Lamar Alexander

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I believe we have 30 minutes for this discussion; is that right?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Yes. I thank the Chair. So as we look back over the history of checks and balances and the imperial Presidency and the importance of making certain we do not have an imperial Presidency, we are reminded the reason we did that was a single word: liberty--the revulsion by the Founders who created this system and who then made sure our President was a President, not a King. And George Washington, who exercised great modesty and restraint, impressed into the American character his own modesty and restraint when he asked that he be called ``Mr. President,'' not something more grand, when he retired to Mount Vernon after two terms, when he could have been President of the United States for life. So that is what the Constitution talked about. It said that for these important positions, the President may nominate, but if the Senate does not confirm them, they cannot serve. There is also a provision toward the end of article II, section 2 about recess appointments. Here is what the court said when it got out its American history book and began to compare that with the Constitution: This was written for a time when it took Senator Houston of Texas--I ask, Madam President, that I have time to speak in morning business.

Mr. ALEXANDER. So this was written at a time when Senator Sam Houston of Texas had to ride a horse, get on a steamboat, get in a stagecoach, and make his way to Washington over a period of 5 or 6 or 7 weeks, and the same to go home; and when President Polk had a vacancy in 1846 in the Attorney General's Office and wrote a letter to someone in New Hampshire and invited him to take the position and that took 2 or 3 weeks to get the letter, and then in 2 or 3 weeks back came the answer: No. Communication was a little different back then, so it was necessary, for the government to operate, to put into the Constitution that when the Congress, the Senate was home--which meant all over this big, grand country, before the days of communication and travel--that during a 4- or 5- or 6-month period, the President could appoint someone to that position during the recess, the Constitution says. The Constitution says, according to the court, that when a vacancy occurs during the recess, the President may make an appointment during that recess. So the court was talking about only one recess, and that is the one between the annual sessions of Congress--the one between when we end in 2012 and start in 2013. Since that time, starting right after the Civil War, the President and Congress have been inventing these various ideas about other recesses. We even got down to the idea where we created having a recess for 3 days and then having a pro forma session to prevent the President from making any, quote, recess appointment during that time. But what the court has said is that all that does not really matter, that the only recess during which a President may make an appointment is between the end of an annual session and the beginning of the next. I believe the ruling is correct. I believe it will be affirmed. I have no idea whether the Supreme Court will affirm it in whole, but surely they will at least say that the Senate itself--not the President--will decide when the Senate is in session and when the Senate is in recess, and if they do that, the era of the recess appointment is likely over. There is no need for a recess appointment in a modern era where the Senate is in session almost all the time. And the recess appointment has become used by Presidents to get around the checks and balances that are in article II, section 2 of the Constitution that provide liberty for the citizens of this country by avoiding an imperial Presidency. So I call on the NLRB to take down the ``open for business'' sign and put up one that says ``help wanted; nominations accepted.'' The NLRB can do a number of things, but the Board cannot as long as it does not have a quorum. And the two members who are there unconstitutionally should leave their positions immediately, and accept no more pay. Madam President, the Senator from Wyoming has been a leader on this issue, and I would like to now yield the floor and listen to his remarks.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. It seems lately that I come to the floor when the Republican leader is making especially reasonable, sensible proposals. I heard him say the same thing last week, and I agree with him. I saw a number of my Democratic friends this weekend in different places, and I said: Look, the President has been elected. He deserves credit for that, and he now has a chance to define his legacy. He told us what that is in his inaugural address. Isn't this the right time to get out of the way this difficult problem of dealing with entitlements that every single one of us knows we have to do? Hasn't the House of Representatives actually given us an unexpected 3 or 4 months in which we can do it? If President Obama wants, as I am sure he must, to begin to work on the other issues he talked about in his inaugural address--immigration, for example, and his other important issues--why would we not go to work right now, as the Republican leader says, and deal with the runaway, out-of-control entitlement spending that is going to bankrupt the program the seniors depend upon to pay their medical bills? We know that is going to happen. The Medicare trustees have said it is going to happen in 12 years, and we have all made speeches saying what we should do with it. Let's just do it. As the Republican leader says, this isn't about austerity. The Australian Foreign Minister came to this country about a month ago, and in his first address--he is a great friend of America's. He said the United States of America is one budget agreement away--one budget agreement away--from reasserting its global preeminence. That is his view from Down Under. Looking at Asia, looking at China, looking at Japan, he wants us to succeed. He thinks that if we succeed, Australia succeeds. He wants us to get this done. Average families want us to get this done. They don't know why we don't get it done. They understand we can't keep spending money we don't have. We have had recommendations from the President's debt commission, from the Domenici-Rivlin group, and from the Ryan-Wyden proposal. We have had all of these different ideas. We know exactly what to do, and suddenly we have 3 months to do it. I urge the President to make a proposal, show us what to do. There are 40 or 50--there might be 60 or 70 of us here on both sides of the aisle ready to go the work and to do it now. I congratulate the Republican leader for his reasonableness and his comments, and I hope he continues to offer this. I might say, without trying to embarrass him, that every time we have had a crisis we need to solve, it has been the Republican leader and the White House that have gotten it done. So why don't they try again? Why don't they try again? That is my wish. I came here to talk about something else today, but I am glad I was here to hear that, and I congratulate the Republican leader.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I yield to the Senator.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Senator from Kentucky. As we spoke on the floor, another example is President Johnson and Everett Dirksen on civil rights. That would not have happened if the government hadn't been divided, and it wouldn't have been as easily accepted by the American people if it had not been divided. If the Republicans and the Democrats--if this Democratic President and this mixture of Republicans and Democrats in Congress say to the American people: We have a real fiscal cliff for you; all the programs you depend upon to pay your medical bills aren't going to have enough money to pay them, and we are going to have to make some changes to deal with that, people will accept that, especially if it comes from both of us. As far as who is supposed to propose it, well, Senator Corker and I have proposed it. We proposed what to do, but we are not President. We are not President. I don't know what the experience of the Governor of Virginia was, but if in Tennessee I had waited around for the legislature to come up with a road program, we would still be driving on dirt roads. The President has to lay it out there and say: Let's do it this way. Then the legislators, all 535 of us, will say: No, Mr. President, we couldn't possibly do it that way. Let's do it a little bit differently, and we will come to a result. That is the way our system works. We have 3 months to do it, and I hope the Republican leader will continue to make his point.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, last Friday a three-judge Federal appellate court made an important decision. It said that the President of the United States, President Obama, on January 4, 2012, made some recess appointments when the Senate wasn't in recess. In other words, they were constitutionally invalid. The President made four appointments on January 4, 2012--three to the National Labor Relations Board and one to the consumer finance agency. He did it under his so-called recess appointment authority, which is defined in article II of the Constitution. But the Court said: No, Mr. President. The Senate wasn't in recess. The only time you can make those appointments is between the annual sessions of Congress, and the Constitution also says that those vacancies to which you appoint have to happen during that recess. The Chairman of the National Labor Relations Board made a remarkable response to the order of the Court. The order of the Court, by the way, vacated an important decision the Board made and said the two remaining NLRB members who are still on the Board are unconstitutionally there, so they vacated the order. Instead of recognizing the authority of the Court, the NLRB Chairman said, in effect: I am going to hang up a sign that says ``Open for business. We have important work to do.'' And they are going to keep going despite the fact that the NLRB has made 219 decisions with these two unconstitutionally appointed members since the month of January 2012, all of which, I would say, are invalid because the members who voted on the decisions were unconstitutionally appointed. I am here today to call for Sharon Block and Richard Griffin--the two members of the National Labor Relations Board who were unconstitutionally appointed by the President according to the Federal appellate court--calling on them to resign their positions and calling on the President of the United States to nominate a full slate of members to the National Labor Relations Board, and then let's do what the Constitution says we are supposed to do. The best known authority of this body, the Senate, is likely to be the advice and consent provisions of the Constitution. Article II, section 2: With the advice and consent of the Senate, the President shall appoint Ambassadors and others. There are about 1,100 of those whom the President appoints. Two years ago and then just last week, we streamlined the confirmation process a little bit to narrow the focus on the most important appointees and make it easier to get them confirmed. Those are the checks and balances the Constitution meant to establish. They did that so we would have liberty from a tyrannical executive branch, which is what the Founders were worried about. The Court has said the President has exceeded that. Therefore, these two remaining members of the NLRB should resign immediately and pack their bags and go home with our thanks for their hard work, despite the fact that the 219 cases they voted on ought to be vacated and probably will be when someone challenges those cases. A new sign needs to go up at the National Labor Relations Board. Take down the sign that says ``Open for business'' and put up a sign that says ``Help wanted. Nominations accepted.'' The three-judge court of appeals did an interesting thing: They actually read the Constitution in its plain English. Here is what the Constitution says: The President shall have power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate. Now, what is the recess of the Senate? Well, let's go back to the beginning of our country and for many years thereafter. Sam Houston, Senator Sam Houston of Texas, had to go from Texas to New Orleans, get on a boat, come up the Mississippi River, and then ride a horse and take a stagecoach to get here. It took him weeks--same to go home. James K. Polk of Tennessee, Speaker of the House, would take a stagecoach up to Pennsylvania and then follow the road or go on the river up to Pennsylvania and follow the road to the House of Representatives. At one time, President Polk, after he became the President, had a vacancy in the Attorney General's Office, and he wrote to some person up in New Hampshire and asked him to take the job. It took 2 or 3 weeks to receive the letter, and it took 2 or 3 weeks to get the answer, and the answer was no. In those days, there were long, extended periods in this country between the annual sessions of the Congress, when the Members of Congress were spread all over the country. The Founders anticipated that, and they wisely put into the Constitution a provision that said that during those times, the President may make a recess appointment while the Senate is in recess. And that person may hold the position until the end of the session. Well, over the years, that has changed. Various Presidents have tried various ways to fill vacancies during a recess, and that has become something different in the last while. This hasn't been just Democratic Presidents who have done it. Presidents have become frustrated because sometimes Senators don't give their advice and consent. I know about that; I was nominated by President Bush the first to be the Education Secretary, and the Senator from Ohio at the time thought I needed a little examination and held me up for 3 months. Finally, the Senate agreed to my confirmation unanimously. But that is what we are for. We are supposed to consider the President's nomination of Senator Kerry to be Secretary of State, as we are. We are supposed to consider the nomination of Senator Hagel as Secretary of Defense. And according to the law, we are supposed to consider the President's nominees for the very important National Labor Relations Board. But what the President did was to make three appointments to the Board the day after we went into our annual session. We went into session on January 3, 2012, and he made these appointments on January 4. The court said the Senate was clearly in session--clearly in session. So if the President disagrees with the Senate, if he is afraid he is about to nominate somebody who the Senate won't like, well, then, he had better get somebody the Senate will approve or else he is not going to get that nominee. But the President said: No, I am going to do it my way, so I will try to change this recess appointment and do it in a way that is more extreme than has ever been done before. I want to hasten to add there is no excuse here that if the President hadn't acted in this way the Senate might have held up the nomination for too long. Of course, the Senate has that right, if it chooses to do so. But in this case the nominations only arrived 3 weeks before the President made his appointments. So we have a straight-out set of facts here, says the court. According to the Constitution, valid appointments may only be made during the recess between annual sessions of Congress, and these were not. Secondly, it may only be made to a vacancy that occurred during the recess, and two of the three vacancies which we are talking about occurred months before the recess. The Chairman of the National Labor Relations Board effectively says ``open for business.'' In fact, the board should not be open for business, because the board only has one member who has been constitutionally appointed and confirmed, unanimously by the Senate. So the board, without a full quorum of three members, which it does not have--two are unconstitutionally appointed--can't issue regulations and can't decide cases, including appeals of decisions of unfair labor practices. Let me give an example that might affect the State of Tennessee. We were very concerned last year--I was; Tennesseans were--when a complaint began to make its way through the National Labor Relations Board affecting the Boeing Company and its decision to put a plant in South Carolina. In other words, Boeing, from a State that does not have a right-to-work law, wanted to put a new plant in a State that does have a right-to-work law, and a complaint was filed, which, on the face of it, made it look like as if, in trying to do that, it is prima facie evidence they were violating national labor laws. That is a very expensive delay for the Boeing Company--or any company. Well, that eventually got settled after a lot of expense. But let's say we have a small supplier in the State of Illinois, which is not a right-to-work State, that might want to work in Tennessee or Virginia, which are, and someone files a complaint. Do we want a board there that is unconstitutionally placed that might rule that is a prima facie violation of Federal law? To have members of the NLRB who are not confirmed by the U.S. Senate raises the prospect that would undermine the right-to-work law in Tennessee and Virginia and all the other States that have chosen to have one. So this has very practical, everyday application in the State of Tennessee. But even though the board can't issue regulations or decide cases, the rest of the NLRB can be open for business while the President makes nominations and the Senate considers those nominations under regular order. For example, the NLRB could conduct elections, it could investigate allegations of unfair labor practices, it could issue a complaint, administrative law judges could hold hearings, regional directors can settle cases, the general counsel may seek to enforce orders, and the general counsel could issue enforcement guidance memoranda. They are all open for business, but the National Labor Relations Board is not open for business. Its ``open for business'' sign needs to come down, and a new one needs to go up that says: Help wanted. Nominations accepted. Finally, there is a larger issue here. At the beginning of last year, I visited Mount Vernon. I mentioned it in the 2 minutes I had at the President's inaugural last week, because it made such an impression on me. I was reminded that the American Revolution was about tyranny by a king. That was the danger. That was what caused people to sacrifice their lives. I saw in the National Archives this weekend the oath of allegiance signed by George Washington and his troops, which swore allegiance to a country that was not even formed yet--an allegiance that would have caused him to be executed if we had lost the American Revolution. So there was a lot at stake when our country was founded, and so much of it was about liberty and about an ability to resist a king or an imperial leader. George Washington himself imposed his own character upon the American character by his modesty and restraint, by his decision to step down as general of the American army. He could have been general for the rest of his life. He made the decision to step down as President of the United States after two terms. He could have been President for the rest of his life. But at the beginning of our country, liberty, to many people, meant avoiding an executive that was too strong, that didn't have proper checks and balances. And our Founders put into our Constitution checks and balances with the court and with the legislature. Of course, as we like to point out, article 1 is about the Congress, about the legislature. And as I said earlier, perhaps the best known function the Senate has is the ability to advise and consent. The President may nominate, but those important people--men and women--may not take their offices until they have been confirmed by the Senate. This administration, I am sorry to say, has not respected those checks and balances, as I had hoped it would. I would suggest maybe a retreat to Mount Vernon for President Obama and the White House staff. The Obama administration has appointed more czars than the Romanovs. We have always had some czars, such as the drug czars, but they have three dozen--three dozen who aren't subject to the usual restrictions that we have through the appropriations process. The most blatant example of the imperial Presidency are the recess appointments at a time when the Senate, according to this court, was not in recess, in order to put into those positions men and women with whom the Senate would not agree. If the President could do what the President did on January 4, 2012, on a regular basis, we might take a recess break for lunch and come back and find we have a new Supreme Court Justice. I am here to suggest the right thing to do would be to respect the tradition of checks and balances that is built into our Constitution. It is at work here, because the President took an action, we didn't like it, and the third branch of government has made a decision the President was wrong. The way to go forward is for the two remaining members of the National Labor Relations Board who were appointed unconstitutionally to resign their position and for the President to nominate as rapidly as he can men or women to fill the remaining vacancies on the board. And to the extent the committee on which I am the ranking Republican, which oversees labor matters, has anything to do with that, I will pledge speedy consideration of those nominees. Let's get the National Labor Relations Board back in business. But it cannot be open for business today. It cannot be properly open for business today. Those two members should resign their positions and recognize the court has said we still have in America a Constitution that provides checks and balances. So take down the sign that says: Open for business, and put up the sign that says: Help wanted. Nominations accepted. Mr. President, I commend my colleagues to read my floor remarks of February 2, 2012, about recess appointments, which I made following the President's so-called recess appointments and following my visit to Mount Vernon. I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I wish to thank Senator Levin for his leadership, as well as Senator McCain, Senators Schumer, Cardin, Pryor, and Senator Kyl--who has now retired from the Senate--and Senator Barrasso. We are hopeful the leaders will be able to recommend to us a set of changes in our rules and procedures and practices that will help the Senate operate in a fairer and more efficient way. That is what all of us want. It is surprising how many of us want that. We all worked pretty hard to get here. We all understand we are political accidents. The Senator from Maine, the Senator from Arkansas--we all know that. We are very fortunate to be here. While we are here, we would like to contribute something. That gets down to a couple things. Let's make it easy for a committee bill to come to the floor, and let's make it easier for Senators from the various States and from various points of view to have their say. Allow them to offer their amendment and have it voted up or down and to have a final vote. That is all. I often use the analogy of the Grand Ole Opry. A person is lucky to be on the Grand Ole Opry. If you are there, you want to sing. Sometimes being in the Senate has been like being in the Grand Ole Opry and not being able to sing. We have all done the finger-pointing. The Democrats--the majority--say: You Republicans are filibustering. You are blocking things and keeping things from happening. What we are saying is the majority leader has used the gag rule 69 times. Senator Daschle only used it once. What the eight of us found very quickly when we sat down in the first meeting a few weeks ago was that we were of the same mind. We honored this institution and we believe our country has serious problems. We want to get to those problems, and we want to serve our country well in the position we have. If we are from Michigan, we want to be able to offer the voices of Michigan on the floor of the Senate. If we are from Nashville or the mountains of Tennessee or Maine, we want to be able to do the same. We want our voices heard--not our voices but the voices of the people whom we represent. That is the importance of the discussion we are having today. My hope is the majority leader and the Republican leader--and I congratulate them for sort of sticking their necks out in their respective conferences--recommend a way that we can do two things: make it easier for bills to come to the floor and make it easier for Senators to get their amendments in. I believe if that happens, this Senate will see a new day. On this side of the aisle, we believe we don't need rules changes; that we just need a change in behavior. On the other side of the aisle, there are those who say: Let's get rid of the filibuster. I think once we get back into what we call regular order, all that talk will go away. I think Senator Mikulski and Senator Shelby are going to have 10 or 11 or 12 appropriations bills ready to come to the floor within a few weeks, and I think they are going to want them to be considered by this body. If they do, we will be busy for 8 or 10 weeks and we will have dozens of amendments. I heard the chairman of the Budget Committee say she intended to have a budget and, if she does, we will have dozens of amendments. Then the voices of the people of this country will be heard here on the floor of the U.S. Senate. We will have votes, we will have amendments, and we will be doing our job, and all of this talk we are having right now will be pushed into the background. There is a reason for a Senate that is different than the House of Representatives. It goes all the way back to the founding of our country. It was noticed by the first observers of our country. Alexis de Tocqueville, in his fascinating view of America in ``Democracy in America'' which he wrote in the early part of the 19th century, said America faced two great challenges. One was Russia. The other one was the tyranny of the majority. This is a democracy. This is a majority rules country. But he saw in a great, big, complex country the danger of the tyranny of the majority. And this institution, the U.S. Senate, has from the beginning of the country protected the minority and protected the unpopular view. If a Senator didn't like the Vietnam war, he or she could stand up and say something here and maybe do something about it. Or if a Senator was on the other side, maybe he or she could do something about it. They could make people slow down and stop and think before the country rushes ahead. Senators of both parties eloquently, as Senator Levin has pointed out, have defended that right. We Republicans in the Bush administration were so upset about the Democrats' blocking of judges that we said we might use the nuclear option, that we might turn this into a majority body. Now there are a number of Democrats who feel the same way here. I hope we put that away and realize that this is the body that stands up for minority views in this country and says, don't run over minorities. Stop and think. Stop and think before you do that. Then we forge a consensus. To conclude my remarks--because I see the Senator from Arkansas, who has been an outstanding contributor to this effort, as he has been through his time in the Senate--I came to the Senate as a young staff aide in 1967. That was a long time ago. I saw a little bit of how important it is to have a body that gains a consensus when we are talking about a big, difficult issue for the whole country. In 1967, the issue was civil rights. The Senator from Maine knows about those early days in the Senate. The Senator from Michigan does as well. There were a minority of Republicans at that time. Everett Dirksen was the Republican leader. But the civil rights bill of 1968 was written in the Republican leader's office. Why? Because at that time they had to get 67 votes to pass it. One might say, Well, that shows what is wrong with the Senate, because it slowed things down. But looking back over history, those last 8 or 10 years of civil rights laws, the Voting Rights Act, eventually all of the laws that changed our country and continue to change it, were big steps. And what happened in 1968 once the Senate gained a consensus on civil rights? Senator Russell, who led the opposition to the civil rights bill through his whole career, got on the airplane, went home to Georgia and said, It is the law of the land. Now we obey it. So the value of having a body in our government that respects the minority and forces a consensus is that once we reach that consensus-- once we reach it--we then have a better chance of having the country behind what we do on the very controversial and difficult issues we face. So if this works out as I hope it does today, I pledge my part to work with the majority, as one Senator, to help make sure bills come to the floor, and to work with Republican Senators in the minority to help make sure they get their amendments. If we do, I think we will do our job better, we will gain more respect, the country will have a stronger government, and the rights of the minority will be protected. I thank Senator Levin for his leadership, as well as Senator Pryor and the others with whom I have worked. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. The Senate works best when committee-approved bills move to the floor in an orderly way and Senators are freely able to debate and amend and vote upon the legislation. Unfortunately, under the current Democratic majority, committee work has been marginalized, as the majority has too often bypassed committees in the legislative process. And on the Senate floor, the twin hallmarks of the Senate, the right to debate and the right to amend legislation, are barely recognizable: to an unprecedented extent the majority has moved to shut off debate on a matter as soon as the Senate has begun to take up the matter, and it has blocked Members--of both parties--from offering their legislative ideas for the body to consider. The proposal we developed addressed a concern of the majority-- namely, the ability of a majority to take up a matter--but it conditioned its ability to bring that matter to conclusion by giving the minority the right to have the Senate consider at least two amendments of the minority's choosing--without any requirement of germaneness--as well as two amendments of the majority's choosing. The minority, in fact, would get to offer the first amendment under this procedure. And while the majority would get to offer the last amendment, all eight of the Members who developed this idea--four Republicans and four Democrats--agreed that the majority could not use its final amendment to strike or eliminate legislative language, if any, that the Senate adopted from one of the minority's amendments.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I strongly agree with the understanding of my friend, the senior Senator from Arizona. I, too, would oppose cloture on a matter if the majority abused the motion to proceed set out in the order by using that procedure as the high-water mark for the consideration of amendments, rather than as a starting point for a robust amendment process.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I wonder if I might pose a question to the Republican leader, if he would retake the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I want to congratulate the Republican leader for his remarks. Here is my question. We have arrived at a time when we have a newly elected President who has had a fine inaugural day. He has an agenda that he wants to follow which he announced in his inaugural address. It is not an agenda that most of us on this side agree with, but he has an agenda that he wants to follow in his second term, all of which would ensure--in his eyes--his legacy as a President. But isn't there one thing that in order to get to that agenda--or any other thing--he and we have to do, and that is to address the debt? Isn't the very best time--isn't the very best time to do something difficult, something nobody wants to talk about, something that is hard--the best time to do that is at a time when we have a divided government, a Democratic President, a Republican House, and 30 or 40 or 50 of us Senators on both sides of the aisle who have been saying for 2 years that we are ready to fix the debt? Isn't this an opportunity now? Not just because it is a divided government, but because the House of Representatives today may very well create a 2-month or 3-month window during which we can address all of these issues if we had Presidential leadership?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I wonder if I might pose one more question to the Republican leader after making a short statement. I came to this body as a young lawyer-legislative aide to Senator Howard Baker a long time ago, in 1967. I remember very well Senator Baker's story about how the civil rights bill of 1968 was passed. I have discussed this with the Republican leader before. He knows that era as well or better than I do. But there was a time when Senator Baker said he was in Everett Dirksen's office--he is the man who had the job that Senator McConnell now has. He was the Republican leader then. He said he heard the telephone ring. He heard only one end of the conversation, but Senator Dirksen was saying: No, Mr. President, I cannot come down and have a drink with you tonight. I did that last night, and Luella is very unhappy with me. And that was the conversation. About 30 minutes later there was a rustle out in the outer office of the Republican leader's office--the very office that Senator McConnell now holds. Two beagles, followed by the President of the United States, came in. Lyndon Johnson, the President, said to the Republican leader: Everett, if you won't have a drink with me, I am down here to have one with you. And they disappeared in the back room for 45 minutes. The point of all that is not their socializing. The point was it was in that very office, the Republican leader's office, that in 1968, the next year, the civil rights bill was written and enacted. Lyndon Johnson got the credit for that in history but Everett Dirksen made it possible, and there were at that time many more Democrats in the Senate than Republicans. What I want to say to Senator McConnell, the Republican leader, the question I want to ask him, is this. He has seen the U.S. Senate and Presidency for the last number of years. He has seen many relationships between the President and leaders of the opposite party. He knows how this place works. My sense of the Republican leader and of the large majority of us is that we wish to see a result. We wish to see a result on this very tough issue of saving Social Security, saving Medicare, saving Medicaid, saving these programs on which seniors depend. I wonder if the Republican leader would agree with me that despite the fact that we engage every day in political matters, that we have big differences of opinion, that on this issue, without Presidential leadership, we cannot get a result and that there are a lot of us on both sides of the aisle who are ready to work with the President to fix the debt?

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Senator from Kentucky for extending his time on the floor. On my own I wish to continue that line of thinking a little bit. It is traditional that when we have a new President, a newly inaugurated President, that he has a pretty good opportunity to get what he asks; that it is a time of maximum leverage, it is a time to do important things, it is a time to do difficult things, it is a time to do things that otherwise might not get done. Presidents are defined by their skills--their communication skills, their electoral ability--but they are also defined by their capacity over a period of years to identify the hard issues that are important to our country and cause people, as the President said in his address day before yesterday, to work together to solve those problems. Now the problem is whether you want to raise taxes on the guy down the street with the biggest house. That is not so hard to do. The problem is to spend money that you do not have--because you can do it; that is not so hard to do. If the problem is to address a disaster to help people who are in desperate shape, there might be some debate about whether it is really a disaster or not but it is not hard to do because in the end it is going to happen. What Presidents are remembered for is dealing with important, difficult crises. President Clinton is remembered for a number of things but one of the things he did was challenge the conventional thinking in his own party to deal with welfare reform. It would not have happened if he had not done it. It would not have happened if he had not done it because a Republican could not have made the argument. A President's job, according to George Reedy, the former press secretary to Lyndon Johnson, is three things: One is to see an urgent need, two is to develop a strategy to meet the need, and the third is to persuade at least half the people he is right. President Nixon in the early 1960s went to China. That seems like ancient history but that was straight against the core of the Republican Party at that time. That was something that was inconceivable for a Republican President to do, given the history of mainland China and Taiwan, as they were both called. There have been many times in our history when Presidents have had to do the hard work. President George H.W. Bush made a budget agreement which may have caused him to lose the election in 1992 because it angered a number of Republicans. But it also helped balance the budget and gave us a period of time in the 1990s when that budget agreement plus a good economy gave us an actual surplus of funding. I sense that there is at the White House a feeling, two things I wish to disabuse the White House of. The first is that the budget problem is not a real problem. I cannot believe people at the White House think that. Everybody knows it is. Senator McConnell gave a very good explanation of what was going on there. But let me say it this way: In 2025, according to the Congressional Budget Office, every dollar of taxes we collect will go to pay for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and interest on the debt, and there is nothing left for national defense, National Laboratories, Pell grants for education, highways, or the investments that we need to make in research to grow this country. It all goes for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and the interest on debt, every single penny we collect. And that is only 12 years away. That is not me talking. That is the Congressional Budget Office saying that. The Medicare trustees have said that in 2024 the Medicare Program will not have enough money to pay all of its bills. Whose bills? Bills of seniors, bills of Tennesseans, many of whom are literally counting the days until they are old enough to be eligible for Medicare so they can pay their medical bills. It would be a tragedy if that day arrived and there were not enough money to pay the bills. But the Medicare trustees, who by law are supposed to tell us these things, say that day will come in 2024. It is just 11 years away and that is the day for people already on Medicare and people who are going to be on Medicare. Medicaid, which is a program for lower income Americans, is an important program. As Governor, I dealt with it in my State. But when I was Governor, it was 8 percent of the State budget. Today it is 26 percent of the State budget. It is soaking up almost every dollar that would go to higher education. As a result, students around the country are wondering: Why are my tuition fees going up? It is because of Washington's Medicaid Program requiring States to make decisions that soak up money that otherwise would be used to fund education. In our State of Tennessee, 30 years ago the State paid 70 percent of the cost of going to the University of Tennessee. Today it pays 30. And Medicaid is the chief culprit. Everyone knows this. The President's own debt commission has told him this and suggested a way to deal with it. Forty or fifty of us on both sides of the aisle have been working together, meeting together, having dinner together, writing bills together, trying to come up with plans to do it. Senator Corker, my colleague from Tennessee, has developed a bill on which I am his prime cosponsor which says we have found a way to strengthen Medicare and other entitlements by reducing the growth in spending. We understand this. We passed a Budget Control Act a couple of years ago. People said they didn't like it. It was not so bad because it took 38 percent of the budget, which is all of our discretionary spending--including national defense, national parks, national labs--and said it will go up at about the rate of inflation. This is before we get to the so-called sequester. But what about the rest of the budget? That is the automatic stuff we do not even vote on: Medicare, entitlements, all this? It is going up at about three to four times the rate of inflation. It is going to bankrupt these programs. Seniors will not be able to have their medical bills paid and the country will be bankrupt. That is no overstatement. The former Comptroller of the Currency says that. President Clinton says this is an urgent problem. The former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says the national debt is the single biggest threat to our national security. Why are we not dealing with it? I think we are not dealing with it, A, because it is hard to do; B, because on both sides of the aisle we have not been effective in dealing with it before. I remember when we had an all-Republican cast of characters here in town--President Bush, a Republican majority--we tried to reduce the growth of Medicare and we could not get the votes to do that. This is not easy to do, but Robert Merry, who wrote a book about President Polk, had lunch with some of us yesterday, made this statement: ``In America's history every crisis has been solved by Presidential leadership or not at all.'' Whether it was Lincoln in the Civil War or Reagan and Tip O'Neill or Nixon to China or Clinton on welfare reform--we can all identify the crises. But it takes Presidential leadership to do it. It takes that to do it. I was a Governor, which is much smaller potatoes. If I sat around waiting for the State legislature, with all respect, to come up with a road program we would still be driving on dirt roads. They were waiting for the Governor to do it. That is how our system works. I wonder if the President thinks that the debt is not a problem? I cannot imagine anybody at the White House thinks that. This is a problem. If the President does not address it during his two terms he will be remembered by history as failing to do that. His legacy may be a failure to address financial matters that put this country on a road to bankruptcy. Or, if he were to do it, if he were to provide the leadership, he would be--as the Australian Foreign Minister has said, ``America is one budget agreement away from reasserting its global preeminence.'' Why wouldn't President Obama want to be known as the President who caused America to reassert its global preeminence by dealing with a budget agreement during the first 3 months of his term and then he can get on with his agenda, about which we can argue? That leaves me with only one thought: That the President thinks we don't want to do it. We do want to do it and it is a misunderstanding if he thinks that. I know the Republican leader would not mind me saying he is a wily, clever tactician who knows the Senate as well as anyone here. But if you look carefully, when we got down to the last few days of the year and needed an agreement on taxes, the Republican leader was in the middle of the agreement. When we needed an agreement to try to avoid default on the debt, the Republican leader was the one who was in the middle of doing that. I think if the White House thinks that the Republican leader or we on the Republican side do not want to fix the debt, they are badly misunderstanding where we are and who we are. I do not know how we can say it more clearly. We have written bills that do it. We have held dinners to talk about it. We have made public statements with Democrats, 30 or 40 of us at a time, saying we support Simpson-Bowles, we support Domenici-Rivlin, or we support this or we support that. What is missing? Two words: Presidential leadership. This is not a partisan comment. It just does not work unless the President lays out his plan. Some say the President does not want to lay out his plan. He has to lay out his plan. He is the President. We are just legislators. Senator Corker and I have put out our plan. Who pays attention to that? Madam President, $1 trillion in reductions and a $1 trillion increase in the debt ceiling--it is out there. That is not going to work. However, if President Obama, with his skills, calls together Simpson and Bowles or his advisers and says: Here is my plan to save Medicare, here is my plan to save Medicaid, here is my plan to fix the debt, and I want bipartisan support to do that, he will get it. At first, because it is a difficult issue, everybody will say: Oh, no, we can't do it that way. We need to sit down, talk, and come up with a result. I think the Republican leader has shown he is prepared and willing to do that. He has said it and done it on other issues. I don't know what else the rest of us can do to show that. What I am trying to respectfully say today, as much as anything, to the President of the United States is congratulations on your inauguration. I was there. I was proud to participate in it and have the opportunity to speak for a minute and a half about why we celebrate for the 57th time the inauguration of an American President. We celebrate it because our country is distinguished from most other countries in the world by the peaceful transition or reaffirmation of the largest amount of power in the world. We have our political contests, and then we have the restraint to respect the results. After winning the election, it is important, first, to get the fiscal house in order. The time to do it is while we have a divided government. The time to do it is while the President is at the peak of his popularity. The time to do it is while the House of Representatives--the Republican House--has created a window of 2 or 3 months to deal with all the fiscal issues. The time to do it is after 2 years of discussion with Republicans and Democrats in a bipartisan way about the need to fix the debt and the importance of it for the country. My hope is that as the President and his advisers look at the Senate, they see a willingness to solve the problem of fixing the debt in a bipartisan way. I get the feeling they don't believe that about us. I don't know what else we can do to cause them to believe that. There is not the same kind of comfortable, back-and-forth relationship there should be. I have heard some people say: Well, the Johnson-Dirksen days are ancient history. That was a long time ago. However, human nature doesn't change. Human nature doesn't change in 50 years, 100 years, or 500 years. There is plenty of good will across the aisle and on this side of the aisle, at the beginning of this term, to work with a newly inaugurated President and say: Mr. President, we are ready to fix the debt. Provide us the leadership. No great crisis is ever solved without Presidential leadership in the United States. You are the President; you are the only one who can lay out the plan. We will then consider it, amend it, argue about it, change it, and pass it. After that, we can get onto the President's agenda, about which we will have a difference of opinion, but he will go down in history as the man who was willing to do something hard within his own party, which was to fix the debt and save the programs seniors depend upon to pay their medical bills. I hope I can say that in the spirit of someone who participated in the inauguration and admires the President's considerable abilities. I hope he and his advisers stop, take a look, and say: Maybe we were wrong. Maybe this is the time to do it. Maybe we are the only ones who can do it, so let's make a proposal and get started. I thank the President. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, Patti Page died on New Year's Day this year. She was 85 years old. The Senate has not been in session for most of the time since then. I wanted to come to the floor to pay a Tennessean's tribute to Patti Page. Patti Page is best known for our State song, the ``Tennessee Waltz.'' A few years ago, in 2007, when I met her for the first time, she told me the story of the ``Tennessee Waltz.'' I knew some of it, but she completed the rest of it. In 1946, a couple of Tennesseans, Pee Wee King and Redd Stewart, were driving from Memphis to Nashville. That was before the interstate highways. It took a pretty good amount of time to drive that distance. I don't know whether or not they were drinking a beer on the way from Memphis to Nashville but they were relaxed, and one of them said to the other, Why is it Kentucky and Missouri have a waltz and Tennessee doesn't have a waltz? So on the way from Memphis to Nashville they took out a penny matchbox, which is one of these big boxes with wooden matches in it, dumped out the matches on the floorboards of the car, and on the back of the penny matchbox, between Memphis and Nashville, in 1946, Pee Wee King and Redd Stewart wrote the ``Tennessee Waltz.'' They sang it around a few places. Pee Wee King sang it at the Grand Ole Opry. Nobody paid much attention to it. Cowboy Copas sang it. They sang it on Red Foley's show in Missouri. Nothing much happened to the ``Tennessee Waltz'' until 1950, and this is the story Patti Page told me. Mercury Records in New York had a new song they were sure was going to be a big hit. It was called ``Boogie Woogie Santa Claus.'' I don't know whether it was a follow up to ``Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,'' but the executives in New York were sure it was going to be a big hit so they wanted the hottest young female singer in America to record ``Boogie Woogie Santa Claus'' so they hired Patti Page. She flew to New York, recorded it for Mercury Records, and then in those days you always had to put a record on the back of the main record. You had to pick a song. It would be the ``B'' side. Just as a throw-away they put on the back of it the song by Pee Wee King and Redd Stewart, the ``Tennessee Waltz.'' We know the rest of the story. The ``Tennessee Waltz'' sold about a million copies. Nobody ever heard of the ``Boogie Woogie Santa Claus'' except those who bought the ``Tennessee Waltz.'' Mike Curb, who runs Kerr Records in Nashville, told me it was the best selling record ever by a female artist. Patti Page eventually sold 100 million records. She was the top selling female artist in record sales in history.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I am here to join the Senator from Indiana, and I think I can presumptively speak for everybody in this body. We want to help the people in New York, New Jersey, and other Northeastern States that were hurt by Sandy. We have had some pretty tough disasters in Tennessee as well. We had a 1,000-year flood 2 years ago--not a 100-year flood but a 1,000-year flood. We knew the Federal Government wasn't going to make us whole. We had billions of dollars of damage, 52 counties hurt, but we knew the Federal Government could help and it did help and it helped swiftly and that is what we want to do in this case. With all the talk about the money we are about to appropriate, I think it is important to remind those who live in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut what is already being done with money we have already appropriated. For example, there are 4,402 FEMA personnel working in those States. There are 514,343 citizens of those States who have already filed individual assistance applications. This is when your home is gone and you need money for rent or you need money to rebuild. Those applications are in. Already $1.13 billion has been paid. There are 24 disaster recovery centers in New York, 24 in New Jersey and 1 in Connecticut. $150 million in disaster loans have already been approved by the Small Business Administration, and more than 360,000 applications have been sent out. The important fact to know is that help for victims of Hurricane Sandy doesn't depend on what we are about to do tonight. We already have money in the bank. We already have FEMA people on the ground. There is already help available. In my experience in our Tennessee disasters, that help comes in a matter of days, in most cases. So what are we about to do? As Senator Coats said--and I wish to congratulate him for making a very sensible approach toward this--what we are about to say is this is $24 billion more for the accounts that are already helping people in the areas hurt by Sandy. For example, there is over $5 billion for the Disaster Relief Fund. That is just to make sure there is enough money to fund those half million requests that are already in. There is $9.7 billion for flood insurance. If you have flood insurance, the Federal Government will be able to pay your claim. There is $3.4 billion to repair roads and bridges. There is $2 billion for community development block grants. We found in Tennessee that is especially flexible money, which is very helpful. That is $2 billion between now and March. There is also $500 million for the Small Business Administration. So what is not included in the proposal we are offering. It doesn't include items that are not related to Hurricane Sandy. This is supposed to be about Hurricane Sandy. It doesn't make changes to the Stafford Act. What that means is we don't go in, in this emergency appropriations bill for the next 3 months, and make wholesale changes in the law, make things permanent that are temporary, and streamline regulations. They all may be good things to do, but we have a process for making legislative changes. We don't include $13 billion for unspecified future projects. They may be good projects, but if they are, we have a process to consider those projects. The distinguished Senator from California and I are the ranking members of one of the subcommittees that does some of that. We expect to do that next year. So we are filling the accounts that are already being used to help many people. Finally, if I may say something about process--which I think would be more interesting to the Senators than to the people of New York and New Jersey--but it is important to know this bill came to the floor in record time. No one objected to its coming to the floor. It was virtually unanimous, before we even started voting on amendments, that we agreed to invoke cloture and to have a final vote of 51 votes so the bill in some form will pass. In return for that, those of us on the minority side, so far as I know, got the amendments we wanted. I simply want to say to my colleagues that it is still far from a perfect process in our effort to continue to improve the way the Senate works. The bill should have gone to committee to begin with. It did not. It could have been amended there. When it came to the floor on Monday, and we said come right on, no one objected to that, we should have started voting. We could have voted for 3 days on this bill: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, instead of running around trying to see who had amendments. Let us just put them up and vote on them. Then we should have had the cloture vote which, as I said, was done with, I think, only one dissenting objection. So the process has been better but not as good as it should be for the Senate. But Senator Coats' substitute is the right proposal. It is 24 billion more dollars now for the accounts that are already being used to help victims of Sandy. The last thing I would say is this. When there is an emergency, Congress has always acted. We don't always do everything in the first week or second or third week because we already have money in the bank for those needs. But in Katrina, for example, there were nine different supplemental appropriations bills over time. The next wave of appropriations requests can come to us, and we will go to work on them in a few weeks. We can get to work in the committee right away, for example, and Senator Feinstein and I could work on it a few weeks after that. Then the majority leader will bring the bills to the floor--which he did not last year--and we can vote on them and have the second round of funding. So I thank the Senator from Indiana, Mr. Coats, for his hard work on this. We want the people of New York and New Jersey to know we want to help them, we are helping them, and will continue to be interested in the things that need to be done. It will not make them whole, but it will help them get on their feet, just as we have in Tennessee and just as we have in other States across the country after large disasters.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, Senator Inouye told me a story which I wish to repeat for our colleagues. In 1973, George Gallup, the pollster, asked to come see him. This was at the height of the Watergate hearings. Back then, these investigations into President Nixon's Watergate break-in were consuming the country. Then there were only three major television networks, plus the Public Broadcasting System, and the Watergate hearings were televised from the Senate every single day, for several hours a day, on all four of those networks. So, almost everyone in the country watched the Watergate hearings for weeks. They got to know Sam Ervin, the chairman. They got to know Howard Baker, the ranking Republican. But George Gallup came to see Senator Inouye. And Senator Inouye said, I am glad to see you, but why do you come to see me? He said, Senator, who would you say is the most recognized person in the United States today? Senator Inouye said, Well, I am sure President Nixon is. And Gallup said, That is right. But the second most recognized person is Senator Dan Inouye. Inouye said, Well, how could that be? George Gallup said, Well, Senator, I suspect so many Americans have never seen a United States Senator of Japanese ancestry with one arm and a distinguished voice and presence, and you have made an indelible impression on the American people. That was 1973. That was a long time ago. Since then, Dan Inouye made an indelible impression on a great many people around the world, and especially on the 100 of us who serve here. He commanded our respect in a remarkable way, in part because of his service in the war. He and Bob Dole, our former colleague, were wounded at about the same time in Europe and were in the same hospital recovering from tremendously serious wounds. Of course, Senator Inouye was later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for that. Senator Pryor was telling the story that when Senator Inouye was finally elected to Congress, he wrote Senator Dole a note and said, I am here, where are you? Because both of them, when they were recovering from their war wounds, had determined that one day they wanted to serve in the United States Congress. Inouye got here first. A few years ago, Senator Inouye and Senator Ted Stevens invited a number of us to go with them to China. It was quite an experience. Senator Stevens--of course, another World War II veteran--had flown the first cargo plane into what was then Peking, in 1944. Of course, Senator Inouye was well regarded in China for his service. So the group of Senators--there must have been a dozen of us of both parties--got more time with Mr. Hu and Mr. Wu, the No. 1 and 2 leaders of China, than the President of the United States nearly did. We were accorded every courtesy possible because of the presence of Senator Inouye and Senator Stevens. They were like brothers. They called one another brothers. They acted that way in private. They served that way in the Senate, as chairman and vice chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. Over a number of decades, they singlehandedly shaped our American defense posture, and they did it with skill and patriotism and knowledge of our structure that very few could have. Several Senators mentioned how bipartisan Dan Inouye was. He was of the old school--not a bad school for today, in my point of view. He treated each Senator with courtesy, even the newer Senators. He treated each Senator with a sense of equality, even those who were in the minority and not on his side of the aisle. He was always fair, he was always courteous, and he always tried to do the right thing. He was a textbook U.S. Senator. He announced for reelection after his last election. I don't know his exact age at the time--maybe 85, 86. He will not be able to run for that reelection now that he is gone, but he will be well remembered. Not long ago, he spoke at our Wednesday morning Prayer Breakfast that we have here. Usually we have 20 or 30 Senators. On the day he spoke, we had maybe 60 or 70. We had Senators sitting on the windowsills, standing around the back, just to hear what he had to say. I won't repeat what he had to say because we don't talk about what goes on there in public except to say he talked about his war experiences--and in a quiet way. He stood there for 10 or 15 minutes and explained those experiences to us, most of whom had never had that sort of experience. It gave us a new sense of him, and it increased our respect for him, if that could have been possible. I join with my colleagues to say Senator Dan Inouye was a patriot. He set the standard, really, for a U.S. Senator. He set the standard for a man or woman in our military fighting to defend his or her country. And he set the standard as an individual who showed courtesy to everyone he met. We will miss him. We honor him. And we give his family our expressions of grief, but, more important, our great respect for our colleague who today is gone. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I have two items I would like to briefly mention. The Nation is consumed by the fiscal cliff. From all I can tell, the Presidential limousine is moving very rapidly toward the fiscal cliff with the President's foot on the accelerator. I am still hopeful we will get a budget agreement that will help us get the economy moving again, but at a time like this, of course, what we all need to be doing is thinking about saving every possible penny to fix the debt. This government in Washington, DC, is borrowing 42 cents out of every dollar we spend. That is why I come to the floor to point out a proposal that has been made to fleece the taxpayers out of an additional $50 billion over the next 6 years. This is a proposal that is as brazen as a mid-day bank robbery on Main Street. It is a proposal by the wind developers of America to say to the taxpayers: Please give us $50 billion or so more dollars over the next 6 years to phase out the Federal taxpayer subsidy for wind power. Why is this a brazen fleecing of the taxpayers? First, this taxpayer subsidy began in 1992, 20 years ago, as a temporary subsidy for a new form of energy. Of course, windmills are not really new. We have had them for hundreds of years. But the idea was to give them a little boost so they could get bigger and perhaps help us supply electricity. It was intended in 1992 that this would only be a temporary tax credit. But as President Reagan used to say: There is nothing that comes as close to eternal life as a government program. So this temporary taxpayer credit has been renewed time after time after time. It is 20 years old. Now, after billions of dollars and 20 years, wind power is, according to President Obama's Energy Secretary, a mature technology. The Congress has decided that Federal taxpayer subsidies for wind power should end at the end of this year. Everyone knows that. This is no surprise. It has been out there for a while, so businesses can plan on this. In other words, it is time for wind power, the Congress has said, to take its place in our free market system and compete with natural gas, compete with nuclear power, compete with hydropower, compete with solar power---compete with other forms of power producing electricity. After all, we produce and use about 20 to 25 percent of all the electricity in the world, and we want to make sure we have plenty of it and that it is a reliable supply at a low price. Yet along came the wind developers who have benefited from this giveaway for 20 years--I say giveaway because, according to the Joint Tax Committee and the United States Treasury, from 2009 through 2013 it has cost the taxpayers $16 billion to subsidize windmills in America. Put that in a little perspective. The federal government spends only $6 billion a year on all energy research. We could be spending it there. We could be reducing the debt. Instead, we are continuing to subsidize this mature technology. But the brazenness of those who have been receiving this giveaway money--it is hard to imagine how it could be exceeded by a so-called phase-out proposal. They announced: Phase us out over the next 6 years, through 2018. In 2013 the credit would be 100 percent. We would have the credit for next year at the same level it is this year. That's estimated to cost about $12 billion. That is twice the amount of money we spend each year on energy research in America. Then, in 2014, they want 90 percent of the previous full tax credit, and then 80 and 70 and 60 and nothing after 2018. I have not had a chance for the Congressional Budget Office to evaluate how much this phase-out would cost, but it is tens of billions of dollars. One estimate is $50 billion new taxpayer dollars at a time when we are borrowing 42 cents out of every dollar to keep doing something that is already phasing out on its own terms. We cannot afford that. We simply can't afford that. We cannot afford 1 year more of the wind tax credit--that is $12 billion--on top of the $16 billion for grants and the production tax credit from 2009 through 2013. Second, it is interfering with the marketplace. The subsidy to wind developers is so great they are actually paying distributors of electricity, in some cases, to take their wind power, which undercuts other forms of electricity on which we rely. Why is that so important? We cannot rely on wind power, because it only works when the wind blows. It often blows at night when we really do not need it. We have a wind farm in Tennessee. It is the only one in the Southeastern United States. Why? Because the wind doesn't blow much in the Southeastern United States. In Tennessee, somebody has a big contract with extra subsidies by the government to put these gigantic towers on top of our scenic mountains. And how much electricity does it produce? Not very much. Of course, these turbines only generate electricity about 19 percent of the time, and it produces even less electricity when we actually need it. You can fly over it or drive by these giant windmills at 4 p.m. in the afternoon in the summer when everybody has their air conditioning on and they need electricity, and not a single windmill is turning. You might go at night and it is turning, but they don't need the extra electricity at 7 or 8 or 9 o'clock at night. That is the problem around the country. It is a puny amount of unreliable, expensive electricity. The idea that the United States of America, using 20 to 25 percent of all the electricity in the world, would produce the largest amount of clean and reliable electricity by windmills is the energy equivalent of going to war in sail boats when nuclear submarines are available. Let's let wind power, after 20 years, find its place in our market. There are clearly places where it should be fine. But there is no need to subsidize it from the Federal Government; to cause the ratepayers of Tennessee, for example, to pay more to import electricity produced by wind from South Dakota when we should be using those dollars either to lower our rates, to pay for air pollution control equipment, and to build nuclear power plants--of which we have several in the Tennessee Valley. They are clean--they emit no sulfur, no nitrogen, no mercury, and no carbon. That is the cleanest form of reliable energy we have in the United States. There may be some places where windmills work, but not along the tops of the Tennessee mountains or even in the valleys of Tennessee. The idea of continuing to waste $50 billion of taxpayer money over the next several years to subsidize a mature technology at a time when the government is going broke is as brazen as a bank robbery in the middle of the day on Main Street. I hope we put a spotlight on this $50 billion giveaway. I hope it becomes the poster child for what is wrong with spending in Washington, DC. I hope the Congress will come to its senses this month and next month and say no to those who come forward with their hand out for this $50 billion giveaway. The Filibuster Madam President, on Tuesday I spoke about the filibuster. I inadvertently made a mistake I would like to correct. When I was looking at the history of filling the tree, which is the gag rule that the majority leader uses to stop Republicans from offering amendments-- we just saw it again today. We had a banking bill. There was a budget point of order that killed the bill. We had a couple of amendments on the Republican side that would fix the budget point of order, and then we could have passed the bill. But the majority leader imposed the gag rule, he filled the tree, and here we are. I was talking about that, and I said that Senator Robert Dole was the first leader to fill the tree, and I was wrong about that. I was reading some information that the Congressional Research Service had given me, and I did not read it right. When the CRS went back and looked at its information, it would appear that in 1980, Senator Robert Byrd used this filling of the tree on the Tonnage Measurement Simplification Act, H.R. 1197. That reminds me of a story Senator Baker used to tell me when he was suddenly elected majority leader in 1981, and Senator Byrd became the minority leader unexpectedly. Senator Baker went to Senator Byrd and said: Senator Byrd, I will never know the rules as well as you do. I'll make a deal with you. I won't surprise you if you won't surprise me. Senator Byrd said to Senator Baker: Let me think about it. He thought about it overnight and said: It's a deal. And they worked that way for 4 years. Senator Byrd knew the rules. In 1980, apparently, at least so far as the research shows, he was the first one to use this arcane procedure of filling the tree. Filling the tree sounds very strange, but it is very simple. It means the majority leader can use it to cut off debate over here. If you bring up a banking bill, and it has a budget problem, and one of us says we can fix that problem, that we have an amendment, if he has filled the tree, we cannot offer amendments. If some Senator--let's not pick on the majority leader--brings up a bill, and, let's say, it is an appropriations bill and it does not include money to rebuild the Center Hill Dam or the Wolf Creek Dam--which is not safe at the moment--and I want to stand up and say, Madam President, my constituents would like to see some money to make this dam safe because if it fails it will flood Nashville--if the tree is filled, I cannot do my job. On our side of the aisle we do not like filling the tree. We are in the minority, and we believe the majority has the right to set the agenda and that we in the minority have the right to offer amendments. The good news is a number of us on both sides of the aisle are working, with the knowledge of the majority leader and the Republican leader, to see if we can make some suggestions privately to Senator Reid and Senator McConnell that they can consider and, hopefully, agree that they are good suggestions, and as we begin the new year we will be able to move bills to the floor. I know the majority leader would like to be able to do that more easily, and maybe some of the fault for that is on our side. We on our side, then, would have a right to do what the minority especially wants to be able to do, which is to offer amendments, because this body is established for the purpose of protecting the rights of the minority. The Congressional Research Service is looking further into the record, but we do have a record of how majority leaders have used this procedure from 1985 to the present. This data supports my larger point which is--what was used rarely is now used too frequently. According to CRS, these are the numbers. Since 1985, Senator Bob Dole filled the tree, used the gag rule, seven times; Senator Byrd used it three times; Senator Mitchell used it three times; Senator Lott, when he was majority leader, used the gag rule 11 times--that is, cut off amendments--Senator Daschle only one time; Senator Frist 15 times. Those are the majority leaders. So since 1985 all of those majority leaders used it a combined 40 times. Our current majority leader, Senator Reid, has used it, as of yesterday, 69 times since he became leader in 2007. This trend, this gagging the minority, is the primary cause of the Senate's dysfunction. I wanted to correct the record. I made a mistake, and I am glad to come and correct it. I don't want Senator Dole to get the credit for that when it appears Senator Byrd actually figured it out. I want to conclude with an optimistic point. I think most of us--and I would include the distinguished Senator from New Hampshire in the chair because we have been together in discussions, bipartisan discussions where we have talked about this--most of us believe we are fortunate to be here. We know we are basically political accidents. Since we are here we want to do our jobs. We would like to advocate the things that people sent us here to do. So if we have a bill, and we are in the majority, we would like to get the bill on the floor. If we have something to say, an amendment, if we are in the minority, we would like to have a chance to offer that amendment. So what a number of us are doing, we have been talking about how we can do two simple things: How can we make it easier for the majority leader to get bills to the floor? And how can we make it easier for the minority especially to be able to offer amendments? If we can do those two things at the beginning of the year, I think the Senate will begin to function much more effectively. It will be a better place to work. We will get our job done in a better way. There will be less finger-pointing, and there will be more results. There will be a change in behavior, which is what we need instead of a change in rules, and it will inspire the confidence of the people of the United States about the kind of job we are doing. I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER

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

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as if in morning business.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, while the Senator from California is still on the Senate floor, I want to thank her for her comments on the Senate rules. I would agree this is something we should be able to talk amongst ourselves and work out. Some of us who have been here for a little while and watch the Senate know it is a unique institution. Fundamentally, most of us on both sides of the aisle know we are not functioning as effectively as we should. And there are only two things that need to happen: We need to get bills to the floor, and then we need to have amendments. Historically, it has been the responsibility of the majority to decide what comes to the floor, and historically the minority--whoever that happens to be--has an opportunity to have amendments. Over the last 25 years, a couple of things have happened. One is the motion to proceed has been used to block bills coming to the floor. That happened rarely 25 years ago. But, on the other hand, something else happened over the last 25 years: a procedure called filling the tree--which is really a gag rule on amendments--was once rarely used but is now abused. During his tenure, Senator Bob Dole used the so- called filling the tree procedure, and used it seven times. Later, Senator Byrd used it three times when he was the majority leader. Senator Mitchell used it three times; Senator Lott, 11; Senator Daschle, only once, this gag rule; Senator Frist, 15. All those leaders used it 40 times. Our majority leader, Senator Reid, has used it 68 times. So we can all come up with statistics on both sides, but shouldn't we just resolve that what we would like to do is show the country we are grown-up, responsible adults; that we can sit down and say, yes, we can agree on ways to make sure that most bills come to the floor and Senators get to offer most of the amendments they want to offer on the bill? I think we can do that. I think there is a spirit on both sides of the aisle to do that, and I am working toward that goal and I know a number of Democrats and Republicans are doing that. I appreciate the spirit of the Senator's remarks on the rules. The Senator from California also mentioned the fiscal cliff, and I would like to talk about that in two ways. I have a little different perspective. The campaign is over. Congratulations to President Obama. He won it. He won the campaign. Isn't this an opportunity for the President to now shift gears, to become President of the United States--to do for the debt that we have, for the social safety net programs that are in jeopardy, to show the same kind of leadership on those issues that President Eisenhower did on the Korean war; that President Lincoln did on the Civil War; that President Reagan did working with Tip O'Neill as was mentioned on Social Security--that was a difficult thing to do back in the early 1980s--and President Clinton did on welfare reform. Robert Merry, who wrote the biography of James K. Polk, said the other day: In the history of the United States every great crisis has been solved by Presidential leadership or not at all. A number of us have made our suggestions about what to do about the fact that our debt is too big, we are spending money we don't have, and one way or the other we have to fix it. It is that simple. We shouldn't be borrowing 42 cents of every dollar we spend. So we have to fix it. And a number of us have said on the Republican side: We will hold our noses and do some things we normally wouldn't do. If the President will come forward with a reasonable proposal on restraining entitlement spending, we will help raise revenues and we will put the two together, and that makes a budget agreement that the new Foreign Minister of Australia described in this way: The United States of America is one budget agreement away from reasserting its global preeminence, one budget agreement away from stopping all talk in the Pacific area of America's decline, one budget agreement away from showing that we can govern ourselves. So why don't we do that? Well, I was Governor of a State. That is a much smaller potatoes job--I know that--than being President. But if we needed better roads--which we did--and I waited around for the legislature to come up with a road program, we would still be driving on dirt roads. If I wanted to recruit the Japanese industry to Tennessee--which we did--and I waited around for the legislature to decide which country to go, we wouldn't have any of the auto jobs we now have. If we needed to reward outstanding teaching, and I waited around for the legislature to decide how to be the first State to pay more for teaching well, we wouldn't be doing it at all--which we are now leading the country in doing. I am trying to say that the way our constitutional system works, at the smaller level in a State with the Governor, or at the national level with the President, the President sets the agenda. Lyndon Johnson's press secretary, George Reedy, said: The President's job is, No. 1, to see an urgent need; No. 2, to develop a strategy to deal with the need; No. 3, persuade at least half the people he is right. Well, President Obama has done 1 and 3, but he hasn't done 2. We are all sitting around waiting for the President's proposal on what to do about fixing the debt. He has told us what he wants to do about taxes, but he has not yet said what to do about spending on runaway entitlement programs which we all know we have to fix. If he will do that, we will get a result. We are not the President. We wanted to be. We tried to be. Some of us have even run for the office, but we are not. He is. It is a great privilege. He won the election. We congratulate him for that. So let's have the President's proposal. We need Presidential leadership on the question. And it is not just an abstract matter of a budget agreement so that the Australian Foreign Minister is happy with the United States, his ally. I know a lot of people in Tennessee--hundreds of thousands of them actually--who can't wait until they are 65 years old in order to get Medicare so they can be assured they can afford their health care bills. There are hundreds of thousands of people in our State for whom Social Security is their only or most of their income. What do we say to them? Do we say to them that we are going to ignore the fact--let's just take Medicare--that they are not going to be able to depend on Medicare unless we take some steps to save it? I mean, we can all count. We know, from the Urban Institute, the average two- earner couple who retires this year will have paid about $122,000 into Medicare during their lifetime and are going to take $387,000 out, that simply can't continue. One way or another we have to make certain that the millions of Americans who are looking forward to Medicare can count on it when they become eligible for Medicare. We have the same responsibility with Social Security. So I would hope the President would recognize there are a lot of us on both sides of the aisle who want to reach a budget agreement. We are waiting for his leadership. He is not sitting around a table as one Senator anymore. He is the President. He is the agenda setter. We need his proposal. Then we can react to it and then we can agree on it. He is not the Speaker. He is not the majority leader of the Senate or the minority leader. He is the President of the United States. Just as President Eisenhower, President Reagan, President Lincoln, all of the Presidents who have led in resolving great crises, I hope President Obama will as well. I want him to succeed in resolving this crisis, and the crisis includes not just raising taxes on rich people--I mean, of course, most people are in favor of raising taxes on the guy with the bigger house down the street. It includes finding a way to fix the debt. I would make one other point on the fiscal cliff. I mentioned that I thought the campaign was over, but the President was in Michigan yesterday on what looked like a campaign event. It seems to me, that time would have been better spent here in Washington, D.C. working on the fiscal cliff, but he was in Michigan. By my way of thinking, he was doing two things: First, he was encouraging the people of Michigan to continue to deny working people the right to get or keep a job without having to pay union dues; and, second, to continue to perpetuate a system that will keep our auto industry from being able to compete in the world marketplace. Michigan is on the verge of becoming the 24th right-to-work State in the United States. The state Senate and the House each passed separate bills in Michigan last week. They passed a final bill today, and I understand the Governor is about to consider whether to sign it. This is what it will do: It will ensure that employees in Michigan do not have to pay union dues in order to get or keep a job. The President said yesterday that Michigan legislators shouldn't be taking away the people's right to bargain for better wages or working conditions. But no one, in passing a right-to-work law, is taking away workers' rights. They're actually giving them a new right--the right not to have to pay union dues in order to get or keep a job. Workers have the right to collectively bargain. Federal laws have recognized that since the 1930s. But since 1947, the Federal Government has also said that States have the right to determine whether to a state may prohibit compulsory unionism. So if Michigan goes the way of the right- to-work law, 24 States have made that decision. The President also said that these right-to-work laws ``have nothing to do with economics and everything to do with politics.'' I would respectfully disagree with that based upon my life's experience. Thirty years ago, Tennessee was the third poorest State. I was looking around for a way to increase family incomes and to attract new jobs. So I went off to Japan to recruit Nissan. We had virtually no auto jobs in Tennessee at the time. They took a look at a map of the United States at night with the lights on, showing that most of the people lived in the east. While most of the people lived in the east, the center of the market is where you wanted to be if you are making big heavy things, and the center of the market had moved toward the southeast. So Tennessee and Kentucky were more in the center of the market than Michigan or other states where autos had normally been manufactured. So Nissan looked aggressively at Tennessee, Kentucky, and Georgia. But then they looked at something else. None of the States north of us had a right-to-work law. They had a very different labor environment. So Nissan came to Tennessee. They weren't the only ones. General Motors and the United Auto Workers partnership came to Tennessee with a Saturn plant. They still have an important General Motors plant there where the workers are members of the United Auto Workers, but it is in a right-to-work State. Over the last 30 years, there have probably been a dozen large assembly plants built in the Southeastern United States. There are about 1,000 suppliers in our State today. What has been the effect of the arrival of the auto industry in Tennessee, attracted by, among other things, our right-to-work law? One-third of our manufacturing jobs today are auto-related jobs. And what has been the effect on the United States? It has maintained a competitive environment where those who want to sell cars in the United States can make them in the United States. Without that competitive environment, my guess is that most of those cars would be made in Mexico or some other place around the world. If you don't believe me, read David Halberstam's work in 1986, a book called ``The Reckoning'' about the American auto industry. In Mr. Halberstam's words, the big three carmakers and the United Auto Workers, had enjoyed setting wages, setting prices, and ultimately became uncompetitive. They laughed at these little Datsuns that Nissan was selling on the west coast and these little Beetles that Volkswagen was selling in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. They ignored the warning of Mitt Romney's father, George Romney, the president of the American Motors Corporation, who said there is nothing more vulnerable than entrenched success. He said that in the 1960s. And what happened? The American automobile industry nearly collapsed. I believe what saved the industry, as much as anything else, was the right-to-work laws and the existence of a competitive environment in the Southeastern United States, where workers could make cars efficiently, be paid well for their work, and make them here in the United States, instead of in Japan. What President Carter said to me when I was Governor of Tennessee was: Governors, go to Japan, persuade them to make in the United States what they want to sell in the United States. They did that and they did well. In fact, the Nissan plant has, for year in and year out, been the most efficient and successful auto plant in North America. The right-to-work law has been about jobs and it has made a difference in Tennessee. I am not entirely sure why Michigan has had a difficult time with its economy lately, but perhaps not being a right- to-work state is one reason. Michigan's right to adopt this law has been an important part of our law in Tennessee. I have literally grown up with it. I remember, as a 7-year-old, Senator Taft arguing the Taft- Hartley Act, or at least I heard my parents talk about it. Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act gave States the right to say that workers in their State did not have to pay union dues to get or keep a job. And I well remember Everett Dirksen's arguments on the Senate floor in the mid-1960s. President Johnson, at the behest of union leaders, wanted to repeal Section 14(b). Dirksen rose up against it. He said: It is the right of the State to do it if it so desires; if the Governor signs the bill, or if they override the Governor's veto. That should be their prerogative in a country where the States and those who represented the States in the Constitutional Convention in 1787 were safeguarded by that residual clause in the Constitution. The right of States to prohibit compulsory union membership has been challenged repeatedly by union officials. But that right has been upheld consistently by the judiciary, including the U.S. Supreme Court. Finally, as a Tennessean, I could be upset that Indiana, and now it appears Michigan, has adopted right-to-work laws. That puts Tennessee at less of a competitive advantage. I believe in States rights. I believe States have the right to be wrong as well as the right to be right. With all these Midwestern States having the right to be wrong and not having right-to-work laws, we benefited enormously in our State by the arrival of the auto industries and other manufacturers. But for our country to exist over the next 20 or 30 years in a very competitive world, where jobs can be anywhere, where things can be manufactured anywhere, we want at least those things that are going to be sold here to be made here. Having a right-to-work law which permits the UAW and General Motors to have a partnership at one plant in Tennessee and Nissan and Volkswagen to have a nonunion plant at another place in Tennessee, by vote of the employees, I submit, will make us a stronger, competitive country. It has everything to do with economics, and I wish the President yesterday had spent his time on the fiscal cliff instead of going to Michigan and arguing in favor of denying workers their right get or keep a job without having to pay union dues, and denying efforts to keep our American automobile industry as competitive as it needs to be in the world marketplace. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for 20 minutes.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Will the Chair please let me know when 5 minutes remains?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I want to speak this afternoon about the Senate as an institution; about its majority leader, Senator Reid, who is my friend; about various conversations we have been having in the Senate and discussions about what the majority leader has said about how the Senate should operate. I know the majority leader cares about this institution. I believe it. He has said it. He shows it. He has one of the most difficult jobs anybody could possibly have. One time he told me: My job is to make everybody mad. In many ways it is, when you have a body of 100 that operates by unanimous consent and every one of us is equal. It is a very difficult job to be the minority leader, which the Republican leader is today. It is a more difficult job to be the majority leader. I emphasize this because I know Senator Reid cares about this institution, and I know Senator Reid does not want to go down in history as the man who ended the Senate. But if he persists in doing what he says he will do--which is to break the rules of the Senate to change the filibuster rules--that will be his legacy. He will go down in history as the Senator who ended the Senate. You might say: Senator Alexander, that is a very serious charge to make about a majority leader whom you know and respect and who you just said cares about this institution. It is a serious charge to make. The only reason I would say it is because Senator Reid said it himself. Shortly after I came to the Senate, in 2005, we Republicans, including this Senator, were very upset about what we believed were unfair efforts by Democrats to keep President Bush from securing an up- or-down vote on his judicial nominees. We were in the majority, we Republicans. We had a Republican President of the United States. We believed that attacks on the President's nominees were extraordinarily unfair, and the other side was using the rules of the Senate to prevent an up-or-down vote. They were filibustering President Bush's nominees. We could not change their minds, so a number of Senators persuaded Senator Frist, my colleague from Tennessee who was then the majority leader, that we should then change the filibuster rules in order to get an up-or-down vote on the judges. We knew our goal was right, so we were going to, if we had to, break the rules to change the rules. As you might guess, the minority, the Democrats at the time, erupted in indignation. They said this has not been done in the 240 or 250 years of the Senate. They pointed out the differences between the Senate and the House of Representatives. Almost every distinguished Member of the Democratic side of the Senate--the majority leader; Senator Biden, now the Vice President of the United States; Senator Obama, now the President of the United States; Senator Clinton, now the Secretary of State of the United States--denounced this evil Republican plan to change the rules of the Senate, to in effect break the rules of the Senate--because the rule says we can only change the rules with 67 votes--in order to change the filibuster rule. Here is what the majority leader said in his book, ``The Good Fight.'' The storm had been gathering all year and word from conservative columnists and in conservative circles was that Senator Frist of Tennessee, who was the majority leader, had decided to pursue a rules change that would kill the filibuster for judicial nominations. And once you opened that Pandora's box it was just a matter of time before a Senate leader who couldn't get his way on something moved to eliminate the filibuster for regular business as well. And that, simply put, would be the end of the United States Senate. That is Senator Reid when he was the minority leader of the Senate. Today another storm is gathering, and the shoes are reversed. The majority leader is the one who wants to invoke what he then called the nuclear option. That was the Democrats' name for what the Republicans were trying to do, and we are the ones who are saying: Please don't do that; stop and think about this; this is not what you want to do to the Senate. People who are listening might say: Wait a minute. This filibuster business has gotten out of hand. What is wrong with having a majority vote in the Senate? Don't we learn in the first grade--at least we did in Maryville, TN--if we have an election for the class president everyone raises their hands and whoever gets the majority wins. That is the American way. That is the American way except it is not the way of the Senate from the beginning of our country. We had a Frenchman who wandered through this country in the 1830s, a young man called de Tocqueville. He wrote a book called ``Democracy In America,'' which is still the finest exposition of our democracy that we have because it was an outsider's look at us. He saw two great dangers to the United States at the time. One was Russia. He was prescient about that. But the second was what he called the tyranny of the majority--that in a great, big, complicated country like this that somehow the majority, in its passions and suddenness and enthusiasm, would run over the minorities. Somehow he must have known we would be a nation filled with minorities; that we would be almost a minority nation, and somehow those minorities needed protection. What has happened over all those years is that the Senate has stood, as Senator Byrd used to say, as the necessary fence that protected minorities in America from the tyranny of the majority. That is why we have a Senate, so if a freight train runs through the House it cannot run through here. It has to slow down and stop and we have to think about it. That is why we have a tradition in the Senate of unlimited amendment and unlimited debate on any subject until 60 of us decide that is enough--which is what we are about to do with the Defense authorization bill. We have had, under the leadership of Senator McCain and Senator Levin, the chairman--and I give Senator Reid great credit for this as well--I think it is 90 amendments that have been dealt with. We will have a cloture vote tomorrow. It will probably pass. I will vote for it. That means it is time to end the debate, time to limit the discussion and come to a conclusion. That is the way the Senate is supposed to work. Here is an image of the difference between the House and the Senate. Most of us know of the work of Robert Caro, who has written the book on Lyndon Johnson. When I first came to the Senate 10 years ago I read that first chapter in Caro's book, the chapter called ``The Desks Of The Senate.'' I imagine the Presiding Officer has had a chance to read that as well. I still say to new Senators or anybody else interested in this body, if they really want to understand the Senate, read Robert Caro's chapter ``The Desks Of The Senate.'' He talked about all these desks and how after an election--just as they will this time--they move two from over here to over there because Democrats won a couple of seats, and that is the way this works. This is the image of the Senate where everybody is equal, and it takes 60 to get a result. The idea is unlimited debate and consideration to protect the minority. It also reminds us that the people who are out of the majority right now may not be out tomorrow. What is the image of the House? The image of the House is that all legislation goes to the House Rules Committee. I have been there. David Dreier took me there. He is the chairman of the House Rules Committee. It is an ornate office. Every piece of legislation in the House has to go through the Rules Committee. Republicans have a narrow majority in the House of Representatives but, guess what, the composition of the Rules Committee is eight Republicans, four Democrats. What if the Democrats gained a one-vote majority in the House? Eight Democrats and four Republicans. What would happen is any piece of legislation the majority wants to push would run through the House like a freight train. That is not what the U.S. Senate is about. That is why Senator Dodd, in his farewell address, said to those who have never been the minority in the Senate, please be careful before changing these filibuster rules. In January, we will have 30 Democratic Members of the U.S. Senate who have never been in the minority. They have not had a chance to experience what some of us have had a chance to experience. While I have not been in the Senate all that long by Senate standards--I have been here 10 years--I have watched the Senate for a long time. I first came here in 1967 as a legislative aide to Howard Baker. Everett Dirksen was the Republican leader and Mike Mansfield was the Democratic leader. The Senate has never worked perfectly. Every majority and minority leader will say that. In the 1960s it was Senator Williams from Delaware who would object and slow down things. In the 1970s it was Senator Allen from Alabama. He would tie up the Senate in complete knots. Because of the individual rights a Senator has, it was just one Senator. In the 1980s it was Senator Metzenbaum. He held up my own nomination to be U.S. Education Secretary for 3 or 4 months, and there was nothing I could do about it. I thought that was very unfair, but it was part of this process whereby a Senator can slow down things. How do leaders respond to that? Well, in 2005 I was as angry as anyone about the Bush judges who were not getting an up-or-down vote, but I did not think it was right to break or change the rules of the U.S. Senate. I didn't want to turn the Senate into the House of Representatives. I made two speeches on the floor and suggested what became, in effect, the Gang of 14. I didn't participate in the gang because my colleague Senator Frist was the Republican leader, and out of respect to him I didn't want to undermine him. Fourteen Senators, including Senator Pryor and Senator McCain on this side, got together and said we cannot let this happen. They met and worked and agreed they would not change the rules and would not filibuster. So when that happened, that meant there could not be a change of the rules by the Republicans and there could not be a filibuster by the Democrats if these 14 Senators agreed with one another. They then created a compromise solution which is where we are today. There have been other ways that leaders have responded. During the Panama Canal debates in 1978 and 1979, I believe Senator Byrd and Senator Baker were the leaders. I believe Senator Byrd was the majority leader. The opponents of the Panama Canal--and this was a time when the Panama Canal was very unpopular with a lot of people. According to Senator Byrd, opponents centered their efforts of winning approval of killer amendments. We all know what those are. I believe one of the main reasons the majority leader does not like bills to come to the floor is because he thinks some of the amendments offered by the minority are going to be unpleasant for Democrats, or even Republicans, to vote for. Well, my feeling about that is: Why would you join the Grand Ole Opry if you don't want to sing? We come here to debate, amend, and vote. Here is what Senator Byrd said: Opponents centered their efforts on winning approval of killer amendments. I made it clear that only the leadership amendments and certain clarifying reservations and understandings would be acceptable. Opponents attempted to circumvent this strategy by offering amendments that were phrased in such a way that Senators would find them difficult to turn down. At first glance many of the amendments seemed innocuous and pro- American. Had they succeeded, however, they would have effectively killed the treaty--this is Senator Byrd. In all 145 amendments, 26 reservations, 18 understandings, 3 declarations--for a total of 192 changes--were proposed. 88 of these were voted on. In the final analysis, nothing passed that was not acceptable to the joint leadership. In other words, the joint leadership sat up there, let everybody vote, let them ventilate, have their say, do their job, and then they defeated them. They either tabled their amendment or they beat them. That is what they were able to do. That is very different from way we are operating today, and that is the way I respectfully suggest we should operate. In the 1980s--and I mentioned it was never perfect--during the Byrd- Baker era, basically the leaders would put a bill on the floor. If it was a bill like the one we are currently considering--the Defense authorization bill--and it had the support of the chairman and ranking minority member, they would simply open the bill for amendments. They might get 300 amendments. They would then ask for unanimous consent to close off amendments and, of course, they would get it because if anybody objected, they would tell them to throw their amendment in there and then they would start voting.