farmland Trust, Audubon, Center for Native

Ecosystems, Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Coevolution

Institute, Defenders of Wildlife, Izaak Walton League

of America, National Campaign for Sustainable

Agriculture, National Wildlife Federation, Natural

Resources Defense Council, Sustainable Agriculture

Coalition.

Mr. President, I yield back our time.

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

Mr. President, we are back on the farm bill. To refresh memories, we have now been on the farm bill 10 days. This is our tenth day. Not one vote has occurred. We have tried time and again to bring up amendments, and they have been objected to. I will attempt to do that again this morning. I will wait until my ranking member is present. I see that Senator Salazar is here to speak on the farm bill.

I wish to make it very clear, tomorrow morning we will have a vote on cloture on the farm bill. I want there to be no mistake in anyone's mind: Tomorrow morning's vote will be a vote on whether we have a farm bill this year. If we get cloture on the farm bill tomorrow, we will have a farm bill this year. We will be able to pass a bill in the Senate, we will go to conference, and we will send it to the President.

If we do not get cloture tomorrow, that is like killing the farm bill. A vote against cloture will be a vote to kill the farm bill. We will run out of time. We will be out of here at Thanksgiving for 2 weeks. When we come back, we have all the appropriations bills to do, we have the Iraq funding bill to work out, and we will only have about 3 weeks before Christmas. Therefore, if we do not get cloture, that is like saying we don't want a farm bill. So I hope everyone understands what the stakes are.

I also hope no one has the mistaken impression that because we invoke cloture, they cannot offer amendments. I got that question from a press person this morning. I had to inform them that, no, if we get cloture, we have 30 hours of debate and people can offer amendments during that 30 hours.

I just spoke with our leader. It would be the prerogative, if we wanted to on the majority side, if we got cloture, to lay down one amendment and take all 30 hours and debate it and block everybody from offering amendments. That has happened around here before, by the way, where we get cloture and then block it and nobody gets to offer any amendments until the end. Then we get into this vote-arama where we have votes on amendments but nobody gets to talk about them. We are not going to do that.

If we get cloture, I will try to reach an agreement with my ranking member, Senator Chambliss, so we can have, say, at least a half hour debate on every amendment and vote. That would give us a shot at having probably pretty close to 20 amendments that could be debated and on which we could vote.

At the end of the 30 hours, of course, any amendments still pending have a right to have a vote. There would be a minute on each side to explain those amendments, and we would vote on them.

I want to make it clear that voting for cloture does not cut off amendments. Yes, it may cut off nongermane amendments dealing with whether we are going to go to the Moon or Mars or whether we are going to do wacky stuff such as that. Yes, it cuts that stuff out. But any amendment that is germane to the farm bill can be offered and will be voted on even after cloture. I want to make that very clear.

If we do not get cloture, that is it; that is the end of the ball game, and I don't know when we can ever come back to the farm bill after that. Certainly not this year.

It is getting late. The crops are in. In most parts of the country, crops are in. And now they are beginning to think about next year. Bankers want to know, farmers need to know what the program is going to be for next year. Will it be this one or will it be what we have come up with in our farm bill and worked out with the House. So it is getting very late, and we need to get this bill done.

I encourage all Senators, we are open for business now. We can take amendments now. We can debate amendments, and we can vote on amendments all day today.

Shortly, I will be asking consent to bring up amendments. I am going to ask consent to bring up Republican amendments that are filed. I have a Lugar amendment. I have a Roberts amendment, an Alexander amendment, a Lott amendment, and I am going to be asking consent to bring up those amendments. If there is no objection, we will bring them up, have a debate, and we can have votes on a lot of amendments this afternoon.

I want to make it very clear again: This side is not holding up the process. We want to vote; we want to debate. Just as yesterday, I wanted to bring up five amendments yesterday and have limited time and vote on them, but it was objected to. I will try that again today. Hopefully, maybe we can make some movement and we can have some votes today on some amendments. I will be doing that shortly.

I see the Senator from Colorado is on the Senate floor. He has been a great member of our Agriculture Committee. No one has worked harder than Senator Salazar in getting us to the point where we have a farm bill that came out of our committee without one negative vote.

I say to my friend from Colorado, someone this morning on a press call asked me: If you don't get cloture, if you don't get this bill, or if the President vetoes it and you have to go back, what are you going to do differently?

I said: I don't know how much we can do differently to get more of a positive vote out of our committee than a unanimous vote. What do you do that is different from that? It is not as if we had a split vote on the committee and we still have to work it out. We didn't have one dissenting vote, so I am not certain how we get much better than that.

I thank my friend from Colorado for all of his hard work on this bill. He was instrumental in a number of issues before the committee, especially on energy, on conservation. The Senator from Colorado was instrumental in working out the agreements and making sure we had a bill that got a unanimous vote out of our committee. I thank him for that.

He has been a champion of ranchers and farmers, a real champion of moving us ahead in energy, in renewable energy, farm-based energy, bio- based energy, which will get us off the Mideast oil pipeline that we have been on for far too long.

Again, I thank my friend from Colorado for all of his hard work. With him, I am hoping we can get cloture on this bill tomorrow and move ahead and go to conference and get a bill we can send to the President. I thank my friend from Colorado for all of his help in getting this farm bill here.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I see my friend, Senator Chambliss, is on the floor. I think we are both very frustrated. I don't think, I know we are both very frustrated that we are stymied on this farm bill. We are not moving anywhere. But in hopes that maybe we can get something moving, I am going to propound some unanimous consent requests to see if we can't break out and move ahead.

So I inquire of my colleague, Senator Chambliss, as to whether we can agree to a time limitation for debate with respect to the pending Dorgan-Grassley amendment. Therefore, I ask unanimous consent that there be 60 minutes of debate prior to a vote in relation to the Dorgan amendment No. 3508, with the time equally divided and controlled in the usual form; that upon the use or yielding back of time, the Senate vote in relation to the amendment; that no second-degree amendment be in order prior to the vote.

Mr. President, I now ask unanimous consent that we proceed to the Lugar-Lautenberg amendment regarding farm program reform; that there be 2 hours of debate with respect to the amendment prior to a vote; that no amendments be in order to the amendment prior to the vote; that the time be equally divided and controlled in the usual form; that upon the use or yielding back of the time, the Senate proceed to vote in relation to the amendment.

Mr. President, in light of that objection, I would inquire as to whether we can enter into an agreement on the Roberts amendment No. 3548; that there be 90 minutes for debate prior to a vote in relation to the amendment, with the time equally divided and controlled in the usual form; that upon the use or yielding back of time, the Senate vote in relation to the amendment, with no second- degree amendment in order prior to the vote.

Mr. President, let's see if there can be agreement to consider the Stevens amendment No. 3569; again that there be 60 minutes of debate prior to a vote in relation to the amendment, with no amendment in order to the amendment prior to the vote, and the time be equally divided and controlled in the usual form; that upon the use or yielding back of time, the Senate proceed to vote in relation to the amendment.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that we proceed to the Allard amendment No. 3572; that there be 60 minutes of debate prior to a vote in relation to the amendment, with the time equally divided and controlled in the usual form, with no second-degree amendment in order prior to the vote; that upon the use or yielding back of the time, the Senate proceed to vote in relation to the amendment.

I do not modify my request.

Mr. President, I am certain the Senator will have another unanimous consent request of his own very shortly, as he just enunciated. I just proposed five requests for votes in relation to amendments that are relevant to the farm bill. As we just heard, there are objections to each one of those.

We are ready to move ahead. We have been here now a week, over a week, on this farm bill, and we are stuck, dead in the water. Again, my friend, Senator Chambliss, said he wanted to send to the desk a list of amendments that have been looked at. Not all of them have been filed, as I understand, but they have been talked about. As I understand it, there are 255 amendments. That is ridiculous. Of course, we are not going to have 255 amendments. But at least we could work. We are here; we could be working now. We could debate the Dorgan amendment and vote on it today. There are five requests I just offered right now, five amendments we could dispose of this afternoon. The other side objected to each one of those.

Again, I am extremely frustrated, as the chairman of the committee. We got a bill through. We worked very hard on it. Senator Chambliss worked very hard on it. Yet we are stuck. We got it through committee. There was not one dissenting vote in the committee, not one. It is a good bill.

As Senator Lincoln said--I heard her speech this morning--it is bipartisan, it is multiregional. There are a lot of compromises in it, as is true in any bill. But we got it through without a dissenting vote. Yet we cannot even work on it on the Senate floor? We cannot even work on it. Forget about passing it, we can't even work on it.

I just propounded five requests to have debate and votes on amendments, relevant amendments to this farm bill, and every time it was objected to.

I don't know. I just want to make it clear that we on this side are ready to do business. We have been for a week. We could have been debating relevant amendments. We could have almost--we could have been done with this bill by now.

I want to point out a little bit of history. On the last farm bill, when I was privileged to chair the committee at that time in the Senate, in 2002, we had 10 days of consideration in December and 6 days in February. That was it. Mr. President, 53 amendments were considered, not 255.

In 1996, we had 4 days of consideration, 24 amendments to the bill; in 1990, 7 days of consideration, and we proceeded to vote on it. This is very frustrating. We are here. We are ready to do business. We are ready to debate and vote. Yet the leadership on the other side says no. The leadership says no.

I wanted to make it clear, fundamentally, basically clear to all Senators and anyone watching: We on this side have been ready, are ready, are willing to debate and vote on these amendments. It has been objected to on the other side.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on November 14, 2007, at 10:30 a.m., in order to conduct a hearing entitled ``Shareholder Rights and Proxy Access.''

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on November 14, 2007, at 2 p.m., in order to conduct a hearing entitled ``Sovereign Wealth Fund Acquisitions and Other Foreign Government Investments in the U.S.: Assessing the Economic and National Security Implications.''

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, November 14, 2007, at 10 a.m., in room 253 of the Russell Senate Office Building, in order to conduct a hearing.

The hearing will focus on the need to improve the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which is responsible for coordinating and directing Federal climate change research. It will also address the need for improved communication of climate information to decision makers.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, November 14, 2007, at 10 a.m., in room SD-366 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, in order to conduct a hearing.

The purpose of the hearing is to receive testimony on the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership as it relates to U.S. policy on nuclear fuel management.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions be authorized to meet in executive session during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, November 14, 2007 at 9:30 a.m. in room 430 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

THE PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

committee on homeland security and governmental affairs

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, November 14, 2007, at 10 a.m. in order to conduct a business meeting to consider pending committee business.

Agenda

Legislation

S. 2324, Inspector General Reform Act of 2007; S. 2292, National Bombing Prevention Act of 2007; S. 1667, a bill to establish a pilot program for the expedited disposal of Federal real property; S. 1000, Telework Enhancement Act of 2007; S. 2321, E-Government Reauthorization Act of 2007; H.R. 390, Preservation of Records of Servitude, Emancipation, and Post-Civil War Reconstruction Act; and H.R. 3571, a bill to amend the Congressional Accountability Act of 1995 to permit individuals who have served as employees of the Office of Compliance to serve as Executive Director, Deputy Executive Director, or General Counsel of the Office, and to permit individuals appointed to such positions to serve one additional term.

Nominations

Robert D. Jamison, Under Secretary for National Protection and Programs, U.S. Department of Homeland Security; Wiley Ross Ashley III, Assistant

Administrator, Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Department of Homeland Security; and the Honorable Ellen C. Williams, Member, Postal Board of Governors.

Postal Naming Bills

S. 2174, a bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 175 South Monroe Street in Tiffin, Ohio, as the ``Paul E. Gillmor Post Office Building;'' H.R. 2089, a bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 701 Loyola Avenue in New Orleans, Louisiana, as the ``Louisiana Armed Services Veterans Post Office;'' H.R. 3297, a bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 950 West Trenton Avenue in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, as the ``Nate DeTample Post Office Building;'' H.R. 3308, a bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 216 East Main Street in Atwood, Indiana, as the ``Lance Corporal David K. Fribley Post Office;'' H.R. 3530, a bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 1400 Highway 41 North in Inverness, Florida, as the ``Chief Warrant Officer Aaron Weaver Post Office Building;'' H.R. 2276, a bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 203 North Main Street in Vassar, Michigan, as the ``Corporal Christopher E. Esckelson Post Office Building;'' H.R. 3325, a bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 235 Mountain Road in Suffield, Connecticut, as the ``Corporal Stephen R. Bixler Post Office;'' S. 2110, a bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 427 North Street in Taft, California, as the ``Larry S. Pierce Post Office;'' H.R. 3382, a bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 200 North William Street in Goldsboro, North Carolina, as the ``Philip A. Baddour Sr. Post Office;'' S. 2290, a bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 16731 Santa Ana Avenue in Fontana, California, as the ``Beatrice E. Watson Post Office Building;'' S. 2272, a bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service known as the Southpark Station in Alexandria, Louisiana, as the ``John `Marty' Thiels Southpark Station;'' H.R. 3446, a bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 202 East Michigan Avenue in Marshall, Michigan, as the ``Michael W. Schragg Post Office Building;'' S. 2150/H.R. 3572, a bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 4320 Blue Parkway in Kansas City, Missouri, as the ``Wallace S. Hartsfield Post Office Building;'' S. 2107/H.R. 3307, a bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 570 Broadway in Bayonne, New Jersey, as the ``Dennis P. Collins Post Office Building;'' H.R. 3518, a bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 1430 South Highway 29 in Cantonment, Florida, as the ``Charles H. Hendrix Post Office Building.''

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Veterans' Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, November 14, 2007, in order to conduct a markup of pending legislation. Immediately following the conclusion of the markup, the Committee will conduct a hearing on the nomination of Michael W. Hager, of Virginia, to be an Assistant Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Human Resources and Management. The committee will meet in room SD-562 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building beginning at 9:30 a.m.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, November 14, 2007, at 2:30 p.m., in order to conduct a hearing entitled, ``Medicaid Providers That Cheat on Their Taxes and What Can Be Done About It.''

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law, be authorized to meet in order to conduct a hearing entitled ``No Safe Haven: Accountability for Human Rights Violators in the United States'' on Wednesday, November 14, 2007, at 10 a.m. in room SD-266 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

Witness list

Panel I: Sigal P. Mandelker, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, DC, and Marcy M. Forman, Director of Office of Investigations, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Washington,

Will the leader yield?

I thank our majority leader for all the support he has given us in getting this bill through even when we worked in committee and working with the Finance Committee to make sure we had the necessary money to meet our obligations and bringing it to the floor in a timely manner. We had all last week; we couldn't get anything done. We have this week before we go home for the Thanksgiving break. We could finish this bill, I say to our leader, we could finish this bill if we could just get the other side to agree to start the process.

We have an amendment, I say to the leader, before us which we could debate. We could even put a time limit on it. We have another amendment on which we could put a time limit. We could get two or three or four amendments done today. But, I say to the leader, I am very frustrated that we have the farm bill out here, we are ready to go--we have been ready for some time--there are amendments filed, and we would like to get started on it, but we can't until the minority leader agrees to move ahead and says we can bring up some of these amendments and move ahead on them. I just hope we don't waste another whole day.

I ask the leader, is there any way we can get the other side to kind of help move us along? I have talked to my ranking member, Senator Chambliss. He wants to move ahead. He has the desire, as I do. As the leader pointed out, this bill came out of committee on a bipartisan vote. There are going to be amendments, and I may support some and not others, and I am sure my ranking member will support some and not others, but that is the amendment process. I think we have a good bill that is going to wind up getting a lot of support on the Senate floor, and the sooner we get to it, the better off we are.

So I am just kind of perplexed, I guess, as to why the minority leader won't let us move ahead or why we can't get some amendments and time agreements.

That is right.

Mr. President, I say to my leader, if he will yield again, I think we have set a record in committee. In a day and a half, we had a comprehensive, 5-year farm bill passed--in a day and a half. I don't think that has ever been done.

Months.

That is right.

I hope we can overcome that because, as the leader said, we had great agreement in committee. He is right. We worked weeks and weeks and weeks in meetings with people in getting it all together, and in a day and a half we got it through on a unanimous vote--not one dissenting vote. So we have a good bill.

Mr. President, would the leader yield just one more time?

I would like to ask the minority leader if during this time we are trying to work out a set number of amendments, we know there are two or three amendments that are absolutely going to be offered. One is the one we are on right now. Then there is another one with I think Senators Lugar and Lautenberg. I am just wondering if we could get time agreements on those.

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

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for up to 10 minutes.

Madam President, earlier today, President Bush vetoed the Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations bill. I wish I could say I was surprised but, frankly, few actions by this President surprise me anymore. This is a good bill, a bipartisan bill, a bill that cleared both Houses with clear, strong majorities. In fact, the first one cleared here by 75 votes. It is a bill that reflects the critical education, health, job training needs of our country, especially for Americans who are at the bottom rungs of the socio- economic ladder. The bill was endorsed by more than 1,000--actually 1,075, to be exact--health, education, social service, and labor organizations in this country. There are disability groups in this letter, disease advocacy groups, school groups, community action partnerships, religious groups--millions of people across America are represented on this letter. This morning President Bush turned his back on all of them.

He seems to have no problem pouring billions of dollars into Iraq for schools, hospitals, job programs, health needs, but when it comes to those priorities here in America, the President says no. After spending all these billions of dollars on schools, hospitals, job programs, and health needs in Iraq, it is time to start investing some of that money here in America.

The President insists we have to stick to exactly the top number in his budget. Frankly, if we did that, we would be cutting programs such as the Low Income Heating Energy Assistance Program for the elderly at a time when we know fuel prices are going to be extremely high this winter.

The President completely zeroed out the social services block grant and cut the community services block grant by 50 percent.

Under the President's budget, we would be cutting the National Cancer Institute. At a time when we are starting to make some progress in the fight against cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and so many other things, he cuts funding for the NIH.

Again, we need to put more money into special education to help some of our beleaguered property tax payers in our States.

We have a backlog of several hundred thousand cases in Social Security. People who have paid in all their lives to Social Security, if they have a problem and they have an appeal pending or a case to be heard--there are 700,000 backlogged. It is about a year-and-a-half wait right now to get Social Security. It is unconscionable. We put money in there to reduce the backlog.

We wanted to fund more community health centers as one of the great things we have done in this country to help people who are not getting their health care needs attended to, to get them at their community health care centers. It has done a great job nationally.

We put more money into the Head Start Program. And No Child Left Behind--we put more money in there to meet our needs in title I schools, teacher training.

These are all provisions that were in our bill. As I noted before, it was bipartisan. I worked very closely with Senator Specter, our ranking member. There were dozens of provisions and funding increases in the bill that were requested specifically by Republicans, those on the other side of the aisle who requested that we increase funding in these areas. Unfortunately, it seems Mr. Bush is more interested in provoking a confrontation than in governing responsibly. He recently dismissed the funding in this bill as ``social spending,'' as though somehow it pays for ice cream socials or Saturday-night socials or something such as that--social spending. I never heard it referred to like that. It is out of bounds, it is out of touch, it shows how isolated this President has become.

Every dime of additional funding in this bill goes to bedrock essential programs and services that have been shortchanged in the last few years. I mentioned them: community health centers, Head Start, NIH, special education, student aid, social services block grant and community services

block grant, Pell grants. These are all things that have been shortchanged. The President's budget would cut NIH, LIHEAP, special education, and eliminate the community services block grant, job training, housing and emergency food assistance for our most needy citizens. Apparently, Mr. Bush sees this as frivolous social spending. I couldn't disagree more.

We have to keep the President's veto this morning in context. During the 6 years Republicans controlled Congress, Mr. Bush did not veto a single appropriations bill, including many that went over his budget. He never vetoed one of them. Now Democrats are in charge. Yes, we have gone over budget in some of the areas I mentioned and not only with the support but the encouragement of Republican Members who wanted to add more money. I guess because the Democrats run Congress now, the President says he will veto them. He did. He vetoed the bill this morning, but he never vetoed one in 6 years even though they were above his request. It smacks of the most blatant form of partisanship and politics. It kind of goes beyond the pale.

A few weeks ago the President sent up a new supplemental spending bill. We will be working on that this week. I don't know if we will pass it this week or when we come back in December. It is more than $196 billion, mostly for Iraq. The Congressional Budget Office now estimates that Mr. Bush's war in Iraq will cost a staggering $1.9 trillion in the next decade. Yet he vetoed this bill, over $12 billion in funding for education, health, biomedical research, and other domestic priorities.

You ask: $1.9 trillion, $12 billion, what does it mean? Look at it this way: Do away with all the zeroes. It means Mr. Bush is asking for $1,900 for Iraq. Yet he vetoed this bill because we spent $12 more than what he wanted. That shows misplaced priorities: $12 billion a month for the war in Iraq, yet he vetoed this bill which is $12 billion for a whole year.

What is most disappointing about the President's veto this morning is his total unwillingness to compromise. Any time we work out bills, we compromise. That is the art of democracy. We compromise. No one around here ever gets everything he or she wants, but we make compromises. We do it in committee; we do it on the floor of the Senate. We do it between the House and the Senate. Then when all is said and done and we work in conference, usually the President will work with us to work out problems. This is where the White House is. Where do we meet? The President never came to our conference--I shouldn't say the President didn't, but his people never came to our conference to offer compromises, where we might meet halfway.

When the President sent down his veto message, he mentioned two things about our bill: One, it had the lifting of his ban on stem cell research; two, it spent more money than he wanted. I thought a compromise might be: OK, we will take off the stem cell stuff, and you agree to the spending priorities we have. We voluntarily, to try to meet the President halfway, said: OK, we will take off the stem cell issue, even though Senator Specter and I both believe strongly in it. It passed the committee with only three dissenting votes. The Senate has spoken at least twice in support of an embryonic stem cell bill to take off the handcuffs the President has put on scientists. But even that wasn't enough.

Then we went to conference. We thought: OK, will the President now try to meet us somewhat on the spending part? The answer was no. It was his way or the highway. We either agree totally with the President or he is going to veto it and the White House will put pressure on the House because that is where the bill goes for an override, to keep them from overriding his veto.

It is sad the President has taken that position. Under the Constitution, Congress does have the power to override a veto. It happened last week with the water resources bill. He vetoed it. Both the House and Senate voted over two-thirds, as is constitutionally required, to override the veto. We could do it on this bill that funds education, everything from Head Start, elementary education with title I, No Child Left Behind, elementary and secondary education, college with Pell grants, student loans, forgiveness of loans if you go into certain occupations such as medically underserved areas, legal services, or become a prosecuting attorney--the type of occupations that don't pay a lot of money but are needed in our country.

On health, especially all the biomedical research that was in that bill for NIH, the money for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for making sure we get more flu vaccine this year stockpiled, not to mention all of the efforts that CDC is doing in stockpiling other vaccines in case of a terrorist incident, something that might happen--we hope it doesn't, but we have to be prepared for it--that is in this bill he vetoed.

I mentioned things such as low-income heating energy assistance for low-income elderly. This is all in this bill. Now it is up to the House whether they will vote to override the veto. It will be interesting to see how many House Members would vote to override the President on the water resources bill but would not vote to override a bill that deals with health, education, community block grants, NIH, the Centers for Disease Control. It will be interesting.

The Water Resources Development Act was an important bill. I was strongly supportive of it. It goes basically to meet one of the urgent infrastructure needs of the country: waterways, to make sure we upgrade our locks and dams and make sure they are adequate to the environmental needs and river transportation needs for the next century. It is vital. The Education, Health and Human Services, and Labor appropriations bill is sort of the counterpart of that in terms of the human infrastructure, making sure we have the best educated populace, that we meet the health care needs of people, that we invest in cutting edge research, that we have good job retraining programs.

We just had a case where a Maytag plant, after all these years, closed in Newton, IA. We need job retraining programs. That is in this bill the President vetoed. It is human infrastructure needs.

It will be interesting to see how many House Members vote to override the President when it comes to the physical infrastructure but now will not vote to override the President when it comes to the human infrastructure. I hope it is very few. I hope we get the same number of votes to override the President's veto on this Education, Health and Human Services, and Labor appropriations bill as we got on the water resources bill.

It is a sad day that the President would veto this bill. We went out of our way to meet him halfway, but he said absolutely not. It is his way or nothing else.

That is not the way we do things. The President is not acting responsibly, quite frankly, in this area. I don't know what we can do. If the House overrides the veto, I am pretty certain we would have the votes here to override the veto. We would have to wait for the House to act first. I hope they do, and I hope we get it. I hope we vote to override the veto. But until then, we have to see what the House is going to do.

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

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

Mr. President, it is hard to believe, but we are on the farm bill. As any casual observer might notice, we are not doing anything. We sit here with an empty Chamber. The farm bill has now been on the floor for over a week. The farm bill was laid down a week ago yesterday, as a matter of fact, and nothing has happened. Why hasn't anything happened? Because we can't get anything from the other side.

We want to move ahead. We wanted to ask unanimous consent to go ahead with an amendment with a time limit, vote on it, and move to another amendment, but the other side refuses. The Republican leadership refuses to move ahead on the farm bill. I suggested earlier today that we may at least want to have some amendments up. We cannot get consent on the other side. So here we sit. At this rate, we may not have a farm bill.

We worked very hard on it this year. First, on the other side in the House, they got a farm bill passed early. We met and worked hard on it all summer long and worked with the Finance Committee to get extra funds to meet our obligations. I am checking on this right now, but I believe we had a record movement of a farm bill through our committee this year--a day and a half, a short day and a half.

Now, this is my seventh farm bill. I have never seen anything move that fast. It was the result of weeks and weeks and months and months of working with the other side, with everybody working together, hammering out agreements, before we brought it to the committee. That is a good way of doing things around here. You establish relationships, figure out what people need to make sure they take care of their constituents. We came out of committee with not one vote against the farm bill. That never happened before, either, to the best of my memory. We always have a split vote coming out of committee on the farm bill. So it took a day and a half to get it out.

I commend my ranking member, Senator Chambliss, who worked very hard on his side to pull things together. I don't even know how many amendments we had in that day and a half--four, five, or six--not very many. We disposed of them; we either adopted them or not. When we voted the bill out, we didn't have one dissenting vote.

So you would think a bill such as that coming to the floor could be handled rapidly. But then we got here and we wanted to move it, so our majority leader, exercising his right as majority leader, said we will do this bill and we will do relevant amendments. If it is relevant to the farm bill, we will take all comers. Bring them all. That sounds good to me--open debate, open amendments. Bring on the amendments to the farm bill. But the other side said, no, they may have some extraneous amendments dealing with children's health care, estate taxes--I don't know what else. We may have had some on this side too. But we were agreeing that we would not take any non-relevant amendments, whether they were from Democrats or Republicans. I thought that was a pretty good way to proceed, to just focus on the farm bill. The Republican side said no.

We have been locked here for over a week. I say to my friends in farm country--farmers, ranchers, agribusiness, the suppliers, wholesalers, retailers, shippers, those who sell seed, the elevator operators, fertilizer dealers, and those in the livestock industry, who want to know what the farm bill is like so they can plan ahead on whether they are going to milk more cows or fewer cows: Will the milk go to class A or class B? Will we feed more cattle or will we shift to feeding hogs? What is the lay of the land going to be? They need certainty. The livestock market is volatile as it is, but they need some certainty as to what we are going to do here. That is why we worked very hard to get the bill done, hopefully, by December, which is not unusual--except for the last farm bill when I was chairman at that time, the House was in Republican hands and the Senate was Democratic, and we got it through ahead of schedule. But for that one exception, every farm bill comes in late. That is just the nature of things around here, I guess. We usually get them done by December. The present farm bill is expired. We are now on a continuing resolution.

I say to my friends in farm and ranch country, you ought to be calling up the minority leadership and saying we ought to get this farm bill through. We have to get it through. But if we don't move soon, we will have an extension of the present farm bill. We will just extend it. All the work we have done this year will be for naught. We will have to pick it up again some other time. That may be what will happen because of the fact that we cannot get an agreement to move ahead. We are stuck here at 6:20 in the evening, and we have been on the bill 1 week with not one amendment. All we ask is for the other side to bring forth amendments, and we will get ours and start moving.

I know we are trying to work things out. After a while, my patience runs out. Next week, we have Thanksgiving. People want to go home for Thanksgiving. If we don't finish the farm bill this week, it is going to be hard to have a farm bill done before we go home for Christmas. I know what it is like after Thanksgiving when we come back. We have 3 weeks, and we have all our appropriations bills. I am chairman of one of the appropriations subcommittees. We have all that to do. We have the Iraq war funding to consider, and we have some tax bills. Everybody is going to want to get out of here and get home for Christmas.

I say to all those watching, if we don't get a farm bill done this week, it will be hard to get one done this year. Maybe we will have to go into next year sometime to get it done. I hope that doesn't happen, but here we sit with no action, and there are going to be other things to be brought up this week, such as conference reports.

So here we sit. I hope we can reach some agreement and move ahead rapidly. If we don't, it looks as if we may be in for a long continuing resolution on the farm bill--either into next year or beyond. I don't know when we can

finally get it done. But it is too important to just leave it go. We would like to get it done. Is there everything in the farm bill I would have wished for? No. Senator Chambliss and every member of the committee could say the same thing. That is the art of compromise. This bill is a good compromise among all regions of the country. I hope we can move ahead.

I want to talk a little about one area of the farm bill about which I feel very passionate. Even though we have done some good things, we haven't done as much as we need to do, considering the enormity of what confronts us in terms of the loss of our soil, the pollution of our water and waterways, and the degradation of whole areas of this country because of intensive cropping or lack of good practices. We are facing a dire circumstance in this country where we are going to lose the productivity of our soil. Almost like global warming, it may reach a point where the scales have tipped so far that to get the productivity back, to clean up our waterways might be almost impossible or will cost so much money that we won't be able to do it.

All of the farmers I have fought for so hard over these last 32 years are what I call the front line of conservationists. Farmers and ranchers want to protect the soil. They want to leave it better for future generations. When you are caught between a rock and a hard place in terms of all of the input costs, what it costs to produce a crop, the demands on those crops, and some negative incentives in the system right now in terms of Government support to farming and ranching--you put all those together, and there is a counterpressure, if you will, from the Government and from society at large against the farmer being a good conservationist.

We are placing tremendous demands on our food and fiber producers in this country--tremendous demands--and, with the ethanol boom and others, even more demand for the productivity of our soil. So what is happening right now, in many cases, is we are pushing it to the limits and beyond the limits to what soil can carry and what our water can carry, and now we have to think about being really good conservationists, not on the scale of the individual farmer but on a national scale.

I wish to take some time to talk about conservation and what is happening in our country at large in terms of conservation and what is happening to our soil and water in America and why we have to do something about it and why little steps, little things aren't going to do it. We need some big steps, big interventions, just as we do on global warming. The previous two speakers talked about that. If we just tinker around the edges, it won't mean anything. It is the same with conservation. We need a national commitment to a conservation ethic to restore, renew, and preserve our waterways, our soil, our wildlife habitats, and, yes, the source of our water. All that needs to be preserved.

I have some pictures I wanted to point to here, some charts to give an idea of what I am talking about. I will bet you, Mr. President, a lot of Americans have seen this first picture somewhere. Every school kid has seen it in a history book. It is reprinted time and time again in one of our periodical magazines, talking about the great Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

What was the Dust Bowl? It took place in the panhandles of Oklahoma, Texas, some in New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, up into Nebraska, and stretching up into South Dakota. This is one of the famous pictures taken in Cimarron, OK, in 1936 in the Dust Bowl. You can see there is no grass, nothing. You can see that the top of the posts are covered with dust. And there is a farmer and his kids running to take shelter from yet another one of the dust storms. That was in Cimarron County.

The year before that, in 1935, under President Franklin Roosevelt, the Soil Conservation Act passed and the Soil Conservation Service began providing help and service to farmers on conservation.

The next picture shows what happened that year. This is another famous picture, of a dust cloud in Kansas. On April 14, 1935, a dust storm started in eastern Montana, western North Dakota, rumbled through South Dakota into Nebraska, across Kansas into Oklahoma and into Texas. This dust storm was called Black Sunday. It was the biggest dust storm ever. In fact, it was preceded the previous year by a dust storm that swept from west to east that dumped dust on New York City. New York City got so dark it had to turn on its lights. Ships at sea could not dock in New York City because of the dust.

There is a wonderful book that I recommend that was released last year. This book by Timothy Egan is called ``The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl.'' I recommend this book.

First of all, it is a great read. He tells a wonderful story about the Dust Bowl, but he tells the history of the whole area and what happened in that area in the 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, up to the 1930s. Here is what he said:

By some estimates, more than 80 million acres in the

southern plains were stripped of topsoil.

Mr. President, 80 million acres.

In less than 20 years, a rich cover that had taken several

thousand years to develop was disappearing day by day.

Eighty million acres of grassland turned over, grassland that he says in the book was laid down almost 20,000 years ago. As he said, this was land the buffalo couldn't hurt, the tornadoes, the fires, and the floods struck, but the grasslands stayed, and they came back year after year.

But then there was the land rush. That area was opened up to homesteaders. They came in with plows and new equipment. They plowed it all up, turned it over.

As one person said in Timothy Egan's book, he looked around and said: There is something wrong here; the wrong side is up. The dirt is up and the grass is down and the wind started blowing. And then came Black Sunday, April 14, 1935, the worst dust storm in recorded history. I don't mean in this century; I mean in recorded history, the worst dust storm ever.

Again, when people look at that picture and they read about Black Sunday, they say: That is all over with; we took care of that situation. But look at this next photograph: a dust storm, the same as you saw before, and this time with color photography. That is a dust storm in the same area in Kansas, taken last year. The same huge dust storms rumbling through the plains because we have, once again, stripped the soil bare, turned the wrong side up, and we lack good conservation practices.

Here is another picture. This one could have been in the thirties just as the first picture I showed, but this was taken in South Dakota last year. Here is a fence. We can barely see it. The top of the fence is almost covered, and it stretches as far as the eye can see. That is just dust and a few tumbleweeds. That is South Dakota last year.

I hope we can recall the lessons of the thirties and what putting marginal cropland in production will really cost us.

This farm bill will prohibit allowing newly broken native sod into the Crop Insurance Program. That is vitally important because you cannot be covered under the disaster provisions of this farm bill unless you buy crop insurance. So if you turn over native sod, you cannot get crop insurance on the newly broken land, and you will not get disaster payments, and you will not be eligible then for all the other programs. So there is a strong provision in this bill to at least save some of the native sod because history can and will and does repeat itself, as we have just shown.

That is the dust. Here is the water. This is a cornfield in my part of the country. We can see that it has rained, and there is water running off. It is running probably into a ditch, that ditch drains probably into a small stream, that small stream runs into a bigger river, and that river goes into either the Missouri River or the Mississippi River.

What happens is when this soil and water runs off, it is taking with it phosphorous, and it is taking with it nitrogen, washing down into the river. What happens to it? When it goes down river, it winds up down south of New Orleans. In this next photograph, the red area is called the hypoxic area, the dead zone in the mouth of the Mississippi. This picture was taken by satellite this year. That area in red is now

the size of New Jersey. These nutrient levels are so high, that it triggers an explosive growth of algae; when the algae dies, the decomposition process consumes all the oxygen, so all marine life dies--no crabs, no shrimp, no nothing.

So, again, the water we saw running off these fields goes into the Mississippi, and this is what happens to it.

What can be done about it? There are things that can be done about it. This picture show us one. I showed you a picture a little bit ago of the water running off the field. That wouldn't happen here. This is the Boone River watershed, Hamilton County, IA. We see buffer strips along the streams. So if there is a heavy rain, any runoff will be trapped by the trees and the grasslands and whatever else is in between.

Those nutrients are good for trees. It makes them grow. The trees keep the nutrients from going in the water. Practices such as this are promoted by several conservation programs--the Conservation Stewardship Program, the EQIP program, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, and the Conservation Reserve Program, especially the continuous signup.

What is so important to note is that these are incentives paid to farmers to do these strips. One might say: Why wouldn't farmers just do that on their own? Why? Because of economics. The Senator was present today when I mentioned earlier about my backyard. I happen to be one of a few people who actually lives in the house in which he was born. Not many people can say that. I actually live in the house in which I was born.

A lot of people say: Harkin, I live in the house I grew up in.

I said: That is not what I said. I live in the house in which I was born. I wasn't born in a hospital. I was born in a house, as were all my five siblings. We lived in a small town in rural Iowa. People were born at home.

In my home, we have a nice backyard with fruit trees. My wife planted a nice garden out there. Ever since I was a kid, I always thought I knew where the end of our garden was to the east, and there has always been a field there, about a 140-acre field with corn and beans.

Because of the high price of corn and the high price of beans, the owner of that property sent a notice to all of us who live around it saying: I just had my property resurveyed, and my property is about 6 feet more into your property than what you think.

He has his rights. No one ever bothered to think about it in the past. We had our garden there, and we had our trees. As a consequence, I am going to have to have some of our bushes and trees taken out and move the line back. I guess I mind a little bit, but the guy is within his rights.

One might think: What does 6 feet mean? Up until now, 6 feet never meant a hoot to any farmer who farmed that land, and it has gone through three or four different hands. No one ever cared about it. Because the demands are now so high on the owner of that property, and I am sure the farmer who farms that land says: You know, that extra 6 feet, I can grow a few more rows of corn in there and get some more money. So before next year we have to move everything back, and they get another 6 feet.

I tell that story to demonstrate the pressures that farmers are under to plow and plant right up to the fence row or anyplace they can get.

I don't know the farmer who owns that land in this photograph, but I can tell you his economic pressures are to plant right up to the stream, to get rid of all that buffer and plant right up to the stream. Why doesn't he? Because he is in a conservation program that is giving him incentives, payments to provide a continuous strip through there. He might have made a little more money if he had planted right up to it, but he has probably a CRP agreement for 10 years, maybe has a CSP contract.

I know a lot of farmers in Iowa who have done buffers like this. You know what, Mr. President. They feel better about it. They feel better about it because they know they are helping keep the water clean. They are farming the way nature really meant for them to farm. But because of economic pressures, they need help.

That is what this farm bill does, it provides some help and support. They get a benefit, but I can tell you, he probably would make more money if he plowed right up to the stream. But he is willing to give up a little bit as long as he gets some help from the Government to put this buffer in. They feel better about it.

What do we get out of it? Cleaner water, fish, not hypoxia down in the Gulf of Mexico. It cleans up our waterways. It preserves our soil for future generations. That is what is in this farm bill, to help them continue to do that.

I talked about the Midwest. How about the East? Here is a farm in Pennsylvania that uses many of our conservation practices. We see strip cropping and contour farming. They have some corn, maybe some alfalfa in there for livestock. It is good conservation practice. It looks as if he has a good rotation practices on this land.

There is one other item in this photograph. We see the city out here. It is encroaching on his farmland. There is a program called the Farmland Protection Program which buys easements on land, permanent easements on land. So that land cannot be converted to development; it has to stay as farmland. Again, here is a farmer. He could be getting CSP, the Conservation Stewardship Program. He may have gotten some EQIP money, and he may be getting farmland protection program money. I don't know. But those are all programs involved in preserving the land. We can see the strip cropping on the hillside and the contour plowing. That is what he has done to hold back the water. Again, part of our farm bill is to provide money for the Farmland Protection Program.

Here is something a little bit closer to where we are here in the Capitol. Any of us who have been around this area for any time knows the Chesapeake Bay is polluted. Now, not all of that Chesapeake Bay pollution is because of farmland. There is a lot of industrial waste coming from factories and from other places up and down--plants, people dumping stuff out and going into the Chesapeake Bay. That has to be stopped. But a big part of the Chesapeake Bay problem is the nutrients coming off a lot of our land, such as livestock waste. It comes from the whole Chesapeake Bay watershed, which extends all the way to New York State. So New York State, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, a little bit of West Virginia, all that water dumps into the Chesapeake Bay, eventually.

Here is a farm in New Castle County, DE. Again, this is a prime example of conservation of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Prior to this picture being taken--you can see some wetlands and farm fields in the background--where that wetland is, crops used to grow. So from those fields, nutrients ran off right into the bay. Through conservation programs and through the Wetlands Reserve Program, this farmer has gone back and, with the help of conservation, has put this back into a wetlands, secluded off from the Chesapeake Bay, so any runoff filters through the wetlands. It filters through the wetlands before it gets to the Chesapeake Bay.

If anybody wants to see how a wetlands works, you don't have to go more than about 15 miles from where this Capitol is, southwest of here. There is something called the Huntley Meadows Wetlands Reserve. I recommend it highly for anyone. Go down there and take a stroll through the wetlands. They have done a great job. They have preserved the wetlands, and it is right in the middle of a city. All of a sudden you go from housing developments and busy thoroughfares up Route 1 and down south, and all of a sudden you are in a wetlands area. A lot of the runoff from apartment houses and businesses and parking lots and everything else drains into this wetlands. By the time it gets through and dumps into the Potomac River, it is clean. The wetlands cleans it up. It is 15 miles from here where you can see it happen, Huntley Meadows.

This bill provides $160 million for the Chesapeake Bay to do this kind of work to back up into the farmlands, restore wetlands, and help farmers build the structures and do the things to clean up the Chesapeake Bay. We can do it. This farmer did it in Delaware.

Now, this photo is from Georgia. Well, you can't see much except this shows pine trees back here. All pine

trees back here, but in the past they were overgrown and so thick that wildlife could not use it for habitat. So they thinned it out to provided for some wildlife cover in that area. One of Senator Chambliss's priorities was to add a feature to the Conservation Reserve Program that will result in better management of soft wood pine stands currently enrolled in the CRP. The Senate bill invests $84 million in this effort. Again, showing the breadth and the depth of what we are doing on conservation in forested areas in the South, making sure we have good conservation at work there also.

And lest we forget about the West, this is Arizona. This is well- managed grazing land. The Conservation Stewardship Program provides incentives to increase current conservation, use better management practices, such as rotational grazing that better utilizes the resource base and increases wildlife habitat. The Senate bill continues to devote 60 percent of the Environmental Quality Incentives Program to livestock needs.

Again, it is hard to see here, but what we are trying to show with this is that with fences, with rotational grazing, you don't feed down all the grass and don't create areas where the wind blows all the dust, or if they have a heavy rain it runs the soil off. This is good conservation practice and rotational grazing. You graze for a while, then you move them on. But in order to do that, you obviously need some fences, and fences cost money. So we provide that kind of help. If a rancher wants to get involved in good conservation practices with rotational grazing, we help with that. We help with that. So even in the Arizona southwest, we can make a difference.

Well, now you might wonder about this picture. Well, we are all familiar with the problems affecting honeybees and other pollinating species. In this farm bill, we have made strategic changes to help with this issue. In the Conservation Reserve Program, the Conservation Stewardship Program, and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, we emphasize the creation and improvement of both the native and managed pollinator habitat. We require the Secretary of Agriculture to update conservation standards to include consideration for pollinators. Now, our Senate bill provides clear direction to focus conservation programs on creating, improving, and maintaining pollinator habitats and to revise and update conservation practices to include pollinators.

Again, together these practices will help to establish better pollination. We know we have had a problem with honeybees dying. We don't know exactly what is causing it. They are doing a lot of research on it now. But we do know one thing. In order for our prairies once again to blossom and do all the kinds of conservation work we need, we need that little animal called a honeybee for pollination purposes. So this bill invests in that also.

Coming full circle, when I started off my talk, I showed pictures of the great Dust Bowl in Kansas and places such as that--eastern Colorado. That is where this picture was taken. If you could take a picture of here in 1935, you would see the Dust Bowl. What has happened in this area, obviously a housing development has grown up, but in the foreground you will see grassland. That is a grassland reserve. They can't build houses there. You see a part of it, but this is a huge grassland reserve--protected by an easement that ensures that it stays in agricultural production. Grass will grow there, and livestock will graze, and the grass will hold the soil down, and keep the dust from blowing.

So, again, in this Grassland Reserve Program, there are about a million acres enrolled right now, but we haven't been doing it very long. Remember, I mentioned in the Dust Bowl that 80 million acres--80 million acres--were turned up. We have a million in protected grassland. We have a long way to go. We have a long way to go. But we put in $240 million for the Grassland Reserve Program in this bill to continue the program.

Now, again, I want to digress a little bit on this grassland. You see, one of the other things we are doing in our farm bill is we are providing money for ethanol--cellulosic ethanol. Ethanol not made from row crops, such as corn, but cellulose made from grass, such as this. With the research we are doing, we know we can make ethanol from these grasses. We are getting the right enzymes to make it economical. The scientists and engineers tell me that in 5 years or so we will have an economical means of making cellulosic ethanol. We are already investing in that in several ethanol plants around the country.

Imagine, if you will, this huge area of grasslands in the Plains States, where I showed the picture of the Dust Bowl.

This is the picture I showed earlier of a dust storm in Kansas last year. Now imagine, if you will, that rather than cropping this land, as we do every year, we have grassland. Now, as Timothy Egan pointed out in his book, nature has a way of selecting the best ecosystem over a long period of time. Nature does that, whether it is the rain forest up in the Northwest, the bay area here for shellfish and others, and backwaters, where all the fish life starts, or in the grasslands in the Plains areas. So over thousands and thousands and thousands of years, nature laid down this thin topsoil, and on top of it grew grasses-- buffalo grass, blue stem, others--and through selectivity, over periods of time, were the hardiest to grow there. They sent their roots down 20, 30 feet into the ground, and they could withstand years of drought, the worst blizzards, and grass fires that used to sweep across the Plains.

Anyone who has ever read the Laura Ingalls Wilder book ``Little House on the Prairie'' knows how she talks about the threat of these huge fires sweeping through and all of that kept coming back, the grasslands that were there. Millions of buffalo ranged up and down there and had enough food to sustain them forever, and in 20 years we turned over 80 million acres of it that then dried up and blew away.

But think about this. We are going to have cellulose ethanol made from grass. Ten years from now, fifteen years from now, twenty years from now, we could see much of this land back into grassland. Not for buffalo to graze on but being grown as cellulosic feedstock being cut for ethanol and making fuel for our country. You don't have to plow it up. You leave it there, you cut it, it stays there and grows the next year. We can have the best conservation, we can have our grasslands, and we can produce the fuel we need for this country and do it in a way that is in concert with nature.

So that is why it is so important we get this grassland back and provide the incentives to protect as much of this grass as possible, and that is why we put $240 million into this bill.

The last couple of things I want to show is the Conservation Security Program, now renamed the Conservation Stewardship Program, which has enrolled about 15 million acres since 2002. This was a new program put into the farm bill in 2002. You see, most conservation programs are programs designed to give incentives to someone to take land out of production, put it into grassland, put it in trees, wetlands and buffer strips. And that is an important part of conservation.

But there is a lot of working lands. We need farmers to be better conservationists on working lands, lands that are being cropped. That means, for example, putting on the right amount of fertilizer and other management practices that can make a big difference for the environment.

Through the Conservation Security Program, I saw areas where farmers enrolled, and transitioned to precision agriculture, with equipment guided by the Global Positioning System. They had soil tests done of their farm, and rather than applying the same amount of fertilizer all over, they put the right amount of fertilizer wherever they applied it--more one place, less in another place. They were able to monitor and get the right amount of fertilizer so it wouldn't run off. They were able to buy equipment so they could do minimum tillage, where they didn't have to turn the soil over with the plow. They could combine, cut the cornstalks and leave it right there on the ground.

I visited a farm in southern Iowa this summer that was in the Conservation Security Program. With help the farmer received from the program, he had purchased some equipment to do what I am talking about. Then he took me over his land. He had corn last year. This year, he is planting beans. So he

is on a rotation, which is good for the soil. But he left all his cornstalks chopped and laid on the ground. At the time of my visit, there was rain in his area. It rained almost 5 inches--5 inches in about 12 hours. Now that is a heavy rain. We drove all over his land in a four-wheel drive vehicle. He hardly had any soil runoff because that rain would hit those cornstalks on the ground, slide off--he almost had literally no soil runoff.

Right across the road was a farmer who was not in the program and was planting corn up and down the hillsides and there were ditches where the water had taken that soil and run off the farm into other ditches, into streams, and the soil was gone.

The program in the 2002 farm bill was a conservation program to help farmers be better conservationists on land on which they were actually producing crops or livestock. They didn't have to take land out of production. They just had to do things better: minimum tillage, crop rotations, buffer strips, applying with the right amount of fertilizer--that type of thing. For producers who have been able to enroll, it has worked wonderfully.

But there has been one problem. The administration decided to allow enrollment on the basis of a watershed rotation. Over eight years, the program would supposedly cover all the watersheds in the country, but it has fallen far short of that goal. That is the bad news.

The good news is in this farm bill we get off the watershed rotation, and make CSP a national program--producers in every watershed and region of the states would be eligible to enroll, every year. Producers are ranked based upon the level of conservation they are already doing, and how much new conservation they are willing to do as part of the contract. We are strengthening this program.

It is hard to see on this chart, but the conservation security program is in every State in the Nation. It is all over, from Washington, Oregon, California, all across the east coast. A lot of people have said it is mostly for the Midwest. That is not true. On the east coast, on the far west up in Idaho. We even have some in Alaska, even some in Hawaii--again, to protect our soil and other resources.

The point I want to make here is in the last 5 years since we put this program in, we have enrolled 15 million acres. I know that sounds like a lot, but under the new program we have in this bill, with the funding we have, we will enroll 13.2 million acres each year in this program--13.2 million acres every year. We had 15 million acres in 5 years. We will do almost as much every year for the next 5 years. This means by the end of this farm bill we will have about 80 million acres enrolled in this program.

What will that mean? It will mean cleaner water, better wildlife habitats, less soil runoff; a better environment, a healthier environment for farmers, their families, and for all of us. That is why this program is so important.

It is sad to say, the House didn't put anything into this program and actually cut the program from baseline. It is an important program, one that can do a lot of good for our country. But it needs to be funded properly to give producers a fair shot at enrolling for it to do the good it has the potential of doing.

Last, here is the kind of thing we are looking at here. We talked about the soil and the land but it all comes down to people and the kind of people we have farming, and their families. That is what it comes down to. How do we nurture beginning farmers? How do we get young people involved in this?

Here is a young dairy farmer, Matt Fendry. He is 25 years old. He farms near Lanesboro in southeast Minnesota. He is a beginning farmer. He sells his milk through Organic Valley out of Lafarge, WI.

Matt, like many beginning farmers and ranchers, will benefit from the provisions we have in the conservation title. Here is how we do it.

For beginning farmers like Matt Fendry, and socially disadvantaged producers, we have included a special increase in cost-share rates up to 90 percent. So if the young man here wants to do good conservation work on his land--maybe rotational grazing the grassland for his cattle--it probably will cost him a little bit to get some things established. He can get back 90 percent. He only has to put up 10 percent of this money. The Government will come in for 90 percent for a beginning farmer.

Ten percent of our conservation programs will be reserved for beginning farmers. And for the first time we will allow the Secretary of Agriculture to advance up to 30 percent of the value of an EQIP contract to beginning and socially disadvantaged producers so they can purchase the materials they need for conservation work.

Most of the EQIP money that will go to Matt for what he will do for good conservation would come after he does it, maybe a year after. That means he would have to borrow the money, and pay interest. Now we give the Secretary authority to get what he needs, 30 percent up front, so if he needs to put in fencing, buy seed, whatever he needs to get this operation going using good conservation, he can get up front.

I think that is probably the bottom line here on my whole talk this evening, and that is what can we do for conservation. But what can we do to get young people involved in a way so they start from the very beginning, not just being a producer but being an environmentally conscious producer and one who, from the very beginning, protects our soil, our water, and our wildlife habitat? That is the goal of this.

You can see I am very passionate about this. I am passionate because if you read history, you know what we are doing. We saw it in the photos at the beginning of my presentation--we are repeating the mistakes of the past. We are abusing the land and pushing it beyond its productive capacity. As I said--the farmers want to protect their soil and their land. But the economics of agriculture drives producers to produce as much as they can when prices are high. The farm bill has to counter those pressures.

It is not good for this country. It is not good for our society. It is not good for rural America. So we need to make some changes in this farm bill and redirect it and guide it toward more conservation.

Back in 1998, I was wondering why it was that Europe was spending so much of government money on their farmers, yet they were complying with the World Trade Organization restrictions on farm subsidies. We are spending less money on our farmers and somehow we are not complying. I wanted to see what were they doing in Europe different than we were doing. So I traveled around and visited a lot of their farms.

No matter where I went, I saw a pristine countryside. I saw a countryside with small towns that were vibrant. I saw soil that was protected, waterways that were decently clean--some areas better than others. Finally I began to figure it out, what countries like France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, England, and Denmark were doing. They were making ``green payments'' to farmers, payments to farmers for conservation. Under the WTO, that is in the ``green box,'' which means it doesn't count against WTO limits. So some of the Europeans figure out here is the way we support our farmers, our small towns, our communities, clean up our water, provide for a beautiful countryside, and, guess what, we don't take a hit in the WTO because of that.

That made me think. I come back, traveling around through this country, I see the wind blowing, I see the dust storms, the soil erosion, the hypoxia maps in the Gulf of Mexico, what is happening to the Chesapeake Bay, and I think: Wait a minute, why aren't we doing that?

We have a program now, a direct payment program--$5 billion a year, $25 billion over the life of this farm bill, that started in 1996, of direct payments to farmers. To qualify for direct payments, all you had to do is have base acreage and a certain crop back in 1981 to 1985. You don't have to plant anything to get this money.

Moreover, the bigger you are, and the bigger the base you had, the more money you get. The result is that these payments lead to a cycle. More direct payments means a greater opportunity to expand. More expansion means more direct payments. It is like a black hole, there is nothing to stop it.

I am concerned that this cycle is hurting family farmers. It encourages producers to get bigger and bigger. Yet here we go, $5 billion a year, $25 billion

over the life of this. It seems to me it would make much more sense and would be more supported, I think, by the general populace, if we took that money and put it out in green payments to farmers to build the buffer strips, the contours, the wetlands, the grasslands--yes, paying farmers to help them use the right amount of fertilizer and do rotations and things such as that, that help preserve the soil.

Conservation programs are perfectly acceptable under WTO. We get a lot out of it. I am hopeful in the coming weeks, maybe as we go to conference on this farm bill, we can do more for conservation.

I want to say we did a good job on conservation in this bill. I am not denying that. We put good money in conservation. I thank my ranking member, Saxby Chambliss, and all the others on the committee. It was a hard fight but we got the money in there. But it is not quite enough when you look at all the other things in the farm bill. We moved the ball forward, but I think with the demands on our farmers now, what we see happening around this country, we need an even greater commitment. We need to do a lot more in conservation than we have ever done before or pretty soon the scales will tip so far that the kind of money it is going to take it to do it will be prohibitive.

That is why I take the time of the Senate tonight to talk about conservation. We need a better conservation ethic in this country. As we consider the farm bill, we need to be talking about soil and water conservation, helping farmers be better stewards of the soil and water. I am hopeful as we move into more debate we can make a few changes that will add some money to conservation before we go to conference. We have done a lot in the farm bill, but we have a lot more we can do.

So I ask any Senator out there who has an amendment, if you have not filed it, you better file it because pretty soon we may cut it off.

I am not encouraging amendments, you understand. I am just saying, if you have one, you better get it in in a hurry, and we will take a look at it.

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

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

Mr. President, on behalf of Senator Reid, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to executive session to consider Calendar No. 206, the nomination of James Kunder to be Deputy Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development; that the nomination be confirmed; the motion to reconsider be laid on the table; the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action; and the Senate then return to legislative session.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Karla Bromwell of my staff be granted floor privileges for the duration of today's session.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Virginia Murphy, who is on detail from the Department of Agriculture to the office of Senator Feinstein, be granted the privileges of the floor for the duration of debate and any vote on H.R. 2419.

Mr. President, for the benefit of all Senators, we are now back on the farm bill. The farm bill was laid down 2 days ago, on Tuesday. We have asked the other side if they want to offer amendments, but we have seen no amendments. We have one amendment pending. The Grassley-Dorgan or Dorgan-Grassley--I don't know which came first on it--amendment is pending. But we have heard from the leader on the other side that they want to offer amendments.

We are here. We are on the farm bill. We have asked for amendments, and in the intervening 48 hours, or 2 days since we laid the bill down, I have not seen one amendment from the other side that has been proffered to be taken up. So here we sit. We are trying to get a handle on how many amendments there will be, trying to reach some agreement, as we always do, to have a package of amendments that we could go to today and tomorrow, spill over into next week, and then reach some agreement, as we always do around here, on how many amendments on their side, on this side, reach an agreement, get a time limit set up on these amendments, and then get to a finish on the farm bill I hope sometime next week before we leave for Thanksgiving. I know there is some other business the majority and minority leaders probably want to conduct next week, but we have to get this farm bill done. It is a good bill.

I remind my fellow Senators and others who may be watching that this farm bill passed the committee unanimously. There was not one vote against it. It is a bipartisan bill. I think regionally it is a balanced bill, for all the regions of the country. I think it addresses the real needs of our farmers and ranchers, as well as the other titles of the farm bill that are encompassed in the farm bill. Energy--we have put a lot, again, into promoting biofuels and bioenergy. In conservation, there are big increases for conservation all over this country. In research, we have money for continuing a strong, robust research program. In nutrition, we have met our obligations to the neediest in our society, providing substantial increases in the Food Stamp Program in terms of the benefits and indexing them for inflation, making sure we have more money for the Emergency Food Assistance Program, for our food banks around the country.

In all the different areas that are covered by the farm bill, I think we have met our obligations to move ahead. We have done so in a very fiscally responsible manner. This farm bill meets all the pay-go requirements we instituted here in the Senate earlier this year--that we would not increase the deficit but that we would pay for things by finding offsets in other areas. The Finance Committee met, and the Finance Committee came up with some loophole closing, some tax collections. I daresay there is not any increase in taxes; it is simply going after taxes that are already owed but are not being collected.

I commend both Senator Baucus and Senator Grassley and all the members of the Finance Committee for their help. With their help, we were able to put in a disaster program for the farm bill, a new disaster payment program--much better than what we have ever had in the past, I would add. Also, we were able to get some funding for some conservation programs and some of the energy programs. This has been a very bipartisan approach on this bill by committee, I would say, between the Agriculture Committee and the Finance Committee.

We are out here on the floor, and I think we can move ahead in good faith by agreeing upon whatever amendments we can agree on on both sides. These are negotiations that take place in every bill in which I have ever been involved. They took place on the last one I was the manager on here, the appropriations bill on Education, Health and Human Services, and Labor. But you can't negotiate if you do not have anything to negotiate on.

I say again to my friends on the other side of the aisle, if there are amendments, if we bring them forth we can discuss them, and maybe we can reach some agreement on a package of amendments that we can then get to and start disposing of, one way or the other.

That is where we are. I see my friend and ranking member, Senator Chambliss, is on the floor. I thank him for all of his good work on the committee. We have worked hard on this bill, and I think we have a good bill, one that, as I said earlier, I could basically support without amendments. I assume there will be amendments--some I may support, some I may not; some Senator Chambliss may support, and some he may not support. But that is the way we do things around here. Then we will go to conference and work it out. I am just hopeful we can get some amendments proffered here and brought over so we can look at them.

I say the same thing on our side too. I have heard of amendments other than the Dorgan and Grassley amendment, and I say if we have Members who have amendments they want to offer on the farm bill, they or their staffs ought to bring them to us as soon as possible so we can take a look at them, see if they are relevant to the farm bill. If they are relevant to the farm bill--I say this very clearly and forthrightly--every amendment that is basically relevant to this farm bill will be considered and disposed of one way or the other. That is really what we have to focus on, amendments that are relative to the farm bill.

Again, I hope Senators on both sides would, if they have amendments, bring them forth so we can put a package together and we can get to it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, how much time do I have?

Mr. President, despite the many positive attributes of Judge Mukasey, I cannot support his nomination for Attorney General. The next Attorney General must be more than a capable steward of the Department of Justice. I have heard a lot about that, that he can run it well.

Given this administration's disdain for the rule of law, it is imperative the next Attorney General be a strong and independent voice for a return to the very basic principle that we are a government of laws and not of the King--the President. Regrettably, I do not believe Judge Mukasey will be that voice.

Over the last 6 years, this administration, supported by faulty legal opinions from the Justice Department, has claimed it can ignore acts of Congress. The President has argued that, despite the fact that since 1978 the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has been the law of the land, he, the President--he has the authority, he says, despite the law, to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant or judicial review. He, the President, believes--the President, the King--he can seize American citizens on American soil, indefinitely detain them without charges, without providing the accused access to counsel, without judicial review. He--the President, the King--believes he can utilize interrogation techniques long considered immoral, ineffective, and illegal, regardless of the laws and treaties Congress has approved.

As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote, however, ``[a] state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens.''

At a time when we sorely need an Attorney General who will stand up for the rule of law, Judge Mukasey has expressed a troubling view of unchecked Executive power. For example, Judge Mukasey asserted that the President can violate congressional statutes where the President claims broad authority to ``defend the Nation.'' That is a loophole big enough to drive anything through. Judge Mukasey refused to answer whether he believes American citizens, detained by the President, have the right to habeas corpus, a right that goes back to 1215; the Magna Carta, articles 38 and 39 of the Magna Carta. You go read it. It says the King can't pick you up and throw you in jail and hold you there unless it is supported by evidence and testimony from your peers. That is the right of habeas corpus, enshrined, article I, section 9 of our Constitution. Mukasey refused to answer whether he believes American citizens have the right to habeas corpus when they are detained by the President.

Similar to many of my colleagues--the Senator from Vermont and the

Senator from Colorado talked about this--I am deeply troubled by the judge's failure to assert that waterboarding is illegal, a process that simulates death by real drowning. Everybody is focused on waterboarding. Sadly, he also refused to answer that other terrible practices which this administration has used are illegal. These include electrical shocks, beatings, the use of dogs, forcing prisoners to stand naked, induced hypothermia. Judge Mukasey doesn't know--he doesn't know whether these are illegal. Imagine that.

Let there be no misunderstanding. Whether waterboarding is illegal is not a difficult question. This Senate has repeatedly stated it, going back at least to the ratification of the Geneva Convention in 1955, that torture is a violation of our highest values and simply not permitted. In 2005, we adopted the McCain amendment, 90 to 9, 90 votes to 9. The amendment stated that cruel, degrading or inhuman treatment of detainees was prohibited.

Last year, the Military Commission Act expressly made clear that the President is bound by the prohibitions against cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of prisoners. Yet Judge Mukasey says he doesn't know. He can't determine whether waterboarding is illegal because he has not seen the evidence. He has not seen the classified material.

You don't need classified material. You don't need any classified material on this.

RADM John Hutson, former Judge Advocate General of the Navy, testified that, ``other than, perhaps the rack and thumbscrews, waterboarding is the most iconic example of torture in history.'' He added, ``[I]t has been repudiated for centuries.'' Going back to the Spanish Inquisition and including World War II, the U.S. military has brought charges against those who practice this technique. In adopting the Military Commission Act, many Senators made clear that interrogation techniques such as waterboarding are illegal and constitute ``grave breaches'' of the Geneva Conventions.

Given this law, given the history, it is disappointing that an esteemed judge, with the highest reputation in our legal community, would not unequivocally state that, of course, waterboarding is both torture and it is illegal. It wasn't a difficult question. It is a question any serious candidate for Attorney General should answer. Because he could not answer it, he is not qualified to be Attorney General.

Are we going to have another Attorney General who is going to kowtow to the King--the President--I am sorry, I get those terms kind of confused when I am talking about Bush. I don't know whether he is King or President. According to the last Attorney General, he was King. Maybe this one believes the same thing. He can do whatever he wants to. But even in 1215, the King of England was held to the standard of habeas corpus. I guess we want to turn the clock back to before the Magna Carta.

I am also troubled by Judge Mukasey's refusal to commit to recommend to the President that the detention center at Guantanamo Bay be closed. He said, ``There are substantial problems with Guantanamo, both problems of reality and problems of perceptions.'' If he believes that, why wouldn't he join with Secretary of Defense Gates and former Secretary of State Colin Powell in recommending that it be closed?

I have a petition, signed by more than 1,000 people from around the United States, urging that our next Attorney General be committed to closing down the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.

I ask unanimous consent it be printed in the Congressional Record.

Mr. President, issues such as torture and Guantanamo Bay, I have to admit, are somewhat personal to me. It was 20-some years ago--I am sorry, 37 years ago, now that I think about it, 1970--when I was a congressional staffer on the House side, for a committee that went to Vietnam to investigate our involvement in the war in Vietnam. During that trip over, through a series of circumstances and because of the bravery of a couple of young people, I was able, with two Congressmen--Congressman ``Gus'' Hawkins from California and Congressman Bill Anderson from Tennessee--to uncover the infamous tiger cages on Con Son Island off the coast of Vietnam.

What did we find there? Inhuman, degrading, terrible conditions, where the Vietnamese had imprisoned civilians--students, human rights activists, along with North Vietnamese POWs--being tortured almost on a daily basis. It would take me more time than I have this evening to be able to describe to you the horrors we saw when we broke into this prison. It was all done with the full knowledge and consent and supervision of the U.S. Government. That is proven. That is on the record. It is on the record.

I saw the damage that it did, what that did to us. We were always saying to the North Vietnamese: Treat our prisoners according to the Geneva Conventions, when our colleague John McCain was there, and others. Yet we were doing the same thing in Vietnam. If you want to go into the court of world opinion, you better go in with clean hands; the court of equity. What we are doing now in Guantanamo covers all that up. It does damage to our reputation. It makes us like them.

The one thing we proved in the 1950s when Joseph McCarthy stood on the floor of this Senate--one thing we proved then is we did not have to be like the Communists to beat them. We don't have to be like the terrorists to beat them. The more we are like them the more likely we are to lose. We need an Attorney General of the United States who has the guts to stand before the committee and say he is going to tell the King that the King is wrong, and this Attorney General nominee will not do that.

Oh, he may run a good department. Oh, he may do all the right things. But we need an Attorney General to tell this King he is wrong and that the rule of law will apply and the rule of law says we will not torture. We will not treat people with inhumane treatment. We will abide by the Geneva Conventions. We will not be like our enemies.

That will send a stronger signal to the world than anything else we could do. For those reasons I, in good conscience, cannot in any way support this nominee for Attorney General.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Dave White, a detailee from USDA to the Committee on Agriculture, and Alexandra Torres, an intern for the committee, be granted the privilege of the floor for any debate and votes on H.R. 2419.