[Pages S4880-S4906]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

AMERICA COMPETES ACT--Continued

Amendment No. 929

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, there will be 2
minutes of debate equally divided on amendment No. 929 offered by the
Senator from South Carolina, Mr. DeMint.
Who yields time?
The Senator from New Mexico.
Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I know Senator Baucus intended to be
here. I don't see him right now. I know the Senator from South Carolina
wishes to use his 1 minute. I am informed that Senator Baucus will
support the amendment and is urging other Senators to do the same.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Carolina.
Mr. DeMINT. Mr. President, I appreciate the support of the majority.
This is clearly a bipartisan idea. The underlying bill has in it a
study to look at obstacles to innovation. This simply adds to that with
a study of our Tax Code to see how it might be obstructing innovation
and investment in our country.
It sounds as if we have good support. I encourage all my colleagues,
Republicans and Democrats, to vote for the amendment.
I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The question is on agreeing to amendment No. 929. The clerk will call
the roll.
The legislative clerk called the roll.
Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from South Dakota (Mr.
Johnson) and the Senator from Illinois (Mr. Obama) are necessarily
absent.
Mr. LOTT. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator
from Arizona (Mr. McCain) and the Senator from Ohio (Mr. Voinovich).
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Are there any other Senators in the Chamber
desiring to vote?
The result was announced--yeas 96, nays 0, as follows:

[Rollcall Vote No. 137 Leg.]

YEAS--96

Akaka
Alexander
Allard
Baucus
Bayh
Bennett
Biden
Bingaman
Bond
Boxer
Brown
Brownback
Bunning
Burr
Byrd
Cantwell
Cardin
Carper
Casey
Chambliss
Clinton
Coburn
Cochran
Coleman
Collins
Conrad
Corker
Cornyn
Craig
Crapo
DeMint
Dodd
Dole
Domenici
Dorgan
Durbin
Ensign
Enzi
Feingold
Feinstein
Graham
Grassley
Gregg
Hagel
Harkin
Hatch
Hutchison
Inhofe
Inouye
Isakson
Kennedy
Kerry
Klobuchar
Kohl
Kyl
Landrieu
Lautenberg
Leahy
Levin
Lieberman
Lincoln
Lott
Lugar
Martinez
McCaskill
McConnell
Menendez
Mikulski
Murkowski
Murray
Nelson (FL)
Nelson (NE)
Pryor
Reed
Reid
Roberts
Rockefeller
Salazar
Sanders
Schumer
Sessions
Shelby
Smith
Snowe
Specter
Stabenow
Stevens
Sununu
Tester
Thomas
Thune
Vitter
Warner
Webb
Whitehouse
Wyden

NOT VOTING--4

Johnson
McCain
Obama
Voinovich
The amendment (No. 929) was agreed to.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.
Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, as I understand it, we are operating
under a time agreement that has been proposed by the Senate leaders.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator is recognized for such time as he
wishes to consume.
Mr. KENNEDY. I thank the Chair.
Mr. President, first of all, I commend my friend and colleague,
Senator Bingaman, as well as Senator Alexander and the group that came
together in support of this idea of competitiveness legislation. I
think it is one of the most important issues we will consider on the
floor of the Senate, and it is something that commands the kind of
broad support that it is getting.
What underlines this legislation is a recognition that the United
States is competing in a global economy. If we are going to compete in
a global economy, we have to make a decision as a nation to the prepare
each and every individual American to stand with the winds in a global
economy. This legislation says that we are going to equip every man,
woman, and child in the United States to be able to deal with the
challenges of a global economy, and I think that is a very important
national purpose.
Throughout history, this country, when it saw that it was challenged,
turned to education to stay competitive. After the Second World War, we
needed to build a new, peacetime economy. We passed the G.I. Bill to
enable those who served in battle to rebuild their lives at home. For
every dollar we invested, the Greatest Generation returned $7 to our
economic growth.
In 1957, we were challenged again. The launch of Sputnik sparked the
Space Age, and we rose to the challenge by passing the National Defense
Education Act and inspiring the nation to ensure that the first
footprint on the moon was left by an American. We doubled the Federal
investment in education. When individuals have their skills uplifted
and when they have their skills enhanced, they find out their
participation in the economy works a great deal better. They are more
productive, they are more useful, they are more creative and more
imaginative and able to compete more effectively. This bill is
enormously important for all Americans and very important for our
country in terms of the whole challenge of globalization.
Secondly, it is enormously important in terms of our national
security. This legislation ensures that we are going to encourage those
forces that enhance our capability in the areas of math, science and
research--all of which are enormously important to make sure we are
going to have the best technology for those who are going to serve in
the Armed Forces. In the Armed Forces we want the best trained and best
led men and women, but we also want the best in technology. This is a
competitiveness bill and a national security bill.
I believe it is going to be enormously helpful and valuable in terms
of our democratic institutions, in making sure we are going to have men
and women in this country who have the ability and commitment to ensure
that our democratic institutions are going to function, and function
very well, and that we will be able to maintain our leadership in the
world.
I, for one, agree with those who believe in each generation, and in
each decade, the United States has to fight for its leadership in the
world. It is not just going to come automatically. We should no longer
think we are going to coast in terms of national and world leadership.
We have to win it, and we have to win it every single day. The way to
win it is with the kinds of investments that are included in this
legislation. So I commend all those who have been a part of this
process, and particularly our friends and colleagues, Senator Bingaman
and Senator Alexander.
To go through very quickly now, after those general comments about
why this legislation is so important, if we look at where the United
States is: America's 15-year-olds scored below the average in math
compared to the youth of other developed nations on a recent
international assessment. On the Programme for International Student
Assessment, you will see that the U.S. ranks 24th.
This chart indicates that since 1975, the U.S. has dropped from 3rd
to 15th place in the production of scientists and engineers.
We are also losing ground in overall high school and college
graduation rates. The U.S. has dropped below that average graduation
rate for OECD countries. Out of 24 nations, the U.S. ranks 14th, just
ahead of Portugal.

[[Page S4881]]

We are going to go to the underlying educational needs when we
reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act and higher education
legislation. We are going to deal with middle schools and high schools.
We are going to try to tie it in and have a seamless web, from the Head
Start education programs through the K-12 and then universities into
the academic world or into the business world. We need to be able to
bring those elements together.
Having said all of that, this legislation is enormously important in
terms of making sure we reach that goal.
This is a chart of research and development investment as a share of
the U.S. economy. It demonstrates we are stagnant. This has to change.
We know we need to invest in research and development.
If you look at some of the countries with which we are going to
compete, India and China in particular, and look at the number of
graduates they have in math and science, you will find that China
awards more than 300,000 bachelor's degrees in engineering and computer
science. We award a little over 100,000.
This is about research and development, but the investments in our
people, investments in our research and development are two sides of
the same coin. They are both essential. What this demonstrates is we
have to do better if we expect to compete.
Fast-growing economies such as China, Ireland, and South Korea are
realizing the potential for economic growth that comes with investing
in innovation. China's investment in research and development rose by
an average of 18 percent from 2000 through 2003. Over the same period,
the increase in U.S. investment averaged only 2 to 3 percent annually.
In the last decade, China has nearly doubled the share of their economy
they spend on research and development, and they have replicated our
National Science Foundation.
This bill puts us on a path to double the basic research funding at
NSF in 5 years, double the basic research funding at the Department of
Energy over the next 10 years, and double the funding at NIST, the
National Institute for Standards and Technology. The bill also creates
a President's Council on Innovation and Competitiveness, to bring
together the heads of Federal agencies with leaders in business and
universities to develop a comprehensive agenda to promote innovation.
If you look at where we are, to give some further illustrations, math
and science classes in high-poverty schools are much more likely to be
taught by teachers who do not have a degree in their field. Fifty-six
percent of science classes in high-poverty schools are taught by
teachers without a relevant degree, compared to just 22 percent of
classes in low-poverty schools. More than a third of math classes in
high-poverty schools are taught by an out-of-field teacher, compared to
just 18 percent of classes in schools with a low-poverty rate.
I was interested the other day in the testimony of Mr. Gates, who
commented on a lot of subjects. He was talking about school dropouts.
There are some who think that school dropouts are children who are
unable to comprehend the curriculum. He said, Oh, no, I am worried
about the dropouts, the minds we are losing--able, gifted minds that
are unchallenged because they had an inferior teacher, no books, or
challenging conditions at home, such as missing meals because they are
poor. We cannot afford to lose any of those.
What we are looking for is high quality teachers. The bill recognizes
and responds to the shortage of high quality math, science, technology
and engineering teachers, particularly in high poverty schools. The
bill expands scholarships and stipends, and creates a new NSDF teaching
fellow program to bring high quality math, science, technology, and
engineering teachers into high-need schools. It also expands the
Teacher Institutes for the 21st Century Program of the NSF to provide
cutting-edge professional development programs for teachers who teach
in high-need schools. These programs are peer reviewed and have
demonstrated to be successful.
The bill creates a summer institute at the Department of Energy to
help math and science teachers, to enable them to go to a number of
areas that deal with energy because that is an agency so focused in
terms of these issues in math and science.
There is a high cost to failing to address our education concerns.
The nation loses over $3.7 billion a year in the cost of remedial
education and lost earning potential, because students are not
adequately prepared to enter college when they leave high school.
The bill provides grants to states to align elementary and secondary
school standards, curricula, and assessments with the demands of
college, the 21st century workforce and the Armed Forces. The grants
support state P-16 councils to bring together leaders in the early
education, K-12, and higher education communities, in the business
sector, and in the military.
It is also increasingly important for students to be exposed to and
immersed in foreign languages and cultures. Only one-third of students
in grades 7-12 and a mere 5 percent of elementary school students study
a foreign language.

If we are going to talk about our ability to be involved in a world
economy, we are fortunate because we have so many who have come from
such different cultures and traditions. I was reminded a few days ago
in our Education Committee, of the number of languages they speak in
St. Paul, Minnesota. Thirty-seven languages are spoken in Everett, MA.
If we are going to compete in the world economy, we are going to have
to do a lot better than we are doing in terms of communication and
language.
This is a balanced program. It has been reviewed by the Academy of
Science, at the Institute of Engineers. It has been recommended by a
wonderful American patriot, Norm Augustine, one of the great American
leaders, corporate leaders, but also someone enormously knowledgeable
on American defense interests and also international competition. This
legislation has been tailored to try to take the very best ideas out
there.
We are going to have to fill in the underlying work that needs to be
done. This is primarily focused on what we are going to need to be able
to compete internationally. We have to be sure the schools at every
level are providing students with a high quality education. We want to
be sure those graduating from our universities will have the skills and
talents and education to move them into the American economy and the
larger economy they will face in the future.
This bill represents the beginning of a strong commitment that we
must sustain and build on if America is to remain competitive in the
years ahead. The legislation has strong support for a renewed
commitment to help the current generation meet and master the global
challenges we now face.
I welcome the opportunity to join with my colleagues and friends, the
principal cosponsors, to commend this legislation, and hopefully we
will be able to complete it.
I know there are other amendments. I have had an opportunity to
review them briefly. A good many of them deal with other issues we
ought to be dealing with at another time. I hope the membership will
recognize this is special legislation. There is a special need. This is
a result of an extraordinary effort on the part of the principal
sponsors of this bill. It deserves to pass and get through. I am very
hopeful it will be done expeditiously.

Amendment No. 940

Mr. President, I send a HELP Committee amendment to the bill which I
think further strengthens the math and science programs. We have gone
over this in considerable detail with our colleagues, since they are
members of the committee. I thank them for their attention. I am
grateful for their support of these particular provisions. Again, I
commend them for the legislation. Hopefully this amendment will be
accepted.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection to setting aside the
pending amendment?
Mr. ALEXANDER. Reserving the right to object--I have no objection.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. The clerk
will report.
The assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

The Senator from Massachusetts [Mr. Kennedy] proposes an
amendment numbered 940.

[[Page S4882]]

(The text of the amendment is printed in today's Record under ``Text
of Amendments.'')
Mr. ALEXANDER. I ask unanimous consent to speak for 2 minutes before
the Senator from Oklahoma.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank Senator Kennedy, the chairman
of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and Senator
Enzi, who was chairman last year, when all this began. I hope our
colleagues can see that these senior Members of the Senate--in the case
of Senator Kennedy and Senator Enzi, they have a large amount of
jurisdiction over this subject; Senator Stevens and Senator Inouye, who
spoke yesterday, have a large amount of jurisdiction over this subject;
Senators Domenici and Bingaman, who introduced legislation last year
that attracted 70 cosponsors--a number of their ideas are within this
legislation, but they have also demonstrated something you don't see
every day with Senators, which is a forbearance.
In other words, they recognize this is a big, 208-page bill with the
President's ideas and those of the Council on Competitiveness and the
Augustine Commission. It is well and carefully crafted, but not every
single section is exactly the way every single Senator would like it.
Also, it has permitted us to have a procedure that brings this bill to
the floor so it has a good chance of being enacted this week. I thank
Senator Kennedy and Senator Enzi, who really have the largest amount of
jurisdiction, for forbearing, being active, leading, and showing a
sense of urgency about this subject by permitting it to come to the
floor in the way it has, and then, in addition to the other
contributions they have made, we have the Kennedy-Enzi HELP Committee
managers' package which is now before the Senate for its consideration.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. McCaskill). The Senator from
Massachusetts.
Mr. KENNEDY. Madam President, I know my friend from Oklahoma is
prepared to speak. I ask unanimous consent to continue for 3 or 4
minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

IRAQ

Mr. KENNEDY. Madam President, just a few minutes ago, Vice President
Cheney attacked the Senate majority leader on Iraq. He accused him of
making ``uninformed and misleading'' statements, of defeatism, and of
playing politics with the war.
Senator Reid's interest is in protecting our troops and our national
security and bringing the war to an end. He is rightly responding to
the American people by demanding a change in our failed policy in Iraq.
He is right to insist that the Iraqis take responsibility for their own
security and their own future and that our troops need begin to
withdraw from Iraq.
It is Vice President Cheney who has been wrong--and deadly wrong--
about Iraq.
Even more, Vice President Cheney is the last person in the
administration who should accuse anyone of making uninformed and
misleading statements.
The Vice President misled the American people in August 2002, when he
insisted that we ``know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire
nuclear weapons'' and that ``many . . . are convinced that Saddam will
acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.''
The Vice President misled the American people in March 2003, when he
said that Saddam Hussein ``has a long-standing relationship with
various terrorist groups, including the al-Qaeda organization.''
The Vice President misled the American people when he insisted that
our troops would ``be greeted as liberators.''
The Vice President misled the American people when he insisted that
the insurgency is ``in the last throes.''
He and the entire administration continue to mislead the American
people when they insist that progress is being made in Iraq.
The facts speak for themselves. Iraq is sliding deeper and deeper
into the abyss of civil war.
Violence and casualties are increasing. Already 3,335 American
soldiers have been killed, and more than 320 of them have been killed
since the surge began.
Civilians continue to flee the violence in Baghdad as the violence
there continues unabated.
Senator Reid is right to insist that we change the mission for our
troops in Iraq and set a target date to bring them home. The American
people agree.
America never should have gone to war when we did, the way we did,
and for the false reasons we were given. It is the Vice President who
has been playing politics with the war in Iraq for more than 4 years.
The American people understand this and will rightly reject the Vice
President's fingerpointing.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma is recognized for 1
hour.
Mr. COBURN. Madam President, the bill we have before us today is a
well-intentioned, thoughtful exercise to try to change the future for
our country. The Commission this bill is based on, the work and
experience of those who have helped coauthor the bill, is rightly so in
their concern for the future of our competitiveness. There is one
problem, however. The biggest dole on our competitiveness today has to
be the largesse of the Federal Government. Let me give a few examples.
Last year, the American people spent $224 billion paying interest on
the national debt. Last year, the American people, through our actions,
spent $350 billion more than we had, which further increased that debt.
In the last 6 years, the individual debt owned by American citizens--
what they are required to pay--has risen from $21,000 to almost
$30,000. At the same time, the average wage in those same 6 years
increased by less than $5,000. So when we think about competitiveness,
we ought to pay close attention to the drags on what will be our
competitive situation.
The No. 1 drag today is the Federal Government. That is not to demean
this bill. I would have loved to have seen a different bill, a bill
that says: Here is what we are doing right. Here is what we are doing
wrong. Here are some new ideas on how to fix what we are doing wrong
and, by the way, here are some things we need to do to keep us
competitive. We didn't do that.
The Department of Education right now has 10 percent of its programs
that are totally ineffective. The Department of Energy, with its $5
billion budget, has 10 percent of its programs that are highly
ineffective. In other words, they are not accomplishing anything. None
of that was looked at, deauthorized, or eliminated in this bill.
Consequently, according to OMB, we have approximately $80 billion that
is going to be authorized to be spent--some of that is reauthorization,
I understand--over the next 4 years that is going to be added to the
debt.
People will say: This is an authorization. That doesn't mean we are
going to spend the money.
Why are we passing the bill if we don't intend to spend the money? We
are going to spend the money. The problem with the way we spend money
is we don't make the same choices the average American makes. We just
chalk it up to our kids and grandkids. So I don't know where the money
is going to come from.
This bill is obviously going to pass. It is going to be conferenced,
and it is probably going to be signed. But we will have missed a great
opportunity to fix many major programs that are not working well today.
This bill creates 20 new Federal programs. It doesn't eliminate one
Federal program that isn't working well today. It doesn't modify, to a
significant extent, those programs which are deemed ineffective and not
working.
What we have is great intention and great legislation, save for the
fact that we are not looking at the whole story. We are not looking at
the whole picture. Should Congress have to do what every family in this
country does every month--make a choice? Where do we prioritize our
spending for this month? Where do we spend more? What are the things on
which we can't afford to spend because we don't have the money? We
don't do that. We authorize programs. Then we appropriate funds.
By the way, the discretionary portion of the Federal Government has
grown about $600 billion in the last 7 years. Senator Carper and myself
held 48 hearings in the last Congress in the

[[Page S4883]]

Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management of the Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs Committee. What we found was an astounding
$200 billion of waste, fraud, abuse, and duplication. There was great
opportunity to take that information and do something about it. We have
not done it.
The Department of Education is not compliant in terms of improper
payments. They don't know where they are paying things wrong or paying
things right. The Department of Energy is noncompliant in terms of
improper payments. They don't know where they are paying things right
and paying things wrong. We have at least 20 percent of the Department
of Energy's budget that is earmarks. They don't get to decide where
they spend the money; the Members of Congress tell them where they have
to spend the money. There is not a sense of prioritizing what our
energy needs are, what our education needs are within the Department of
Energy. There is no commonsense approach to what we are doing.
Consequently, the biggest problem we have in terms of competitiveness,
which this bill won't solve, is more government. It creates more
government rather than less government or the same amount of government
that is more efficient and more effective.
I don't intend to impugn the desires or the sincerity of the Members
of this body who helped put this bill together. There is no question we
need to address the issues that are encompassed in the legislation.
That is not my criticism. My criticism is that when we have an
opportunity to fix things with a bill such as this which cuts across
multiple agencies, we don't do it. What we do is set up a system where
more programs will be created without eliminating the ones that are not
working.
As a matter of fact, in this bill, in the National Science
Foundation, we have a setaside. Where before the National Science
Foundation did everything on peer review--everything on peer review,
there was no politics saying what you have to do--we are taking $1
billion and setting it aside and we are going to tell them what to do.
We know better than the scientists where we ought to be spending our
money? I seriously doubt that.
We claim that what we want to do is reestablish the competitiveness
of the United States. I have no doubt that certain segments of this
bill will go a long way in doing that. I am not critical of the intent
of the bill. But I believe--and I raised this on the last bill we
considered--we continue to authorize new spending. We continue to put
at risk, in the name of competitiveness, the future.
The No. 1 risk for competitiveness is our debt. The fact is, we are
sucking capital out of the capital markets like crazy, making it very
difficult for small businesses that compete in the capital markets on
ideas, innovation, and sole-proprietorships and people who want to take
a risk on their own.
The other thing we didn't do is fix IDEA. One of our problems with
education is, we passed a law that said school districts will do this
for individuals with disabilities. What we promised when we passed that
law--much as we will hear in 2 or 3 years as to what we promise with
this law--was that we would fund 40 percent of the costs in education
for IDEA. That would be the Federal load. This last year, we funded 18
percent. So we wonder why the schools can't compete, why they can't put
the money into math and science, the money into competitiveness, when
$16 billion a year is being absorbed by the school districts to do
something we mandated them to do, which means $16 billion isn't
available for them to teach and mentor math and science, for them to
create greater opportunities to raise interest in the sciences.
So I think if our past actions speak at all about what the future
will bring, you will see we will not keep our word with this bill
either. We will say things, we will do things, we will put at risk the
next two generations, and we will have felt good because we did
something, but we did less than what we could do.
That is what we are doing with this bill. We are doing less than what
we could do. We could, in fact, fix what is wrong in many of those
programs in the Department of Education and in the Department of Energy
today with this bill. It could have been done. It could have been done,
but it was not. So, consequently, we are going to fund ineffective
programs as we authorize and create and fund new programs, many of
which are designed to do the exact same things, but we are not going to
eliminate the programs that are not working.
And lest you think I am an alarmist and known as ``Dr. No,'' think
about what the obligations are of every child who is born in this
country today--just today. What is it? April 24, 2007. When that baby
is delivered and placed in its mother's arms, you are going to see
smiles of joy and tears--none of them with a realization the child who
just came into this world is faced with $453,000 in unfunded
liabilities the moment they take their first breath.
The contrast should be, we are talking about competitiveness. How do
we create a future? What kind of future is it when we create a bill but
do not address the underlying problems that are limiting our
competitiveness in the first place? No. 2, even if we are trained in
math and science, we are going to be so debt ridden we won't have the
money to put into it.
According to the Government Accounting Office, that 8 percent in
interest, that $224 billion we spend now, in the year 2025--a mere 18
years from now--will be 25 percent of the budget and close to $1
trillion. Now, think about that. Should we do the hard work of
eliminating the wasteful and duplicative programs before we create
another?
It is easy to pass legislation that does something good. It is very
hard to get rid of programs that are ineffective and highly
inefficient. The reason is because everybody has an interest group that
supports that program, and we find ourselves adverse to challenging
that group.
But the real choice is between our grandchildren and today's present
inefficiencies. The real choice is whether we are truly going to be
competitive and create an opportunity for the next two generations to
experience the same kind of blessings we have been fortunate enough to
experience as a nation.
The real question is, will we leave a heritage that is similar to the
heritage that was left with us? I tell you, my feelings and my thoughts
are I do not see movement in this body or in the Congress as a whole to
start addressing the underlying problems that are facing us. It is not
a question of partisanship, Democrats or Republicans. It is a question
of expediency. It is hard to tell people no when something is not
working well. It is easy to ignore it.

Amendment No. 917

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment
be set aside and call up amendment No. 917.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection to setting aside the
pending amendment?
Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, reserving the right to object.
No objection, Madam President.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The clerk will report the amendment.
The assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

The Senator from Oklahoma [Mr. Coburn] proposes an
amendment numbered 917.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of
the amendment be dispensed with.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The amendment is as follows:

(Purpose: To express the sense of the Senate that Congress has a moral
obligation to offset the cost of new Government programs and
initiatives)

At the appropriate place, insert the following:

SEC. __. SENSE OF THE SENATE.

(a) Findings.--The Senate finds that--
(1) The national debt of the United States of America now
exceeds $8,500,000,000,000.
(2) Each United States citizen's share of this debt exceeds
$29,000.
(3) Every cent that the United States Government borrows
and adds to this debt is money stolen from future generations
of Americans and from important programs, including Social
Security and Medicare on which our senior citizens depend for
their retirement security.
(4) The power of the purse belongs to Congress.
(5) Congress authorizes and appropriates all Federal
discretionary spending and creates new mandatory spending
programs.
(6) For too long, Congress has simply borrowed more and
more money to pay for new spending, while Americans want
Congress to live within its means, using the same set of

[[Page S4884]]

common sense rules and restraints Americans face everyday;
because in the real world, families cannot follow Congress's
example and must make difficult decisions and set priorities
on how to spend their limited financial resources.
(7) Last year, the interest costs of the Federal debt the
government must pay to those who buy U.S. Treasury bonds were
about 8 percent of the total Federal budget. In total, the
Federal government spent $226 billion on interest costs alone
last year.
(8) According to the Government Accountability Office,
interest costs will consume 25 percent of the entire Federal
budget by 2035. By way of comparison, the Department of
Education's share of Federal spending in 2005 was
approximately 3 percent of all Federal spending. The
Department of Health and Human Services was responsible for
approximately 23 percent of all Federal spending. Spending by
the Social Security Administration was responsible for about
20 percent of all Federal spending. Spending on Medicare was
about 12 percent of all Federal spending. Spending in 2005 by
the Department of Defense--in the midst of two wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan and a global war against terrorism--comprised
about 19 percent of all Federal spending. Thus, if we do not
change our current spending habits, GAO estimates that as a
percentage of Federal spending, interest costs in 2035 will
be larger than defense costs today, Social Security costs
today, Medicare costs today, and education costs today.
(9) The Federal debt undermines United States
competitiveness by consuming capital that would otherwise be
available for private enterprise and innovation.
(10) It is irresponsible for Congress to create or expand
government programs that will result in borrowing from Social
Security, Medicare, foreign nations, or future generations of
Americans without reductions in spending elsewhere within the
Federal budget.
(b) Sense of the Senate.--It is the sense of the Senate
that Congress has a moral obligation to offset the cost of
new Government programs and initiatives.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, it is a simple amendment. We are going
to find out what your Senator believes with this amendment. We offered
this amendment on the last bill. We had some inside baseball excuses
why they would not vote for it. This is a sense-of-the-Senate
amendment. It does not carry any force of law or anything. All it says
is the Senate agrees that before we spend new money, we ought to get
rid of the wasteful programs, we ought to get rid of the ones that are
not working well, or we ought to make them better before we spend
another $60 billion to $80 billion on another set of programs.
That last amendment got 59 votes against it. Only 38 people in the
Senate thought we ought to do that. I will tell you, I think the vast
majority--greater than 95 percent--of the American public thinks we
ought to do that.
So this is a simple amendment. The catch with the amendment is, if
you vote for the amendment and then do not change this bill to do what
needs to be done to eliminate the other programs, you are going to have
a tough time explaining that you agreed to this and then did something
else when you voted for the passage of this bill.
There is a day coming when we will not have the luxury to wait
around. The financial markets will tell us what we will do. We will not
have the freedom within the Senate to make those choices. We will do it
under the duress of extreme financial conditions that will affect our
country.
So this is a simple amendment, very similar to the last one. I took
the authorizing language out of it that some of the appropriators
objected to, so it is very simple.
The final statement in the amendment is:

Sense Of The Senate.--
It is the sense of the Senate that Congress has a moral
obligation to offset the cost of new Government programs and
initiatives.

Now, with a budget deficit last year that was claimed to be $160
billion, under Enron accounting--which was truly $350 billion, if you
looked at what happened to the addition to our debt, what our kids are
going to pay--it is going to be pretty hard to say we should not add
more to the debt. We have a lot of people who will say the debt does
not matter; whatever the debt is, is a percentage of GDP. That is fine
if the underlying assumption is we have great economics, and we are not
going to have contractions of the economy, we are always going to be
able to compete, we are always going to be able to finance our debt.
The fact is, as the Government Accounting Office says, we cannot, and
the interest costs associated with that will be massive.
Why would I come out here and fight friends and foes alike all the
time to do this? Because I think the one shortfall of our body is that
overall we are not looking at the big picture and the long run. This
looks at the long run, but it does not look at the big picture.
Unless we do that, we are going to find ourselves very apologetic to
the next two generations because what, in essence, we will have said is
we cared more about us, we cared more about our comfort, we cared more
about our next election than we did any of the next two generations.
So I put it to my colleagues: Vote against this and vote for the bill
and be honest. But if you think if we create new programs we ought to
eliminate other programs so we do not continue to expand the Federal
Government running a deficit, then you ought to vote for this amendment
and not vote for this bill, until it is made right, until it has
captured the opportunities that are inherent within it to fix what is
wrong in the Department of Energy, to fix what is wrong in the
Department of Education, to fix what is wrong with all these grant
programs that need to be fixed today.
Let's hold us accountable. That is what the American people are
expecting from us. I want to leave the Senate not being known for
anything other than knowing what I did was to try to create and make
sure we maintain the heritage this country has given to us.
With that, Madam President, I reserve the remainder of my time.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the
order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, as I understand what we are doing: We
have a few amendments pending. We are working to clear those amendments
so we can come to a vote on Senator Coburn's amendment. In the
meantime, Senator Sununu has more than one amendment. He has one he
wants to talk about today. He wants to bring it up as soon as he can
and schedule it for a vote. It is a meritorious amendment. I hope we
can do that as soon as possible.
Senator Coburn has reserved the rest of his time. But as I understand
the procedure, Senator Sununu could go ahead and speak until the next
scheduled speaker, who is scheduled to speak at 4 o'clock; is that
correct?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. There is no order.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Thank you, Madam President.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma.
Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent, with deference
to the Senator from Tennessee, that prior to the vote on my amendment I
be given 2 or 3 minutes to speak on it.
Mr. ALEXANDER. No objection. Could we have 4 minutes equally divided?
Mr. COBURN. Absolutely.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Any objection? Prior to the vote, if and when the vote
is set?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Thank you.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Hampshire.
Mr. SUNUNU. Madam President, I rise to speak on the legislation in
general terms. As the Senator from Tennessee indicated, I filed three
different amendments. I certainly wish to call at least one of those
amendments up at the appropriate time. They address a number of
concerns I have with the underlying legislation.
But let me begin by saying I do appreciate the complexity of the
challenge the Senator from Tennessee has undertaken in trying to
assemble from different committees of jurisdiction the components of
this bill. I think, unfortunately, dealing with this legislation has
laid to bare some of the weaknesses and problems with the way we are
organized in Congress because it has been, unfortunately, an
inefficient process in many ways.
There are five or six different committees that have jurisdiction in
different areas of this legislation. They all want to try to leave
their mark on

[[Page S4885]]

the legislation. As a result, the Senator from Tennessee and others
have had to deal with duplication and overlap in many cases with
initiatives begun by different committees that have effectively the
same goal and the same end. Over the past 12 or 18 months, I think they
have eliminated a number of these problems from the legislation but
many remain. I am one of the only, if not the only, engineer in the
Senate. At least I was an engineer; I worked as an engineer during my
previous work experience. I would like to think that I am still
employable as an engineer perhaps someday in the future. I do value
very much this experience and this background in science and technology
when we are dealing with problems on the Commerce Committee having to
do with telecommunications or spectrum allocation or policies on
environmental issues with particulate matter or pollution standards. I
like to think it helps to have at least some grounding in a lot of the
technical matters that underlie the basic legislation.

I think it is essential, when we are looking at policy to encourage
and inspire students to pursue science and mathematics and to try to
improve our competitiveness in fields of science and engineering, that
we focus on a few core principles. I begin with the basic objective of
maximizing research in the most basic areas of math and science. In
this effort we are talking about the funds that go to the National
Science Foundation and the funds that go to the National Institutes of
Health. These are investments in basic sciences: in the case of the
National Science Foundation, in physics, chemistry, physical science,
and computational mathematics. They are peer-reviewed, which is
intended to insulate them from political forces, legislative forces,
and allow those with expertise in these areas to decide what sorts of
research projects and programs receive funding in any given year.
It is essential we maintain that independent peer review process at
the National Science Foundation, just as it is important at the
National Institutes of Health because if we allow politics to enter
this process, we are going to do these areas a great injustice.
Commensurate with that focus on physical sciences and computational
mathematics as we pursue research in science and engineering, it is
also important that we avoid policies that try to pick winners or
losers within our economy. Here I point to various programs that over
the years have subsidized product development for profitable companies,
product development for products being introduced into the existing
marketplace today that effectively picks one firm and one firm's
products at the expense of others. Some people would say, well, that is
research. But it certainly isn't the kind of peer-reviewed research
that does and should take place at the National Science Foundation. It
is product development work. Any time we start subsidizing product
development for companies that are competing in the marketplace selling
goods and services to consumers, we distort the marketplace, we provide
unnecessary subsidies, and in programs like the advanced technology
program we have done just that time and time again.
The companies that have received these subsidies are good firms with
good employees, but I think putting funds in this area at the expense
of physics and chemistry and mathematics at the National Science
Foundation is a grave mistake. We need to maximize that research, make
sure it is peer-reviewed, don't pick winners and losers in private
industry, and focus on educational programs where it can make the
biggest difference in inspiring young students in these careers in math
and science.
I look back on my own experience and ask the very basic question:
What led me to pursue a degree in mechanical engineering when I was an
undergraduate in college? I didn't make that decision when I was a
freshman in college. I didn't even make that decision to pursue
interests in math and science when I was in high school. I would argue
for most students it happens in sixth and seventh and eighth grade.
They realize they have an interest in math and science. More often than
not it is because they have had a strong, credible, inspirational
teacher in math and science, and my experience is no different. Jane
Batts and Blake Richards, my math and science teachers in fourth and
fifth grade, I think set me on that path that ultimately brought me to
a mechanical engineering degree. So if we are going to look at
educational programs that are meant to inspire students in math and
science, they had better be focused on those key years: sixth, seventh,
and eighth grade.
Finally--this is a point that Senator Coburn was speaking to--we need
to look at the programs that are already in place and ask honest
questions about how effective they are. How many do we have that deal
with these areas of math and science education? How many do we have
that deal with the areas of research? And, in particular, I think we
should look to the work done by the American Competitiveness Council.
What they found is that in the areas of science, technology,
education--science, technology, engineering and mathematics--stem
programs--there are 106 different programs within 8 or 10 different
agencies, including the Department of Transportation, the Department of
Commerce, the Department of Energy, the Department of Homeland
Security, 35 at the National Science Foundation, 12 at the Department
of Agriculture.
In this legislation before us we do ourselves a disservice if we
don't look at these programs and ask the questions: How effective are
these programs? How can they be improved? How can they become more
focused or better focused on inspiring those young students? As the
American Competitiveness Council looked at these programs, they came up
with a series of recommendations and findings. They made that very
argument: that there was overlap in these science, technology,
engineering, and math educational programs; that communication and
coordination among agencies could be improved; and that current
programs tended to be focused on short-term support rather than longer
term impact. Those are the very findings we should be trying to
implement and execute as part of this legislation, but I don't see it
in the underlying bill.
So the amendments I have focused on, first, the overlap and
duplication and lack of focus within those educational programs, to try
to strengthen them, measure their effect, and ensure that they have a
greater impact on those students; and, second, to make sure we are
appropriately focused on basic, fundamental research within the
National Science Foundation and that we are maintaining its
independence and that we ensure the peer review process is what
determines how and where funds are allocated.

I know we are working on an agreement on the Senate floor, so I am
not able to offer my amendment at the moment, but let me speak to what
it attempts to do. I have an amendment that strikes section 4002 of
this legislation. Section 4002 does two things within the National
Science Foundation that I think set the wrong precedent.
First, it establishes a set-aside, a minimum allocation for
educational and human resources within the National Science Foundation
of $1.05 billion. I recognize the educational initiatives within the
National Science Foundation are important, but I certainly can't say,
and I don't think any Member of the Senate can say, whether $1.05
billion is exactly the right number. But more important, we shouldn't
be mandating in law that the National Science Foundation direct a
specific amount of money to any area. We should, to the greatest of our
ability, allow those decisions to be set on a yearly basis by the
experts and the leadership of the National Science Foundation. If we
think they are not doing a good job, they should probably be replaced.
But they are hired specifically because they have the best and most
advanced understanding of what our needs are, what the most valuable
areas of research are, and what the best kinds of partnerships might be
for education related to physics, chemistry, mathematics, and material
science. So I would strike that set-aside, not because we don't think
any money should be going to this area--of course, money should be
going to this area--but because it is a dangerous precedent for
legislators to start carving up pieces of the National Science
Foundation for specific initiatives.

[[Page S4886]]

Second, this particular section of the legislation mandates--it
requires--that there be a specific percentage increase in this one
particular area each year between now and 2011. While I don't know
whether that percentage increase will turn out to be the right amount
or the wrong amount over the next several years, I think it is a bad
precedent to require as part of the legislation that a designated
portion of money go to any of the specific areas supported by the
National Science Foundation. Once we move away from the peer review
process, once we move away from independence within the National
Science Foundation to allocate funds as the leadership there sees fit,
then I think we run the risk of undermining the great strength that the
National Science Foundation has represented over the past several
years.
I began speaking about doubling resources for the National Science
Foundation 4 or 5 years ago because it has been so successful in
providing resources for basic research in key areas of physical
sciences, and I am extremely concerned that if we adopt the provisions
of section 4002 and start carving out pieces we think are politically
popular at a particular point in time, we will dramatically undermine
its effectiveness and have the unintended consequence of weakening the
organization's ability to inspire the next generation of engineers and
scientists.
I look forward to offering these amendments at the appropriate time,
and I thank you, Madam President, for the time this afternoon.
I yield the floor.

Entitlement Programs

Mr. GREGG. Madam President, let me step over to the chair from which
the junior Senator has been speaking.
I wanted to speak about a couple of issues. The first issue I want to
talk about is the recent report which came out yesterday from the
Medicare trustees which said that the Medicare trust fund is in dire
straits. The Medicare trustees are required under law to report to the
Senate and to the Congress and to the American people what the economic
status is of the trust fund as it looks out into the future.
A lot of us have been talking for a long time about the problems with
the entitlement programs we have--specifically Medicare, Medicaid, and
Social Security--and the fact that these three funds are headed toward
a meltdown, which is going to take with them the economy of this
country. The practical effect of these three funds in their present
spend-out situation is that they have approximately $70 trillion of
unfunded liability--$70 trillion over their actuarial life.
Now, $1 trillion is a number that a lot of us have a problem
comprehending. To try to put that number into perspective, if you took
all the taxes paid in the United States since we became a country, I
think we have paid about $46 trillion in taxes. If you take the entire
net worth of America--all our assets, including all our cars, all our
homes, all our stocks--that, again, is in the $45 trillion to $50
trillion net worth.
So what we have on the books as a result of the projected costs of
the Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security system is a cost that
exceeds all the taxes paid in the history of this country and exceeds
the net worth of this country.
Why is that? Why are we confronting this problem? Well, it is
basically a function of demographics. The postwar baby boomer
generation, of which I am a member, the largest generation in American
history, is beginning to retire.
By the year 2020, 2025, the number of retired citizens in this
country will double from the present number who are retired today. It
will go from about 35 million retired citizens up to about 70 million
retired citizens. The number of people working to support those retired
citizens will drop commensurately. So both Social Security and
Medicare, and to some extent Medicaid, were programs designed with the
concept that there would be a lot of people working for every person
retired. They were essentially pyramids.
In fact, in 1950, there were about 12.5 people working for every
person retired. So 12 people were paying into Social Security for every
1 person taking out. Today, there are about 3.5 people paying into
Social Security and Medicare for every one person taking out. Social
Security is running into surplus. But as this baby boom generation
retires, that number changes radically. We go from those large numbers
paying in and a small number taking out to a large number taking out
and a small number paying in. There will be about two paying in for
every one person taking out by about 2025. We go from a pyramid to a
rectangle and the system cannot support itself.
This chart reflects the severity of the problem. These three
programs--Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid--as a percentage of
spending of the GDP, by the year 2025, or 2028, will absorb almost 20
percent of GDP. Why is that a problem? Today, and historically, the
Federal Government has only spent 20 percent of gross national product.
So the practical implications are that by 2025, or 2028, the total
spending of these three programs alone will absorb all of the money
that has historically been spent by the Federal Government, which means
that nothing else could be spent--no other money--on things such as
national defense, the environment, and education. It would all be going
to these three programs, assuming you maintain the Federal share of the
GDP at its present level.
Things get worse, unfortunately, as the baby boom generation
accelerates into the 2030 period, when paying for those programs alone
reaches 27, 28 percent of GDP by about 2040. Obviously, it is not a
sustainable situation. Obviously, it is a situation where if we
continue on this path, we would essentially be saying to our children
that we are going to subject you to a cost that far exceeds anything
you could afford and basically hit you with a tax burden that would
essentially mean that you--our children and grandchildren--in order to
support this retired generation, would be unable to send your children
to college, buy your home, purchase your cars, live your lifestyle in
the manner our generation has been able to live. The money is going to
have to be spent by taking taxes out of your pocket.
A lot of us have been talking about and some people have even tried
to address this issue--specifically, the administration. The biggest
part of this problem is not Social Security, ironically; it is
Medicare. Now, the Medicare trustees yesterday made the point once
again that if we don't do something and start to do it fairly soon in
addressing the Medicare problem, we will bankrupt our children and our
children's children's future with the cost of this program. This was
their obligation as trustees. They are supposed to look at it
objectively, and they have. They said this program is headed toward
about $35 trillion of unfunded liability, that that is a huge number
and we need to correct that. Ironically, and fortunately, a couple of
years ago we put into place a law that requires that when the Medicare
Program starts to go in the direction of insolvency at a rate that
means it is going to take a significant amount of money from the
general taxpayers' pockets versus money from the wage earner, as they
pay their hospital insurance, that at that point the Federal Government
is supposed to act.
The way it works is this: If more than 45 percent of the Medicare
trust fund is being supported by general fund dollars, what does that
mean? Well, the Medicare trust fund theoretically was supposed to be
the Parts A and B, the hospital and doctor part; that was supposed to
be supported primarily by insurance premiums being paid on your
hospital insurance tax taken out of your salary every week. But, of
course, under the Part B program, we have never done that. We have
ended up subsidizing that program with general funds instead of having
it come out of the payroll tax. What this law says is when those
general fund subsidies exceed 45 percent of the total cost of the
Medicare system, it is an excessively dangerous situation and it has to
be addressed. If this happens 2 years in a row, where the cost of
Medicare is exceeding 45 percent of the general funds coming from the
Federal Treasury, that means people's income taxes, the taxes people
pay every day--then at that point the administration is supposed to
send up--whatever administration is in power--a proposal to correct the
problem.
That is what the Medicare trustees concluded. Last year, they
concluded

[[Page S4887]]

the trust funds were in severe strain and we are going to hit the 45-
percent level. This year, they have concluded the trust funds are under
severe strain, and it is going to hit the 45-percent level. The
practical effect of that is now the administration is required, prior
to the next budget, to send up a proposal to correct the problem.
Unfortunately, under the law, even though the administration is
required to send up such a proposal, the Congress is not required to
act on it.
Ironically, the administration, in an act of true fiscal
responsibility to our children and our children's children, this year
sent up a proposal to try to correct this problem, or at least begin to
correct the problem, although not fully. They suggested this year that
there should be two adjustments in the Medicare trust fund, neither of
which would have a significant impact on beneficiaries. In fact, for
the most part, it would have absolutely no impact on the beneficiaries,
and unless you were a beneficiary in a very high-income situation, with
more than $85,000 of personal income, or if you are married and have
more than $160,000 of joint income, it would not affect you at all.
There are two proposals that insulate beneficiaries. The first proposal
was that we do an accurate reimbursement to providers. Under the
present law, the health care professionals have estimated that provider
groups are getting about a 1.2 percent extra payment over what they
should be getting as a result of the fact that there have been new
efficiencies introduced into the provider repayment systems, through
technology primarily, that have reduced costs, but that reduction in
cost has not been reflected in the reimbursement. So we are actually
paying more than we should be paying in these accounts.
The administration didn't suggest that they capture all that money.
They suggested let's take half of that--leave the provider groups with
half of that money--I don't want to use the word windfall, but as a
bonus to them. Let's take the other half and use it to try to bring the
Medicare trust fund into some sort of solvency. That was the first
proposal of the administration. It was a reasoned proposal in light of
the fact that all of the professional groups have concluded that this
overpayment is occurring.
The second proposal they made was that people getting Part D, the
drug benefit--if they are very high-income individuals--should pay part
of the premium for that drug benefit. Under the Part D premium, there
was no contribution required, unlike Part B, which has a means test--
very limited, but it has one. Part D did not. The administration said,
listen, if you are a retired Senator, you should not be subsidized by
somebody who is working in a restaurant, or in a gas station, or on a
manufacturing line, which is what happens today. The way the law works
today, a person who is out there working for a living, maybe trying to
raise their children, is actually having to pay to subsidize retired
Senators who are getting Medicare or, for that matter--I don't want to
pick on Bill Gates' father as an example, but Bill Gates' father, or
Warren Buffet--millionaires and billionaires--are being subsidized by
people who are making an everyday wage and trying to make ends meet for
their families. So the administration suggested if you have more than
$80,000 of personal income as an individual, or $160,000 of joint
income as a family, then you should be required to pay a portion--just
a portion--of your Part D premium. That is a very reasonable approach.
Those two proposals together would have reduced the outyear
insolvency of the Medicare trust fund by almost a third. It would have
taken tremendous pressure off of the trust funds, especially the
Medicare trust fund. They were both rejected out of hand by the other
side of the aisle. They were demagoged. People came to the floor and
said this would savage Medicare, would destroy Medicare, that it was
going to undermine the rights of senior citizens to get Medicare.
Outrageous statements were made on the other side of the aisle, and
they continue to be made relative to these proposals that were
reasonably benign, that didn't affect beneficiaries, and would have
actually put Medicare on a solvency footing instead of insolvency,
which is where it is headed now.
Now the trustees have done their job and said, the administration is
absolutely right. If we don't correct this problem, we are going to
have a Medicare system that cannot be afforded by our children and
grandchildren. As a result, we will have a major contraction in the
system. Yet even though the Medicare trustees have said that--and they
are a pretty objective group and they are required under the law to be
so--we have the leading Senator on the other side, Senator Schumer,
taking the position that that is just politics, that Medicare is fine,
and instead of peddling an ill-conceived Social Security privatization
plan that has already been overwhelmingly rejected by the American
people, the administration should turn its attention to strengthening
Medicare.
Where was Senator Schumer when this amendment was offered on the
floor? He voted against it. When the administration suggested something
that was responsible, such as making high-income individuals pay a part
of their premium on Part D, Senator Schumer rejected it. When this
administration came forward and suggested we should reimburse providers
honestly and directly and fairly but not overly reimburse them--not too
much overly reimburse them--and take the savings and use it to make the
Medicare system more solvent, where were Senator Schumer and his
colleagues? They rejected that.
Now they have the audacity to come forward and attack the Medicare
trustees, whose job it is to present the facts as they are, and the
facts are the Medicare system is going into bankruptcy, and him saying
that is politics and trying to hyperbolize it into privatization, which
has nothing to do with Medicare--how outrageous and irresponsible for
one generation not to face up to the problems it is giving the other
generation. Senator Schumer is a baby boomer, as I am. It is our
problem we are passing on to our kids. We are the problem. We exist and
we are going to retire in massive numbers, and then we are going to
turn the bill over to our children. We have a responsibility as a
generation but, more importantly, we have a responsibility as
policymakers in the Senate to act, especially when the Medicare
trustees have told us the problem is there, it is legitimate, and it is
pretty obvious to anybody because we are all alive.
We have a bill, a law on the books, that says specifically this
problem must be addressed when the Medicare trustees, 2 years in a row,
have determined there is a problem, that 45 percent of the General
Treasury or more is being used to support Medicare, and we need to
adjust the system to effectively address that issue and to make the
system solvent and affordable for our children. And especially we
should act when reasonable proposals are brought to the floor,
proposals that have no maliciousness to them, have no political agenda
to them, have no purpose other than putting in place policies which are
going to make the system more solvent and more affordable. Yet they are
rejected--rejected with partisan rhetoric of the worst order because it
has nothing to do with the Medicare plan; privatization is thrown at
the suggestion that we correct the Medicare system by making rich
people pay more of their costs by getting the reimbursement formula
correct. That is subject to pejorative privatization by the Senator
from New York, with no proposals at all--none--from the other side of
the aisle to correct this problem which is looming. Other than fighting
terrorism and the threat of an Islamic fundamentalist detonating a
weapon of mass destruction in one of our cities or somewhere in
America, there is probably no problem which is more significant to the
future of this Nation than the pending fiscal meltdown which we are
going to confront as a result of the cost of these programs which we
put on the books and which, in their present process, cannot be
afforded.

If we just wait until we arrive at the cliff--and we will be going
pretty fast when we reach that cliff; we are not going to be able to
stop--and only try to deal with it then, what will be our

[[Page S4888]]

options? They will be so few and they will be so painful that they will
have a dramatic and dislocating effect not only on the generation that
has to pay the costs but on the generation that receives these
benefits.
We can, today, put in place changes which are gradual, which are
reasoned, and which will accomplish the type of adjustments that are
necessary to make this program work--work well for the beneficiaries so
we have a strong, solvent Medicare system and work well for those who
pay the taxes to support them. But if every time the issue is raised
that there has to be legitimate action in this area, especially when it
is being raised by the Medicare trustees, who do not have a political
agenda but are simply reporting a factual assessment of an actuarially
existing fact pattern--which is there are so many people alive today
who are baby boomers that when they retire, they are just going to
basically overwhelm the system--if every time those red flags are
raised, they are going to be responded to by the leadership on the
other side with pejoratives and partisanship and the use of phrases
such as ``privatization,'' then we are not going to accomplish anything
around here. All we are going to see is that we can deal with the next
election but we can't deal with the next generation. You might win the
next election, which I guess is the purpose of Senator Schumer, but it
is going to leave our kids one heck of a mess, and seniors who retire
in the 2020 period are going to also be in a pretty horrific way. Total
irresponsibility in the remarks of the Senator from New York in
response to the very responsible warnings brought forth by the Medicare
trustees.
On a second issue to which I wish to speak briefly--actually, not so
briefly--which is the issue before us, the competitiveness bill, this
competitiveness bill is well-intentioned. We all know that we as a
nation are confronting some very severe issues relative to our capacity
as a culture to compete in this world and be successful. We also know
that the essence of our capacity to compete is tied directly to our
capacity to produce an intelligent, thoughtful, knowledge-based
society. We are, without question, a country where success in the
global competition is not going to be built off of excessive manpower
or a dramatic amount of resources. It is going to be built off of
having brighter and smarter people who add value to products and
produce items that people around the world need and want, and they are
inventive and creative. The great genius of America is our creativeness
and our inventiveness. So the goal of this proposal is appropriate,
genuine, and well-intentioned, but the question becomes whether the
execution of that goal, on balance, accomplishes its purpose.
The Congress has this tendency--and I have seen it innumerable
times--when it sees a problem, to create a plethora of different little
programs, most of them not too big, all across the spectrum, which are
basically the ideas of a bunch of different people who came to the
table, but because there wasn't one cohesive idea that was dominant,
everybody's idea got into play. I guess that is the problem when you
have the committee designing the horse. That famous story--if a
committee designs a horse, you end up with something that doesn't look
like a horse. That is what happens when you have a proposal which puts
a large chunk of money on the table and then says: Here, let's spend
it. That, unfortunately, is where this proposal ends up to a large
degree.
Ironically, this proposal has a lot of specific initiatives in it
which we already tried before or which are duplicative programs we have
tried before, the irony being pretty apparent in items such as the
Manufacturing Extension Program, which, during the first few years of
this administration, it sent up proposals to basically zero it out.
That is a program the purpose of which was to create these
manufacturing extension centers around the country, which we did--they
are called the Hollings centers--but we also understood they would be
self-sustaining centers once the Federal Government got them up and
running. We now find they are not, so this bill essentially continues
them. Also, it basically restarts something called the ATP program. It
gives it a new name and title. It creates a brandnew series of
education initiatives in the Department of Energy which are pretty much
duplicative of initiatives in the Department of Education, and some
education initiatives in the National Science Foundation. It creates
new directives to the NOAA which are almost identical to what NOAA
already does but in addition are completely duplicative of what the
Oceans Commission concluded should be done and which was put into
action about 2 or 3 years ago as a result of the Oceans Commission.
As well-intentioned as this bill may be, in the end what it does is
it increases spending by $16 billion. That is the proposal: $16 billion
over 4 years. What it buys is a whole lot of little initiatives all
over the country which are the interests of this Senator or that
Senator but which in their totality have very little cohesion to them,
direction to them, or purpose to them and, as a practical matter, are
not paid for.

Here is the situation we confront. It is not as acute as the issue I
was talking about before in the Social Security entitlement accounts,
but the situation is this: We are spending a lot of money we don't
have. In the nondefense discretionary accounts, we have been fairly
disciplined over the last few years, but we are still spending a lot of
money we don't have.
What this proposal says is, even though we are spending a lot of
money we don't have, we are going to spend more money we don't have
because these are feel-good initiatives, and if we just sprinkle a
little crumbs all over the place, we can put out good press releases
and feel content that we have addressed the competitiveness question in
this country.
The competitiveness question in this country is not going to be
dramatically improved by spending $16 billion we don't have and then
sending the bill to our kids. If we want to improve competitiveness in
this country, we should be doing fairly substantive things that will
impact a lot of different areas and won't necessarily cost us too much
money.
We might start, for example, with tort reform, where we see a massive
amount of money spent inefficiently in this culture because we have to
fear lawsuits that are, quite honestly, in many instances frivolous and
that end up causing people to do defensive activities. Correct the tort
system, and that would create a fair amount of efficiency and
productivity in this economy.
Correct the regulatory morass we have. The fact is that to can get an
efficient powerplant on line--which we need a lot of in this country if
we are going to have an efficient economy--it literally takes years and
years of regulatory hoops to jump through, many of which are
duplicative, before you can get a decent powerplant up and running.
When was the last time a nuclear powerplant was brought on line in this
country? Well, I think it was 1988. Nuclear power is by far the most
efficient way and the most environmentally sound way to bring large
amounts of power online. Yet we can't license nuclear powerplants.
Senator Domenici, in a recent bill he produced in this Senate, which
didn't pass the Congress, has tried to streamline the effort.
Hopefully, it will result in more powerplants coming on line.
The simple fact is that we regulate ourselves into
noncompetitiveness. So if we want to correct the issue of
competitiveness, let's address some of these regulatory issues. They
don't have to be broad. It doesn't have to be a broad exercise. It can
be reasonably narrow.
In the area of immigration policy, we know there are very bright,
capable people around this world who want to come to America and be
productive. As Bill Gates described them in testimony before the HELP
Committee, he looks at them as job-setters. When he brings one of these
really bright people from someplace else in the world and puts them to
work at Microsoft, the way he sees that is that person is generating
jobs. It is the opposite of outsourcing; it is insourcing. If you bring
somebody in with special talents and abilities, especially in the
science and mathematics areas, that person becomes a job center around
which other jobs are created because of their creativity and their
abilities.
And what do we do to those folks? We tell them they can't come to the
United States even though they want

[[Page S4889]]

to, even though they have jobs here. We say: I am sorry, we can only
have 65,000 people with that talent in this country. That is it--even
though there may be 150,000 or 200,000 who would like to come to this
country and all of whom could come into this country from the
standpoint of being safe, sound, good contributing citizens and all of
whom, if they were here, would probably be giving us economic added
ability which would create jobs. It doesn't cost us any money to bring
these people in. In fact, it gives us more economic activity, which
gives us more jobs, probably more tax dollars from these people,
generating more taxes to the Federal Treasury. That is something we can
address if you want to improve the productivity of this Nation.
The idea that the Federal Government is going to sprinkle $16 billion
around to various programs--and it is sprinkled all over, a lot of
programs here, many of which either existed before or are being
recreated--and it is going to result in significantly more
competitiveness--well, it might work, but the only way you could
justify it is if you paid for it by reducing $16 billion somewhere else
in inefficiencies before you move down this road. The irony of this is
we have done it so many times before, and it hasn't worked because the
Federal Government can't command and control the economy. That is why
it doesn't work.
I was Governor when President Bush 1, who was very concerned about
education and wanted to be known as the education President, called a
conference of Governors together--the first time it happened since
Lincoln--I believe in Charlottesville, VA. The purpose of the
conference was to figure out how we as a nation were going to capture
and reform the education agenda. This was in 1989. I was Governor at
the time. Do you know what the first conclusion of that Governors
conference was? I think we came up with 10 directives. The first
conclusion was that we would lead the world in math-science education
in the elementary and secondary school systems by the year 2000 because
at that time we were 14 out of 16 countries of the industrialized
world.
I heard Senator Kennedy a while ago doing his presentation on this
issue on the Senate floor, and he put up a chart. I think he said we
were 24th out of 24 industrialized countries. We actually lost ground
if that is true. I don't know what the number is, but we are certainly
not at the top. Yet throughout this period we have created program
after program after program.
There is an initiative in here for the National Science Foundation to
reenergize its directorate on education. I was here the last time we
did that. I was in the House. It is a good idea, especially if you have
the funds to pay for it. But the fact is, it is a sprinkling effort.
The marketplace, in creating an atmosphere where there is competition,
is the way you make yourself more competitive. Spreading money over a
whole plethora of new programs might produce some results, but unless
you pay for it, in the end it is going to end up costing us
significantly. It is going to end up costing the next generation
significantly. So as well-intentioned as this proposal may be, I have
serious reservations about its effectiveness.
I would probably be willing to support it if it were paid for, but it
isn't paid for, and it is just going to add $16 billion to the debt.
Now, we will hear from others that this is just an authorized number,
but I can assure everyone that all we will hear about once this
authorized number is passed is that we need to appropriate the money to
meet those needs. So that is a straw dog argument. If you put on the
table that you are going to spend $16 billion more, that you don't
have, the odds are the Congress is going to spend $16 billion once it
gets authorized to do so.
At this time I understand we are not taking amendments, but if we
were in the process of taking amendments, I would offer an amendment to
do something substantive in the area of competition and making our
country more viable, and that would be to lift the cap on the H1B visa
program from 65,000 to 150,000. A very simple action. It would bring in
a large group of people who would be constructive citizens with science
and technology backgrounds that we need.
We would not be replacing people who are in jobs, but we would
actually be creating more jobs--probably a lot more jobs in the arenas
in which they work--and that would actually have an immediate impact on
competitiveness in this country. We wouldn't have to wait another 10
years to have another conference by another Presidency or another
Congress that says we are not caught up in the competitiveness area and
therefore we have to address math and science education. We would
actually have the people here next year who would have the math and
science skills and who would be able to contribute constructively.
So that would be the amendment I would offer, and I certainly hope to
have the opportunity to offer that amendment before this bill leaves
the floor.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I understand my junior colleague has a
request before I proceed.
Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator
Domenici be recognized for up to 15 minutes, that Senator Sanders would
follow him for up to 20 minutes, and that Senator Ensign would follow
him for up to 15 minutes.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Is there objection? The Chair hears
none, and it is so ordered.
Senator Domenici.
Mr. DOMENICI. I thank Senator Bingaman.
Mr. President, I am not sure I will take the whole 15, although I
have been speaking on this issue for a long enough time that one would
think I might have spoken out, but I haven't. I am very excited about
the bill, and so I am afraid I will use every 1 of the 15 minutes
because there is a lot I want to say.
First of all, let me say that I have the greatest respect for those
who oppose this bill, such as the distinguished Senator from New
Hampshire, chairman of the Budget Committee in the past, who has spoken
eloquently about the problems of Social Security and spoken his piece
today about this bill.
On the other hand, for myself, I want to say that the time has come
for a new bill to get passed, and I want it to be bipartisan and I want
Republicans to join Democrats on the bill that I believe we will look
back on and say it was the biggest, most significant, most important
piece of legislation that we have ever passed, that added to the brain
power of the American people, and particularly added to the brain power
of the young people coming along who are going to try to keep us the
most productive Nation on Earth by getting educated properly.
We are trying to pass this bill after having been told by the best of
Americans who took a look at our country, who looked at our laws, and
then recommended that we do 20 things. They were all recommendations
aimed at the proposal that we were going backward; that we were in
reverse gear as far as giving our young people the education they
deserve in the areas of math, science, physics, engineering, and the
like.
We were advised by the very best Americans. They did this as a
gratuity. They weren't paid. They used their time to tell us what was
going wrong and what could be fixed in terms of brain power development
among our people. They said, essentially, our biggest problem is, after
grade 4 and through grade 12 our young people are not getting educated
in math, science, physics, and the like by teachers who are educators
in those subjects; that huge percentages of the teachers don't even
know the subject matter. Yet they are required to teach because they do
not have anybody else. So they teach math even if they haven't studied
math. They told us we should fix that. This bill will fix that, we
hope.
They told us a number of other things. They said put them into law
and try to get these things passed, and over the next 5 to 10 years you
will see a big difference. The National Science Foundation should
receive much more money for the hard science research projects; that
the budget of the Department of Energy, which has a science fund,
should get more money for the science that it does in the great
laboratories of the United States; and to help bring up the education
for those youngsters we are talking about by giving them exciting
opportunities in the summer months and elsewise, and give the teachers
those times to get educated so they can pass on much more

[[Page S4890]]

brain power and excitement about these subjects to our young people.
Now, there is no doubt what is in this bill could be done better if
one person, or two, who were knowledgeable and fair were doing it and
following the recommendations of those who told us to do so. But we
can't do that here. We have to go to committees eventually and ask
Senators who have vested interests. So we don't have a perfectly drawn
bill in comparison to the 20 ideas propounded by the National Academy
and the special bill that was produced by the ex-president of Lockheed
Martin, Norm Augustine. Now, that part is so. It is true it is a good
bill in that regard. So we have to argue about some other points that
come in, such as we should not pass any new legislation so long as we
have a deficit.
One Senator, a Senator from Oklahoma, has an amendment. I have great
respect for him. He says it is the sense of the Senate that the
Congress has a moral obligation to offset the cost of new government
programs and initiatives. First of all, let me suggest to the
distinguished Senator that this bill does not spend money. If it spent
money, it would be subject to a point of order under the budget and
would fall because it is new spending. Nobody has raised that. Even the
great, distinguished, former chairman of the Budget Committee has not
done that. He did not stand up and say this bill falls under the Budget
Act because it spends money. Why didn't he? Because it doesn't spend
money.
There still has to be another act before this spends money. It has to
be appropriated. And any authorization bill is the same way. It does
not spend money. It does not need approval of the Budget Committee
because it doesn't spend money. However, when we try to spend the
money, then we better have it in the budget or it will fall under a
point of order. That is the truth, and there is nothing moral or
immoral about it.
The truth is, when the Senator says we have to offset the cost of
government programs and initiatives, and that we have an obligation to
our citizens to do so, certainly he ought to recognize we shouldn't
have to do it when there is no money being spent because if that is the
case, then we are just talking about words. They have no effect. We are
talking about words. These words are talking about programs that don't
spend money, and the Senator is trying to suggest that since they might
spend the money, we ought to do something about it in advance. We would
never pass anything around here if we added another requirement to
legislation that before it is ever a spending bill it once again clear
some new hurdle.
If the distinguished Senator from Oklahoma would like to do that, he
ought to go after the Budget Act of the United States and provide that
there is a way to raise a point of order against authorizing
legislation. We already have enough, but if he wants to do more, more
budget points of order, he could put that in there and have a nice
debate and see what the Senate thinks of adding that provision to the
Budget Act on an authorization.
My good friend, the Senator from New Hampshire, talked about a lot of
things that we could be doing that would help our country become a more
competitive country, which is what this is all about: putting more
brain power in our young people, helping them get more excited about
the good things that prepare them innovatively in order to create great
things. He spoke of a number of things he would do and could do outside
this bill. I agree with him. In fact, I could rewrite a bill we just
finished on energy. And if everybody were with me, I could add five or
six things to it--even though it is only a year and a half old--that
would help with our energy independence. But we have to do things we
are asked to do around here, and we have to do them the best we can.
This bill will cost $60 billion, if we decide to spend it, over the
next 4 years--if we decide to spend it. Of that, $16 billion represents
new programs that are not currently in existence. Now, if anybody can
truly, with a really straight face, tell the American people that is
what is going to break America--this $16 billion that isn't even spent,
that we might spend--it is really going to harm America's economic
future, then I don't know what to tell them about what is happening to
our budget naturally, about how much is spent for Social Security and
other things that just come as a natural matter because of the way the
laws are written and that they spend freely on their own.
I want to close by saying to those who oppose the bill, I believe the
time has come to pass this bill. It is new, to some extent, and the
newness is what is good about it. I believe the time has come to take a
chance on some new ways to educate our young people and see if we can't
get more brain power developing in the young people of our country.
Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I thank the Chair.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Vermont.

Amendment No. 936

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I wish to discuss an amendment, amendment
No. 936, which I have filed to this bill.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to add the following Senators
as cosponsors of this amendment: Senator Baucus, Senator Leahy, and
Senator Lincoln.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so
ordered.
Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, let me begin by commending the
distinguished majority leader, Senator Reid, for introducing S. 761,
the America COMPETES Act, and bringing it to the floor, along with the
minority leader, Senator McConnell, Senator Bingaman, Senator Domenici,
and a number of other Senators in a true spirit of bipartisanship.
There is no question the Congress has to do a better job in making
sure the United States is able to compete in the global economy. The
America COMPETES Act will begin to accomplish this important
undertaking by doubling the investment in basic research at the
National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and
Technology, and the Department of Energy's Office of Science in the
next 5 to 10 years.
I am also pleased this bill will improve teacher training in math and
science and help low-income students succeed in college preparatory
courses. I applaud these provisions and thank my colleagues for working
on this important piece of legislation.
But in my opinion, if we truly want to provide the tools necessary
for American workers to compete in the global economy, much more needs
to be done. That is why I will be offering this amendment, which I hope
will attract bipartisan support.
This amendment is simple and it is straightforward. At a time when
the United States has lost over 3 million manufacturing jobs, at a time
when we are on the cusp of losing millions more of high-paying
information technology jobs, this amendment would begin to reverse that
trend by providing employees with the resources they need to own their
own businesses through employee stock ownership plans and eligible
worker-owned cooperatives.
Specifically, this amendment would authorize $100 million to create a
U.S. employee ownership competitiveness fund within the Department of
Commerce to provide loans, loan guarantees, technical assistance, and
grants to expand employee ownership throughout this country.
Why is it so important for the Senate to provide incentives to expand
employee ownership in this country? The answer is pretty simple:
Employee ownership is one of the keys to creating a sustainable economy
with jobs that pay a living wage. This amendment has the strong support
of the ESOP Association, a nonprofit organization serving approximately
2,500 employee stock ownership plans throughout the country. Let me
quote from a letter they recently sent to my office:

Your amendment is a modest first step in awakening our
government to the fact that in the 21st Century the inclusion
of employees as owners of the companies where they work in a
meaningful manner should be a key component of any national
competitiveness program. If the Senate adopts your amendment
and it eventually becomes law, we assure you that the ESOP
community will work constructively to ensure that the loan
and grant program you propose works effectively to benefit
the employee owners, the employee-owned companies, and our
American economy.

The concept of an ESOP or a worker-owned company is not a radical
idea.

[[Page S4891]]

Not only are there some 11,000 ESOPs in our country, but there are some
major corporations that everybody is very familiar with, including
Procter & Gamble and Anheuser-Busch, that are also ESOPs.
Interestingly, the Tribune Company, one of the major publishers in
America, is in the process of becoming a 60-percent employee-owned
company.
Every day we read in the papers about plants that are being moved to
China, Mexico, and a number of other low-wage countries. Since a number
of these factories were making profits, they were doing well in the
United States. Shutting them down was unnecessary and could have been
avoided if these plants were sold to their employees through ESOPs, or
worker-owned cooperatives. In other words, in my State, the State of
Vermont, and throughout this country, there are companies, large and
small, that are making a profit where owners--who may be retiring, who
started a company and now they are retiring--want to be able to leave
their companies to their employees if these workers had the resources,
if they had the technical assistance and legal advice to know how to
put together that transaction--which in many cases is pretty
complicated.
Further, study after study has shown when employees own their own
companies, when they work for themselves, when they are involved in the
decisionmaking that impacts their jobs, workers become more motivated,
absenteeism goes down, worker productivity goes up, and people stay on
the job for a longer period of time because they are proud of and
involved with what they are doing.
Most important to the communities throughout this country is when
workers own the place in which they work, shock of all shocks, they are
not going to shut it down and move the plant to China.
Since 2000, the U.S. manufacturing sector has lost 3.2 million good-
paying manufacturing jobs. Put another way, since President Bush was
elected President, this country has seen one out of every six factory
jobs disappear--one out of every six.
In addition, the Associated Press recently reported a study by
Moody's which found: ``16 percent of the nation's 379 metropolitan
areas are in recession, reflecting primarily the troubles in
manufacturing.''
I suspect this problem is even worse in rural areas in my own small
State of Vermont. We have lost about 20 percent of our manufacturing
jobs in the last 5 years. Let me give an example of some of the jobs we
have been losing as a country and why, in fact, we need to be
competitive and why, in fact, we need to encourage ESOPs and worker-
owned industry. From 2001 to 2006, the United States of America has
experienced a loss of 42 percent of our communication equipment jobs,
37 percent of our jobs have been lost in the manufacture of
semiconductors and electronic components, 43 percent of our textile
jobs have disappeared, and about half of our apparel jobs have
vanished.
Not only are we losing good-paying manufacturing jobs, we are also
losing high-paying information technology jobs.

While the loss of manufacturing jobs has been well documented, it may
come as a surprise to some that from January of 2001 to January of
2006, the information sector of the American economy lost over 640,000
jobs, or more than 17 percent of its workforce.
The trends there are pretty ominous. Alan Blinder, the former Vice
Chairman of the Federal Reserve, has recently concluded that between 30
million to 40 million jobs in the United States are vulnerable to
overseas outsourcing over the next 10 to 20 years. While, of course, we
have to invest in math and science, of course, we have to educate our
students as best we can, we cannot ignore the significant impact
globalization is having on our blue-collar factory jobs and on our
white-collar information technology jobs.
Today there are some 11,000 employee stock ownership plans, hundreds
of worker-owned cooperatives, and thousands of other companies with
some form of employee ownership. Many of them are thriving. In fact,
employee ownership has been proven to increase employment, increase
productivity, increase sales, and increase wages in the United States.
Yet despite the important role that worker ownership can play in
revitalizing our economy, the Federal Government has failed to commit
the resources needed to allow employee ownership to realize its true
potential, and that is why this amendment is so important.
While this issue may be new to this bill, I have actually been
working on it for several years. In the House, when I was the ranking
member of the Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit Subcommittee,
I was able to hold a hearing on this issue nearly 4 years ago and we
had some wonderful testimony.
I fear in the next 10 to 20 years, if we do not change course, there
will not be a major automobile industry in this country. We must not
allow that to happen. We must protect good-paying jobs in this country.
I believe employee ownership may be one of the ways we can keep good-
paying jobs in America.
Let me conclude by saying in my opinion it would be much more
important to provide this assistance to employees who could be creating
and retaining jobs right here in the United States by the expansion of
employee ownership. This is a very important issue. There is a lot of
excitement all over the country about it. Let us protect American jobs.
Let us give working people in this country the opportunity to own the
places in which they are working. Let us make this country more
economically competitive. I very much hope my colleagues will be
supporting this amendment when it is offered.
I yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from New Mexico.

Amendment No. 928

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I ask for regular order with respect to
the DeMint amendment No. 928.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The amendment is now pending.

Amendment No. 947 to Amendment No. 928

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I ask to call up the Dodd-Shelby
amendment No. 947. It is a second-degree amendment.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will report.
The assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

The Senator from New Mexico [Mr. Bingaman], for Mr. Dodd,
for himself and Mr. Shelby, proposes an amendment numbered
947 to amendment No. 928.

Mr. BINGAMAN. I ask unanimous consent the reading of the amendment be
dispensed with.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The amendment is as follows:

(Purpose: To express the sense of the Senate with respect to small
business growth and capital markets)

In lieu of the matter proposed to be inserted, insert the
following:

SEC. ___. SENSE OF THE SENATE REGARDING SMALL BUSINESS GROWTH
AND CAPITAL MARKETS.

(a) Findings.--The Congress finds that--
(1) the United States has the most fair, most transparent,
and most efficient capital markets in the world, in part due
to its strong securities statutory and regulatory scheme;
(2) it is of paramount importance for the continued growth
of our Nation's economy, that our capital markets retain
their leading position in the world;
(3) small businesses are vital participants in United
States capital markets, and play a critical role in future
economic growth and high-wage job creation;
(4) section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, has
greatly enhanced the quality of corporate governance and
financial reporting for public companies and increased
investor confidence;
(5) the Securities and Exchange Commission (in this section
referred to as the ``Commission'') and the Public Company
Accounting Oversight Board (in this section referred to as
the ``PCAOB'') have both determined that the current auditing
standard implementing section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act
of 2002 has imposed unnecessary and unintended cost burdens
on small and mid-sized public companies;
(6) the Commission and PCAOB are now near completion of a
2-year process intended to revise the standard in order to
provide more efficient and effective regulation; and
(7) the chairman of the Commission recently has said, with
respect to section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002,
that, ``We don't need to change the law, we need to change
the way the law is implemented. It is the implementation of
the law that has caused the excessive burden, not the law
itself. That's an important distinction. I don't believe
these important investor protections, which are even now only
a few years old, should be opened up for amendment, or that
they need to be.''.

[[Page S4892]]

(b) Sense of the Senate.--It is the sense of the Senate
that the Commission and the PCAOB should complete
promulgation of the final rules implementing section 404 of
the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (15 U.S.C. 7262).

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I have a unanimous consent request here
which I will propound at this point, that sets out a procedure for us
to follow this evening.
I ask unanimous consent that at 5:10 p.m. the Senate resume debate
with respect to the Dodd-Shelby amendment, No. 947, and the DeMint
amendment No. 928, with the time divided 5 minutes each for Senators
Dodd and Shelby, and 10 minutes under the control of Senator DeMint, to
be debated concurrently; that no amendments be in order to either
amendment and that the Dodd amendment be modified to be a first-degree
amendment; that upon the use or yielding back of time, the Senate
proceed to vote in relation to the Dodd-Shelby amendment, as modified;
that there be 2 minutes between the votes equally divided and
controlled between Senators Dodd and DeMint or their designees, to be
followed by a vote in relation to the DeMint amendment; that upon the
use of that time, the Senate, without further intervening action or
debate, vote in relation to the DeMint amendment; that upon disposition
of the DeMint amendment, the Senate resume the Coburn amendment No.
917, and that the previous order with respect to the debate time prior
to the vote be in order, with the time equally divided and controlled
between Senators Bingaman and Coburn or their designees; and without
further debate the Senate proceed to vote in relation to the Coburn
amendment No. 917; that no amendment be in order to the Coburn
amendment; that upon disposition of these amendments it be in order to
call up the Sununu amendment No. 938 and the Sanders amendment No. 936,
and the Senate then return to the regular order of amendments.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Is there objection?
Mr. ALEXANDER. No objection.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so
ordered.
Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Texas is
recognized.
Mrs. HUTCHISON. Mr. President, I rise to speak in favor of the
America COMPETES Act.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Who yields time?
The Senator from New Mexico.
Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I did not realize that the time was
reserved between now and 5:10. Is it reserved? My impression was that
the floor was open for Senators to speak or offer amendments.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Senator Ensign was supposed to
speak after Senator Sanders.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Senator Ensign will not be here. Senator Hutchison and
then Senator Cornyn would like to take that time. I ask unanimous
consent that Senator Hutchison and Senator Cornyn be allowed to take
the time between now and 5:10 when the vote begins.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Is there objection?
Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, could we clarify what the request is? I
am sorry. I was not able to pay full attention.
Mr. ALEXANDER. I asked that Senator Hutchison have 10 minutes,
followed by Senator Cornyn for 10 minutes.
Mr. BINGAMAN. Could we modify that request to provide that Senator
Cornyn's intention is to offer and then withdraw an amendment?
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Texas.
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, that is my intention.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Is there objection?
Mr. ALEXANDER. Could we ask the intention of the senior Senator from
Texas?
Mrs. HUTCHISON. I intend to speak on the bill.
Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I have no objection to the Senator from
Texas being allotted 10 minutes and then the other Senator from Texas,
Mr. Cornyn, going ahead with his comments and the offering and
withdrawal of an amendment.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so
ordered.
The Senator from Texas is recognized.
Mrs. HUTCHISON. I thank the Chair.
Mr. President, I rise to speak in favor of the America COMPETES Act.
I thank the Senator from Tennessee, Mr. Alexander, Senator Domenici,
Senator Bingaman, and Senator Cornyn. I have worked with all of them to
try to focus first on what the problems are with regard to higher
education and then to look at K-12 education. Certainly, the Senator
from Tennessee, having been the Secretary of Education and the Governor
of Tennessee, has dealt with education issues and has taken a major
lead on trying to reform our education system so that it does meet the
needs of the future generation.
Having the National Academy do a study, resulting in the report
called ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm,'' was exactly the right
thing to do. I would never have thought we could have such a clear
message from the National Academy about what we do right, what we do
wrong, what is missing, and what we have to improve.
Norm Augustine, former chairman of the board of Lockheed Corporation,
was chairman of the committee. It was a distinguished group, including
the former president of Texas A&M who is now Secretary of Defense.
There were others. I was so pleased to see that they saw the problem.
The problem is that fewer than 30 percent of U.S. fourth- and eighth-
grade students performed at a proficient level or higher in
mathematics. The United States placed near the bottom 20 percent of
nations in advanced mathematics and physics in testing. The United
States is 20th among nations in the proportion of its 24-year-olds with
degrees in science or engineering. The United States graduates about
70,000 engineers every year. India is matriculating about 250,000, and
in China the number is even greater. Within a few years, approximately
90 percent of all scientists and engineers in the world will live in
Asia. If we have fewer innovators, we are going to have fewer
innovations.
America has staked its economy on being the creators for the world.
We have had the innovators. We have had the engineers, the scientists,
the researchers. Yet we are now falling back in K-12, and our
institutions of higher education are not getting students with the
proper prerequisites to go into those course studies. We have to start
from the beginning. The bill before us takes those steps. I am proud to
be a cosponsor.
There are three areas: research, education, and innovation.
First, research. The bill increases the research investment by
doubling the authorized funding levels for the National Science
Foundation. It also substantially increases funding in the Department
of Energy's Office of Science, and it brings NASA into the equation,
one of our premier research institutions. We are going to increase the
emphasis on science in NASA because we already have the infrastructure.
We have paid for the infrastructure, but we are shortchanging the
science. So that is a part of this bill as well.
The second focus is education, specifically in the fields of science,
technology, engineering, math, and critical foreign languages. We offer
competitive grants to States to promote better coordination of
elementary and secondary education. We want to strengthen the skill of
teachers by giving them incentives to major in their course curriculum
and then get education certifications in the same college degree but as
a secondary part of their degree rather than the primary focus of their
degree, because if we have math majors teaching math instead of
education majors teaching math, we know the student is going to have a
better opportunity to excel. We want to give the people who have
already chosen teaching the opportunity to get a higher degree in their
course curriculum, go back and get a master's degree and help them with
grants to do that, because if they will commit to continuing to teach,
then we will have better qualified teachers.

Innovation is the third focus of our bill. Since the beginning of the
industrial revolution, America has been the innovator in the world.
Economic studies have shown that as much as 85 percent of the measured
growth in per

[[Page S4893]]

capita income has been due to technological change. But these
technologies did not appear out of thin air; they were designed and
developed by scientists and engineers at innovative companies such as
EDS, Dell, Apple, Microsoft, and through Government investment in NASA
and the National Science Foundation.
With that in mind, our bill ensures that both NASA and the National
Science Foundation are able to expand their strong traditional roles in
fostering technological and scientific excellence. We have increased
NASA funding to support basic research and foster new innovation, but
the NASA budget is being starved with infrastructure requirements. They
are not able to do the science that would make the investment in the
infrastructure pay off. We have to bring NASA back to its original
scientific purpose. We have the Innovative Partnerships Program. We
have the NASA Education Program. We are beginning to focus on exactly
what we need to do.
This is a bipartisan effort sorely needed in Congress today,
something on which we can all agree. America is falling behind. We are
falling behind in education. We are falling behind in innovation. We
are importing technological jobs that we ought to be creating ourselves
with our own American students, but we don't have enough qualified
students graduating from our colleges to fill these technical jobs. We
need to upgrade our education system. That is exactly what this bill
today is trying to do. We are attempting--both sides of the aisle--to
make America better, to reclaim our prowess in education, K-12 as well
as higher education, and to make sure we continue to be the innovators
of the future as we have been in the past.
I urge my colleagues to support this legislation. Let's work on
amendments. Let's get them through, but let's come to a conclusion. I
know the President would like to sign a bill that moves our country
forward in something as important as education.
I thank the Chair and yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The junior Senator from Texas.

Amendment No. 902

(Purpose: To amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to
increase competitiveness in the United States)

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I have an amendment at the desk. I ask
unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment, call up amendment
902, and ask for its immediate consideration.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so
ordered. The clerk will report.
The assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

The Senator from Texas [Mr. Cornyn] proposes an amendment
numbered 902.

Mr. CORNYN. I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be
dispensed with.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so
ordered.
(The text of the amendment is printed in today's Record under ``Text
of Amendments.'')
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, as I told the distinguished Senator from
New Mexico and the distinguished Senator from Tennessee, it is my
intention to withdraw this amendment following my remarks. But I
believe it is important, when we are talking about America's
competitiveness, to talk about people with some of the very most
desirable skills and education and how it is that we might attract them
to live and work and create jobs here in America.
First, I express my gratitude to both Senator Bingaman and Senator
Alexander for their leadership on this issue. It is not often enough
that we have an opportunity to work on a bipartisan basis on something
that is so right and so good and so meritorious as this. It feels good.
I think we ought to do it more often.
I do wish to talk about this amendment which is called the Securing
Knowledge, Innovation, and Leadership Act amendment, otherwise known as
the SKIL bill. This was a component of the comprehensive immigration
reform bill that passed the Senate last year. Of course, that did not
go anywhere. We are back again. I assure my colleagues that we will be
coming back time and time again until we get this matter voted on.
In the past 2 years, there has been much focus by Congress and the
administration on restoring America's competitive edge. While some have
viewed the SKIL bill, as it is called, as an immigration issue, I
believe it should be considered as a competitiveness issue, not just an
immigration one. In fact, the National Academy of Sciences included
similar recommendations in its study ``Rising Above the Gathering
Storm.'' This very report was the original, the genesis of America
COMPETES and several other bills introduced in the 109th Congress. That
report recommended to Congress that it should ``continue to improve
visa processing for international students and scholars to provide less
complex procedures and continue to make improvements on such issues as
visa categories and duration, travel for scientific meetings, the
technology-alert list, reciprocity agreements, and changes in status.''
The report also recommended that Congress should ``institute a new
skills-based, preferential immigration option. Doctoral-level education
in science and engineering skills would substantially raise an
applicant's chances and priority in obtaining U.S. citizenship'' under
this particular legislation.
The United States has always been blessed by recruiting the best and
the brightest from all around the world, whether they be scholars,
scientists, or researchers. As we all know, the United States is now
engaged, though, in a global competition for these very same
scientists, scholars, and researchers.
In this global economy, there are only three ways for us to retain
the most brilliant workforce in the world: No. 1, we can grow our own
talent, which is the intent of the bill we are debating right now; No.
2, we can continue to recruit the top students from around the world
from other nations; or, No. 3, we can watch our companies move their
workforce and jobs to other countries in order to find that talented
workforce and to remain competitive. I don't know if there are any
other choices than those--grow our own talent, import the best talent,
or see our jobs go overseas. Those are the choices we have. The
countries that can attract and retain the best and the brightest will
obviously have an advantage over other countries in this global
competition.
As we have heard, the United States does not produce enough
engineers. Over half of master's and Ph.D. degrees in the United States
go to foreign students each year, foreign students who study in the
United States. China graduates four times as many engineers as we do,
and within a few years approximately 90 percent of all scientists and
engineers in the world will be in Asia.

Foreign students help us fill the gap right now--a gap we are going
to try to make up through growing more of our own talent right here
through the great provisions of this legislation--but then our
immigration policy, as currently constituted, forces these best and
brightest students, these foreign students, to return home because
there are no high-tech visas.
Our immigration policy has not adapted to the changing international
environment or this global competition. Only 65,000 visas are issued
each year to this category of the best and the brightest. For the past
few years, the cap has been reached before the fiscal year even begins.
But this year, on April 1, 2007, there was a loud outcry for immediate
relief in our highly skilled immigration policies because that was the
day the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service announced the 2008 cap
for H-1B visas was met. That is right, because the United States has
already met the cap for H-1B visas, foreign students graduating from
our universities this spring are virtually shut out of the U.S. job
market. We hit that cap on the very day the opportunity for filing for
those types of visas was presented.
This situation is unprecedented. What it means is employers cannot
hire highly educated workers for up to 1 year, until the next allotment
of visas becomes available. With global competition, of course, these
workers have a lot of other options as to where to go. They can go to
England. They can go to France. They can go to India. They can go to
China. In short, they can go to our global competitors and work there
and take the jobs that

[[Page S4894]]

could be created here in America with them.
This SKIL bill has important protections for American workers, and I
hope my colleagues will listen to this because there is, frankly, a lot
of misconception about foreign students and foreign workers coming here
and taking American jobs at a lower wage. In fact, high-tech visas
generate fees to pay for U.S. worker training programs. Every time an
employer sponsors a foreign worker, that employer must contribute to a
fund to train U.S. workers. Of course, under our law, they cannot be
hired to come in and work at a lower wage than would have to be paid to
a comparable U.S. worker. Immigrant professionals actually create jobs
here in the United States. The founder of Intel is a prime example. He
was an immigrant from Hungary and has created hundreds of thousands of
jobs at his company here in America.
So sound policy will start by retaining foreign students who are
educated here in the United States, particularly in the most sought
after areas of math, science, and engineering.
We should exempt from the annual visa limit any foreign student who
graduates from a U.S. university with a master's degree or a Ph.D.
degree in these essential fields. It is simply a matter of economic
survival and competition for the United States. Also, insourcing
talented workers, as I pointed out, is preferable to outsourcing those
jobs and the associated economic activity that goes with it to other
countries. We should make it easier for those who do comply with our
immigration laws to travel in and out of our country as well. We must
also attract the best and brightest who are working in other countries
to come here and do their work in the United States so those jobs can
stay here.
In the long run, we have to improve our schools and encourage more
U.S. students to study engineering and mathematics, and the America
COMPETES Act, as it is currently written, does just that. But in the
short term, we have to adapt our immigration policy so when those U.S.
students are educated in engineering fields, there will be jobs right
here in the United States for them to perform. Then we can reap the
benefits of the most outstanding college and university education in
the world, which students travel from all around the world in order to
be able to obtain, and then that they not have to go home after they
graduate from college if they are in the essential fields of math,
science, and engineering.
If we do not act, America's technology industry, its health care
industry, higher education, research institutions, financial services
industries will be harmed and our economy will suffer. The intersection
of our immigration policy and our country's ability to compete for
global talent is critical, and we cannot wait years to address this
issue. It is imperative we address it as soon as possible.

Amendment No. 902, withdrawn

My only regret is we are unable to do so on this bill because it
belongs on this bill. But I understand the practical ramifications of
continuing to insist upon a vote on this particular amendment at this
time. So it is with some regret that I ask unanimous consent to
withdraw my amendment but urge my colleagues to continue to work to
support H-1B visa reform and see that the SKIL bill, as currently
presented as an amendment to this bill, is ultimately enacted into law
because, frankly, it is in the best interest of the United States and
American jobs right here at home.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Salazar). Without objection, the amendment
from the Senator from Texas is withdrawn.
Mr. CORNYN. I yield the floor.
Yhe PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, within 3 or 4 minutes, we will be
moving to amendments as described by the Senator from New Mexico. But
before he speaks, let me thank the Senator from Texas both for his
leadership on the amendment and for his spirit of cooperation and
willingness to withdraw the amendment.
It is my hope that this is not the end of that discussion. I strongly
agree with him. Our immigration laws are archaic in this regard. We
have 650,000 legal new citizens every year, and we should, in our own
interests, allow highly skilled men and women--the brightest people in
the world who come here to study, earn these degrees in science,
technology, math--to stay here and create jobs instead of going home
and creating jobs. We should do that. So he has highlighted that. The
Senate adopted that last year. I hope we will have a chance to adopt it
again before Memorial Day. I salute the Senator for that, and I hope
this is just the beginning of his insistence on this and other types of
legislation that would reform our immigration policy.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico.
Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, let me also commend the Senator from
Texas and thank him for his support for the underlying legislation. I
do think the substance of what he is trying to get accomplished with
regard to the immigration laws of the country--I very much support
trying to facilitate allowing people who get an education here to stay
here and use those talents and skills and knowledge they have acquired
to benefit our country. So we need to work on that. I think the
appropriate place to do that is as part of the debate we will do on
immigration, which is coming up. The majority leader has indicated he
plans to get to that issue in May, so I think, clearly, that is coming
up very soon. But I commend the Senator from Texas for his willingness
to withdraw his amendment at this time.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The senior Senator from New Mexico.
Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I am not going to take any time. In
fact, I just want to do something I very rarely do, but it seems
appropriate based on the arguments I have made this day. So I am going
to ask for a parliamentary inquiry of the Chair. My parliamentary
inquiry is, would this bill, with any of the amendments that have been
adopted so far, be subject to a point of order under the Budget Act of
the United States?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Chair is not aware of any such points of
order against this bill.
Mr. DOMENICI. I thank the Chair.
I yield the floor.
Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

Amendment No. 908, as Modified

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I send a modification to amendment No.
908 to the desk.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, the amendment is so
modified.
The amendment, as modified, is as follows:

On page 55, lines 21 and 22, strike ``engineering)'' and
insert ``engineering and technology)''.
On page 56, line 8, after ``engineering'' insert ``and
technology''.
On page 56, line 24, strike ``mathematics and science'' and
insert ``mathematics, science, engineering, and technology''.
On page 59, line 6, strike ``mathematics and science'' and
insert ``mathematics, science, and, to the extent applicable,
technology and engineering''.
On page 59, line 15, strike ``mathematics and science'' and
insert ``mathematics, science, technology, and engineering''.
On page 60, line 6, strike ``mathematics and science'' and
insert ``mathematics, science, technology, and engineering''.
On page 60, line 10, before ``that'' insert ``in
mathematics, science, and to the extent applicable,
technology and engineering''.
On page 60, line 24, strike ``mathematics and science'' and
insert ``mathematics, science, and to the extent applicable,
technology and engineering''.
On page 61, lines 8 and 9, strike ``mathematics and
science'' and insert ``mathematics, science, and, to the
extent applicable, technology and engineering''.
On page 62, line 14, strike ``mathematics or science'' and
insert ``mathematics, science, technology, or engineering''.
On page 65, lines 16 and 17, strike ``MATHEMATICS AND
SCIENCE'' and insert ``MATHEMATICS, SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND
ENGINEERING''.
On page 65, line 19, strike ``MATHEMATICS AND SCIENCE'' and
insert ``MATHEMATICS, SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND ENGINEERING''.
On page 66, lines 8 and 9, strike ``Mathematics and
Science'' and insert ``Mathematics, Science, Technology, and
Engineering''.
On page 67, line 9, strike ``Mathematics and Science'' and
insert ``Mathematics, Science, Technology, and Engineering''.

[[Page S4895]]

On page 67, lines 16 and 17, strike ``math and science''
and insert ``mathematics, science, and technology''.
On page 68, lines 21 and 22, strike ``mathematics or
science (including engineering)'' and insert ``mathematics,
science, or engineering''.
On page 69, lines 4 and 5, strike ``mathematics or
science'' and insert ``mathematics, science, or technology''.
Beginning on page 69, line 25 through page 70, line 1,
strike ``mathematics and science'' and insert ``mathematics,
science, technology, and engineering''.
On page 70, lines 10 and 11, strike ``mathematics and
science'' and insert ``mathematics, science, technology, and
engineering''.
On page 71, line 7, strike ``mathematics and science'' and
insert ``mathematics, science, technology, and engineering''.
On page 71, line 10, strike ``mathematics and science'' and
insert ``mathematics, science, technology, and engineering''.
On page 71, line 18, strike ``mathematics and science'' and
insert ``mathematics, science, and, to the extent applicable,
technology and engineering''.
On page 72, line 23, strike ``mathematics and science'' and
insert ``mathematics, science, technology, and engineering''.
On page 73, line 14, strike ``mathematics and science'' and
insert ``mathematics, science, and to the extent applicable,
technology and engineering''.
On page 73, lines 18 and 19, strike ``mathematics and
science'' and insert ``mathematics, science, and to the
extent applicable, technology and engineering''.
On page 73, lines 23 and 24, strike ``mathematics and
science'' and insert ``mathematics, science, technology, and
engineering''.

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I ask that we proceed to act on this
modified amendment at this point. This is the managers' package from
the Energy Committee, and it clarifies several points that are of a
technical nature. I ask unanimous consent that the amendment, as
modified, be agreed to.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, the managers' amendment, as
modified, is agreed to.
The amendment (No. 908), as modified, was agreed to.

Amendment No. 940

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I also call up amendment No. 940.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The amendment is pending.
Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, again, this is a managers' package from
the HELP Committee. Senator Kennedy and Senator Enzi are cosponsoring
this. I would urge that the Senate agree to this amendment at this
time.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the amendment.
The amendment (No. 940) was agreed to.
Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I know Senator Dodd
and Senator Shelby are here ready to speak, and Senator DeMint as well,
with regard to their respective amendments.

Amendments Nos. 947 and 928

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, amendment No. 947 is
modified to be a first-degree amendment.
Who yields time?
Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I believe Senator Dodd has 5 minutes,
Senator Shelby has 5 minutes, and Senator DeMint has 10 minutes under
the order.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator is correct.
The Senator from Connecticut is recognized.
Mr. DODD. Mr. President, let me briefly first thank my colleague from
Alabama, Senator Shelby, the former chairman of the Banking Committee,
who will also be offering this amendment for the consideration of our
colleagues.
Our markets, I think all of us know, are the most fair and efficient
in the world due to many reasons, but in large part to our strong
statutory and regulatory schemes in the country. The amendment we are
offering recognizes the very significant role of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act
of improving and maintaining the integrity of the capital markets of
this country, as well as the important role of small businesses in
economic growth and job creation. We all remember and understand very
well the debate that went on a number of years ago as a result of some
of the disasters that occurred in Enron and WorldCom to make sure our
public companies would be more accountable and more responsive to the
concerns of the shareholders.
The SEC and the PCAOB have determined that the existing
implementation of section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation has not
fully achieved the intent of the statute. Last December, they proposed
management guidance and revised auditing standards to more
appropriately implement the statute, without having an unintended or
inappropriate impact on small businesses.
The amendment I offer with my colleague from Alabama expresses the
sense of the Senate that the Securities and Exchange Commission and the
Public Company Accounting Oversight Board continue their rulemaking and
finalize their ongoing rulemaking process. These two agencies are
currently considering about 200 comments and letters from the public
commenting on their proposed regulations dealing with section 404. The
letters come from a wide variety of interested parties, offering views
on the strengths of the proposals and suggestions for those
improvements. The capital markets and all businesses, including small
businesses, will be better served by a deliberative process of
rulemaking conducted by these agencies.
I commend Chris Cox for the fine job he is doing at the SEC. They
have responded very well to the concerns about the section 404
requirements, particularly the smaller public companies.
SEC Chairman Cox has recently said:

We don't need to change the law.

I am quoting him now, Mr. President.

We need to change the way the law is implemented. It is the
implementation of the law that has caused the excessive
burden, not the law itself. That is an important distinction.

He goes on to say.

I don't believe these important investor protections, which
are even now only a few years old, should be opened up to an
amendment, or that they need to be.

I agree with Chris Cox, President Bush's appointee to head up the
SEC. They are doing a very fine job. I think it would be irresponsible
for us at this juncture to jump in and basically reduce by 80 percent
the number of companies that would have to comply with section 404. Let
the SEC do their job. That is what we have asked them to do. They are
responsible. They are a responsible agency in charge of looking at
this. If and when they come back, and there are those of us here who
feel they haven't gone far enough, that those burdens still exist, then
I would welcome an opportunity to address that. But it is very
premature to jump in at this juncture while the SEC is doing the job we
asked them to do, acting responsibly, and performing their public
functions under good leadership. It seems to me this is not a moment
for us to jump into the middle of this and by a vote of small margins
decide we are going to tell these agencies what to do with the
professional staffs they have and the commentary process where the
public has an opportunity to address and comment on the suggested rule
changes that Christopher Cox and his staff at the SEC and the other
commissioners are considering at this moment.
So for all of those reasons, we are offering this amendment which
offers us an opportunity to express our concerns about where this is
headed. Let's send a message that we are watching very carefully, we
care about this, but avoid the situation of this body engaging in a
regulatory process, which is properly left to the agencies charged with
that responsibility. For those reasons I urge the adoption of the Dodd-
Shelby amendment.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to add Senator Reed of Rhode
Island, the chairman of the subcommittee, as a cosponsor of the
amendment.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I yield the floor.
Mr. SHELBY. Mr. President, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 that we are
familiar with has provided real benefits to the capital markets. On the
other hand, there is no question that its implementation has been too
costly, particularly for small public companies. We know this. This is
a given.
That is why I am encouraged that the securities regulators charged
with implementing this legislation at the Securities and Exchange
Commission and the PCAOB are near the end of a 2-year

[[Page S4896]]

process to make significant changes that are likely to reduce the
unacceptable costs and burdens of section 404 compliance which Senator
Dodd alluded to.
This body, I believe, ought to give the regulators, the Securities
and Exchange Commission, and the Public Company Accounting Oversight
Board a chance to fix this problem, because they have been involved in
this for over a year now. It is very complex. Both the SEC and the
PCAOB acted last December, just a few months ago, to propose
initiatives aimed at reducing the costs associated with section 404 of
Sarbanes-Oxley. These actions are the most significant to date and
should lower costs on investments while at the same time preserving the
benefits of effective internal controls.
In testimony before the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship
Committee last week, Chairman Cox of the Securities and Exchange
Commission stated:

Focusing on the implementation of 404, rather than changing
the law, is consistent with the SEC's view that the problems
we have seen with 404 to date can be remedied without
amending the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

I am willing to give the SEC a limited opportunity to deliver.
Chairman Cox said the Commission's 404 proposal would permit companies
to:

Scale and tailor their evaluation procedures to fit their
facts and circumstances, and investors will benefit from the
use-compliance costs.

The SEC is expected to adopt the measure in the next few weeks.
The PCAOB, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board's, proposals
to repeal auditing standard No. 2 and replace it with a new standard on
auditing internal control over financial reporting would provide,
according to PCAOB Chairman Mark Olson:

Additional flexibility to promote scalability, avoid
unintended consequences, and address other valid concerns.

The PCAOB is currently reviewing the comments submitted in response
to its proposal and is expected, along with the SEC, to submit the
standard for SEC review and approval next month. Chairman Cox of the
SEC, whom we have worked with on the Banking Committee a lot, said the
two regulators have worked together to ensure that the new rules are:

Mutually reinforceable and should significantly improve the
implementation of section 404, making it more efficient and
effective for small and medium-sized businesses.

That is what we all want. We all agree that unnecessary costs imposed
by regulations are a real problem for both large and small companies.
The regulators have acknowledged this fact and are attempting to
address it. On the Banking Committee that Chairman Dodd now chairs and
which I chaired, we have oversight of that, and we have worked with
them and have had hearings to give some relief to small businesses
here, and they are in the process of doing it. I am willing to give the
SEC and the PCAOB some additional time, but I am not willing to give
them unlimited time. We shouldn't do that. Chairman Dodd and I intend
to monitor closely their progress and hold them accountable should
there be any unnecessary delays.
I urge my colleagues this afternoon to support the Dodd-Shelby
amendment with the understanding that we intend to follow closely in
oversight, working with the regulators, their progress and will take
whatever action is necessary to ensure the vitality of our small
business community, which is vital and important to America. I urge
support of the Dodd-Shelby amendment.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Carolina is recognized.
Mr. DeMINT. Mr. President, in a few moments the Senate will vote on
two amendments related to Sarbanes-Oxley. The first is the Dodd-Shelby
amendment, which is a nonbinding resolution that suggests the SEC and
the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board move ahead with changing
the Sarbanes-Oxley regulations. My amendment, which will come after
that, actually changes the law in one small section of Sarbanes-Oxley,
which would facilitate that happening.
Despite what has been reported today, my conversation with some of
the regulators and some of the observers of the SEC is there is not
real clarity as to how far the SEC can go in changing this one section
that is problematic in Sarbanes-Oxley. We know from our work with
Federal agencies that as long as there is doubt, there is no action.
While there has been good intent from the SEC for many years, this bill
has been destroying our capital formation in this country for nearly 5
years. Admittedly, Sarbanes-Oxley has done some good things, but I
think it is beyond question particularly for small companies, small
public companies, that section 404 of Sarbanes-Oxley is doing untold
harm in this country today. So the difference here is a nonbinding
resolution which encourages the SEC to act and an amendment that
actually makes that happen.
I am going to support the Dodd-Shelby amendment. While I have some
problems with the specific findings, the intent is right. The
regulators have a responsibility to continue to look at their
regulations to make sure they encourage competition and good enterprise
in our country. So I am going to support the amendment. But Congress
also has a responsibility to make sure that the laws we pass work, and
if they are not interpreted properly by our regulatory agencies, that
we go back and make those changes to make it work.

So the ``sense of the Senate'' maintains the status quo for
regulatory agencies to determine how we deal with Sarbanes-Oxley. While
I know the chairman and ranking member remain hopeful that something
will happen, the same thing was said to me well over a year ago when I
talked to Chairman Cox and others that the changes were eminent, but
since then in this country we have lost our status as the No. 1 market
exchange. Instead of 9 out of every 10 IPOs being formed in this
country with foreign capital, it is completely reversed, where 9 out of
10 are out of this country. Our trade competitors have Sarbanes-Oxley
free zones that encourage capital to come that way instead of toward
us. We cannot leave the responsibility for this law on the regulatory
agencies.
I encourage all of my colleagues to vote for both amendments.
I thank Senator Martinez, Senator Cornyn, and Senator Ensign for
supporting and cosponsoring my amendment. I also thank Democratic
Congressman Gregory Meeks from New York for having the courage to
introduce this measure in the House.
I also want to inform my colleagues that my amendment today is
supported by the Independent Community Bankers of America. It is also
being key voted by the Americans for Tax Reform, the Club for Growth,
the Americans for Prosperity, and many other people who look at our
economy across the country and realize it is time for Congress to act.
We have waited for the SEC for 5 years and have seen capital chased
from this country. It is time for Congress to take the responsibility
for what we did in the first place, and I urge my colleagues to support
both amendments.
I yield to my colleague, the Senator from Florida, to speak on behalf
of my amendment.
Mr. MARTINEZ. Mr. President, I add a word of encouragement to our
colleagues to support both of these good amendments. I agree
wholeheartedly with my colleague from South Carolina that it is time we
take action. It is time we act.
I have heard untold stories for years now as a candidate for the
Senate and as a Senator of the problems that small companies of America
are facing over the burdens imposed upon them by section 404, unfair
burdens that disproportionately fall on small businesses than they do
on large. A recent GAO study requested by our colleague Senator Snowe
found the cost of compliance for small public companies to comply with
Sarbanes-Oxley has been disproportionately higher for small businesses
than it was for larger companies.
Small businesses are vital to the growth of business in America. They
are where most of our jobs are created in this day and time. The fact
is for us to idly sit by and hope the regulators will do the right
thing, hope they go far enough, isn't good enough for me. I want to act
now. I want to make sure we support the amendment by Senators Dodd and
Shelby, but I also want to encourage support for our amendment, because
ours will take action and will do it now.
What it does is it exempts smaller companies with market
capitalization

[[Page S4897]]

of less than $700 million, with revenues of less than $125 million, and
with fewer than 1,500 shareholders from the onerous burdens of section
404.
There are a number of ways to maintain investor protections while
lowering the cost of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, but we should start by
exempting small companies from having to comply with section 404 of
Sarbanes-Oxley, the section that requires the double audit.
Oftentimes small business cannot even find an accounting firm willing
to perform the audit, let alone afford to take a significant percentage
of revenue to conduct a duplicate audit. The fact is this is strangling
America's business. It is, as Senator DeMint pointed out, not allowing
us to play the role we have traditionally played in the capital market.
Mayor Bloomberg conducted a study in New York about why we were
losing our competitive edge vis-a-vis other foreign markets. One of the
reasons that was found for that, among several others--but it is a
significant reason--was Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.
It is time we act. We passed the law and it was a good thing to do;
it has done a lot of good. But aspects of it are now hurting American
business and we need to pull those back. That is what the DeMint
amendment does. I encourage my colleagues to do that as well.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Carolina is recognized.
Mr. DeMINT. Mr. President, how much time remains on my side?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has 3 minutes 6 seconds.
Mr. DeMINT. Mr. President, parliamentary inquiry: These bills are
side-by-sides, correct? This is not a second-degree amendment.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Both amendments are first-degree amendments.
Mr. DeMINT. My colleagues can vote for both of these amendments. I
encourage Members of the Senate, both Republicans and Democrats, to
vote for both of them because both are needed. We need the SEC to take
its responsibility. But since there is some concern as to how far the
SEC can go to correct this problem, my amendment simply changes one
aspect of Sarbanes-Oxley that allows small companies--companies with
$125 million in revenue or less, or less than 1,500 shareholders--to
voluntarily opt out of the external audit, with notification to their
shareholders.
These are certainly not huge corporations. This certainly doesn't gut
Sarbanes-Oxley. It does what so many economic experts have encouraged
us to do for years, and that is to fix the one small part of Sarbanes-
Oxley that costs small businesses in a disproportionate way.
I thank the managers and those who offered the side-by-side, and I
encourage my colleagues to vote for both of them.
I yield the floor and reserve the remainder of my time.
Mr. DODD. Mr. President, is all time yielded back?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut has 38 seconds.
Mr. DODD. Again, Chris Cox, Chairman of the SEC, pointed out he
doesn't want the law changed. He wants to be able to work with the
Commission and the staff to deal with these issues. The Chairman of the
SEC has wide latitude within which to operate here. The statute gives
broad discretion. Senator Shelby and I believe this matter ought to be
left at this juncture. The Commission is relegated to do their job. Let
them complete their work and make their recommendations. If we are
dissatisfied, we can respond.
Mr. SHELBY. Mr. President, do I have any time left?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has 34 seconds.
Mr. SHELBY. Mr. President, I have been informed by my staff that the
staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission, headed by Christopher
Cox, a former Congressman, has reiterated a few minutes ago to our
Banking Committee staff that they will be done with this work in a few
weeks. This is premature, the amendment offered by the Senator from
South Carolina. As I said earlier, I believe we need to let the SEC and
PCAOB do their work. I agree with Chairman Dodd.
Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays on the Dodd-
Shelby-Reed amendment.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There is a sufficient second.
The question is on agreeing to the amendment
The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant legislative clerk called the roll.
Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from South Dakota (Mr.
Johnson) and the Senator from Massachusetts (Mr. Kerry) are necessarily
absent.
I further announce that, if present and voting, the Senator from
Massachusetts (Mr. Kerry) would vote ``yea.''
Mr. LOTT. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator
from Arizona (Mr. McCain).
The PRESIDING OFFICER. (Mr. Menendez). Are there any other Senators
in the Chamber desiring to vote?
The result was announced--yeas 97, nays 0, as follows:

[Rollcall Vote No. 138 Leg.]

YEAS--97

Akaka
Alexander
Allard
Baucus
Bayh
Bennett
Biden
Bingaman
Bond
Boxer
Brown
Brownback
Bunning
Burr
Byrd
Cantwell
Cardin
Carper
Casey
Chambliss
Clinton
Coburn
Cochran
Coleman
Collins
Conrad
Corker
Cornyn
Craig
Crapo
DeMint
Dodd
Dole
Domenici
Dorgan
Durbin
Ensign
Enzi
Feingold
Feinstein
Graham
Grassley
Gregg
Hagel
Harkin
Hatch
Hutchison
Inhofe
Inouye
Isakson
Kennedy
Klobuchar
Kohl
Kyl
Landrieu
Lautenberg
Leahy
Levin
Lieberman
Lincoln
Lott
Lugar
Martinez
McCaskill
McConnell
Menendez
Mikulski
Murkowski
Murray
Nelson (FL)
Nelson (NE)
Obama
Pryor
Reed
Reid
Roberts
Rockefeller
Salazar
Sanders
Schumer
Sessions
Shelby
Smith
Snowe
Specter
Stabenow
Stevens
Sununu
Tester
Thomas
Thune
Vitter
Voinovich
Warner
Webb
Whitehouse
Wyden

NOT VOTING--3

Johnson
Kerry
McCain
The amendment (No. 947), as modified, was agreed to.

Amendment No. 928

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, there will now be 2
minutes of debate equally divided on amendment No. 928 offered by the
Senator from South Carolina, Mr. DeMint.
Who yields time? The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. DODD. Mr. President, at an appropriate moment, along with my
colleague from Alabama, I will offer a motion to table the DeMint
amendment. I do so respectfully of my colleague. We are just about 2 or
3 weeks away from the SEC issuing regulations regarding Sarbanes-Oxley
on this 404 issue. It would be inappropriate for us to jump in and draw
a conclusion as to what the SEC ought to be doing.
Chris Cox is doing a very good job at the SEC. Staff and
Commissioners are doing the job we asked them to do.
To conclude the point here, this is a matter that is being well
addressed by the SEC under Chris Cox. They have asked to have the
appropriate time, the remaining 2 or 3 weeks, to finish their
recommendations. They may very well come to the recommendation that has
been offered by our colleague from South Carolina, but we ought to
allow them to do their job. That is what they have been asked to do.
We are not a regulatory body. We don't have to agree with them, but
we should allow them to complete their work. That is why we are
offering this amendment. It is premature for us to jump in before they
have completed their task.
Mr. President, I yield to my colleague from Alabama.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The time of the Senator has expired.
Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have 30 seconds
for my colleague from Alabama.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. SHELBY. Mr. President, I agree with Senator Dodd. We work on the
Banking Committee with this. The SEC has asked us to hold off. We all
want to give relief under Sarbanes-Oxley for small businesses. The SEC,
PCAOB are in the process of doing this, and this is probably going to
happen in the next couple of weeks.

[[Page S4898]]

I don't disagree with what Senator DeMint is trying to do, but I
think it is premature. The timing is not good. But the timing is always
good if we work with the SEC on something they know a heck of a lot
about. This is a very complex issue.
(At the request of Mr. Reid, the following statement was ordered to
be printed in the Record.)
<bullet> Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, the United States has the fairest,
most transparent and most efficient financial markets in the world. Our
Nation achieved this status by developing a regulatory approach that
insures investors around the world have confidence in our markets. We
cannot go back to the days of Enron accounting for small businesses.
As chairman of the Senate Committee on Small Business and
Entrepreneurship, I oppose the amendment by Senator DeMint to provide
an exemption from Sarbanes-Oxley regulations for small public companies
because I believe it is premature, would endanger small business
investors and limit access to capital for small public companies in the
United States.
Last week, I held a hearing in the committee on the upcoming changes
to the Sarbanes-Oxley law and how they will affect small business. In
that hearing, no Senator or witness expressed any support for providing
a permanent exemption from Sarbanes-Oxley regulations for small public
companies. The Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher
Cox has said that he strongly opposes any type of permanent exemption
for small public companies from Sarbanes-Oxley regulations.
Here is why. It wasn't too long ago, between the years 1998-2000,
that public companies were issuing financial restatements at a rate
that was higher than the previous 10 years combined. Too often, public
companies were overstating their income to attract investors. As a
result, the trust and confidence of the American people in their
financial markets was dangerously eroded by the actions of WorldCom,
Inc., Enron, Arthur Andersen and others. The shocking malfeasance by
these businesses and accounting firms put a strain on the growth of our
economy, cost investors billions in assets and hurt the integrity of
our financial markets around the world.
By all accounts, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has brought back
accountability to corporate governance, auditing, and financial
reporting for public companies. The audit of internal controls over
financial reporting has produced significant benefits and public
company financial reporting has improved. As a result, investor
confidence in our capital markets has been restored and our Nation's
economic growth continues. Recent published reports show that
accounting restatements on large companies' financial reports declined
by 20 percent last year. This is important evidence that Sarbanes-Oxley
is working.
These improvements, however, have not come without some drawbacks.
Too many small public companies who played by the rules are now
expected to deal with the time and financial burden required to comply
with the Sarbanes-Oxley law. Last year, small businesses with less than
$75 million in assets saw the number of financial restatements increase
by 46 percent. This shows that small businesses getting ready to comply
with Sarbanes-Oxley are having trouble. But I believe we will all
benefit when small businesses eventually comply with Sarbanes Oxley.
According to a recent United States Government Accounting Office--GAO--
study requested by Senator Snowe, the cost of compliance and the time
needed for small public companies to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley
regulations has been disproportionately higher than for large public
companies. Firms with assets of $1 billion or more spend just thirteen
cents per $100 in revenue for audit fees, while small businesses are
forced to spend more than a dollar per $100 in revenue to comply with
the same rules.
The response to these problems is not to give a permanent blanket
exemption from these regulations to small public companies, instead we
need to assist them in making the transition to comply with the Law.
That is why the SEC and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board--
PCAOB--are currently considering final rules and guidance on the
implementation of Sarbanes-Oxley that will make it easier for small
businesses to comply with the law.
In his testimony to the Small Business Committee, Chairman Cox said
three quarters of the comment letters regarding the proposed Sarbanes-
Oxley rule changes from small business interests supported the efforts
to make it easier for small businesses to comply with the law.
Specifically, these small businesses believed that the proposed rules
would allow managements to tailor their audits and evaluations to the
facts and circumstances of their particular companies and focus on
their areas that are most important to reliable financial reporting.
Chairman Olson testified at the same hearing that while the PCAOB is
committed to making the process cost-effective for small businesses,
the oversight program it has in place is reducing the risk of financial
reporting failures and renewing confidence in U.S. security markets. We
also heard from Joseph Piche, whose private company Eikos, Inc.
operates out of Franklin, MA. Mr. Piche's testimony reflected the
sentiments of so many small business owners--that while the burdens of
cost make it difficult under the current regulatory structure,
entrepreneurs rely on capital markets, and capital markets rely on
trust. The Sarbanes-Oxley law has helped to restore this trust.
So the upcoming changes to Sarbanes-Oxley will save small public
companies time and money. Unfortunately, before these changes are even
finalized, the DeMint amendment would provide a permanent exemption to
more than 6,000 small public companies from ever having to comply with
Sarbanes-Oxley.
As Mr. Piche and other industry witnesses told the Small Business
Committee, small businesses aren't resistant to fair and open financial
reporting, because they know that it leads the way to access to
capital. Today, small public companies are vital participants in U.S.
capital markets and play a critical role in future economic growth and
high-wage job creation. Once provided with the necessary regulatory
flexibility, I have no doubt that our small public companies will be
able to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley law, just as big businesses are
doing today. All small public companies know it is in their best
interest to have regulations in place that provide transparency and
accountability. These are the qualities that encourage investor
confidence in U.S. markets. It gives them access to more investors and
increases the pool of available capital while keeping their competitors
from manipulating the marketplace through faulty accounting.
As we move forward, there are additional steps that can be taken to
assist small business. First, I recently wrote to the SEC and PCAOB
with Senator Snowe, urging the regulators to give small businesses up
to an additional year to comply with the pending changes to the
Sarbanes-Oxley regulations. I believe this added time will help small
businesses adapt to the changing regulatory structure and make it
easier for those who lack the expertise or financial resources to
comply with the law. The SEC has previously supported providing small
public companies with additional time to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley and
I hope they will do so again.
The DeMint amendment is an overreaching, premature policy reversal
that preempts years of thoughtful regulatory consideration on the part
of the SEC and the PCAOB. It represents a blanket exemption that has
the potential to take U.S. capital markets a large step backwards to
the days of Enron. I urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment and
allow the regulators to finish their jobs.
As chair of the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, I
will continue to closely follow the impact of Sarbanes-Oxley on small
firms and look forward to working with Senator Snowe and my colleagues
on the committee to determine what necessary steps Congress can take to
help small public companies abide by the law while simultaneously
allowing them to focus on what they do best--creating jobs and growing
our economy by participating in our capital markets. This will help
small businesses achieve the American dream of becoming innovative
public companies.

[[Page S4899]]

We can help our small public companies and encourage additional small
businesses to become public companies--while ensuring transparency and
honest accounting. This will help ensure that the United States
continues to have the fairest, most transparent and most efficient
financial markets in the world.<bullet>
Mr. DeMINT. Mr. President, I am obviously disappointed the chairman
will move to table. We have had a good debate on it. The debate on
Sarbanes-Oxley has been going on for almost 5 years, since it was
passed. Every time someone expresses a problem, they go right to
section 404, and just to small businesses that are being hurt most by
this.
I talked with the SEC well over a year ago. I heard exactly the same
thing I am hearing today: We are on it. It is going to happen very
soon.
Let me suggest this to my colleagues. Let us pass this bill today and
send it to conference. That will be a few weeks of work. If the SEC
responds, then take it out in conference. The Democrats are in control
of the conference. There is no harm done. But let us not continue to
allow investment capital to be shipped out of this country without
doing anything about it.
The only reason the SEC is even talking about it now is that we
introduced this bill with Democrats and Republicans in the House. It is
time to act now. Please vote for this bill. Let us move it to
conference and shake up the SEC.
Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I move to table the DeMint amendment, and I
ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The question is on agreeing to the motion.
The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk called the roll.
Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from South Dakota (Mr.
Johnson) and the Senator from Massachusetts (Mr. Kerry) are necessarily
absent.
I further announce that if present and voting, the Senator from
Massachusetts (Mr. Kerry) would vote ``yea.''
Mr. LOTT. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator
from Arizona (Mr. McCain).
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Are there any other Senators in the Chamber
desiring to vote?
The result was announced--yeas 62, nays 35, as follows:

[Rollcall Vote No. 139 Leg.]

YEAS--62

Akaka
Baucus
Bayh
Bennett
Biden
Bingaman
Bond
Boxer
Brown
Byrd
Cantwell
Cardin
Carper
Casey
Clinton
Cochran
Collins
Conrad
Crapo
Dodd
Dorgan
Durbin
Enzi
Feingold
Feinstein
Graham
Harkin
Hatch
Inouye
Kennedy
Klobuchar
Kohl
Lautenberg
Leahy
Levin
Lieberman
Lincoln
McCaskill
Menendez
Mikulski
Murkowski
Murray
Nelson (FL)
Nelson (NE)
Obama
Pryor
Reed
Reid
Rockefeller
Salazar
Sanders
Schumer
Sessions
Shelby
Snowe
Stabenow
Stevens
Tester
Thomas
Webb
Whitehouse
Wyden

NAYS--35

Alexander
Allard
Brownback
Bunning
Burr
Chambliss
Coburn
Coleman
Corker
Cornyn
Craig
DeMint
Dole
Domenici
Ensign
Grassley
Gregg
Hagel
Hutchison
Inhofe
Isakson
Kyl
Landrieu
Lott
Lugar
Martinez
McConnell
Roberts
Smith
Specter
Sununu
Thune
Vitter
Voinovich
Warner

NOT VOTING--3

Johnson
Kerry
McCain
The motion was agreed to.
Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote, and I move to
lay that motion on the table.
The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Amendment No. 917

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, there will now be 4
minutes of debate on amendment No. 917, offered by the Senator from
Oklahoma, Mr. Coburn.
Who yields time? The Senator from New Mexico.
Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, regarding the amendment we are about to
vote on, we voted on essentially the same amendment last Wednesday as
an amendment to the Court Security Improvement Act. The amendment
provides that any new program or initiative that is contained in
legislation be offset. The point that defeated the amendment last week
is still valid; that is, we should not be required to offset
authorizing legislation. This is authorizing legislation. There is no
spending in this bill. This does not appropriate funds.
Mr. President, on behalf of myself and my colleague, Senator
Domenici, I will be moving to table the amendment after he completes
his statement.
I yield the remainder of my time to Senator Domenici.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico is recognized.
Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, first, might I say to the Senator from
Oklahoma, I have watched you in your concern for spending, and I
appreciate what you are trying to do to cut spending in the Senate.
But let me say to the Senate, this afternoon I asked the Chair for a
point of order. I asked whether this bill would violate the Budget Act.
After looking at the bill and coming back, I was advised it does not
violate the Budget Act. The reason it does not is because there is no
spending in it. If it were spending money, it would be violating the
budget because it is not in the budget, and we passed a budget.
Having said that, if we are not spending money, then why should we
chastise ourselves about spending money and suggesting that we have to
offset something when, as a matter of fact, there is nothing to offset
because there is no spending? If we get into this game that authorizing
is spending, then we will have a fourth tier of Government. Instead of
a budget appropriations and direct spending, we will have people
bringing up a new way to attack it on every kind of authorizing bill. I
don't think we need that. We need to get on with business every now and
then. This is one time.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma is recognized.
Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, the reason you ought to vote for this
sense of the Senate--it doesn't say anything about authorizing. What it
says is, and the American people expect, if we are going to create new
programs, we ought to get rid of the programs that are not working. We
spend $84,000 a second. We spent $350 billion we didn't have last year,
and we charged it to the next generation. We have 10 percent of the
Department of Energy that is ineffective, we have 10 percent of the
Department of Education that is ineffective, and you offset none of the
programs as you reauthorize this bill. We doubled up. This says, sense
of the Senate, if we are going to spend more money and create new
programs, we ought to go after the ones that do not work.
Vote against it at your own peril.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader is recognized.
Mr. REID. Mr. President, this is the last vote this evening. I am
glad to see the managers are moving this bill along. We are probably
going to have a vote in the morning, around 11 o'clock. That will be
the first vote.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico is recognized.
Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I move to table the Coburn amendment and
ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second? There is a
sufficient second.
The question is on agreeing to the motion. The clerk will call the
roll.
The legislative clerk called the roll.
Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from South Dakota (Mr.
Johnson) and the Senator from Massachusetts (Mr. Kerry) are necessarily
absent.
I further announce that, if present and voting, the Senator from
Massachusetts (Mr. Kerry) would vote ``yea.''
Mr. LOTT. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator
from Arizona (Mr. McCain).
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Are there any other Senators in the Chamber
desiring to vote?
The result was announced--yeas 54, nays 43, as follows:

[[Page S4900]]

[Rollcall Vote No. 140 Leg.]

YEAS--54

Akaka
Alexander
Baucus
Bennett
Biden
Bingaman
Bond
Boxer
Brown
Byrd
Cantwell
Cardin
Carper
Casey
Clinton
Cochran
Conrad
Dodd
Domenici
Feinstein
Harkin
Inouye
Kennedy
Klobuchar
Landrieu
Lautenberg
Leahy
Levin
Lincoln
Lugar
McCaskill
Menendez
Mikulski
Murkowski
Murray
Nelson (FL)
Nelson (NE)
Obama
Pryor
Reed
Reid
Rockefeller
Salazar
Sanders
Schumer
Snowe
Specter
Stabenow
Stevens
Tester
Warner
Webb
Whitehouse
Wyden

NAYS--43

Allard
Bayh
Brownback
Bunning
Burr
Chambliss
Coburn
Coleman
Collins
Corker
Cornyn
Craig
Crapo
DeMint
Dole
Dorgan
Durbin
Ensign
Enzi
Feingold
Graham
Grassley
Gregg
Hagel
Hatch
Hutchison
Inhofe
Isakson
Kohl
Kyl
Lieberman
Lott
Martinez
McConnell
Roberts
Sessions
Shelby
Smith
Sununu
Thomas
Thune
Vitter
Voinovich

NOT VOTING--3

Johnson
Kerry
McCain
The motion was agreed to.
Mr. MENENDEZ. The Senator from Michigan is recognized.
Ms. STABENOW. Mr. President, I thank my friend from New Mexico, who
is doing such a wonderful job on the legislation that is in front of
us. I wish to compliment everyone who is involved with this legislation
for working so hard, including Senator Alexander and Senator Bingaman.
This is a wonderful bill. So we congratulate them for that.

Iraq Supplemental

I wish to speak this evening about the supplemental appropriations
bill the Senate will vote on later this week. I also wish to rise with
great concern and, frankly--I am not sure what the word is;
``disappointment'' is not strong enough for how I feel about what the
Vice President has said today about our leader, our great leader in the
Senate, who has spoken so passionately and cares so deeply about the
troops who are serving us overseas, their families who are here at
home, who wants to make sure the strategy is right for them.
We all know--and our military experts have told us time and again--
that a military victory is not going to happen, that it has to be a
political victory, a political strategy of the Iraqis stepping up and
taking control and making the tough decisions they need to make to take
control of their own security. We have heard that from many experts
within the military and without. Yet today the Vice President was here,
not far from this Chamber, unleashing his wrath, as only he seems to be
able to, about our leader, calling him names and mischaracterizing his
positions. That is extremely unfortunate because while the men and
women are serving us right now in Iraq, over there doing their best to
focus on the mission, they expect us to be at home focusing on the
strategy, the resources, and the equipment they need.
I had an opportunity to talk to a young man not long ago who had come
home from Iraq. I asked him how he felt about the debate going on about
the strategy, the debate we were having in the Senate and the House. He
said, frankly, he would expect us to be doing that because that is our
job. That is our job. They are doing their job. As my husband, who was
in the Air Force and Air National Guard, reminds me continually, their
job is to implement the mission. They are doing it. Our job is to get
it right, to have the right strategy, and to back them up and give them
the resources they need.
The name calling coming from the Vice President is not going to get
the job done. What is going to get the job done is our ability to work
together and look at the facts, not some stubborn sense of
unwillingness to change or to do more of the same which, unfortunately,
is what is happening now with this surge. It is more of the same.
Instead of doing that, we need to be joining together to say: Let's
look at the reality of what is going on on the ground. More and more
Americans and Iraqis are being killed every day. Let's look at the
reality of what we need to do to be successful, to bring our troops
home safely, to address the success we all would like to see happen in
terms of a democracy that works, the Iraqi Government being able to
step up and to govern their country, which is an incredibly difficult
and complicated thing to do, obviously.
I find it very disappointing. I work with our leader, as we all do
every day. There is no one who has spent more time thinking and
focusing and discussing and listening on these issues around the war
than he has--no one who is more thoughtful or more caring, no one who
is more concerned about our veterans coming home.
We welcome, certainly, the Vice President coming and meeting with us
and joining in the discussion. But I certainly hope we are not going to
see more of what we saw today. It was an effort to attack a great
leader and, essentially, instead of moving the ball forward, make it
more difficult for us to do what we need to do to come together.
On this particular bill, the supplemental appropriations bill, I
certainly hope the President will sign this legislation, will
reconsider the position that has been taken and sign this legislation.
We are going to be sending a bill to the President that will fund the
troops--in fact, it adds dollars to do that--as well as veterans, as
well as addressing a number of other critical issues. The question
before the President will be, Will he sign this bill? We are not trying
to play games. We are sending him an emergency supplemental for the war
and for other critical American needs--our communities, our families'
needs, just as we do every year in an appropriations bill, in a
supplemental. The question is whether the President will step up and do
his duty and sign this bill so that those dollars can get to the
troops.
This legislation represents the best opportunity for us to change the
course in Iraq as well as protect our troops and our veterans and to
give them what they need now. Unfortunately, the President has put our
troops in the middle of an endless Iraqi civil war. We know this to be
true. People in my great State know this is true.
Unfortunately, we find ourselves in a situation where our troops are
in an endless civil war. The American people are paying a huge price
for this war, most importantly, in lives, not only family members lost
but people coming home with permanent disabilities, with head injuries,
with mental health problems. There is a huge price being paid by
Americans for what is occurring and has been occurring.
We are also paying a huge price in dollars, $10 billion a month, and
then we look at the fact that we could fund a program to cover every
child with health care in America for $10 billion a year. We know while
lives are the most important issue, resources for Americans to address
our needs at home is also a critical issue.
We also know we are paying a huge price as it relates to our own
security interests. The majority of Americans, a bipartisan majority in
Congress, military experts, and the Iraq Study Group believe this war
cannot be won militarily and that the current path is not sustainable.
The supplemental appropriations bill recognizes it is long past time to
change course. The American people know that. That is really what last
November was about. People want a change. They know this isn't working.
It is not sustainable. They expect us to step up together and make that
change.
This bill fully funds our troops. We are passing a bill agreed to by
the House and Senate that fully funds our troops and provides a plan to
responsibly end the war and bring them home safely. I don't know what
more we could ask of the proposal. We are providing the resources and
also putting in place a responsible way to provide benchmarks and
measurements and bring a responsible end to the war.
Our bill holds the Iraqis accountable for securing their own Nation
and forging political reconciliation. We know more of the same--more
surges, more efforts that have been tried and tried time after time--is
not working. I don't believe they can work. But what can work is
holding the Iraqis accountable for securing their own nation and making
the tough decisions that one has to make when they want to have a
democracy. It is not easy. We know that. They are in a very difficult
situation. But it is their country, and they

[[Page S4901]]

need to step up and make those decisions and bring all parties together
and find some way to live together.
Our bill ensures our troops are combat ready before being deployed to
Iraq. I can't imagine that there is one individual in the armed
services or one mom or dad or brother or sister or son or daughter of a
combat troop that would not want us, and doesn't expect us already, to
be making sure that our troops are combat ready before being deployed.
It provides them with all the resources needed on the battlefield and
when they return. We are very committed and, in fact, I am very proud
of the fact that in our budget resolution passed a few weeks ago, for
the first time we meet the dollars needed for veterans health care and
other critical veterans services identified by the veterans
organizations themselves. For the first time ever, we put forth the
dollars that are needed when our troops are coming home. A Presidential
veto will deny our troops the resources and the strategy they need and
send exactly the wrong message to the Iraqi political leaders. We hope
the President will join us in giving our troops the resources and
strategy they need and deserve. That is what this bill is about.

After more than 4 years of a failed policy, it is time for this
Nation to change course and Iraq to take responsibility for its own
future.
This is a good bill we will have before us. Overall, it provides more
than $100 billion for the Department of Defense, primarily for
continued military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It includes a $1
billion increase for the National Guard and Reserves for equipment
desperately needed and $1.1 billion for military housing. It provides
$3 billion for the purchase of mine-resistant, ambush-protected
vehicles, vehicles designed to withstand roadside bombs. Every day we
pick up the paper and see where more lives have been lost, injuries
have been sustained as a result of roadside bombs. It contains more
than $5 billion to ensure that returning troops and veterans receive
the health care they have earned with their service so that we don't
ever have to have another Walter Reed incident.
It has $6.9 billion for the victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita as
well. We know when we are doing an emergency supplemental, just as in
every other year when our colleagues were in the majority, as well as
when we are in the majority, there are a number of emergency needs for
the country.
One thing in the supplemental has been funding the troops. We have
added funding for our veterans and also understand there are some
critical needs at home, critical needs that Americans have. Certainly,
we all know the resources and the focus on those families who were hit
by the hurricanes have been shamefully slow in going to that region to
rebuild American communities, American homes, to support American
families. Our bill does that.
It provides emergency funding also for the Children's Health
Insurance Program because we have a number of places in the country
where the resources are running out, and we want to make sure children
can continue to get health care. That is an emergency at home.
Ask any family who is worried about whether their children are going
to get sick tonight, say a little prayer: Please God, don't let the
kids get sick because what are we going to do. Our bill addresses
children's health care emergency funding.
It also includes homeland security investments totaling $2.25 billion
for port security and mass transit security, for explosives detection
equipment at airports, and for several initiatives in the 9/11 bill
that recently passed the Senate. I am very proud of the fact that our
new majority placed a priority on passing the 9/11 Commission
recommendations. It was long overdue, but it was a priority for us in
the first few weeks of our new majority, and we did it. Now we have the
resources that go with that. It is not enough to pass the
recommendations. We have to make sure the resources are there to keep
us safe at home.
So, yes, this is a supplemental bill to support our troops abroad, to
support their efforts while they are in theater in combat, but we also
know we have folks on the front lines at home, our police officers and
firefighters and others, and security needs here. We address that.
We also know there have been a group of folks waiting for way too
long for some disaster assistance related to agriculture, including my
home State of Michigan where apple and cherry growers have been
waiting. In this legislation, $3.5 billion is provided to help relieve
the enormous pressure on farmers and ranchers as a result of severe
drought and agricultural disasters. Again, this is about helping people
at home, putting Americans first when we know there is a disaster.
Whether it is Hurricane Katrina or whether it is cherry growers in
northern Michigan, our job is to also focus on our people here and
their emergency needs.
The conference agreement also includes emergency funding for forest
firefighting, low-income home energy assistance, and pandemic flu
preparations, which we should all be concerned about--again, critical
needs for Americans, American families.
Finally, there are other items in this bill that are good for workers
and small business. The bill has an increase in the minimum wage to
$7.25 an hour, giving hard-working Americans a much deserved raise
after 10 years--10 years. It provides almost $5 billion in tax cuts for
small businesses as well. We know the majority of jobs come from small
business. This supports their efforts as well.
So I would say to President Bush: Sign this bill. Sign this bill.
This is a bill which funds our troops, which keeps our commitments to
our veterans, and which addresses other American priorities for our
communities and our families.
Mr. President, if you do, we will change course in Iraq, give our
troops the equipment they need, the health care they deserve, and
provide much needed investments here at home in America.
President Bush, if you veto this bill, you are denying funds to the
troops in the field and going against the wishes of the majority of the
American people.
It is time for the administration to stop saying no to troops and no
to the American people. We need the President to say yes to working
with us, to support our troops and what they need, which this
legislation does, to support the American people, American families,
and critical emergency needs here at home, and to put in place a
strategy for success--a real strategy for success--by focusing on
efforts that empower and send a message to the Iraqi Government to step
up. While we are willing to support them, we will not continue to send
our brave men and women into the middle of a civil war day after day
after day and continually say it is OK, everything is going great. It
is not going great.
It is time for a new strategy. We have put forward a strategy in a
very responsible way in this legislation, along with meeting our
obligations and responsibilities to our troops, our veterans, their
families, and to America as a whole.
I hope when President Bush reads this bill--and I hope he will--I
hope he will look at what is in here with an open mind, and agree with
us that this is a bill which makes sense for America at home and
abroad.
Thank you, Mr. President.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico.

Amendments Nos. 938 and 936 En Bloc

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, under the previous order, I call up
amendments Nos. 938 and 936.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
The legislative clerk read as follows:

The Senator from New Mexico [Mr. Bingaman] proposes en bloc
amendments numbered 938 and 936.

The amendments are as follows:

(Purpose: To strike the provisions regarding strengthening the
education and human resources directorate of the National Science
Foundation)

Strike section 4002.
____

(Purpose: To increase the competitiveness of American workers through
the expansion of employee ownership, and for other purposes)

At the appropriate place, insert the following:

SEC. __. EMPLOYEE OWNERSHIP EXPANSION.

(a) Findings.--Congress makes the following findings:
(1) Between 2000 and 2006, the United States lost more than
3,000,000 manufacturing jobs.
(2) In 2006, the international trade deficit of the United
States was more than

[[Page S4902]]

$763,000,000,000, $232,000,000,000 of which was due to the
Nation's trade imbalance with China.
(3) Preserving and increasing jobs in the United States
that pay a living wage should be a top priority of Congress.
(4) Providing loan guarantees, direct loans, grants, and
technical assistance to employees to buy their own companies
will increase the competitiveness of the United States.
(b) United States Employee Ownership Competitiveness
Fund.--
(1) Establishment.--Not later than 30 days after the date
of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Commerce
(referred to in this section as the ``Secretary'') shall
establish the United States Employee Ownership
Competitiveness Fund (referred to in this section as the
``Fund'') to foster increased employee ownership of companies
and greater employee participation in company decision-making
throughout the United States.
(2) Organization.--
(A) Management.--The Fund shall be managed by a Director,
who shall be appointed by, and serve at the pleasure of, the
Secretary.
(B) Staff.--The Director may select, appoint, employ, and
fix the compensation of such employees as shall be necessary
to carry out the functions of the Fund.
(3) Functions.--Amounts in the Fund established under
paragraph (1) may be used to provide--
(A) loans subordinated to the interests of all other
creditors, loan guarantees, and technical assistance, on such
terms and subject to such conditions as the Secretary
determines to be appropriate, to employees to purchase a
business through an employee stock ownership plan or eligible
worker-owned cooperative that are at least 51 percent
employee owned; and
(B) grants to States and nonprofit and cooperative
organizations with experience in developing employee-owned
businesses and worker-owned cooperatives to--
(i) provide education and outreach to inform people about
the possibilities and benefits of employee ownership of
companies, gain sharing, and participation in company
decision-making, including some financial education;
(ii) provide technical assistance to assist employee
efforts to become business owners;
(iii) provide participation training to teach employees and
employers methods of employee participation in company
decision-making; and
(iv) conduct objective third party prefeasibility and
feasibility studies to determine if employees desiring to
start employee stock ownership plans or worker cooperatives
could make a profit.
(4) Preconditions.--Before the Director makes any
subordinated loan or loan guarantee from the Fund under
paragraph (3)(A), the recipient employees shall submit to the
Fund--
(A) a business plan showing that--
(i) at least 51 percent of all interests in the employee
stock ownership plan or eligible worker-owned cooperative is
owned or controlled by employees;
(ii) the Board of Directors of the employee stock ownership
plan or eligible worker-owned cooperative is elected by all
of the employees; and
(iii) all employees receive basic information about company
progress and have the opportunity to participate in day-to-
day operations; and
(B) a feasibility study from an objective third party with
a positive determination that the employee stock ownership
plan or eligible worker-owned cooperative will be profitable
enough to pay any loan, subordinated loan, or loan guarantee
that was made possible through the Fund.
(5) Insurance of subordinated loans and loan guarantees.--
(A) In general.--The Director shall use amounts in the Fund
to insure any subordinated loan or loan guarantee provided
under this section against the nonrepayment of the
outstanding balance of the loan.
(B) Annual premiums.--The annual premium for the insurance
of each subordinated loan or loan guarantee under this
subsection shall be paid by the borrower in such manner and
in such amount as the Secretary determines to be appropriate.
(C) Premiums and guarantee fees available to cover
losses.--The premiums paid to the Fund from insurance issued
under this paragraph and the fees paid to the Fund for loan
guarantees issued under paragraph (2)(A) shall be deposited
in an account managed by the Secretary of Commerce and may be
used to reimburse the Fund for any losses incurred by the
Fund in connection with any such loan or loan guarantee.
(6) Technical assistance in the discretion of the
secretary.--If a grant is made under paragraph (3)(B)(ii),
the Secretary may require the Director to--
(A) provide for the targeting of key groups such as
retiring business owners, unions, managers, trade
associations, and community organizations;
(B) encourage cooperation in organizing workshops and
conferences; and
(C) provide for the preparation and distribution of
materials concerning employee ownership and participation.
(7) Participation training in the discretion of the
secretary.--If a grant is made under paragraph (3)(B)(iii),
the Secretary may require the Director to provide for--
(A) courses on employee participation; and
(B) the development and fostering of networks of employee-
owned companies to spread the use of successful participation
techniques.
(c) Rulemaking.--Not later than 30 days after the date of
the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Commerce shall
promulgate regulations that ensure--
(1) the safety and soundness of the Fund; and
(2) that the Fund does not compete with commercial
financial institutions.
(d) Authorization of Appropriations.--There are authorized
to be appropriated to carry out this section--
(1) $100,000,000 for fiscal year 2008; and
(2) such sums as may be necessary for subsequent fiscal
years.

Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I also wish to propound a unanimous
consent request. I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate resumes
consideration of S. 761 on Wednesday, there be 30 minutes of debate
with respect to the Sununu amendment No. 938, with the time equally
divided and controlled between Senators Sununu and Kennedy or their
designees; that upon the use or yielding back of time, the Senate
proceed to vote in relation to the amendment, with no amendment in
order to the amendment prior to the vote.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma.
Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, it is my understanding that the Senator
from Tennessee wants to make a comment. If the Senator from Ohio would
permit me, I have a very short statement to make concerning an
amendment. It will not take more than 5 minutes.
Mr. BROWN. Sure.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Oklahoma and
the Senator from Ohio for their courtesy.
I simply want to acknowledge the comments of Senator Bingaman from
New Mexico and say I think our day has been productive and to say our
colleagues have been very helpful in bringing their amendments to the
floor.
I ask the Senator what he envisions for tomorrow beyond what he
already announced.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico.
Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, I thank my colleague for his question
and his great work on this legislation.
The plan for tomorrow, as I understand it, is we will go ahead with
this Sununu amendment at around 10:45 and hopefully vote shortly after
11 o'clock on that amendment. We have talked to Senator Coburn from
Oklahoma about considering three amendments he still has that he is
committed to offering at some time in the 2 o'clock period.
We urge other Senators who have amendments they wish to have votes on
to bring those to the floor for consideration after disposing of
Senator Sununu's amendment shortly after 11 o'clock. Now, obviously,
the Senator's amendment is still pending, as we have indicated, and we
still have to get agreement as to how to proceed on that. We are
working on that at the present time.
But I agree, we have made good progress today. I hope we can complete
the remaining amendments tomorrow and proceed to final action on the
bill.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from New Mexico.
The majority leader and the Republican leader would both like us to
finish tomorrow, if we can. I think we have a good chance of doing
that. Senator Inhofe is staying tonight to talk about an amendment he
hopes to bring up tomorrow. I talked with Senator Grassley. The number
of amendments that seem to need to be offered seems to be narrowing
down. I would say to my colleagues, with the briefing that is scheduled
for tomorrow afternoon at 4 o'clock, we are going to do our best to get
as many of those as possible in before 4 o'clock so we can finish the
bill tomorrow, if possible.
I am going to defer any other remarks I have until after the Senator
from Oklahoma and the Senator from Ohio and the Senator from New York
have had a chance to speak.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma.

[[Page S4903]]

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, what the Senator from New Mexico is
suggesting is exactly what I have in mind. I have an amendment I will
be calling up at an appropriate time that is mutually agreeable. It
does affect the taxation end. I have talked to Senator Baucus and
Senator Grassley. I believe they are going to be favorable toward it.
There are not many one-sentence amendments. That is what this one is.
Let me read it to you and tell you why I am offering it. Then I will
wait until tomorrow and hopefully get in the mix.

Notwithstanding any other provision of the law; no federal
funds shall be provided to any organization or entity that
advocates against tax competition or United States tax
competitiveness.

Let me just give you an example. After World War II, there was an
effort to implement the Marshall Plan. When that was done, in 1961, an
organization was formed that was called the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development. This is an international organization
which advocates tax increases for the United States specifically to
make us less competitive. They have stated explicitly that low-tax
policies ``unfairly erode the tax bases of other countries and distort
the location of capital and services.''
What we have here is a Paris-based bunch of bureaucrats seeking to
protect high-tax welfare states from the free market. That is why the
OECD goes on to say that free market tax competition ``may hamper the
application of progressive tax rates and the achievement of
redistributive goals.'' Clearly, free market tax competition makes it
harder to implement socialistic welfare states. The free market,
evidently, has not been fair to socialistic welfare states. Well, it is
a good thing they have the OECD and nearly $100 million in U.S.
taxpayer money to aid them.
Noted economist Walter Williams clearly sees the direction in which
this is headed when he says that ``the bottom line agenda for the OECD
is to establish a tax cartel where nations get together and collude on
taxes.''
Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill seconded that when he said that he
was ``troubled by the underlying premise that low tax rates are somehow
suspect and by the notion that any country . . . should interfere in
any other country's'' tax policy.
So the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has
issued a report entitled ``Harmful Tax Competition: An Emerging Global
Issue,'' which establishes a new international body, the Forum on
Harmful Tax Practices, to implement the measures outlined in the
report. The OECD has endorsed and encouraged higher taxes, new taxes,
and global taxes no fewer than 24 times. They have advocated a value-
added tax, a 40-cent increase in the gas tax, a carbon tax, a
fertilizer tax, ending the deductibility of State and local taxes from
Federal taxes, and new taxes at the State level.
So I believe this is something we will have a chance to debate, and I
would think it actually would be accepted. Again, all it is going to be
is just one sentence. It reads:

Notwithstanding any other provision of the law; no federal
funds shall be provided to any organization or entity that
advocates against tax competition or United States tax
competitiveness.

I cannot think of any more appropriate bill to have this on than this
bill we have before us currently.
With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor. I thank the Senator from
Ohio, who has stepped aside for me.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York.
Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I also thank the Senator from Ohio for
letting me make some brief remarks, and then I will yield the floor to
him.
First, I wish to praise my colleagues from New Mexico and Tennessee,
who have done an excellent job on this legislation. I applaud the
bipartisan group that put together this extraordinary bill we are
considering, the America COMPETES Act, because this legislation will
provide invaluable resources to help slingshot our economy forward and
ensure that our great country does not lose step with our global
competitors.
I am particularly proud of one provision I authored and has been
included in the managers' amendment that was adopted earlier today.
That is what I want to speak about.
The program is called the National Science Foundation Teaching
Fellowship, and it will go a long way toward ensuring that our high
school students are taught math and science by the best and the
brightest.
I wish to express my deep gratitude to Senators Kennedy, Bingaman,
Enzi, and Alexander for including this important provision in the bill.
I would also like to thank my friend and colleague, Senator Clinton,
for her valuable support as a committee member in this process.
The NSF Teaching Fellowship is modeled after a highly successful
program in New York City called Math for America. The program recruits
top math and science graduates to become teachers and retains them as
teachers by offering financial incentives. The program will ensure that
leaders in math and science train future generations of innovators--
instead of leaving the classroom for research or other opportunities.
It is working in New York City, and it is crucial to expand this
model to the rest of the country. Let me share with you some statistics
that will explain why.
Our students are not currently prepared to compete in a technological
economy. In the 2003 PISA math assessment that compared 15-year-old
students across the world, American students ranked 24th out of the 29
participating countries--here in America, in math, 24th out of 29. How
are we going to stay the greatest country in the world when that has
happened?
Students currently studying math and science will be the fuel that
powers our economy for the next century, and there is no question we
are not giving them the tools they need to compete.
One reason why our students are not doing well is because only one-
third of math teachers and less than two-thirds of science teachers
majored or minored in the subject they teach. It is not hard to
understand why. Starting salaries for math and science majors can be as
much as $20,000 higher in the private sector than they are for public
school teachers. But by allowing this disincentive to teach to
continue, we are ignoring our responsibility to have our students
taught by teachers who know math and science backward and forward. The
bottom line is the American economic engine may stall if we don't have
a highly skilled workforce to keep it going. Unfortunately, this is
where we are faltering.

So today the Senate has adopted the NSF Teaching Fellowship program,
along with other excellent provisions in the America COMPETES Act, to
fill in the gap. Here is how the program will work. NSF teaching
fellows will have to take a test to prove their strengths in math or
science. Then they enroll in a 1-year master's degree program in
teaching that will give them teaching certification, and it is all paid
for. They will agree to teach for at least 4 years, and for those 4
years, they will receive bonuses on top of their salaries. These
individuals will infuse our schools with a deep passion for and an
understanding of math and science and will share their knowledge with
other teachers in their school.
To retain our current teachers who are outstanding at what they do
and can provide expertise in the classroom that our teaching fellows
won't yet have, there is another category called NSF Master Teaching
Fellows. Master fellows are existing teachers who already have a
master's degree in math or science education. They will also take a
test demonstrating they have a high level understanding of their
subject area. For the next 5 years they will serve as leaders in their
school, providing mentorship for other teachers in their department as
well as assisting with curriculum development and professional
development. For these 5 years they also will receive bonuses on top of
their salaries.
Last year I introduced the Math and Science Teaching Corps Act with
my friend Congressman Jim Saxton in the House. Today that bill has
evolved into a program that has been included in the America COMPETES
Act.
The question is: Will this generation have the skill sets necessary
to take full advantage of this new economy? Right now our children are
lagging behind and we must act quickly before businesses need to look
elsewhere. Math and science skills are the key to

[[Page S4904]]

maintaining this country's competitiveness in the global economy, and
this legislation will help ensure that.
I believe the NSF Teaching Fellowship, as well as the rest of the
America COMPETES Act, will put us back on track. I am proud to have
been included in the process and I look forward to working with my
colleagues to complete work on this important bill.

Medicare

Mr. President, I want also to take 1 more minute to address the
comments this afternoon of my friend and colleague Senator Gregg. He
and I often agree, and I believe we do on this particular issue as
well, about the need to shore up Medicare. I think he misunderstood my
comments from yesterday and I want to take a moment to discuss them.
Yesterday the Social Security and Medicare trustees released their
annual report showing that Social Security does not face an impending
funding crisis, but Medicare funds are less secure. The report
indicates that the Social Security trust fund would be solvent 1 year
longer than was predicted in last year's report, that is until 2041,
but Medicare would be exhausted as soon as 2019 in terms of the
Medicare trust fund.
The Senator should know I did not and would not attack the
independent trustees of the Medicare and Social Security trust funds.
My statement responded to two things: first, the administration's
misguided mission to use any and all news with regard to Social
Security as an opportunity to push for privatizing Social Security;
second, the administration's unwillingness to do something to fix
underlying problems in our health care system and reduce budget
deficits to shore up Medicare before it is too late.
My colleague from New Hampshire pointed out that most of us on this
side of the aisle voted against some of his amendments. That doesn't
mean we don't want to fix Medicare; it means we don't agree with the
way he is proposing. In fact, we have to get a handle on the whole
health care system to fix Medicare, not chop away and slash away at
Medicare itself. So I agree with the Senator from New Hampshire, we
can't leave these problems to future generations. I look forward to
working with him on that important issue.
I once again thank my good colleague from Ohio for his generosity of
both time and spirit.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, before the Senator from Ohio goes
forward, I simply say to the Senator from New York I applaud his work
on the math program. I remember last year when we talked about it, and
I met with his constituents who have done so much good work with that
model.
Among the other things which are important about the program is that
it defines a fair way of identifying a high-need set of teachers--in
this case math and science--and when they go into teaching, to pay them
more for being good teachers. That is a tough thing to do. It is tough
to do that in a fair way, but the Senator has found one way to do it.
We have a variety of other ways to do it. Senator Durbin and I have
supported an amendment, the teacher incentive fund, which encourages
that sort of experimentation, a not-made-in-Washington formula.
But if we are to have areas of high need such as math and science and
low-income children who can't achieve, we are going to have to find
some fair ways for outstanding school teaching and leadership. The
Senator from New York has taken an important step in that direction as
part of what he has done today, and I congratulate him for that.
Mr. SCHUMER. I thank my colleague.

vote explanation

Mr. OBAMA. Mr. President, during rollcall vote No. 137 today, I was
at a speaking engagement in another part of the city and was unable to
return in time for the vote. Had I been able to vote, I would have
voted for the amendment offered by Senator DeMint.
Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, I rise today in support of Majority
Leader Reid's legislation S. 761, the America Creating Opportunities to
Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education and Science--
COMPETES--Act of 2007 to help maintain our Nation's competitive edge in
the critical areas of math, science, engineering and technology.
I am pleased to be a cosponsor of this important bill with 57 of my
colleagues.
This bill will strengthen educational opportunities in math, science,
engineering, and technology from elementary through graduate school,
increase the Federal investment in basic research, and develop an
innovation infrastructure--all which is greatly needed in an
increasingly competitive global economy.
This bipartisan bill reflects recommendations by the National
Academies' report ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm'' and the Council
on Competitiveness' ``Innovate America'' report.
Both of these reports conclude that action is needed now in order to
secure our country's economic and technological leadership in the
future.
For example, indicators of the need for action are the following:
More than 600,000 engineers graduated from institutions of higher
education in China in 2004. In India, the figure was 350,000. In the
U.S., it was only about 70,000. Science and engineering jobs are
expected to grow by 21 percent from 2004 to 2014, compared to a growth
of 13 percent in all other fields, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics
reports.
Nationwide, about 68 percent of middle school math students were
taught by teachers who did not have a major or certification in the
subject. For science middle school students, 57 percent were taught by
teachers who did not have a major or certification in the subject--
based on the 2004 report by the National Center for Education
Statistics.
In California, the State also faces a critical shortage of math and
science teachers. The State will need to produce more than 16,000 new
math and science teachers within 5 years and more than 33,000 over the
next decade due to attrition and retirement. This is from the March
2007 report by the California Council on Science and Technology.
This report also concludes that strengthening the teaching of math
and science is crucial if California is to maintain its competitive
edge and economic growth.
That is why it is imperative that we take steps to ensure that our
children, as our future leaders, are fully prepared with the skills to
take on the demands of the country's changing economy and workplace.
Specifically, this bill would increase authorized funding for the
National Science Foundation from $6.8 billion in fiscal year 2008 to
$11.2 billion in fiscal year 2011. California receives about 20 percent
of total funding from NSF grants; increase authorized funding for the
U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science from $4.6 billion in
fiscal year 2008 to over $5.2 billion in fiscal year 2011. California
receives over 20 percent of total Federal funding; direct NASA to
transfer $160 million from its accounts for the funding of basic
science and research for fiscal year 2008 and fully participate in
interagency activities to foster innovation; authorize $290 million
over 4 years to establish a Distinguished Scientists Program under the
U.S. Department of Energy which would be a joint program between
universities and National Laboratories to support up to 100
distinguished scientist positions; authorize $210 million for fiscal
year 2008, and such sums as necessary for each of the following three
years, for new grants under the U.S. Department of Education to develop
university degree programs for students to pursue bachelor's degrees in
math, science, engineering, and critical foreign languages with
concurrent teaching credentials.
Also, grants would be used for master's degree programs in these
fields for current teachers to improve their skills.
This model is similar to the University of California's California
Teach Program which aims to put a thousand new math and science
teachers annually into the State's classrooms.
It will authorize $190 million over 4 years to create a new grant
program to improve the skills of K-12 math and science teachers, under
the U.S. Department of Energy, for summer institutes at each of the
National Laboratories; authorizes $146.7 million for fiscal year 2008
and such sums as necessary for the following 3 years to provide ``Math
Now'' grants, under the

[[Page S4905]]

U.S. Department of Education, to improve math instruction for
struggling elementary and middle school students; authorize $140
million over 4 years for a new competitive grant program under the U.S.
Department of Energy to assist States in establishing or expanding
statewide math and science specialty schools and provide expert
assistance in teaching from the National Laboratories' at these
schools; establishes a President's Council on Innovation and
Competitiveness and requires the National Academy of Sciences to
conduct a study to identify barriers to innovation 1 year after
enactment.
America's economy is fueled by innovation, and innovation is enabled
by a strong foundation in math and science. Our country's math and
science foundation is eroding, and our innovative strength is similarly
weakening.
The U.S. trade balance in high-technology products has shifted from a
$54 billion surplus in 1990 to a $50 billion deficit in 2001.
This legislation can help reverse this trend. It will help maintain
our Nation's global competitiveness and continue to attract the best
and brightest minds across the country to pursue careers as engineers,
scientists, technicians, and very importantly, as math and science
teachers.
I urge my colleagues to support this important legislation.
Mr. CARDIN. Mr. President, I rise today in strong support of S. 761,
the America COMPETES Act of 2007. If we consider the people who have
given us the light bulb, the blood bank, the artificial heart, the
microchip processor, and Microsoft, we must acknowledge that access to
quality education and openness to innovation in America have nurtured
many of the most influential inventors and the best trained workforce
in modern history.
But while technological progress has revolutionized the workplace,
our education system has failed to keep pace; now, many of our Nation's
schools are unable to provide their students with the scientific,
technological, engineering, and mathematical knowledge and skills the
21st century economy demands. Without sufficient numbers of well-
trained people and the scientific and technical innovations they
produce, the United States is in jeopardy of losing its place as the
center for the high-quality jobs and innovative enterprise that have
been part of our national heritage.
I applaud Senators Bingaman and Alexander and the other leading
sponsors of the bill for taking action to ensure that this Nation
remains a leader for innovation, and I am proud to join them as a
cosponsor of this bill. I am grateful to the academic and business
leaders, including Nancy Grasmick, the Maryland State superintendent of
schools, and Dr. C.D. Mote, Jr., president of the University of
Maryland, who produced both the National Academies' ``Rising Above the
Gathering Storm'' and the Council on Competitiveness' ``Innovative
America'' reports and recommendations that serve as the foundation for
this legislation. I am proud of the legislation the Senate is
considering: it takes significant steps to stimulate and support
innovation in our Nation.
When I ask young scientists and engineers what triggered their
interest, they cite--almost without exception--a teacher, mentor, or
internship as the inspiration for their love of science, math, and
innovation. I am pleased, therefore, that this bill includes several
measures to improve teacher recruitment and training, develop
partnerships between schools and laboratories, and encourage internship
programs. All of these provisions will increase students' exposure to
inspirational teaching, talented scientists, and real-world experience.
Education research and the anecdotal evidence I mentioned above
indicate that teacher quality is the most important factor influencing
student achievement. Yet our best teachers are not evenly distributed
among our Nations communities. Far too many of our highest need school
districts are struggling to recruit and retain experienced teachers. To
address this inequity, S. 761 includes important measures to recruit
and train high-quality math and science teachers for high-need school
districts. The legislation also creates mentorship and apprenticeship
programs for women, who are underrepresented in science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics careers.
The growing gap between what is taught in elementary and secondary
schools and the skills necessary to succeed in college, graduate
school, and today's workforce threatens the implicit promise we have
each made to our own children and those whom we represent: get good
grades in school and you will succeed in life. S. 761 contains
competitive grants to States that will encourage better alignment of
elementary and secondary curricula with the knowledge and skills
required by colleges and universities, 21st century employers, and the
Armed Forces, so that high school graduates will be prepared to succeed
in the world.
Those students who choose to pursue high-tech careers require Federal
funding to conduct research. Many scientists and mathematicians make
their greatest discoveries early in their careers, before they have
developed the track records and reputations often required to secure
research grants. The leaders of Johns Hopkins and other great Maryland
research institutions have told me that it is difficult for their young
and most daring researchers to secure necessary research funding.
S. 761 would significantly increase America's investment in research,
doubling funding for the National Science Foundation and the Department
of Energy's Office of Science over the next 4 years and authorizing a
significant increase in funding for the National Institute of Standards
and Technology. But the legislation goes further by also targeting more
funds to young researchers and high-risk frontier research. S. 761
would increase the number of research fellowships and traineeships that
provide critical support for science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics graduate students and would require NIST to set aside at
least 8 percent of its annual funding for high-risk, high-reward
innovation acceleration research.
Today, we face enormous technological challenges, which include
halting global climate change, achieving energy independence, and
finding cures for AIDS, malaria, diabetes, and other devastating
diseases. We must equip ourselves with skills and resources to tackle
these problems so that our children and grandchildren may inherit a
world rich with economic opportunities. Therefore, I am urging my
colleagues to join me in support of this critical legislation.
Mr. ROBERTS. Mr. President. I rise today in support of S. 761, the
America COMPETES Act. This sweeping legislation takes bold steps to
recapture America's prowess in the global economy.
The demand for talented persons in the areas of science, technology,
engineering, mathematics, and critical foreign language far exceeds the
supply in the United States. The likelihood of finding a job in these
high-need areas after college is almost guaranteed, yet we find
ourselves still lagging behind other countries in producing these
graduates. America ranks No. 24 out of industrialized nations in
mathematical literacy for children entering high school. Right now,
China is graduating four times the number of engineers as the United
States, with India not far behind.
I am deeply concerned with these trends. It is vital to have a
superior science and mathematics education system and workforce. In
1997, I formed an Advisory Committee on Science, Technology, and the
Future in my home State of Kansas. This committee helps me find ways to
align Federal and State initiatives to enhance science and technology
in the State. The advisory committee has been instrumental in
identifying high-need high-tech jobs in the State while focusing on
ways to educate, train, and attract talented persons into these fields.
Kansas continues to be a State rich with high-tech industry. Wichita
is the aviation capital of the United States, producing approximately
50 percent of all U.S. general aviation. This industry needs aviation
researchers, engineers, and skilled technicians. My home State is
rapidly growing in the areas of bioscience, including drug discovery,
new treatments for disease, food safety, animal health, and renewable
energy. The Roberts Advisory Committee has recognized that while these
industries are growing, they have a limited

[[Page S4906]]

pool of talented employees to choose from.
Like many States, Kansas is facing a shortage of math and science
teacher applicants. I agree with my advisory committee that global
competitiveness lies with our younger generation. It is imperative that
we provide them with an education from science and math teachers
possessing a solid knowledge base and effective teaching skills. We
also need to find ways to spark students' interests in math, science,
and technology while they are in the early years of education. The
America COMPETES Act addresses these needs by strengthening the skills
of math and science teachers, creating partnerships between National
Laboratories and high-need high schools, facilitating the expansion of
advanced placement programs, and increasing the number of students who
study foreign languages.
Additionally, the bill provides an increase in research investment by
doubling the funding for the National Science Foundation, NSF. The
grants distributed to States from the NSF are being used to conduct
extraordinary research in every corner of the world.
My advisory committee supports the America COMPETES Act, and so do I.
It is only through our commitment to the underlying goals of this bill
that we will see success in building our competitive workforce.
Ms. MIKULSKI. Mr. President, I would like to thank my colleagues
Senator Jeff Bingaman, Senator Pete Domenici, Senator Lamar Alexander,
and Majority Leader Harry Reid for their efforts to move this issue. I
am so proud of this great bipartisan team of 54 Senators working to
pass this bill. I can't say enough about the appreciation that many of
us in the Senate feel about my colleagues' initiation of the report,
``Rising Above the Gathering Storm,'' which is the basis for this
legislation, the America COMPETES Act.
America must remain an innovation economy. This legislation creates
the building blocks that we need for a smarter America. Our Nation is
in an amazing race--the race for discovery and new knowledge, the race
to remain competitive and to foster an innovation society, to create
new ideas that lead to new breakthroughs, new products, and new jobs,
the innovations that have the power to save lives, create prosperity
and protect the homeland, the innovation to make America safer,
stronger, and smarter.
This legislation is called the America COMPETES Act or America
Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in
Technology, Education and Science. It is divided into three sections:
research, education and innovation. It calls for getting new ideas by
doubling Federal funding for research at the National Science
Foundation and establishing the Innovation Acceleration Research
Program to fund frontier research like testing new theories and using
new research methods; getting the best minds with scholarships for
future math and science teachers, including $10,000 scholarships from
the National Science Foundation for undergraduate students majoring in
math or science along with teacher certification; and establishing a
President's Council on Innovation and Competitiveness to develop a
comprehensive agenda to promote innovation and competitiveness in the
public and private sectors.
Why is this so important? Because a country that doesn't innovate,
stagnates. The whole foundation of American culture and economy is
based on the concept of discovery and innovation. That is part of our
culture. When you look at what has made America a superpower, it is our
innovation and our technology. We have to look at where the new ideas
are going to come from that are going to generate the new products and
workforce for the 21st century.
I want America to win the Nobel Prizes and the markets. This
legislation will help to set the framework. It will make sure that
we're helping our young people with scholarships and helping our
science teachers and those working in science with funding and research
opportunities. We also are forming partnerships with the private sector
and building an innovation-friendly Government.
The very essence of our culture is innovation and discovery. Remember
we got here because someone wanted to discover. When Lewis and Clark
set out on their expedition, it wasn't the National Geographic Society,
to find a trail to the Pacific--it was called the Corps of Discovery.
That is who we are. That is what our culture is, and that is what we
need to maintain.
We are a nation of explorers and pioneers always searching for new
frontiers. The next generation of pioneers, engineers, and scientists
is out there. They will help us create jobs and win the markets. Most
importantly, they will help us win the amazing race. I will use my
position as chair of the subcommittee that funds science to make sure
that there is money in the Federal checkbook to support these
proposals, and I hope my colleagues will do the same.
Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I have an amendment to S. 761, the America
COMPETES Act. My amendment would allow competency-based institutions of
higher learning to access grant programs which will help them train
math, science, and critical foreign language teachers.
I applaud the goals of increasing the numbers of math, science, and
critical foreign language teachers in our schools, including high-need
schools. Our ability to compete as a nation is directly tied to our
ability to educate our young people and retrain those who are in
industries that are no longer viable.
We now have the finest system of higher education in the world. There
is no doubt that if we provide the proper incentives, many brilliant
innovators and educators will take up the clarion call.
I come before this body today to introduce my amendment because many
of today's teachers are teaching an older generation of students. The
U.S. economy is in a state of continual change, and with that change
comes displacement of workers and a need to retrain and retool. These
nontraditional students often receive their training from accredited
schools who assess student development based on a student's ability to
demonstrate competency in the material being taught. Under the bill as
drafted, these competency-based universities would not be able to
access the grant money for teacher development. My amendment would
remove this bias and allow competency-based universities access to the
teacher development grant money. This in turn will increase the
teaching quality in math, science, and critical foreign language,
thereby providing the students attending these universities with a
better education.
Current bill language would prevent participation by well-respected
and widely recognized institutions, such as Western Governors
University, WGU. WGU was set up by over 19 Governors to provide
innovation in higher education and is now training over 1,000 math and
science teachers, the majority of whom are women and minorities. WGU's
innovative approach to teacher education has proven very successful.
As we set about to ensure that our Nation has the needed highly
qualified teachers in critical subject areas, we must make certain that
these institutions are included in this legislation. Therefore, I ask
my colleagues to join me in supporting this amendment.

____________________