Lamar Alexander

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. If the mortgage holders around the world--China, the Middle East, and other countries--worry about our ability to pay it back, I suppose they could simply stop buying our dollars or ask us to pay them more or pay a higher interest rate for our mortgage debt.

Mr. ALEXANDER. We have been worrying about sending billions of dollars overseas to buy oil. So we should be worried about sending half of that money overseas to pay interest on the debt. The Senator from New Hampshire was Governor of New Hampshire, as I was Governor of Tennessee, and we used to have a friendly competition about which had the most conservative fiscal policies. Of course, Tennessee did, but one thing we always tried to do was keep our debt low because that meant we had more money for schools and for State parks and for hospitals. What happens when we run the debt so high that we are paying $800 billion in interest, which I believe is 8 times more than the Federal Government spends on education each year and 8 times more than the Federal Government spends on transportation each year. We are taking away the money that we would invest to make this a better country in the future.

Mr. ALEXANDER. How much time do we have, Mr. President?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I see the Senator from North Dakota here. We have been talking about Senator Gregg's amendment, which would try to put some limit on the size of the debt. And we have been talking about my proposal, the runaway debt point of order, which would say debt is not where it should be, so let's say whoa out there and let ourselves and the American people know when we reach a debt level of 90 percent of GDP and that we should not have a budget in any year that does that. I know the chairman, Senator Conrad, has said in committee he didn't think that was a very effective way to do things. I wonder why that is true because it seems to me it would be extremely effective to shine a big spotlight on the Senate and say you have proposed a budget where debt exceeds 90 percent of the gross domestic product of this country for a year. You cannot do that, unless a bipartisan group of 60 of you agree to do it. I wonder whether Senator Gregg believes these kinds of limits or spotlights would be a helpful tool in beginning to reduce the staggering debt these budgets propose.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I believe our time has expired. I ask unanimous consent to allow a couple more minutes because I see Senator Kyl from Arizona who wishes to speak briefly.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Guatemala, the Philippines, Cuba, Nigeria, and Aruba are countries that have an annual deficit level lower than we will have.

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

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I was just making my entrance at the time the Senator from Connecticut concluded. I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 747 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I see the Senator from New Hampshire is here, and the Senator from Arizona, the assistant Republican leader, will be here in a few minutes, I believe. Senator Gregg earlier offered an amendment which essentially would say that the projected debt under President Obama's budget couldn't go up more than all of the debt that has been accumulated by all of the Presidents from George Washington to President Bush. That is one way of saying to the American people and to the Senate that the debt that is proposed by these budgets is so staggeringly high that we need to find some way to put a limit on it. I am offering with my amendment another way to put some limit on the debt. I call it a runaway debt point of order. This is not a matter of not letting the horse get out of the barn; this recognizes that the horse is already out of the barn and we are trying to put a fence around him before he gets into the next county or even into the next country. This amendment would create a new point of order against considering any budget resolution that estimates gross Federal debt--our total debt, total amount of obligations--exceeding 90 percent of gross domestic product in any year covered by the budget. To put that in a little plainer English, what it means is the Senate would be forced to come up with 60 votes if the public debt in any year goes beyond 90 percent of the estimated gross domestic product. The gross domestic product is what all of us produce in the United States every year. Despite the fact we are in an economic slowdown, we are a very privileged country. We make up only about 5 percent of the world population--those of us who live in the United States--but year in and year out we produce about $1 out of every $4 of wealth produced in the world. So 22, 23, 25, 26 percent of all of the wealth, all of the money produced each year in the world is produced in the United States for distribution among primarily the 5 percent of us who live here. We are a very privileged country. This amendment says if we intend in any year to increase the debt above 90 percent of all of that production in any year, that 60 Senators have to agree with it. When was the last time the United States had a debt, a national debt, that exceeded 90 percent of the gross domestic product? It was when we were fighting in World War II and as we were coming out of World War II. Of course, during that time, it didn't matter what we spent. It didn't matter what we taxed. We were in a fight for our lives, and we did whatever we could think of to do, spent whatever we could think of to spend, and ran up any debt we needed to to win the war. And we did win that war. Right after World War II, our national debt was about 90 percent of the annual gross domestic product of the United States. More recently, it has been about 40 percent. So here is what happens now--the Senator from New Hampshire went into this to some degree. We talked about deficits and we need to make a clear distinction between deficits and debt. Deficits adds to the debt each year. We talked about the fact that the deficit is going up this year and next year during the recession, and we understand that is necessary to some degree. But then the deficit comes back down to approximately 4 percent of gross domestic product, and it stays at a little over 4 percent in President Obama's budget. That is also the Conrad budget, which OMB Director for President Obama said, is about 98 percent of the Obama budget. This proposes an annual deficit as compared with GDP that is worse than the following countries: Guatemala, the Philippines, Aruba, Cuba, Nigeria. This amendment I'm offering, however, seeks to talk about the debt. For example, the President's proposal is to double the debt in 5 years and to almost triple it in almost 10 years. So we start out with debt held by the public at about 40 percent of gross domestic product. But by 2014, we are at 66.5 percent of gross domestic product under Senator Conrad's budget. President Obama proposed a 10-year budget--which is a picture of America's future in the same way that a photograph of a first grade class would be a picture of a community's future 10 years out--that actually presented a very honest picture of our future as he sees it. I respect him greatly for that. I just don't like the picture he has presented because that picture, as I mentioned, doubles the debt in 5 years and nearly triples it in 10 years. So we go from a level of debt held by the public equaling about 40 percent of gross domestic product to 82 percent of gross domestic product. Under President Bush--and we hear a lot of talking about President Bush, we had lower deficits. I was listening to the radio yesterday morning, and they said: How can you Republicans be talking about debt when under President Bush you ran up the debt? True, true. But Senator Gregg offered an amendment that gives us a chance to deal with that because he points out that President Obama would increase the debt more than, not just President Bush, but than all of the Presidents put together, going back to George Washington. That is a very sobering fact. So President Bush may have made some mistakes, but he was not judged on whether he caused Hurricane Katrina. He was judged on how he reacted to it. President Obama certainly didn't create the economic mess we are in, and he won't be judged by that, but he will be judged-- and the majority party will be judged--by how they react to it. I don't believe doubling the debt and tripling the debt is the way to grow the economy or restore good jobs. I see the Senator from New Hampshire here, and I would like to ask him about these gross domestic product discussions--90 percent of this and 20 percent of that and a trillion of this--all of that makes the case, but it is hard to fathom. Through the Chair, I would ask the Senator from New Hampshire how would he put it in terms that the average family can deal with, what it means to double the debt in 5 years and nearly triple it in 10 years, as the President's budget would do.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I understand the Senator from North Dakota, the chairman of the Budget Committee, may come to the floor. If he does and wants to speak, I will defer to him. In the meantime, I will address the President's budget, which the Senate will begin to consider this morning at 10 o'clock. Those of us who have spent a lot of time around schools, children, and education know there is a very good way to get a picture of the future and that is to walk into a first-grade class in Arkansas, Tennessee or anywhere else in America and take a photograph of the first graders. If you do that, you have a picture of that town, that neighborhood, that community, and our country 10, 15, 20 years out. The President's budget plan for the next 10 years gives us that kind of photograph of the future of our country. I commend the President for his candor, but I don't like the picture I see. I think, increasingly, our friends around the world and people in this country feel the same way. The Budget Committee chairman, Senator Conrad, has developed a different budget--somewhat different. He says it is about 98 percent similar to the President's budget. What the chairman, Senator Conrad, does is say let's look 5 years out, not 10 years, as the President has suggested. Senator Conrad has moved a few ``children'' out of the picture--the alternative minimum tax ``child'' is over here during the class photograph, so we will not be seeing that person. I think the ``doc fix'' to avoid cuts in physician payments, which we are going to spend money on, is over here, so we will not see that ``child'' during the class picture. The money for the banks--I think we all hope Secretary Geithner's plan to begin to get toxic assets out of the banks will work. If it doesn't, we may have to go to plan B, and we should have the money in reserve if that is necessary. That ``child'' is also out of the class photograph. With all respect, the attempt of the chairman of the committee to present a 5-year budget, leaving out items that we know we will be spending money on, doesn't come nearly as close to giving us an accurate picture of what the country would be like 10 years from now with the budget we are acting upon. The President's photograph of the future is a more accurate picture, one we should pay attention to. But it is a blueprint for America that is a very different kind of America--an America with less freedom, with more Government, with more taxes, with more spending, with more borrowing, and an America that our children and our grandchildren will have difficulty affording. This blueprint that President Obama has laid out for us includes a trillion dollars more in spending for health care on top of the trillion dollars in so-called stimulus money that was spent. It includes more than a trillion dollars in taxes, including a national sales tax on energy in the middle of a recession. It would double the debt in 5 years and nearly triple the national debt in 10 years. There is nothing in the President's budget that would seriously get to work on something he said he wants to work on, which is out-of- control entitlement spending, which accounts for more than 60 percent of the spending in this budget. It is important for the American people to know this budget that we begin working on at 10 a.m. this morning is a budget of which 60 percent is out of Congress' hands. It is on automatic pilot. It is spending for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and it is going up-- everyone agrees--at an unsustainable rate, which means we cannot earn enough money to pay at that rate 10, 15, 20 years out; and there is nothing in the budget that would begin to take charge of that problem, such as the commission that Senator Gregg and Senator Conrad have proposed; whereby, we would, as a Congress, come up with a plan and present the plan for controlling entitlement spending, and we would vote it up or down--much in the same way that we deal with the difficult problem of closing defense bases. This 10-year picture of America's future is causing concern around the world. In China, where the savings rate is as high as 50 percent, compared to ours of about 1 percent--although it is up temporarily in the recession to about 5 percent. In China, a country that buys many of our dollars, leaders there express extraordinary concern about the value of the dollar and whether they should continue to buy our dollars. Of course, if people overseas do not find buying our dollar as attractive, the price of our dollar goes down and the cash we are paid when we work is worth less and we can buy less and our standard of living will be less. We are a very lucky country. Here we are in the middle of this recession where people are hurting, where people are having difficulty finding jobs, and still in this year, we will be producing nearly a quarter of all the money in the world to be distributed among just 5 percent of the people in the world. One way we keep that high standard of living compared with the rest of the world is to make sure the dollars we produce and earn and spend are valuable dollars. If we spend too much and tax too much and borrow too much, they become worth less and China and other countries will not buy those dollars. Not only is it causing concern in China, we have our European friends expressing concern about the U.S. financial condition. This is a turn of affairs. I have heard a lot of comment on this floor and over in the House of Representatives about: Oh, my goodness, we don't want to be like France, we don't want to be like some European country. We are already worse than that in some ways. In order to be admitted to the European Union, a country's annual deficit has to be less than 3 percent of its gross domestic product. We are already exceeding that. The President's 10-year budget plan would have us settle in, after the recession is over, at about 4 percent. So we would be permanently disqualified from joining the European Union, according to the plan that is laid out before us. The plan also shows that every year of the 10 years of this budget, our total gross debt, which is all of the public debt we have--that is, debt that we individuals have when we loan money to our own Government or that we owe to the Chinese when they buy our dollars, or other countries around the world--that debt every year exceeds 90 percent of our gross domestic product, 90 percent of everything we work and earn and produce every year in this country that produces 25 percent of the world's income. We would be at that level for each of the 10 years. That is an alarming number. That is the highest amount of debt compared to our gross domestic product that we have had since the end of World War II. And, of course, during World War II we were just paying no attention to what we spent, what we borrowed, what we taxed because we had to win the war. Still we find ourselves today with that level of debt. Polls show this not only is causing concern around the world, it is causing concern at home. I normally do not think it is wise for elected officials to rely on public opinion polls when they vote. We are sent here, of course, to respect the views of the people who elected us but also to make some independent judgments. The Peter G. Peterson Foundation--which is headed by with David Walker, the former Comptroller General of the United States--has done some very important work over the last few years to try to bring to the American people the seriousness of the problem of our debt. Earlier this month, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation released a public opinion survey that was done jointly by Democratic and Republican pollsters. It showed the following: that voters rank the need to address our budget challenges as a top priority for the Obama administration second only to the need to get the economy back on track and get Americans back to work; that Americans see the threat to our future posed by our growing deficit and debt as more grave and more significant than global warming, more grave and more significant than declines in education, more grave and more significant than manufacturing, and more grave and more significant than the prospect of a rogue nation developing a nuclear weapon. In other words, the American people, like people in the rest of the world, look at our fiscal condition, look at this budget discussion we are beginning at 10 a.m. today--in just a few minutes--and they are concerned about this issue. We are the world leaders. Our dollar is the world's currency by choice. People who buy and people who follow our leadership are concerned. Another way to think about the importance of the debt is this way: In the 10th year of the President's budget, we will be spending $800 billion on interest alone. Our credit card will have that big a monthly payment just for interest. That means we will be spending more on interest in the 10th year than we will on national defense, which is $700 billion. We will be spending eight times as much on interest as we will be spending on education, eight times as much on interest as we will be spending on transportation. Every dollar we spend on interest is a dollar we will not be spending on investments to protect our nation's competitive edge in the future, it is a dollar we will not have in our pocket to spend for our families, it is a dollar the small businessperson will not have in his or her pocket to create a job, and it is a dollar that makes us a little less wealthy. No one is suggesting that President Obama single-handedly caused these large deficits this year or that he is responsible for the economic mess in which we find ourselves. Our friends on the other side, the Democrats, always like to begin their speeches by blaming whatever they can on President Bush. But I think the American people are ready for a talk about where do we go from here. President Bush did not cause Hurricane Katrina, but he got in some trouble for how he dealt with the cleanup after Hurricane Katrina. In the same way, President Obama had nothing to do with the economic mess in which we find ourselves today, but he will be judged and his administration will be correctly judged based upon how well they lead us in responding to the economic mess in which we find ourselves today. We would suggest that spending this much, taxing this much, and borrowing this much will not help get us out of our economic mess. The right way to deal with this is not to increase our debt levels to levels that have not been seen since World War II. The right way to deal with it is not to spend another trillion dollars on health care at a time when we are already spending 17 percent of the gross domestic product, which is that much more than every other industrialized country in the world is spending. The right way to do it is not to put a national energy tax on the American people in the middle of a recession. There is a better way, and I will be offering an amendment in a few minutes in the Budget Committee to show how we can deal with climate change and clean air without new taxes. We can do it by starting with conservation, with construction of 100 new nuclear powerplants. That is 70 percent of our carbon-free energy today. We can do it by electrifying half our cars and trucks and plugging them into nuclear plants and to coal plants at night when they have plenty of extra electricity. We do not have to build one new powerplant in the next 20 years for the purpose of charging plug-in electric cars unless we wish to. We need to have aggressive research to make solar power cost competitive, to find a way to capture the carbon produced by coal plants, to have the safe processing of nuclear waste. We need to be very aggressive on conservation and efficiency, which is the easiest way for us to deal with clean energy. We need to develop our oil and gas offshore. We can do it 10 miles offshore so we cannot see it, but we need to do it because the natural gas is important for home heating and, to some extent, for electricity. We are going to be using oil even if we do electrify half our cars and trucks, and we should be using our own oil instead of sending billions of dollars overseas and making us hostage to countries that are not always friendly to us. This is an important day in the Senate. This is a day when we begin to talk about the budget. We Republicans appreciate the fact that the President has given us a photograph of the future, in the same way we would take a photograph of first graders, and imagine what the country would look like in 10 years. We admire and appreciate his honesty in doing that, but we do not like the picture we see--too much spending, too much debt, too much borrowing, levels that concern the world and levels that concern the American people. It is not necessary to do that. It is not a wise way to create jobs in this country and to begin to get us out of this economic mess--but it will give us in that picture of our future a very different kind of country with more Government, more debt, less freedom, and a country that our children and grandchildren will have a difficult time affording. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. I would like to commend Senator Mikulski for all the hard work that you, Senator Kennedy, Senator Hatch and Senator Enzi have put into crafting this bipartisan legislation. In a time when we are seeing record numbers of Americans looking to give their time and energy to service, I am pleased that we are strengthening and expanding national service programs to create more opportunities for those willing to serve. I thank the Senator for her work on this effort. In particular, I am pleased with the creation of the new national service corps, which will address educational, health, veteran, and environmental needs. One professional education corps currently in operation, Teach For America, has been an AmeriCorps program since 1994 and is the Nation's largest professional service corps. Teach For America recruits top-college graduates of all backgrounds and career interests to commit to teach for at least 2 years in our Nation's most underserved classrooms. To date, 20,000 Teach For America corps members have enriched the lives of more than 3 million low income students at our Nation's lowest performing schools. I am very encouraged by the fact that while only 1 in 10 Teach For America corps members initially planned on a career in education, two-thirds of them remain in the field in some capacity. This demonstrates the life-changing impact that this kind of service can have on an individual. Teach For America is also experiencing remarkable growth as more and more Americans look to give back to their communities. Applications were up 40 percent this year, with 35,000 people applying to serve through Teach For America alone. However, I am concerned that there may be some confusion about the ability of Teach for America participants to serve in the Education Corps that we are creating with this bill. As I understand it, Teach For America will continue to be eligible under the national service corps description in section 122(c)(1)(D) and that because of that eligibility will be eligible as a program model for service corps for funding under the Education Corps and any of the newly created corps programs under section 122. Is this understanding correct?

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Would the Chair please advise me when I have used 10 minutes.

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

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Senator Byrd, our senior Member of this body, wrote the budget legislation that created the reconciliation process. He has told us that. He has reminded us of that. He talked about how he sat in his office for 10 days and did it to get it right. This is what he said: I was one of the authors of the legislation that created the budget reconciliation process in 1974. I am certain that putting health care reform and climate change legislation on a freight train through Congress is an outrage that must be resisted. That is Senator Robert Byrd, the senior Democrat, the senior Senator who wrote budget reconciliation. Senator Conrad, Senator Baucus, Senator Dorgan, Senator Carper, and many others have said basically the same thing: We agree. Don't use the reconciliation to ram through health care reform. So let's take the budget in the next 10 days, let's debate it, let's have our differences of opinion, but then let's follow the President's wise beginning on health care and reform it this year in the way he has suggested and the way he campaigned on. And let's take the energy issue and the climate change issue and let's look carefully at how we have the right clean energy strategy, which some of us believe is different from just taxes and high prices and more subsidies. As far as the budget in general, we believe it spends too much, it taxes too much, and it borrows too much. If I could conclude with only one example of how that excessive borrowing will hurt the economy and hurt the country--an example that helps to illustrate why this 10-year budget the President set is a blueprint for a different kind of country, one with less freedom, one with more Government, and one which our children cannot afford--if there were any one example of why that is true, this would be it: It would be the amount of interest on the debt we will be paying in the 10th year of the budget sent by President Obama. In that year, interest on the debt will be $806 billion. The amount of spending on defense by the Federal Government in that year is projected to be $720 billion. So we will be spending more on interest than we do on defense. Federal spending on education in that year would be $95 billion. So we would be spending eight times as much on interest as we would on education. In the 10th year of the budget, $100 billion is allocated for transportation spending by the Federal Government on things like roads and bridges that need to be fixed--we agree on that, and we would like to have the money to do it. But we will be spending on interest alone eight times what we will be spending on transportation. When I was Governor of Tennessee, we were a low-tax, low-debt State. The reason we did not have much debt is because for every penny we did not have to pay in interest, we could pay it for a teacher's salary, we could improve a prenatal health care clinic, we could build a road, we could have a center of excellence at the university. So low debt means more money for the things we really want to have to invest in this country to make it a better place. The President's budget is straightforward. Give the President credit. The attempts by Congress to make it gimmicky and less transparent are deplorable. The idea of trying to pass a health care reform proposal that affects 17 percent of the economy and to impose a national sales tax on the entire energy system during a recession is a bad idea. What we should do is take this 10-year budget, whittle it back to size so it doesn't spend so much, doesn't borrow so much and doesn't tax so much and move ahead with a blueprint that maintains our freedom, that limits our Government, that preserves choices and that our children and grandchildren can afford. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER. The health care bill ought to be written by, as Senators Baucus and Grassley have said, the Health and Finance Committees, by the full Senate, with full participation. I mean, technically, you know, the Democratic majority can say: We won the election, we will write the bill. President Bush was Commander in Chief, and technically he could wage war in Iraq without the bipartisan support of Congress. But that helped him lose the support of the country. It damaged his Presidency. And it will do the same for President Obama if he is not allowed to continue on the path he began on, which is a bipartisan effort in the Congress to bring a health care bill this year. I mean, the Republican leader of the Senate, in his first speech, went to the National Press Club here in Washington and he said: Mr. President, I am ready to work with you across party lines on entitlements. The most explosive, runaway cost in Government is Medicare and Medicaid. And it is better to reform health care before we put reduced costs on Medicaid. If we just put caps on the existing system, it would blow up. So we are ready to do that. I don't know what more the Republicans could say to send this clear message: We are ready to work across party lines. And the President has said it himself. So why are we having this debate about whether to pass a health care bill as part of the budget. That is not right for the country, and it needs to stop today. The idea of passing a so-called cap-and-trade energy tax in the middle of a recession as part of the budget--that is equally unwise. This is a major new idea and proposal, to impose this national tax on the country that produces 25 percent of all of the money in the world and 25 percent of all of the energy in the world. And we have no idea what it would do. We do know one thing it would do: it would raise prices a lot. It would raise the price of your electric bill by a lot, and it would raise the price of your gasoline at the pump by a lot. That may not be as much of a problem today as it was a year ago. When gas goes back up to $3 or $3.50, you can be sure there will be plenty of people worrying about it. And when they hear that a national energy tax applied to gasoline, to fuel, has the effect in the first several years of raising the price of gasoline but not reducing the carbon that causes climate change, they are going to be really mad about that because they will say: Then why did you do that? I care about climate change, they may say, but why would you impose a remedy on me that raises my price but doesn't do anything about the carbon I am worried about? Some might say: Well, what we should have done is have a low-carbon fuel standard that would gradually kick in, give the economy a chance to adjust, so that we can, for example, be driving electric cars which we can plug in at night using power generated by existing nuclear plants and coal plants. We don't have to build one new power plant, not one new coal plant, not one new windmill for the purpose of charging these new electric cars. So we could have a low carbon fuel standard, plug our plug-in cars in at night, and that would be a better result than putting a big, new national sales tax on the economy in the middle of a recession. There are a lot of questions about this proposal even if we weren't in a recession. Creating a big slush fund here in Washington--nothing more dangerous than that. You saw that with the stimulus bill. Put a trillion dollars out here, and Congress goes crazy. Everybody has an idea about what to do. We can all spend money. And if we bring all of this money in here, Congress will find a way to spend it. And I guarantee, it is a lot of money. This tax would raise $60, $80, $100 billion a year and bring it to Washington. The President says: Well, we ought to give most of it back to the people. Well, which people? In what way? Why not all of it? That should be a debate. Should this tax be economy-wide, if we ever have it? Why not do as I have suggested and just put a cap and trade on power plants--that is 40 percent of carbon--and a low-carbon fuel standard on fuel--that is another 30 percent. So why do you need an economy-wide cap and trade to affect small business and farms and manufacturing? And then who gets all of the money raised from this energy tax? A lot of the big companies came up to Capitol Hill when they first heard about this cap and trade proposal. They saw a lot of money coming into Washington and they thought they might get free allowances to produce carbon. But now the President wants to spend all of that money, and the companies are not so sure they like the idea anymore. What about offsets? Offsets are a racket. You know, they have become a racket. Somebody saves a little carbon in Madagascar. Well, you get credit for it in the United States. There is not much of a way to police that, and it is not a very good idea. This carbon tax, this national sales tax, goes all the way to 2050. So it takes $60, $80 $120, $150 billion a year out of the economy-- maybe not doing everything it's expected to do--in the name of dealing with climate change. Well, the first thing is, imposing this new tax in the middle of a recession is a supremely bad idea. Second, that doesn't mean we have to stop our efforts to deal with climate change and clean air. In fact, we can accelerate our clean energy efforts. They begin with the 2005 Energy bill. I see the ranking member of the Energy Committee on the floor, Senator Murkowski. She was a major part of that, and she will be a major part of this debate as we go along. But we can promote conservation and efficiency without having a national tax on every electric bill. As Al Gore has said, buildings are 40 percent of carbon. So let's go to work on that. I know that in Tennessee we waste more energy than any other State. We have the highest use per capita of electricity. If we just changed 12 lightbulbs in each house, we could save the equivalent of a nuclear power plant. That would be a smart thing to do. Let's start with conservation and efficiency. Let's electrify half of our cars and trucks. We can do that because the automobile companies are building the cars and trucks. Let's plug them in at night when the electricity is cheap. We don't have to build one new power plant, the Brookings Institute says. Three, let's make solar power cost competitive with power from fossil fuels. We have been really miserly about energy research and development, and we ought to be bending over backward to put money wisely to make solar costs competitive, as the National Academy of Engineering says, to find a way to capture carbon from existing coal plants, to find ways to reprocess nuclear waste. While we are worrying about carbon, why don't we set as a goal to build 100 new nuclear power plants. Nuclear power is 20 percent of our electricity, but it is 70 percent of our carbon-free, nitrogen-free, sulfur-free, and mercury-free electricity. Why are we going slow on it? So we would say no to higher taxes, higher prices, and more subsidies--certainly not in the middle of a recession--and yes to more conservation, more efficiency, more nuclear power, more electric cars, and more research and development on solar, advanced biofuels, nuclear, and carbon capture. That is a pretty good agenda for dealing with clear air and climate change, and it doesn't impose an unwise, multibillion dollar national tax on electric bills in the middle of a recession, which would hurt the economy. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a couple of letters. One is a letter from a number of Senators--looks like more than two dozen--opposing using the budget reconciliation process to expedite passage of climate legislation. A second letter comes from the Republican members of the Committee on Environment and Public Works. It objects to collecting $646 billion in new climate revenues from the American people in the middle of a recession.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, one of the encouraging things that happened in Washington this year is that the President sent us a budget that was more transparent and more open than previous budgets. It was a 10-year budget instead of 5 years. It gave us a blueprint for the future in that way, the way we ought to be thinking about things. It included some things that had not been included before: the cost of the war; the so-called AMT fix--to address the millionaire's tax the Congress passed in the 1960s designed to catch 155 people who were not paying any taxes, but today will catch 28 million people, mostly middle-class Americans, unless we fix it; and what around here is irreverently called the ``doc fix,'' to deal with the mandated 20- percent cut in what Medicare pays its physicians. That cut in physician payments is not going to happen, we know that, so the President included that in the budget. There was money for helping to fix the banks, to get the toxic assets out of the banks and get credit flowing again, get the economy moving again, and that was in the budget. On big issues like health care, the President said: Let's work in a bipartisan way. I invite the Congress to come up with a bill. Many Members of Congress said the same thing. The President held a health care summit earlier this month. I agree with the President we should try to reform health care this year. Most Republicans agree with that, that we need to make it possible for every single family to afford health insurance. People who are losing their jobs today or were between jobs ever understand what difficulty this causes families. So that was encouraging. Now, I hear some very different sounds coming from around the Congress. It makes me wonder who is in charge here. I hear that instead of a 10-year budget, we may have a 5-year budget. The problem with the 5-year budget is most of the problems in the 10-year budget are in the second 5 years. This budget spends too much, taxes too much, borrows too much. It doubles the debt in 5 years, the national debt, and it nearly triples the national debt in the 10-year period. So we need to know where we are headed with this budget, and we will not know if we just talk about the next 5 years. I hear that we are going to act like the so-called millionaire's tax, the AMT, is fixed. That is not fixed; we have to deal with it. The ``doc fix'' to avoid cuts in physician payments? We are just not going to include that in the budget, so I hear. We are going to have to deal with that. We all know we are going to have to deal with that. We ought to put that in the budget. The cost of the war should be there. We need to recognize the first order of business in this country is to fix the banks and get credit flowing again. Secretary Geithner came forward with a plan on Monday that I hope works. At least for the first time we are beginning to address the central problem of what we do about the toxic assets in the banks that are causing the banks to freeze up and not loan, bringing everything to a halt. Get the toxic assets out and lending increases, houses begin to sell, jobs begin to be created again, people go back to work, the economy improves. So it was a very prudent thing for the President to put in his budget a $250 billion placeholder for the banks. He may need to ask us for that. In my view, I thought he should have asked us for it in January. I thought, instead of passing a $1 trillion stimulus bill, borrowing and spending money we don't have, that it would have been better for President Obama to do now as President Eisenhower did in 1952 when he said: I shall go to Korea. And he went to Korea. That was the issue then. It was not the only issue then, just like today there are lots of different things Presidents need to do. But Eisenhower said: I will go to Korea. He arrived there just a few days after Thanksgiving. He said: I will honorably focus my attention on the war until it is ended. The people elected him for that and he did that and he gained the confidence of the American people. I and most Americans have great confidence in this President. If President Obama, in the same way that President Eisenhower said he would go to Korea, says he will fix the banks and he will get credit flowing and he will honorably concentrate his focus on that until the job is done--I think we believe he can do that. So he was right to put the money in the budget, which I understand now may be coming out. So we have a budget that is not really a budget anymore. It is not a clear picture. While I have been very complimentary of the President for his straightforwardness in the budget, that does not mean I have to like what is in the budget because I do not. But before I get to that part of it, let me talk about the two things that concern me most about what may be coming down the road and which I hope do not come. One of them is the idea that we would use the budget to pass a health care bill to transform the health care system and the American economy. The second is the idea that we would use the budget to impose a national sales tax on electric bills, gasoline prices, and all energy--in other words, to impose a cap-and-trade system on virtually the whole economy. We need to reform health care. We need to debate climate change and cap and trade. But we need to do it in the way the Congress is supposed to do it, not by slipping it through with 51 votes when we are supposed to be making a budget, just because we can do that. Think about that for a moment. The President has created this tremendously good environment for dealing with health care. He ran on a campaign: I am going to change the way things are done in Washington. People need to work across party lines to get things done on big issues that affect the country. That is what the President said. He is right about that. There are a lot of new Senators who were elected saying the same thing. There are a lot of Senators who have been here before, like me, who said exactly this--I am here to try to work across party lines to get results on big issues. There is not a bigger issue than health care, after we get through fixing the banks. The President had, as I mentioned, the health care summit at the White House--off to a much better start, this President, than President Clinton was when he tried to deal with the same issue early in his administration. The President also had a fiscal responsibility summit in February that I attended where health care was a major topic. We were all there, and various people got up and said: We need to work on this, do this together. The President wisely said: I am not going to send a proposal. I am going to let the Congress develop a proposal. We will work with you on these things. Well, all of a sudden, we hear that the health care plan might be coming through on the budget. How can we possibly do that? If the President and Senate Democrats try to use this arcane budget procedure to reform health care, it will be the Parliamentarian and his wonderful staff who will end up writing the health care bill. Health care is 17 percent of the American gross domestic product. These are big issues. Are we going to have a single-payer system? Is everybody going to have Medicare? Is anybody going to have a choice of a doctor? Is anyone going to have a choice of an insurance policy? What about the guaranteed costs? Will all Americans have the same kind of health coverage that Federal employees, including Senators, have? Is that a good idea? Will we give more permission to large employers to connect behavior to health care premiums so that we can have more prevention of disease? How much do we spend on people who are older and where we are spending more time? Mr. President, I do not believe there is another Republican speaker. I ask unanimous consent to speak another 5 minutes. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Bennet) Without objection, it is so ordered.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I will comment on the Republican leader's remarks. I agree with him that this budget borrows too much. We say that publicly on the floor and we say that privately in our discussions. Many of us are afraid that this 10-year budget is a blueprint for our country that our children and grandchildren simply cannot afford. First, I will say a word about the President's press conference this evening. I hope that during his press conference, the President will reject the bill passed by the House of Representatives last week about the AIG bonuses as not the kind of thoughtful and mature response that the American people deserve from Congress in a time of crisis. It is certainly not worthy of approval from the President of the United States. I hope the President will focus attention on something that is a mature and thoughtful response and is worthy of the attention of the President of the United States, and that is Secretary Geithner's proposal yesterday to use a partnership of public and private resources to begin to get the toxic assets out of banks, fix the banks, and get credit flowing again. I voted last October and then again on January 15 to give, first, President Bush and, next, President Obama the money he needed to fix the banks. I could say, at this point, the proposal of the Secretary yesterday at first blush seems to me to be underfunded, undercapitalized by tax dollars and too late. But it is more important to say I believe it appears to be on exactly the right track, that it appears to be well thought out, and that at first blush it seems to be attracting support from the private sector, which it needs to do to be successful. History shows us some lessons about when we have bank problems--and we have had plenty of them. When I was Governor of Tennessee in the 1980s, dozens of banks failed because of a problem with the Butcher brothers, who were basically kiting banks. But the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation came in and over the weekend usually recapitalized the banks, got rid of the bad assets, put them back out there, and our economy grew again. That is harder to do today because the businesses are bigger and the crisis is much larger. But the fundamental solution to our economic troubles is the same. We need to fix the banks and get credit flowing again, and the way to fix the banks is to get enough of the toxic assets out so they can have confidence to lend money, and business can start growing, and people can get jobs again. That is the history lesson. There is another history lesson, and that is that we need the President of the United States to focus his full attention on fixing the banks and getting credit flowing again. I have used the example of President Eisenhower going to Korea. Someone said to me: Senator Alexander, no one pays attention to history. Well, they ought to. President Eisenhower said in October of 1952: I shall go to Korea to fix the Korean war. That was in October. He was elected President, and within weeks he went to Korea. He said: I will concentrate my full attention on this problem until it is honorably ended. President Eisenhower was a very capable man. He was capable of doing more than one thing at a time. But he knew the country needed him to do one thing and the country needed to have confidence he would do it. President Obama is extraordinarily capable as well. When I, or others, have suggested he is doing more than one thing at a time, he often says: I can walk and chew gum at the same time. I don't doubt that. I think we may not have had a more impressive President in terms of intellectual ability, and he has impressive people around him. What we need for the President to do--and tonight would be a good time to start--is to assure us, as President Eisenhower did when he said ``I shall go to Korea,'' and say: I shall fix the banks and get credit flowing again. We know that a President this impressive and this talented, if he decides to throw himself into this problem with everybody he's got for as long as it takes, he will wear everybody else out and he'll get the job done. From the day he makes that clear, confidence in this country will begin to recover at a fairly rapid rate. I say that with great respect to the President and to the proposal Secretary Geithner made yesterday, which I think is mature and thoughtful and the kind of proposal we ought to be focusing on in a bipartisan way. As to the budget, the budget also makes a difference to whether the economy recovers. It is hard for the economy to recover if the Congress spends too much, if the Congress taxes too much, and especially if the Congress borrows too much. The Republican leader pointed that out in his remarks. This 10-year budget is a blueprint for a country our children and grandchildren cannot afford. It doubles the public debt in 5 years, and nearly triples it in 10. It grows the public debt to 82 percent of the gross domestic product by 2019. The gross domestic product is the sum total of all our efforts in a year, all the money we produce, and we produce 25 percent of all the money in the world each year, more or less. This 10-year budget creates more new debt than all the Presidents of the United States from George Washington to George W. Bush combined. Let me say that again. All the Presidents of the United States, from George Washington to George Bush, did not run up as much debt as this President proposes to do in the next 10 years. By the year 2019, we will be spending more than $800 billion just on interest payments on our debt every year. We only spend $720 billion on Defense in that year. We will be spending more on interest than we do on defense, and we will have enough left over to fund all the Federal spending on education. That is too much borrowing. What do we do about that? There are a number of things we can do. I suggest we put a limit on runaway debt so that it cannot be more in any year than 90 percent of our gross domestic product. Another idea would be to enact a bipartisan Conrad-Gregg proposal which would say to Congress and the President: We need to set up a special mechanism to deal with entitlement spending--the runaway spending for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, which is the biggest part of our debt problem. The proposal would set up a special commission that would figure out how to bring entitlement spending under control, make recommendations to the Congress, and we would vote it up or down, and act in the same way we close defense bases, which is also very hard to do. The Conrad-Gregg proposal has broad support in the Senate. It has broad support in the House. The President of the United States says he wants to control entitlement spending. The Republican leader of the Senate, Senator McConnell, in his first address this year, went to the National Press Club and said: Mr. President, I am ready to work with you on entitlement spending. In other words, he wants to bring the debt down in the outyears. But so far we have not seen that priority. I think the priority today ought to be to fix the banks and get credit flowing again. I support the President's objective to reform health care this year. I think health care has to be reformed in order to bring entitlement spending under control. But why can't we go ahead and work on Social Security? Why can't we pass the Gregg-Conrad bill? Why can't we send sub-signals that we are serious about reducing entitlement spending? Instead, this budget would move $117 billion of funding for Pell grants from discretionary spending to entitlement spending; in other words, move it from the area where we would spend it only if we can afford it to the area where we automatically spend it without having to vote on it. We shouldn't be adding anything to entitlement spending this year. Finally, new taxation is not good, for this year especially. I care about climate change, but now is not the time to impose a $600 billion tax on electric bills and gasoline prices in the middle of a recession. Republicans will offer a clean energy agenda based on conservation, nuclear power, electric cars, finding more natural gas, aggressively funding research in solar energy, and finding ways to capture carbon. We can do all that without imposing a new tax on the American people in the middle of a recession. I look forward to the President's remarks tonight. I hope, as I believe most Americans do, that he rejects the House bill of last week and expands on Secretary Geithner's proposal. I applaud him and I applaud the Secretary for a mature, thoughtful proposal, and I hope the President will, as Presidents must, select the most urgent issue before us and focus on it with all he has until he fixes the problem. He can do that. Only a President can do it, and this President is especially talented. I believe if he makes clear he intends to do it, the country will have confidence that he will get the job done. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, would the Chair inform me when I have 1 minute?

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that if Senator Byrd and Senator Kennedy make statements today on this legislation, as I believe they will, that our statements be put in the Record in about the same place, with Senator Byrd's first, then Senator Kennedy's, and mine third.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, in the speech I made 6 years ago, I called it the American History and Civics Education Act. I suggested we create summer academies for outstanding students and teachers of American history. The idea was to create one of those academies focused on American history and civics for teachers and one for students and to see how they worked and to gradually expand them. These presidential academies for students and teachers were modeled after the Tennessee Governors School, which I began when I was Governor of Tennessee, which still continue today, after 20 years. They are relatively inexpensive. They are 2-, 3-, or 4-week schools for students, and one for teachers. They held students in a variety of subjects, such as mathematics, science, the arts, international studies. They come together for a while and inspire one another, and then they go back to their schools and inspire their fellow students. They have been a great success in Tennessee and in other States. Senator Reid, the majority leader, was the whip at that time. He was on the floor when I made my remarks and he asked to be the prime cosponsor of the legislation, and he was. Senator Kennedy, who has had a long interest in U.S. history, takes his family once a year to some an historical part of the United States. A couple years ago, they went into Virginia and saw where Patrick Henry made his famous speech. I kid him and say he cares so much about history because he is a part of it in such a big way. Senator Kennedy heard about the proposal, and he went along the Democratic side and rounded up 20 cosponsors of the legislation. So, Senator Kennedy, Senator Reid and I and several Republican Senators introduced a bill. We had a hearing during which Senator Byrd testified on behalf of my proposal for summer academies. It passed the Senate and the House, and we have had those summer academies now for three summers. One of those is at the Ashland University in Ashland, OH, which has been a great success. I see the students and teachers every summer. I bring them on the Senate floor, and it has been proven that it is good for teachers and good for our country. So that is the reason we want to expand those programs. We also felt we would meet as a group--those of us who have something to do with U.S. history here--and we met with the Library of Congress and with other parts of the Federal Government and many of us are involved in helping Americans learn more about our country's history, especially young people. As part of that, we thought it would be wise to try to consolidate in one section of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act--which we call No Child Left Behind--the various programs we already have for U.S. history and then to expand those that seemed worthwhile. That is what this legislation does. There is a great need for it. I mentioned earlier that it is our worst subject for high school, even though some of our pages seem to do pretty well. Very few students score at or above the proficient level on the American history exam conducted by the National Assessment for Education Progress. Twenty percent of fourth graders were proficient in U.S. history, 17 percent of eighth graders were proficient in U.S. history, and 12 percent of high school seniors were proficient in U.S. history. In addition, the No Child Left Behind Act may have had the unintentional effect of reducing the focus on U.S. history, as some school districts have concentrated their efforts on reading and mathematics. Therefore, it is appropriate and necessary to improve and expand State and local efforts to increase the understanding and awareness of American history and to do it, of course, in a way that doesn't preempt State and local responsibility and authority for elementary and secondary education. Therefore, what the legislation we are doing today will do is expand the summer academies. We call them presidential academies for teachers and congressional academies for students. Those academies were created in 2004 to the number of 100 in the summer gradually over the years. The priority would be to place those academies in the National Park Service's national centennial parks initiative so the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, and other museums that have innovative programs in U.S. history can be aligned with these academies. David McCullough, for example, suggested we have the academies at locations such as Andrew Jackson's home in Heritage. I think an even better idea would be to have a week for U.S. teachers at John Adams' home in Massachusetts, with Mr. McCullough as the teacher. That is the idea. Secondly, we would expand the Nation's report card--we call that NAEP--so there could be a 10-State pilot program for American history and civics student assessment in grades 8 and 12. Today, our Nation's report card doesn't measure State performance in American history. It gives us a picture of how 8th to 12th graders do nationally. This would permit Colorado, Tennessee, Alaska, and California to compare the seniors and, in doing so, call attention to improvements that might need to be made. The third thing would be to require all States to develop and implement standards and assessments in American history under the No Child Left Behind Act. But it doesn't require any Federal reporting, as we do in other subjects. Finally, it would take Senator Byrd's program--called Teaching American History, which he put into the No Child Left Behind Act 6 years ago--and it would double the authorization for that program from $100 million to $200 million, so it can serve even more than the 20,000 teachers it serves today. I thank David Cleary and Sarah Rittling of my staff, who have worked hard with the staffs of Senators Byrd and Kennedy to prepare this legislation. We intend to invite all Members of the Senate, and we hope the House will join us in cosponsoring this. Finally, I wish to tell one short story to conclude my remarks about some of the teachers who have participated. One of the things a Senator can do is to bring someone on the Senate floor who is not a Senator. It has to be done when the Senate is not in session and I have found it is a great privilege for most Americans. Early one morning last summer, I brought onto the Senate floor the 50 teachers who had been selected-- one from each State--for the presidential academy for outstanding teachers of American history. I showed them Daniel Webster's desk right here, and I showed them Jefferson Davis's desk, which is back there, and where the sword mark is where when the Union soldier came in and started chopping the desk, and the soldier who was stopped by a commander who said, ``We came to save the Union, not destroy it.'' I showed them where the majority and minority leaders speak. They saw ``E Pluribus Unum'' up there, and ``In God We Trust'' back there. They learned that we operate by unanimous consent, and we talked about what it would be like to actually try to operate a classroom by unanimous consent, much less the Senate. As you might expect, they asked a lot of good questions, being outstanding history teachers. I especially remember the final question. I believe it was from the teacher from Oregon who asked: Senator, what would you like for us to take back to our students? I said that what I hope you will take back is that I get up every day, and I believe most of us on either side get up hoping that by the end of the day, we will have done something to make our country look better. It may not look that way on television or read that way in the newspaper because we are sent here to debate great issues. That produces conflict and disagreement a lot of the time. I feel, and I believe all of us feel, we are in a very special place, in a very special country, with a very special tradition. We would like for the students to know that and to know that is how we feel about the job we have. I am delighted today that Senators Byrd and Kennedy, who have contributed so much to U.S. history over the years, both in their own personalities and by legislation they have introduced, have joined me in this effort to expand the Federal programs that focus on putting U.S. history and civics in a little higher place in the classroom so that our students learn what it means to be an American. I invite my colleagues to join us, and I invite all Americans to join us in their communities, in their schools and in their States, to make that a priority. Exhibit 1 Remarks of Sen. Alexander--American History and Civics Education Act Introduction Mr. President, from the Senate's earliest days, new members have observed as we just heard a ritual of remaining silent during floor debates for a period of time that ranged from several weeks to two years. By waiting a respectful amount of time before giving their so-called ``maiden speeches,'' freshman senators hoped their senior colleagues would respect them for their humility. This information comes from the Senate historian, Richard Baker, who told me that in 1906, the former Governor of Wisconsin, Robert LaFollette, arrived here ``anything but humble'' (and I'm sensitive to this as a former governor). He waited just three months, a brief period by the standards of those days, before launching his first major address. He spoke for eight hours over three days; his remarks in the Congressional Record consumed 148 pages. As he began to speak, most of the senators present in the chamber pointedly rose from their desks and departed. LaFollete's wife, observing from the gallery, wrote, ``There was no mistaking that this was a polite form of hazing.'' From our first day here, as the majority leader said, we new members of this 108th Congress have been encouraged to speak up, and most of us have. But, with the encouragement of the majority leader, several of us intend also to revive the tradition of the maiden address by making a signature speech on an issue that is important both to the country and to each of us. I want to thank my colleagues who are here, and I want to assure all of you that I will not speak for three days--as former Governor LaFollette did. Mr. President, I rise to address the intersection of two urgent concerns that will determine our country's future. These are also the two topics I care about the most: the education of our children and the principles that unite us as Americans. It is time that we put the teaching of American history and civics back in its rightful place in our schools so our children can grow up learning what it means to be an American. Especially during such serious times when our values and way of life are being attacked, we need to understand clearly just what those values are. In this, most Americans would agree. For example, in Thanksgiving remarks in 2001, President Bush praised our nation's response to September 11. ``I call it,'' he said, ``the American character.'' At about the same time, while speaking at Harvard, former Vice-President Al Gore said, ``We should [fight] for the values that bind us together as a country.'' Both men were invoking a creed of ideas and values in which most Americans believe. ``It has been our fate as a nation,'' the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote, ``not to have ideologies but to be one.'' This value based identity has inspired both patriotism and division at home, as well as emulation and hatred abroad. For terrorists, as well as for those who admire America, at issue is the United States itself--not what we do, but who we are. Yet our children do not know what makes America exceptional. National exams show that three-quarters of the nation's 4th, 8th and 12th graders are not proficient in civics knowledge and one-third does not even have basic knowledge, making them ``civic illiterates.'' Children are not learning about American history and civics because they are not being taught it. American history has been watered down, and civics is too often dropped from the curriculum entirely. Until the 1960s, civics education, which teaches the duties of citizenship, was a regular part of the high school curriculum, but today's college graduates probably have less civics knowledge than high school graduates of 50 years ago. Reforms, so-called, in the '60s and '70s resulted in the widespread elimination of required classes and curriculum in civics education. Today, more than half the states have no requirement for students to take a course--even for one semester--in American government. To help put the teaching of American history and civics in its rightful place, today I introduce legislation along with several distinguished co-sponsors including: Senators Reid, Gregg, Santorum, Inhofe and Nickles. We call it the ``American History and Civics Act.'' This act creates Presidential Academies for Teachers of American History and Civics and Congressional Academies for Students of American History and Civics. These residential academies would operate for two weeks (in the case of teachers) and four weeks (for students) during the summer. Their purpose would be to inspire better teaching and more learning of the key events, persons and ideas that shape the institutions and democratic heritage of the United States. I have had some experience with such residential summer academies, when I was Governor of Tennessee. In 1984, we began creating Governor's schools for students and teachers. For example, there was the Governor's School for the Arts at Middle Tennessee State University and the Governor's School of International Studies at the University of Memphis as well as the Governor's School for Teachers of Writing at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, which was especially successful. Eventually there were eight Governor's Schools helping thousands of Tennessee teachers improve their skills and inspiring outstanding students to learn more about core curriculum subjects. When these teachers and students returned to their schools for the next school year, they brought with them a new enthusiasm for teaching and learning that infected their peers. Dollar for dollar, the Governor's Schools were one of the most effective and popular educational initiatives in our state's history. States other than Tennessee have had similar success with summer residential academies. The first Governor's school was started in North Carolina in 1963 when Governor Terry Sanford established it at Salem College in Winston-Salem. Upon the establishment of the first school, several states, including Georgia, South Carolina, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee established similar schools. For example, in 1973 Pennsylvania established Governor's Schools of Excellence, which has 14 different programs of study. As in Tennessee, students participating in the Pennsylvania Governor's School program attend academies at 8 different colleges to study everything from international studies, to health care and teaching. Also established in 1973, Virginia's Governor's School is a summer residential program for 7500 of the Commonwealth's most gifted students. Mississippi established its Governor's School in 1981. The Mississippi University for Women hosts the program, which is designed to give students academic, creative, and leadership experiences. Every year West Virginia brings 80 of its most talented high school performing and visual arts students to West Liberty State College for a three-week residential program. These are just a few of the more than 100 Governors' schools in 28 states--clearly the model is a good one. The legislation I propose today applies that successful model to American history and civics education at the national level by establishing Presidential and Congressional academies for students and teachers of those subjects. Additionally, this proposed legislation authorizes the creation of a national alliance of American history and civics teachers who would be connected by the internet. The alliance would facilitate sharing of best practices in the teaching of American history and civics. It is modeled after an alliance I helped the National Geographic Society begin during the 1980's to put geography back into the American school curriculum. Tennessee and the University of Tennessee were among the first sponsors of the alliance. This legislation creates a pilot program. Up to 12 Presidential academies for teachers and 12 Congressional Academies for students would be sponsored by educational institutions. The National Endowment for the Humanities would award 2-year renewable grants to those institutions after a peer review process. Each grant would be subject to rigorous review after three years to determine whether the overall program should continue, expand or end. The legislation authorizes $25 million annually for the four year pilot program. There is a broad basis of renewed support for and interest in American history and civics in our country. David Gordon noted in a recent issue of the Harvard Education Letter: ``A 1998 survey by the nonpartisan research organization Public Agenda showed that 84 percent of parents with school-aged children said they believe that the United States is a special country and they want schools to convey that belief to their children by teaching about its heroes and traditions. Similar numbers identified the American ideal as including equal opportunity, individual freedom, and tolerance and respect for others. Those findings were consistent across racial and ethnic groups.'' Our national leadership has responded to this renewed interest. In 2000, at the initiative of my distinguished colleague Senator Byrd, Congress created grants for schools that teach American history as a separate subject within school curricula. We appropriated $100 million for those grants in the recent Omnibus appropriations bill, and rightfully so. They encourage schools and teachers to focus on the teaching of traditional American history, and provide important financial support. Last September, with historian David McCullough at his side, President Bush announced a new initiative to encourage the teaching of American history and civics. He established the ``We the People'' program at the NEH, which will develop curricula and sponsor lectures on American history and civics. He announced the ``Our Documents'' project, run by the National Archives. This would take one hundred of America's most important documents from the National Archives to classrooms and communities across the country. This year, he will convene a White House forum on American history, civics, and service. There, we will discuss new policies to improve the teaching of history and civics in elementary and secondary schools. This proposed legislation takes the next step by training teachers and encouraging outstanding students. We need to foster a love of this subject and arm teachers with the skills to impart that love to their students. I am pleased that today one of the leading members of the House of Representatives, Roger Wicker of Mississippi, along with a number of his colleagues, are introducing the same legislation in the House. I want to thank Senator Gregg, Chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, who has agreed that the committee will hold hearings on this legislation so that we can determine how it might supplement and work with recently enacted legislation and the President's various initiatives. Mr. President, in 1988, at a meeting of educators in Rochester, the President of Notre Dame University, Monk Malloy, asked this question: ``What is the rationale for the public school?'' There was an unexpected silence around the room until Al Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, answered in this way: ``The public school was created to teach immigrant children the three R's and what it means to be an American with the hope that they would then go home and teach their parents.'' From the founding of America, we have always understood how important it is for citizens to understand the principles that unite us as a country. Other countries are united by their ethnicity. If you move to Japan for example, you can't become Japanese. Americans, on the other hand, are united by a few things in which we believe. To become an American citizen, you subscribe to those principles. If there were no agreement on those principles, as Samuel Huntington has noted, we would be the United Nations instead of the United States of America. There has therefore been a continuous education process to remind Americans just what those principles are. Thomas Jefferson, in his retirement at Monticello, would spend evenings explaining to overnight guests what he had in mind when he helped create what we call America. By the mid-19th century it was just assumed that everybody knew what it meant to be an American. In his letter from the Alamo, Col. William Barrett Travis pleaded for help simply ``in the name of liberty, patriotism and everything dear to the American character.'' There were new waves of immigration in the late 19th century that brought to our country a record number of new people from other lands whose view of what it means to be an American was indistinct--and Americans responded by teaching them. In Wisconsin, for example, the Kohler Company actually housed German immigrants together so that they might be ``Americanized'' during non-working hours. But the most important Americanizing institution, as Mr. Shanker reminded us in Rochester in 1988, was the new common school. McGuffey's Reader, which was used in many classrooms, sold more than 120 million copies introducing a common culture of literature, patriotic speeches and historical references. In the 20th century it was war that made Americans stop and think about what we were defending. President Roosevelt made certain that those who charged the beaches of Normandy knew they were defending for freedoms. But after World War II, the emphasis on teaching and defining the principles that unite us has waned. Unpleasant experiences with McCarthyism in the 1950's, discouragement after the Vietnam War, and history books that left out or distorted the history of African-Americans made some skittish about discussing ``Americanism.'' The end of the Cold War removed a preoccupation with who we were not, making it less important to consider who we are. The Immigration law changes in 1965 brought to our shores many new Americans and many cultural changes. As a result, the American Way became much more often praised than defined. Changes in community attitudes, as they always are, were reflected in our schools. According to historian Diane Ravitch, the public school virtually abandoned its role as the chief Americanizing Institution. We have gone, she explains, from one extreme (simplistic patriotism and incomplete history) to the other--``public schools with an adversary culture that emphasize the nation's warts and diminish its genuine accomplishments. There is no literary canon. There are no common readings, no agreed upon lists of books, poems and stories from which students and parents might be taught a common culture and be reminded of what it means to be an American.'' During this time many of our national leaders contributed to this drift toward agnostic Americanism. These leaders celebrated multiculturalism and bilingualism and diversity at a time when there should have been more emphasis on a common culture and learning English and unity. America's variety and diversity is a great strength, but it is not our greatest strength. Jerusalem is diverse. The Balkans are diverse. America's greatest accomplishment is not its variety and diversity but that we have found a way to take all that variety and diversity and unite ourselves as one country. E pluribus unum: out of many, one. That is what makes America truly exceptional. Since 9/11 the national conversation about what it means to be an American has been different. The terrorists focused their cross-hairs on the creed that unites Americans as one country--forcing us to remind ourselves of those principles, to examine and define them, and to celebrate them. The President himself has been the lead teacher. President Bush has literally taken us back to school on what it means to be an American. When he took the country to church on television after the attacks he reminded us that no country is more religious than we are. When he walked across the street to the mosque he reminded the world that we separate church and state and that there is freedom here to believe in whatever one wants to believe. When he attacked and defeated the Taliban, he honored life. When we put planes back in the air and opened financial markets and began going to football games again we celebrated liberty. The President called on us to make those magnificent images of courage and charity and leadership and selflessness more permanent in our every day lives through Freedom Corps. And with his optimism, he warded off doomsayers who tried to diminish the real gift of Americans to civilization, our cockeyed optimism that anything is possible. Just after 9/11, I proposed an idea I called ``Pledge Plus Three.'' Why not start each school day with the Pledge of Allegiance--as we do here in the Senate--followed by a faculty member or student sharing for three minutes ``what it means to be an American.'' The Pledge embodies many of the ideals of our National Creed: ``one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.'' It speaks to our unity, to our faith, to our value of freedom, and to our belief in the fair treatment of all Americans. If more future federal judges took more classes in American history and civics and learned more about those values, we might have fewer mind-boggling decisions like the one issued recently by the Ninth Circuit. Before I was elected to the Senate, I taught some of our future judges and legislators a course at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government entitled ``The American Character and America's Government.'' The purpose of the course was to help policy makers, civil servants and journalists analyze the American creed and character and apply it in the solving of public policy problems. We tried to figure out, if you will, what would be ``the American way'' to solve a given problem. The students and I did not have much trouble deciding that America is truly exceptional (not always better, but truly exceptional) or in identifying the major principles of the American Creed or the distinct characteristics of our country. Such principles as: liberty, equal opportunity, rule of law, laissez faire, individualism, e pluribus unum, the separation of church and state. But what we also found as we find in this body was that applying those principles to today's issues was hard work. This was because the principles of the creed often conflicted. For example, when discussing President Bush's faith-based charity legislation, we know that ``In God We Trust'' but we also know that we don't trust government with God. When considering whether the federal government should pay for scholarships which middle and low income families might use at any accredited school--public, private or religious-- we find that the principle of equal opportunity conflicted with the separation of church and state. And we find there are great disappointments when we try to live up to our greatest dreams, for example, President Kennedy's pledge that we will ``pay any price or bear any burden'' to defend freedom, or Thomas Jefferson's assertion that ``all men are created equal,'' or the American dream that for anyone who works hard, tomorrow will always be better than today. We are often disappointed when we try to live up to those dreams. We learned that, as Samuel Huntington has written, balancing these conflicts and disappointments is what most of American politics and government is about. Mr. President, if most of our politics and government is about applying to our most urgent problems the principles and characteristics that make us the exceptional United States of America, then we had better get about the teaching and learning of those principles and characteristics. The legislation I propose today with several co-sponsors will help our schools do what they were established to do in the first place. At a time when there are record numbers of new Americans, and at a time when our values are under attack, at a time when we are considering going to war to defend those values, there can be no more urgent task than putting the teaching of American history and civics back in its rightful place in our schools so our children can grow up learning what it means to be an American.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask the Chair to let me know when 9 minutes has elapsed.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Chair very much. Mr. President, the recession is no time to impose a $600-plus billion tax on everybody's electric bill. This is not the time to do that, if the time is ever right to do that. MIT suggests a bill such as the one the President has proposed would cost each American family $3,100 a year. In the middle of a recession, that is not a good idea. In conclusion, I think Coach K's advice to our impressive new President is good advice. We know he can have summits, make trips, and deal with a lot of different things. He has smart people dealing with him. But we have a tough economic problem, and it is the economy, Mr. President. We need the President to focus on the economy and concentrate on it, until the banks are fixed and the credit is flowing. We need a budget that doesn't spend so much, tax so much, and raise debt so much. Otherwise, we will deliver a country to our children and grandchildren that they can't afford. I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Chair. (The remarks of Mr. Alexander pertaining to the introduction of S. 659 are printed in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, on a day in a week when there is a lot of news where people are hurting in a serious economy, I have some good news to report, and it will just take me a few minutes to do it. Our senior Senator, Mr. Byrd, Senator Ted Kennedy, who is chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and I introduced legislation today that will help push the teaching of U.S. history in our classrooms. The way I like to describe it is by saying this: that it will help to put the teaching of American history and civics back in its rightful place, in our classrooms, so our children can grow up learning what it means to be an American. The legislation which we have introduced would expand summer academies for outstanding teachers, authorize new teacher programs, require States to set standards for the teaching and learning of U.S. History, and create new opportunities to compare the tests that students take on U.S. history. Specifically, the legislation would, No. 1, authorize 100 new summer academies for outstanding students and teachers of U.S. history and align those academies with locations in our national park system, such as the John Adams' House in Massachusetts or the Independence Hall in Philadelphia. I see the pages sitting here today. They are real students of U.S. history because they live it and learn it each day they are here. I don't know what their scores are on the advanced placement tests for U.S. history, but I know one fact, which the Chair may be interested in learning: The highest scores in any high school in America on the advanced placement test for U.S. history is not from a New England prep school or a Tennessee prep school or an elite school in some rich part of America; it is from the page school of the House of Representatives. They had better scores on U.S. history than any other high school. I don't know what the Senate page scores were, so I won't compare them. The point is--and this is an idea David McCullough, a well-known author, had: We would expand the number of presidential and congressional academies for outstanding students and teachers and have them placed in the National Park Service initiative. Second, the bill we've introduced today would double the authorization of funding for the teaching of American history programs in local school districts, which today involve 20,000 students as a part of the No Child Left Behind Act. Third, it would require States to develop and implement standards for student assessments in U.S. history, although there would be no Federal reporting requirement, as there is now for reading and mathematics. Finally, it would allow States to compare history and civics student test scores in the 8th and 12th grades by establishing a 10-State pilot program expanding the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), which is also called the ``Nation's Report Card.'' We have a tradition in the Senate where each of us, when we first arrive, make a maiden speech. We still call it that. Most of us pick a subject that is important to us. I made mine almost exactly 6 years ago, on March 4, 2003. The subject was something I cared about then and care about today and on which we have made some progress. I argued, as I mentioned earlier, it was time to put the teaching of American history and civics back in its rightful place in our schools so as our children grow, they can learn what it means to be an American. On the ``Nation's Report Card,'' our worst scores for our seniors in high school are not in math or science but in U.S. history. It will be very difficult for us as a country to succeed if we don't learn where we came from. I ask unanimous consent that the speech I made 6 years ago be printed in the Record immediately following my remarks.