Lamar Alexander

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, all of us watched the President's remarks last night. It is rare for a President to make a speech from the Oval Office. President Reagan did it with the Challenger tragedy. President George W. Bush, spoke about 9/11. I thought the President was right to focus on what the government is doing to clean up the oil spill, and what we are doing to help those who are hurt. I think he missed an opportunity, though, in terms of looking to the energy future. He mentioned the climate bill. Of course that is House passed cap- and-trade bill which doesn't have enough support to pass the Senate. He mentioned windmills and solar panels, which have nothing to do with reducing our dependence on foreign oil. I thought the missed opportunity was the President could have announced a mini-Manhattan Project to reduce our dependence on foreign oil by electrifying half our cars and trucks, which we could do without building any new powerplants by plugging them in at night. The President is in favor of that. Secretary Chu is a leader in it. In a bipartisan way we support that goal. All 41 Republican Senators support electrifying our cars and trucks. Senator Dorgan, Senator Merkley, and I support legislation for that. He could have talked about that. A second part of the clean energy future could have been creating the environment to build 100 new nuclear power plants. The President has taken some impressive steps to create a better environment for nuclear power. All 41 Republican Senators support that. That would be for clean electricity, not for fuel, but it would be a clean energy future. Third, the President could have focused on mini-Manhattan Projects for energy research and development, such as reducing the cost of solar power by a factor of 4; recapturing carbon from coal plants; trying to invent a 500-mile battery, which would have made sure that we electrify a significant part of our cars and trucks in America; recycling used nuclear fuel; and biofuels--all 41 Republican Senators support the goal of doubling energy research and development. So does the President. So those are three steps toward clean energy independence that we agree on. He mentioned windmills and solar panels, which have nothing to do with reducing our dependence on foreign oil--those are for electricity, not fuel. They are puny amounts of electricity, in any event. If he would stick with the things that we and he agree on, he could have used that speech for an important step forward for our country. In that sense, I think it was a missed opportunity. This past weekend the President sent a letter to Congress urging us to approve $50 billion in emergency aid to State and local governments. I want to speak about that today from the vantage point I have as a former Governor and former U.S. Secretary of Education. According to the Wall Street Journal on Monday, the letter said budget cuts at State and local levels were leading to massive layoffs of teachers, policemen, and firefighters. The two points I want to make are that, No. 1, we here in Washington--I tried not to, but the majority did--created this financial cliff over which the States are about to run. And, No. 2, when it comes to the question of $23 billion for teachers, I think we need to ask, where is the money going to go? And from whose schoolchildren are we going to borrow it? Because right now we do not have extra money lying around in Washington, DC. We have a great big problem with spending and debt. Let me start with what I said first, which is that we in Washington have created this financial cliff over which State Governors are running. As we were debating the health care bill I said, not really in jest, that everybody who votes for it ought to be forced to go home and serve as Governor of their State under the new rules. Take Tennessee, for example. We were very fortunate that our State was one of the two winners in the Race to the Top education plan. Give credit to the Governor and teachers in the State. Tennessee will get a half billion dollars as a result of it. Yet, according to our Governor, the health care bill will take away more than twice as much during the same period of time by imposing $1.1 billion in new Medicaid costs on the State between 2014 and 2019. So we are causing problems for the State that caused the layoffs. Let me not ask you to take my word for it. Here is a January op-ed from the Wall Street Journal by the Democratic Lieutenant Governor of New York, Mr. Ravitch, who says the Federal stimulus, which Congress passed at the beginning of 2009: . . . has provided significant budget relief to the states. . . . He approved of that. but this relief is temporary and makes it harder for States to cut expenditures. In major areas such as transportation, education and health care, stimulus funds come with strings attached. These strings prevent States from substituting federal money for state funds, require states to spend minimum amounts of their own funds, and prevent states from tightening eligibility standards for benefits. Lieutenant Governor Ravitch goes on to say: Because of these requirements, states, instead of cutting spending in transportation, education and health care, have been forced to keep most of their expenditures at previous levels. . . . We did that. Congress did that. . . . and use federal funds only as supplements. The net result is this: The federal stimulus has led States to increase overall spending in these core areas, which in effect has only raised the height of the cliff from which state spending will fall if stimulus funds evaporate. That is the Lieutenant Governor of New York talking about the evaporation of stimulus funds which comes at the end of this year and he is saying we made it harder for States to pay their bills. At the time the stimulus package was passed, everyone said it was one-time funding. All of us knew that Medicaid costs were overwhelming the States. Still, Congress went ahead--the majority, in any event--and increased the federal match for Medicaid, and required States not to change eligibility requirements. Thus they created this financial cliff at the end of the year which will cause the States' share for Medicaid spending to increase from an average of 34 percent to 43 percent, a net increase of $39 billion in costs for 2011. We are getting close to the $50 billion we are being asked to bail States out for. Let me say a word about teacher salaries. The first question is, where is the rest of the money going to go? The request, as it has been talked about, says this will save 100,000, maybe 300,000 teacher jobs. We are supposed to appropriate $23 billion for that purpose. At $100,000 that works out to about $230,000 per teacher job saved. If we are saving 300,000 teacher jobs with that $23 billion, that works out to $76,667 per teacher job saved. The average national teacher's salary is $46,752. Where does the rest of the money go? At the beginning of this administration there was a huge increase in education funds; $97 billion over 2 years for elementary and secondary education and $53.6 billion for the State Fiscal Stabilization fund. We were assured this was one-time funding. In April 2009, the Department of Education itself said in its guidance to the States on how to spend the money: The [funds are] expected to be a one-time infusion of substantial new resources. These funds should be invested in ways that do not result in unsustainable continuing commitments after the funding expires. What we could have said is, we don't have any more money either, States. We just print it up here. So don't expect us to send you anymore. The U.S. Department of Education helpfully suggested what some of those one-time expenditures might be--making improvements in teacher effectiveness; establishing pre-K-to-college-and-career data systems; making progress toward rigorous college- and career-ready standards; providing targeted, selective support; and effective interventions for the lowest performing schools. In other words, the States and schools were told: Don't spend this money on continuing programs. Spend it once. Our Governor, a Democratic Governor in Tennessee, got the message. Governor Bredesen said in his State of the Union Address in 2009: Please let me make it clear that no proposed version of the stimulus is any panacea or silver bullet; substantial cuts are still needed under any circumstances. Furthermore, it is vital to remember that this stimulus money is one-time funding.

Mr. ALEXANDER

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

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, could you please let me know when I have consumed 10 minutes.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I thank the Senator from Florida for his comments. All of us are deeply concerned about his State, the coast, and those others on the gulf coast. I know he is working hard to see that the Federal Government makes the appropriate response. Tonight the President of the United States speaks to the Nation from the Oval Office about the oil spill. The oil spill is in its 57th day. I would like, with respect, to suggest what I hope the President does not do tonight and what I hope he does do, because the entire Nation's attention is focused on this tragic spill, the consequences for the people in the gulf, the consequences for the people of this country, and the consequences for our energy and economic future. What I hope the President does not do tonight, No. 1, is use the oil spill as an excuse to pass a national energy tax, collecting hundreds of billions of dollars from Americans and driving jobs overseas looking for cheap energy. The so-called cap-and-trade national energy tax is not appropriate here because it has nothing to do with cleaning up this oil spill. Not only does it drive jobs overseas, it also does not work when applied to fuel. We have had plenty of testimony before the Environment and Public Works Committee. It would simply raise the gasoline tax but it is not going to change behavior enough to reduce the amount of gasoline consumed or carbon emitted. Finally, when applied to utilities, is premature because we have not yet found ways to recapture carbon from coal plants cost effectively or in a way that would enable coal plants to make money from the carbon rather than raising the price of everybody's electric bill. So, No. 1, I hope the President stays focused and does not follow the advice of the White House Chief of Staff, who has been so often quoted: Never let a crisis go to waste. This is a crisis, but do not try to mislead the American people into thinking the cure for the oil spill is a new national energy tax that drives jobs overseas looking for cheap energy. No. 2, I would hope the President--while helping us figure out what to do about the oil spill and making sure it never happens again--does not destroy the rest of the gulf coast economy in the meantime. The Senators from Louisiana, Ms. Landrieu and Mr. Vitter, have both spoken eloquently on behalf of the livelihoods of so many in that area. We do not stop flying after a terrible airplane accident, and we are not going to stop offshore drilling after a tragic spill such as this one. What we need to do is to find out why it happened and to make sure it does not happen again. Thirty percent of the oil and twenty-five percent of the natural gas we produce in the United States comes from thousands of wells in the Gulf of Mexico. If we were to shut them down, natural gas prices, home heating prices, and gasoline prices, all would skyrocket, and we would rely more on tankers from overseas that have a worse safety record than the offshore oil drillers. No. 3, I hope the President will not recommend, as the current legislation pending in the Senate does, that we spend taxes collected for the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund on something other than cleaning up oil spills. Let me say that again. I think Americans might be looking at Washington and wondering: What is this? You mean to say I am paying a higher gasoline tax, in effect, to go into a fund to clean up oil spills and the Congress is thinking about spending that money on something other than cleaning up oil spills? The answer is exactly right. The proposal that is on the floor before the Senate today would raise from 8 cents to 41 cents the per-barrel fee on oil that is supposed to be used to clean up oil spills and spend it on more government. So that is another thing I hope the President does not do tonight. I hope he remembers it is called the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund. If we want to re-earn the trust of the American people, we would spend the oil spill cleanup money on cleaning up oil spills. Finally, I hope the President does not pretend that renewable electricity has anything to do with reducing our dependence on foreign oil. Already, I see the ads for the windmills that the big corporations are putting out. But let's think about renewable electricity for a minute. We are talking about oil in the gulf. We use oil for transportation, not to create electricity. Renewable electricity--wind, solar, and biomass--creates electricity, which we do not need more of for transportation because there is so much unused power at night. So a clean energy program that is a national windmill policy or a national solar energy policy or national biomass policy may be useful for the country in some ways, but it has nothing to do with reducing our dependence on foreign oil. I will say more in a minute on how we can do that. But let me stop for a minute, if I may, to back up what I said. Solar energy, for example, is two-hundredths of 1 percent of the electricity we produce in the United States. We all hope someday we can reduce its cost by a factor of four and put it on rooftops as an intermittent supplement to our electricity needs. It has great potential for that. But the better way to spend money is on research and development to reduce its cost, not to pretend that somehow solar panels have anything to do with cleaning up the oil spill or reducing oil consumption. Biomass, which is sort of a controlled bonfire, has the potential to help clean up our forests and generate electricity. We have in the forests of Tennessee, New Hampshire, and other places dead trees from the pine beetle or from other disease. Cleaning them up and burning them to create electricity is a good idea, and there is biomass is also an important source of energy for our industrial sector as well. But the idea of cutting down and burning trees to create large amounts of electricity is a preposterous idea in the United States. As an example, one would have to continuously forest an area one-and- a-half times the size of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park in order to produce enough electricity to equal one nuclear reactor. And in foresting an area one-and-a-half times the size of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, you would have hundreds of trucks every day running up and down the mountain, belching out fumes, carrying the wood to a place to burn it. Finally, wind, which has become the ``pet rock'' of the 21st century energy policies. Wind can also be a useful supplement in our country. But it is important to know that it only produces 1.8 percent of our electricity, and wind turbines have nothing to do with reducing our country's dependence on oil. In addition, there are many other more efficient ways to produce clean, carbon-free electricity. For example, I just mentioned that wind produces 1.8 percent of all of our electricity and about 6 percent of our carbon-free electricity. Nuclear power produces 20 percent of all of our electricity and 70 percent of our carbon-free, pollution-free electricity. To produce the 20 percent of our electricity that comes from about 100 nuclear reactors today would require 186,000 of these 50-story wind turbines covering an area the size of West Virginia. The Tennessee Valley Authority, in the region where I live says that it can depend on wind to be there when it needs it 12 percent of the time because, of course, you can only use it when the wind blows. This compares to the dependability of nuclear to be there 91 percent of the time when it is needed. Then we have all seen and heard the awful stories of the pelicans immersed in oil. Well, that is not the only form of energy that causes a problem with birds. The American Bird Conservancy says the 25,000 wind turbines we have today can kill up to 275,000 birds a year, and one wind farm in California killed 79 Golden Eagles in one year. So the point is, we need renewable energy. We need to advance it. We hope solar becomes cost competitive. Biomass can be useful. So can wind power. But it has nothing to do with reducing our dependence on foreign oil. Now what do I hope the President does say tonight. Well, No. 1, I hope the President stays focused on cleaning up the oil spill--cleaning up the oil spill and taking care of those who have been harmed. We need a plan to fix the problem. We need accountability in the regulation of energy production. We need to ask the question, Where is the President's plan? Where are the people and the equipment necessary to implement the President's plan to clean up an oil spill? This is not the first time we have had such a spill. After the Exxon Valdez tanker spill--that was different, but it was still a big spill of oil--the country was convulsed by that, and Congress acted and passed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. It said the President shall ensure that he has a plan to clean up a worst-case oil spill and have the people and equipment to do it. Effectively, the President has delegated that job to the spiller. Perhaps President Bush would have done the same. Perhaps President Clinton would have done the same. But if the only option the President has is to delegate the law to the spiller, perhaps he should amend his plan or we should change the law. We should discuss that, and perhaps the President will make a recommendation on that. But tonight the first thing is: Clean up the oil. Get the job done. Plug the hole. No. 2, help people who are hurt. I come from a State where we have just had a thousand-year flood event, where we have had $2 billion of damage in Nashville alone, and the flood damage went all the way to Memphis. We know what that kind of pain is, and people are busy helping each other and cleaning up and not looting and not complaining. But we feel deeply for the people on the gulf coast and we want to help them. We would like to help make sure BP pays for the cleanup and damages as they have promised. We would like to help raise the limits on liability and address the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund. Congress might consider the nuclear energy model of insurance for the future because that model gets all of the nuclear companies involved in, No. 1, making the nuclear reactors safe, and in, No. 2, addressing any sort of accident they had. I wish to see a similar sort of insurance fund for the oil well companies so you do not have just BP involved in cleaning it up, but you have every other oil company interested also in providing the technology, the expertise, the help and the advice to do the job. The third and final thing I hope the President does is chart a way for our clean energy future. I have heard a lot about that on the other side of the aisle, and there is a great deal of bipartisan cooperation in this area. Let me be specific. For fuel, I hope the President will renew his support for electric cars and trucks. Republican Senators-- all 41 of us--have said we support the idea of electrifying half our cars and trucks. That is a very ambitious goal for our country. But we can do it. It is the single best way to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. If we were to electrify half our cars and trucks--which would take a while--we could reduce our dependence on oil by perhaps one-third. But we would still be using 12 million barrels of oil a day. Senator Dorgan and I and Senator Merkley have introduced bipartisan legislation to create a better environment for electric cars and trucks in America. The President has strongly urged this idea, and Secretary Chu has worked hard to create support for batteries and for cars. There is room for bipartisan agreement on the single best way to reduce our dependence on oil, and that would be by encouraging electric cars and trucks; electrifying half of them. No. 2, for electricity, the single best way to produce clean electricity is nuclear power. One hundred nuclear reactors produce 20 percent of our power, but 70 percent, as I said, of all of our carbon- free electricity. Senator Webb and I have introduced legislation to create an environment in which we can build 100 more nuclear reactors. We do not need these reactors in order to have electric cars and trucks. The Brookings Institution and Obama administration officials have said we do not need to build one new powerplant in order to electrify half our cars and trucks because we have so much extra electricity at night. If we plug them in when we sleep we can have electric cars and trucks and would need no new windmills, no new nuclear plants, no new coal plants for that purpose. But if we need new green electricity, the best source for it is nuclear powerplants. They are the most useful. They are the most reliable, and they do the least damage to the environment. The number of deaths due to nuclear accidents at American commercial U.S. nuclear powerplants is zero. The number of deaths due to nuclear accidents in the Navy nuclear fleet is zero. There is a system of accountability, and as a result, a very good record. So it is electric cars and trucks for fuel, nuclear power for electricity. The President has been very good in the last few months on nuclear power. He has appointed strong members to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He has appointed strong members to a commission to deal with used nuclear fuel. He has done a good job of beginning to get the loan guarantees going for the first new plants. So electric cars and trucks and nuclear power are areas where we should be able to work in a bipartisan way in the future. The third area is on energy research and development. The President has recommended and the Congress has approved more money for energy research and development. Republicans support doubling our energy research and development for a clean energy future. That would mean projects such as reducing the cost of solar power to one-fourth of today's cost. That would mean recapturing carbon from coal plants. It would mean developing a 500-mile battery, which would almost guarantee the electrification of half our cars and trucks over time. It would mean intensive research to find ways to recycle used nuclear fuel in a way that does not isolate plutonium. It would also mean research for making clean biofuels from crops we do not eat. Making great advances in solar, carbon recapture, electric batteries, nuclear recycling, and biofuels would be the third important part of our energy future. While we are at it, Congress should pass the clean air bill Senator Carper and I have authored, and that 13 other Senators have cosponsored. It is cosponsored by eight Democrats, six Republicans, and one Independent. While we are figuring out what to do about carbon, we can go ahead and do what we know how to do, which is reduce pollution from mercury, sulphur, and nitrogen from our coal plants to improve our air quality, reduce health care costs, and save lives. So there are many things I hope the President will talk about to have bipartisan support: fuel, electric cars and trucks, electricity, nuclear plants, energy R&D, solar, carbon recapture, batteries, nuclear, clean fuels, and finally, the clean air bill Senator Carper and I and others support. This is an important time for our country. It is a time when we deserve bipartisan action. It is a time when we deserve to look to the future. It is a time when we need to focus on cleaning up the spill, helping the people who are hurt, planning for a future, and doing it in a realistic and bipartisan way. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record an op-ed I wrote and which was published in the Wall Street Journal on Friday and an address I gave yesterday in Knoxville to a group of scientists entitled ``Nuclear Power is Green.''

Mr. ALEXANDER. Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Senator from Arizona for his leadership and for his thoughtful comments on the health care law. We fought those battles last year. We won the argument but lost the vote. That is not so good for the country, as our country is now finding out. I am one of those 40 million Americans who are eligible for Medicare, who received that brochure in the mail last week. I spoke about it yesterday. I found it very disingenuous and misleading and unfortunate. (The remarks of Mr. Alexander pertaining to the introduction of S. 3470 are located in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, on behalf of Senator Corker and myself, I rise to introduce the Tennessee Wilderness Act of 2010. The legislation will implement an important next step in conservation for some of the wildest, most beautiful and pristine areas in east Tennessee near where I live. To say that these are among the wildest, most pristine and beautiful areas sets a very high bar since the region is home to the Appalachian Mountains, and our Nation's most visited national park, a World Heritage site--in fact, one of the most visited sites in the world--the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, much of which is managed as if it were a wilderness area. From growing up in these mountains and my many years of hiking the quiet trails of the Cherokee National Forest, I can attest that the wilderness areas we protected there are something very special. Congress began protecting wilderness areas in the Cherokee National Forest in 1975, with additional wilderness areas being established by the Tennessee Wilderness Act of 1984 and the Tennessee Wilderness Act of 1986. I was Governor of Tennessee during that time. I remember testifying on behalf of and strongly supporting our congressional delegation as we did that. I know sometimes our western friends are surprised to see Tennessee Republicans advocating wilderness, bragging about the fact that the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is managed in large extent as if it were a wilderness area and adding certain sections of the Cherokee National Forest to wilderness. The Federal Government doesn't own very much of our land, but we have lots of visitors. Two or three times as many people visited the Great Smokies as visit Yellowstone. We have lots of visitors but very little Federal land. We like to protect it. We like to have clean air. We like to enjoy it ourselves. We like the Cherokee National Forest because it gives us an opportunity to do some things we can't do in the national park. We can hunt, fish, ride horses, camp, do things in a great many ways. I believe this legislation, the Tennessee Wilderness Act of 2010, will create for Tennessee families and especially Tennessee youngsters, who need to be outdoors and away from the computer screens and television screens, an even more attractive opportunity to enjoy this beautiful part of our natural heritage. I emphasize that the lands that will be designated as wilderness by this legislation are already Federal lands. They are part of the Cherokee National Forest. The areas covered were recommended for wilderness by the U.S. Forest Service in the development of its comprehensive 2004 forest plan which included extensive opportunities for public comment. Those areas have been managed as if they were wilderness areas since that time. This new bill will officially designate as wilderness nearly 20,000 acres as recommended by the Forest Service. The bill establishes one new wilderness area, the 9,038 acre Upper Bald River Wilderness in Monroe County. This new area complements the existing Bald River Gorge Wilderness. It lies just south of that existing area, separated only by the Bald River Road, which will, of course, remain an open public road. By protecting the Upper Bald River Wilderness as well as the existing wilderness area, we will be protecting most of the Bald River watershed. Excellent trails traverse the Upper Bald River area, including the Benton MacKaye Trail, offering excellent hiking, backpacking, and horseback riding, as well as access for hunters and fishermen. The rest of the lands designated as wilderness in this legislation are relatively small but important additions to some of the areas Congress established in 1975, 1984 and 1986. They have the effect of better protecting not only ecosystems and watersheds but also the diverse recreational value of these areas. At the southern end of the Cherokee National Forest is one of the largest national forest wilderness complexes in the Southeastern United States. It comprises the Cohutta Wilderness, most of which lies in Georgia, and the Big Frog Wilderness in Polk County, TN. The new legislation makes a small but important addition of 348 acres to the Big Frog Wilderness. The Big Frog-Cohutta combination, with adjacent primitive areas, creates the largest track of wilderness on national forest lands in the Eastern United States. In the same way, the new legislation makes two small but important additions to the Little Frog Mountain Wilderness, also in Polk County. These additions, totaling 966 acres, were recommended by the Forest Service to give more logical boundaries to the Little Frog Mountain Wilderness and protect the corridor for the Benton MacKaye Trail. In upper east Tennessee, in Unicoi and Washington Counties, this new legislation would add 2,922 acres to the Sampson Mountain Wilderness. This is at the heart of a marvelous scenic region of our State. Along these scenic trails, visitors can see flame azalea, mountain laurel, rhododendron, trailing arbutus, crested dwarf iris, mayapple, bloodroot, toothwort, magnolia, dogwood, redbud, and many other flowering plants, shrubs, and trees. The last 2 or 3 months have been the time of year to visit that area with its many species of shrubs and trees. The 1986 Tennessee Wilderness Act established the Big Laurel Branch Wilderness in Carter and Johnson Counties at the furthest upper east Tennessee end of our State. The new legislation proposes to add 4,446 acres, including some 4.5 miles of the Appalachian National Scenic Trail. The addition lies along the slopes of Iron Mountain just north of Watauga Lake, one of the cleanest lakes in America. The final element of the new legislation is an important addition to the Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Wilderness. Here visitors will find perhaps the most impressive stands of virgin eastern forest in the United States. The 1,836-acre addition includes remnant old-growth forest. The Benton MacKaye Trail passes through this area, making it a popular destination for horseback riders and hikers. This is a simple bill, but it will make a significant contribution for these wild and pristine areas of the Cherokee National Forest. I thank and salute the Cherokee National Forest staff and the many citizens of Tennessee who worked to define these proposals and to build grassroots support. These proposals have broad support from outdoors clubs, trail maintenance groups, local businesses, and conservation organizations. I specifically want to thank Will Skelton, a Knoxville lawyer who has been instrumental in conservation for decades in Tennessee. No one has done more to help more families appreciate, enjoy, and hike in the Cherokee National Forest than has Will Skelton. I thank the Tennessee Wild group for their role in this proposal. Getting out in the woods and mountains of east Tennessee is an ever more popular activity. People go to the wilderness to experience nature most wild, walking a trail to some resting place where the noises are trees creaking, the smells are of wet moss and leaves, the colors are pure, and the world is at peace. That is why these protected wilderness areas have such immense value for our people, and it is why the value will multiply many times as our world grows more crowded. The foundational statute under which we protect the wilderness areas is the 1964 Wilderness Act. The Congress of that time showed extraordinary prescience about the threats that destroy wilderness: In order to assure that an increasing population, accompanied by expanding settlement and growing mechanization, does not occupy and modify all areas of the United States and its possessions, leaving no lands designated for preservation and protection in their natural condition, it is hereby declared to be the policy of the Congress to secure for the American people of present and future generations the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness. We need more opportunities for young Americans to get away from the computer screens and into the American outdoors. Eastern Tennessee provides a beautiful place to do that, and this act will provide more opportunities for that as well. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill and support material be printed in the Record.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, on behalf of Senator Corker and myself, I rise to introduce the Tennessee Wilderness Act of 2010. The legislation will implement an important next step in conservation for some of the wildest, most beautiful and pristine areas in east Tennessee near where I live. To say that these are among the wildest, most pristine and beautiful areas sets a very high bar since the region is home to the Appalachian Mountains, and our Nation's most visited national park, a World Heritage site--in fact, one of the most visited sites in the world--the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, much of which is managed as if it were a wilderness area. From growing up in these mountains and my many years of hiking the quiet trails of the Cherokee National Forest, I can attest that the wilderness areas we protected there are something very special. Congress began protecting wilderness areas in the Cherokee National Forest in 1975, with additional wilderness areas being established by the Tennessee Wilderness Act of 1984 and the Tennessee Wilderness Act of 1986. I was Governor of Tennessee during that time. I remember testifying on behalf of and strongly supporting our congressional delegation as we did that. I know sometimes our western friends are surprised to see Tennessee Republicans advocating wilderness, bragging about the fact that the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is managed in large extent as if it were a wilderness area and adding certain sections of the Cherokee National Forest to wilderness. The Federal Government doesn't own very much of our land, but we have lots of visitors. Two or three times as many people visited the Great Smokies as visit Yellowstone. We have lots of visitors but very little Federal land. We like to protect it. We like to have clean air. We like to enjoy it ourselves. We like the Cherokee National Forest because it gives us an opportunity to do some things we can't do in the national park. We can hunt, fish, ride horses, camp, do things in a great many ways. I believe this legislation, the Tennessee Wilderness Act of 2010, will create for Tennessee families and especially Tennessee youngsters, who need to be outdoors and away from the computer screens and television screens, an even more attractive opportunity to enjoy this beautiful part of our natural heritage. I emphasize that the lands that will be designated as wilderness by this legislation are already Federal lands. They are part of the Cherokee National Forest. The areas covered were recommended for wilderness by the U.S. Forest Service in the development of its comprehensive 2004 forest plan which included extensive opportunities for public comment. Those areas have been managed as if they were wilderness areas since that time. This new bill will officially designate as wilderness nearly 20,000 acres as recommended by the Forest Service. The bill establishes one new wilderness area, the 9,038 acre Upper Bald River Wilderness in Monroe County. This new area complements the existing Bald River Gorge Wilderness. It lies just south of that existing area, separated only by the Bald River Road, which will, of course, remain an open public road. By protecting the Upper Bald River Wilderness as well as the existing wilderness area, we will be protecting most of the Bald River watershed. Excellent trails traverse the Upper Bald River area, including the Benton MacKaye Trail, offering excellent hiking, backpacking, and horseback riding, as well as access for hunters and fishermen. The rest of the lands designated as wilderness in this legislation are relatively small but important additions to some of the areas Congress established in 1975, 1984 and 1986. They have the effect of better protecting not only ecosystems and watersheds but also the diverse recreational value of these areas. At the southern end of the Cherokee National Forest is one of the largest national forest wilderness complexes in the Southeastern United States. It comprises the Cohutta Wilderness, most of which lies in Georgia, and the Big Frog Wilderness in Polk County, TN. The new legislation makes a small but important addition of 348 acres to the Big Frog Wilderness. The Big Frog-Cohutta combination, with adjacent primitive areas, creates the largest track of wilderness on national forest lands in the Eastern United States. In the same way, the new legislation makes two small but important additions to the Little Frog Mountain Wilderness, also in Polk County. These additions, totaling 966 acres, were recommended by the Forest Service to give more logical boundaries to the Little Frog Mountain Wilderness and protect the corridor for the Benton MacKaye Trail. In upper east Tennessee, in Unicoi and Washington Counties, this new legislation would add 2,922 acres to the Sampson Mountain Wilderness. This is at the heart of a marvelous scenic region of our State. Along these scenic trails, visitors can see flame azalea, mountain laurel, rhododendron, trailing arbutus, crested dwarf iris, mayapple, bloodroot, toothwort, magnolia, dogwood, redbud, and many other flowering plants, shrubs, and trees. The last 2 or 3 months have been the time of year to visit that area with its many species of shrubs and trees. The 1986 Tennessee Wilderness Act established the Big Laurel Branch Wilderness in Carter and Johnson Counties at the furthest upper east Tennessee end of our State. The new legislation proposes to add 4,446 acres, including some 4.5 miles of the Appalachian National Scenic Trail. The addition lies along the slopes of Iron Mountain just north of Watauga Lake, one of the cleanest lakes in America. The final element of the new legislation is an important addition to the Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Wilderness. Here visitors will find perhaps the most impressive stands of virgin eastern forest in the United States. The 1,836-acre addition includes remnant old-growth forest. The Benton MacKaye Trail passes through this area, making it a popular destination for horseback riders and hikers. This is a simple bill, but it will make a significant contribution for these wild and pristine areas of the Cherokee National Forest. I thank and salute the Cherokee National Forest staff and the many citizens of Tennessee who worked to define these proposals and to build grassroots support. These proposals have broad support from outdoors clubs, trail maintenance groups, local businesses, and conservation organizations. I specifically want to thank Will Skelton, a Knoxville lawyer who has been instrumental in conservation for decades in Tennessee. No one has done more to help more families appreciate, enjoy, and hike in the Cherokee National Forest than has Will Skelton. I thank the Tennessee Wild group for their role in this proposal. Getting out in the woods and mountains of east Tennessee is an ever more popular activity. People go to the wilderness to experience nature most wild, walking a trail to some resting place where the noises are trees creaking, the smells are of wet moss and leaves, the colors are pure, and the world is at peace. That is why these protected wilderness areas have such immense value for our people, and it is why the value will multiply many times as our world grows more crowded. The foundational statute under which we protect the wilderness areas is the 1964 Wilderness Act. The Congress of that time showed extraordinary prescience about the threats that destroy wilderness: In order to assure that an increasing population, accompanied by expanding settlement and growing mechanization, does not occupy and modify all areas of the United States and its possessions, leaving no lands designated for preservation and protection in their natural condition, it is hereby declared to be the policy of the Congress to secure for the American people of present and future generations the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness. We need more opportunities for young Americans to get away from the computer screens and into the American outdoors. Eastern Tennessee provides a beautiful place to do that, and this act will provide more opportunities for that as well. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill and support material be printed in the Record.

Mr. ALEXANDER

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

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I get a fair amount of mail. I received the other day a nice envelope from the Department of Health and Human Services addressed to Andrew L. Alexander, Jr., in my Nashville residence, with a nice brochure here: Medicare and the New Health Care Law; What It Means to You. I am one of those 40 million Americans who is 65 or older, so I am a part of Medicare. I was very interested to read the brochure, because I spent a lot of time, as did the Senator from New Hampshire, and the Senator from Montana probably spent even more, on the new health care law. As I read through this brochure, it did not bear very much relationship to the way I understood the law I voted on Christmas Eve at the end of last year when we passed this health care law. This brochure, which has been mailed at taxpayer expense to more than 40 million Americans, is an attempt by the administration to explain that the health care law does what it does not do or does not do what it does. Let me be specific about why I say that. Throughout the debate, those of us on the Republican side of the aisle said the health care law would cut Medicare, raise premiums, raise taxes, pass Medicaid costs on to States, and add to our national debt. Those on the other side said we were wrong. Since they had the votes, they passed the bill. It is now law. But let me take two or three examples from the mail I got the other day. The brochure claims, in the first paragraph, that the new health care law will result in ``increased quality health care.'' Well, that would mean, to me, I would think, as I read that, that I, an individual on Medicare, or that any individual in the United States, would continue to have at least the coverage I am having today and hopefully more. Yet Medicare's own Chief Actuary noted in an April 22 memorandum that without intervening legislation to correct a payment cut in the new law, some providers would ``end their participation in the program''-- that is Medicare--with the effect of ``possibly jeopardizing access for beneficiaries.'' It looks to me if you want to be accurate in writing 40 million Americans about what is happening with Medicare, you would add that in there and say there is another view by the Chief Actuary of Medicare in the Obama administration. The Chief Actuary also concluded that 15 percent of Part A providers--we mean by that hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, hospices, home health agencies--may be unable to sustain their operation in the next 10 years as a result of drastic Medicare cuts in the new law. That does not sound like ``increased quality health care'' to me. No. 2, the second paragraph of the brochure says: The new health care law will keep Medicare strong and solvent. Here is the truth, at least as we see it. The $529 billion in cuts to Medicare--no one disputes that we have those--are being used to pay for a $1 trillion--when fully implemented over 10 years--health care bill, not to shore up Medicare. According to the same people who put out this brochure, the CMS Chief Actuary, you cannot double-count the Medicare cuts as both paying for expanding the health care delivery system and increasing the solvency of the program. I mean, common sense says if you take $529 billion out of Medicare over the first 10 years, or $1 trillion out of Medicare over 10 years, when it is fully implemented, and you spend almost all of that on something other than Medicare, that is not the way to make Medicare more solvent, even if it is a new Medicare Program. Any savings from Medicare, we believe, ought to be spent on Medicare, rather than running up the fiscal deficit in Medicare. No. 3, on the second page, the brochure says if you are in a Medicare Advantage plan, you will still receive guaranteed Medicare benefits. This is one of the most disingenuous comments in the brochure. If you read that and are one of the more than 11 million people on Medicare Advantage, you would think: My Medicare Advantage must be OK. The truth is, Medicare Advantage plans will have less generous benefit packages, according to the CMS, the group that puts this out, according to the Chief Actuary. He says it will result in less generous benefit packages. The Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf testified that fully half the benefits currently provided to seniors under Medicare Advantage would disappear under the proposal in the earlier bills offered by the Senator from Montana, which were virtually the same as this bill. Here is the difference. They will come back and say: But we said ``guaranteed benefits.'' They would be right about that. But guaranteed Medicare benefits are what everybody has. If one wants Medicare Advantage, which they pay a little more for to cover dental, vision, and hearing, or other extra benefits, that is why they buy Medicare Advantage. The truth is, the Medicare cuts in the health care law will limit plan choices and reduce benefits for almost 11 million seniors enrolled in Medicare Advantage on those extra benefits. That is relatively one-fourth of all seniors in Medicare, and there are 40 million of us in Medicare. In my State of Tennessee, there are nearly a quarter of a million on Medicare Advantage who will lose those benefits. So it is not true--or at least it is disingenuous--that benefits will not change. Guaranteed benefits won't, but extra benefits likely will. Finally, it says the new law preserves and strengthens Medicare. That is also disingenuous, because the new law does not include paying doctors who serve Medicare patients proper compensation. We call this the sustainable growth rate, the SGR. Some people call it the doc-fix. One would think a comprehensive health care law would include proper compensation for doctors who serve Medicare patients, but it does not. Why? It would have, according to the President's budget, added $371 billion to the cost of the bill and made it add to the debt, which we said it would. So what did we do instead? We simply passed a health care law, the majority did, and claimed it doesn't add to the debt, expand the health care delivery system--which we all know costs too much already--and went on our way. And we still have with us the big cut in payments to doctors which will increasingly create, for those on Medicare, a sort of health care bridge to nowhere or to the emergency room, as we find Americans who are on the big government programs, Medicare and Medicaid, unable, in the case of Medicaid or Medicare, to find doctors who are willing to serve them at the lower rates and, in the case of those who go to Walgreens in Washington State, a drugstore company that won't fill present description drugs for Medicaid patients because of the low rates. I am disappointed that the administration, in its effort to make the health care law sound better, would send out what amounts to propaganda. There is a Federal law against propaganda. It says annual appropriations can't be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States. I know a little about that. When I was Education Secretary in 1991 and 1992, I sent out what I thought was a very carefully written article to teachers about President Bush's, the first, education program, and the Democrats in Congress hauled me up before the committee and had the General Accounting Office investigate me and castigated me for putting out publicity and propaganda in violation of the law. Some House Members have written the General Accounting Office and said this violates the law. I don't know whether it violates the law, but it doesn't tell the truth in the way we Medicare beneficiaries deserve to have the truth told to us about what the health care law does. I am disappointed in it. I hope the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services will be more accurate in the future and present a more balanced characterization of the law. I am sure during the rest of this year there will be a great many Americans who will take a closer look at the law and agree with Republicans who said no to this because it will raise premiums, raise taxes, and it will send new costs to States and will cut Medicare. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I congratulate the Senator from Arizona. There is no one more thoughtful on finance matters and job creation than he. He has made a very important point. It was a well- intentioned effort by the administration to say: We have an economic recession so we need to stimulate the economy through some government spending. There were proposals on the Republican side to do that to a much lesser extent. But what has happened is, as the Senator has pointed out, the focus has been much too heavily on creating more government jobs, when what we need is an environment for job growth in the private sector. In fact, as the Senator from Arizona pointed out, the actions the government has taken over the last year during this great recession too often make it harder to create jobs in the private sector. The health care bill taxes job creators and investors. Those are the ones who create the jobs. The stimulus package runs up the debt. The higher the debt goes, the more money it sucks out of the system, and the harder it is to get money and to create jobs. The financial regulation bill makes credit harder to get on Main Street, as we now see it going through the Congress. If you can't get credit, you can't create a job. Jobs are at the front of everyone's mind. Our friend, the former Governor from Virginia, is here. He knows this very well. The Governor of Tennessee, Phil Bredesen, said the other day that in my State, if he had 100 conversations, 95 would be about jobs. I agree. But clearly a fundamental difference of opinion we seem to have in the Senate is our focus on creating an environment for job growth in the private sector. The Democratic focus seems to me to be much more focused on creating more government jobs. That is not working. Because if the economy continues to grow for the rest of the year at approximately the rate it has grown for the first part of the year, we will end the year with 10 percent unemployment. As we all know, that burden falls most heavily on lower income Americans.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I rise to speak on what I call an oilspill response for grownups. The tragic gulf oilspill has produced overreaction, demagoguery, and bad policy. I would cite ``Obama's Katrina, end offshore drilling, produce 20 percent of our electricity from windmills'' as three examples of overreaction, demagoguery, and bad policy. None of these options helps clean up and move forward a country using 25 percent of the world's energy, as the United States does year-in and year-out. If we Americans want both clean energy and a high standard of living, then here are 10 steps for thoughtful grownups: No. 1, figure out what went wrong and make it unlikely to happen again. We do not stop flying after a terrible airplane crash, and we are not going to stop drilling offshore after this terrible spill. Thirty percent of U.S. oil production and 25 percent of our natural gas production come from thousands of active wells in the Gulf of Mexico. Without it, gasoline prices would skyrocket, and we would depend more on tankers from the Middle East with worse safety records than American offshore drillers. No. 2, learn a safety lesson from the U.S. nuclear industry. That lesson is accountability. For 60 years, reactors on U.S. Navy ships have operated without killing one sailor. Why? The career of a ship's commander can be ended by one mistake. Incidentally, the number of deaths from nuclear accidents at U.S. commercial reactors is also zero. No. 3, what was the President's cleanup plan and where were the people and equipment to implement it? In 1990, after the Exxon Valdez spill, a new law passed by Congress required that the President ``ensure'' the cleanup of a spill and have the people and equipment to do it. That is what the law has said since 1990. President Obama effectively delegated this job to the spiller, BP. Is that the President's only real option today? If so, what should future Presidents have on hand for backup if the spiller of oil cannot perform? No. 4, put back on the table more onshore resources for oil and natural gas. Drilling in a few thousand acres along the edge of the 19 million-acre Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and at other onshore locations would produce vast oil supplies. A spill on land could be contained much more easily than 1 mile deep in water. No. 5, electrify half our cars and trucks. This is an ambitious goal, but it is the single best way to reduce U.S. oil consumption. Electrifying half our cars and trucks could cut our oil consumption by about one-third, to about 13 million barrels of petroleum product a day. A Brookings Institution study says we can electrify half our cars and trucks without building one single new powerplant if we plug in our cars at night. Last week, Senator Dorgan, Senator Merkley, and I introduced legislation to jump-start America's effort to electrify half our cars and trucks. This is a subject about which Republicans and Democrats in the Senate agree. No. 6, invest in energy research and development. This is another subject about which Republicans and Democrats in the Senate agree. A cost-competitive 500-mile battery would virtually guarantee eventual electrification of half our cars and trucks. While we are at it, reducing the cost of solar power by a factor of 4 would be a good response to a clean energy challenge, as would finding a way for utilities to actually make money from the CO2 their coal plants produce. No. 7, stop pretending wind power has anything to do with reducing America's dependence on oil. Windmills generate electricity, not transportation fuel. Wind has become the energy pet rock of the 21st century, as well as a taxpayer ripoff. According to the Energy Information Administration, wind produces only 1.3 percent of U.S. electricity but receives Federal taxpayer subsidies 25 times as much per megawatt hour as subsidies for all other forms of electricity production combined. Wind can be a useful energy supplement, but it has nothing to do with ending our dependence on oil. No. 8, if we need more green electricity, build nuclear plants. This is another subject upon which Republicans and Democrats agree. The 100 commercial nuclear plants we already have produce 70 percent of our pollution-free, carbon-free electricity. Yet the United States has not broken ground on a new reactor in 30 years, while China starts one every 3 months and France is 80 percent nuclear. We would not put our nuclear navy in mothballs if we were going to war. We should not put our nuclear plants in mothballs if we want low-cost, reliable green energy. Finally, Nos. 9 and 10. No. 9, focus on conservation. In the region where I live, the Tennessee Valley Authority could close four of its dirtiest coal plants if we residents of the TVA region reduced our per capita use of electricity just to the national average. No. 10, make sure liability limits are appropriate for spill damage. The Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, funded by a per-barrel fee on industry, should be adjusted to pay for cleanup and to compensate those hurt by spills. An industry insurance program like that of the nuclear industry is also an attractive model to consider. So I offer this afternoon these 10 grownup steps--grownup steps forward that could help turn a tragic event into a stronger America. I thank the Acting President pro tempore and yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the chairman and vice chairman for their commitment and the assistance they have already extended to my State in this bill.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the chairman and the vice chairman for their comments and their work on this bill, particularly the assistance they have worked to provide to my state. As my colleagues know, the amount of property damage in Tennessee may be more than $10 billion and is the worst natural disaster since President Obama has been in office. While the funding in this bill is important and significant for Tennessee and Rhode Island, it represents only the beginning of what is needed in my state, and I ask for the chairman and vice chairman's continuing support for additional funding for recovery efforts in Tennessee.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, the worst natural disaster since the President took office was the recent flooding in Tennessee. There are 13,000 painters, plumbers, carpenters in Nashville alone, who have 11,000 structures to work on. They will get fined up to $37,500 a day if they disturb six square feet of lead paint in a home unless they get this certificate, and there are only three EPA trainers in the entire State of Tennessee to train them. This is making it harder and more expensive for people to get their homes fixed after the flood. Senator Collins has a reasonable amendment to give them until September to get their certification. Earlier today my colleague on the Environment and Public Works Committee, Senator Boxer, said that the EPA had granted a waiver to Tennessee because of the President's disaster declaration for 45 counties. Well that is true. However, the waiver means that if your basement was flooded--and there was lead paint--then you could bulldoze the house but not repair the basement. That's not the kind of relief we were looking for in Tennessee. Thank you, Mr. President, and I urge my colleagues to support the amendment.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, with all of the recent talk of earmarks, I want to share an op-ed that I wrote for the Nashville Tennessean and appeared in that paper on May 19 about the importance of asking Congress to fund Tennessee projects. Following is the text of that article: In 2007, the Corps of Engineers told me that two big flood control dams on the Cumberland River system were near failure. I asked for and Congress approved $120 million to begin repairing Center Hill and Wolf Creek Dams. During the recent flood, these repairs kept water levels higher behind these dams, which in turn kept millions of gallons out of the Cumberland River. According to the Corps, if Wolf Creek Dam had failed, flooding in Nashville would have been 4 feet higher. My $120 million appropriation request was called an ``earmark.'' Here is another ``earmark.'' In 2003, 40 Clarksville community leaders visited me in Washington. They and the commander of the 101st Airborne, GEN David Petraeus, wanted new housing for soldiers returning from Iraq. This was their top priority, but the money was not in President George W. Bush's budget. Over 3 years, I asked for $196 million. Congress approved. By 2007, when the most-deployed troops in America came home, new housing was ready. Some say abolishing such earmarks will help solve Washington's out-of-control spending. I say this is a hoax, for two reasons: 1. Abolishing earmarks doesn't reduce the Federal debt one penny. If I ask for a Tennessee project and Congress approves, other spending in the budget is reduced by an equal amount. This debate over earmarks is a sideshow. The main show is the Democratic budget that would double the Federal debt in 5 years and triple it in 10. The way to control Federal spending is, first, to limit growth of discretionary spending to 2 percent a year--40 percent of the budget--and, second, to slow down automatic entitlement spending--most of the rest of the budget. Earmarks total 1 percent of all spending--and, again, earmarks add zero to total spending. 2. Under article I of the U.S. Constitution, only Congress--not the President--appropriates funds. When Tennesseans come to see me about making Center Hill and Wolf Creek Dams safe or improving housing at Fort Campbell, my job is not to give them President Obama's telephone number. Some appropriations are vital. Then, you might ask, why all the fuss? Because some Members of Congress have abused earmarks. Some ask for silly ones. Some ask for too many. Two were convicted of taking campaign contributions in exchange for recommending projects. Perhaps a senator is more likely to vote for a bill that includes his or her appropriations amendment--but this can be said about any amendment to any bill. My view is that if you have a couple of bad acts on the Grand Ole Opry, you don't cancel the Opry, you cancel the acts. That is why some Congressmen lose elections and some are in jail. That is why Congress ended middle-of-the-night earmarks and even required its Members to attest that appropriations do not benefit them or their families. That is why 2 years ago I voted for a 1-year moratorium on earmarks to encourage more reforms. Now I am cosponsoring Senator Tom Coburn's legislation to put all earmarks on one Web site to make them easier to find. Tennessee projects already are on my Web site. Some specific appropriations are vital to our State, and to our country. The Human Genome Project was an earmark. The Manhattan Project that won World War II was an earmark. It might be easier for me to say, ``OK, no more earmarks.'' Then I wouldn't have to explain them in articles like this. But how would I explain to Clarksvillians why soldiers returning from Iraq didn't get new housing or to Nashvillians why the water was 4 feet higher during the flood? Make no mistake: If I had not asked, there would not have been enough Federal money for that housing or to repair those dams. Just last week, the President asked for specific appropriations for the gulf coast oilspill, but not for flooding in 52 Tennessee counties. I did ask, and the Senate Committee approved. I did not want Washington to overlook the worst natural disaster since the president took office just because Tennesseans are cleaning up and helping one another instead of complaining and looting. Sometimes the job I was elected to do includes asking Congress to fund worthwhile Tennessee projects.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, about a year ago, the United Arab Emirates decided to secure its energy future. The Emirates is a small Persian Gulf state that is awash in oil and annually rakes in about $80 billion in oil revenues. For its own domestic energy needs, however, it opted to go with another technology--nuclear power. Its reasoning was that the oil in the ground will eventually run out and that it would be best to conserve and prepare for that day. The Emirates specified they wanted to build four nuclear reactors and estimated the costs at around $40 billion. Sure enough, the bids soon started coming in from the world's leading nuclear vendors. There was Areva, the company born out of France's nuclear effort--they now get 80 percent of their electricity from nuclear and are building one of their new Evolutionary Power Reactors in Finland. There was Westinghouse, which is building its new AP1000 reactors in Japan and China. You may recognize the name. They were once, along with General Electric, America's leading electrical manufacturer. Now they are a Japanese company, bought by Toshiba in 2006. While these two giants dueled, a third competitor entered the field. South Korea only started building its own nuclear reactors in 1996. Before that they bought from the U.S. and the Japanese. But then they took an old design from Combustion Engineering, another American company, and fashioned the APR-1400. After building a few for themselves they entered the world market. Meanwhile, in the Persian Gulf oil business, the Koreans had established a reputation for getting things done on budget and on time. Still, it was a complete shock last October when the United Arab Emirates passed over bids from the world's two leading companies, Areva and Westinghouse, and awarded the contract to South Korea for $20 billion--half the original estimated price. The French and the Japanese have gone back to the drawing boards to figure out what went wrong so they will be better able to compete next time. How did the Koreans come so far so fast? People will talk about ``cheap labor,'' ``government enterprise'' and ``copycat technology.'' But I have another hypothesis. Year after year, Korean students are at the top of world performance in math and science while the United States doesn't even rank in the top 10. In the Program for International Student Assessment's math test for 15-year-old students, for instance, South Korea ranks third, behind Finland and Taiwan, while the United States ranks 21st. They are 75 points ahead of us on a scale of 1,000. We have been hearing about these statistics for decades--maybe we have even grown used to them--but now we are starting to see the consequences. We are a country that is falling behind the rest of the world in science literacy. In terms of energy, the rest of the world is currently going through a nuclear renaissance while we are barely able to construct new reactors in our own country. Part of our population still thinks a nuclear reactor is an atomic bomb that can go up in a mushroom cloud any minute. A larger number believes that if we cover the Great Smoky Mountains with windmills we could generate all the electricity we need without having to build either nuclear reactors or coal plants. I call this ``Going to War in Sailboats.'' That is the title of a book I have just written. If we were to go to war tomorrow, would we put our fleet of nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers in mothballs and commission a fleet of sailing vessels? Four years ago Senator Jeff Bingaman and I asked the National Academies: What are the top 10 actions, in priority order, that federal policymakers could take to enhance the science and technology enterprise so that the United States can successfully compete, prosper, and be secure in the global community of the 21st century? What strategy, with several concrete steps, could be used to implement each of those actions? The Academies responded quickly to that request by assembling a distinguished panel, headed by Norman R. Augustine that quickly produced a list of 20 recommendations along with strategies in the report, ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm.'' That report was issued 3 years ago. I think its message is even more immediate today. In response to the Gathering Storm report, Congress enacted and the President signed the America COMPETES Act in 2007, incorporating many of the Academies' recommendations and establishing a blueprint for maintaining America's competitive position. In the COMPETES Act we authorized funding to improve education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. We increased funding for scientific and technological research. And we established ARPA-E--modeled on the Defense Department's Advanced Research Project Agency, the one that started the Internet--but aimed this time specifically at advanced research projects on energy. Just 2 months ago I attended ARPA-E's Inaugural Energy Innovation Summit, at which more than 50 innovators from around the country presented the prototypes of what we hope will be the next generation of energy innovation. Some of these ideas are truly exciting. We saw designs for a ``Metal- Air'' battery that could have a 1000-mile range that would be 10 times what our best car batteries can get today. We saw plans for converting waste gas from refineries to gasoline that could save us 46 million barrels of oil each year. We saw projects for using sunlight and electricity to convert carbon dioxide back to gasoline and a ``self- digesting'' biofuels plant that uses enzymes to convert cellulose plant material to a gasoline substitute. But there are still other areas where we must forge ahead. What about these new small modular reactors? Companies like Toshiba, Babcock & Wilcox, and Hyperion all have plans for reactors that are so small they can serve as ``nuclear batteries.'' They are assembled at the factory and shipped to the site, where they are fitted together like Lego blocks. They have a lower cost of entry which is important for smaller utilities. We already have reactors like this aboard our submarines and aircraft carriers. We have done this for more than 50 years. Why not put a 125-megawatt reactor back in Oak Ridge, TN, where it would power the entire site and meet one-half of the Department of Energy's carbon footprint reduction goal? The people of East Tennessee are not afraid of nuclear power. With Senator James Webb of Virginia I have introduced a clean energy bill that calls for building 100 new nuclear reactors in the next 20 years to secure our energy future while cutting our carbon emissions and keeping energy prices low. With Senators Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota I have introduced a bill that would set up 10 model communities around the country to develop the infrastructure needed to support electric cars. Forty Republican Senators support the proposition of electrifying half our cars and trucks as a way to reduce our carbon footprint even further and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. The recent tragedy of the oilspill in the gulf has only highlighted the need to begin this effort. Still, we have a formidable task ahead of us. In 2008, 1 year after passage of the America COMPETES Act, Norman Augustine wrote an article in Science Magazine. Since The Gathering Storm had been published, he noted, many new developments had occurred in science and education. A new research university was established in Saudi Arabia, with an opening endowment equal to what the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had amassed after 142 years. 200,000 Chinese students were studying abroad, mostly pursing science or engineering degrees, often under government scholarships. Government investment in R&D increased by 25 percent--in the United Kingdom. An initiative was under way to create a global nanotechnology hub--in India. An additional $10 billion was being devoted to K-12 education, with emphasis on math and science--in Brazil. Another $3 billion was added to the nation's research budget--in Russia. So it is still a competitive world out there. A study done far back in the 1950s determined that 85 percent of the per capita income growth in American history has occurred, not because of increasing capital stock or other measurable inputs, but because of technological innovation. As educators and scientists, I know you are aware of how important your work is to America's economic future. And I am sure you are ready to join us in this effort.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Maine, and I see the Senator from Mississippi here. I would be remiss if I did not thank him and the chairman of the committee for including within the supplemental appropriations bill several provisions that will make it easier for the people of Tennessee, the important one being $5.1 billion in money for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. That helps everybody who has had a disaster. FEMA is out of money. That account is dry. Whether it is a flood in Iowa, a drought in Oregon, a river in Georgia, a flood in Tennessee, or what is happening in the gulf coast today in Mississippi, that account needs to be furnished. But there are other provisions in the supplemental appropriations bill. The President didn't ask for these, but he mentioned that in his visit with us yesterday in the Republican caucus. He mentioned the flooding in Tennessee, which I appreciate. I should also say that the FEMA representatives who have come to Tennessee since the flood have done a first-class job. As of last week, about $100 million had already been delivered to more than 30,000 Tennesseans who have been damaged by the flood. This has happened in just 10 days. The very experienced director of FEMA for Tennessee, Gracia Szczech, said she had her breath taken away by the amount of damage and the number of individuals affected and how rapidly it has gone out. Tennesseans understand that Federal money is not going to make anybody whole. We are going to have to rebuild our own homes and our own buildings. But the actions of the supplemental appropriations bill will help. Most impressive, though, as I have mentioned--and I appreciate the Senator from Maine saying something about it--is the spirit and attitude of Tennesseans. In Clarksville, where Fort Campbell is--the most deployed troops in America--they got a day off. They do not have many days off. Five hundred of them went out and cleaned up three neighborhoods in Clarksville, Montgomery County. I visited the Bellevue Community Center in Nashville, and it was terrific to see so many volunteers walking in and asking to help. Whole congregations in Tennessee--a 1,500-person congregation--went en masse to help other counties and other neighborhoods. I would say to the Senator from Mississippi, during the Katrina episode a few years ago, our church, the Westminster Presbyterian Church, sent dozens and dozens of Tennesseans down to help out at the gulf coast. Well, now our church is the headquarters for many Mississippians and others who are returning to Tennessee to return the favor and help Tennesseans get back on their feet. This is going to be a long, several-year recovery for us, but this supplemental appropriations bill will help, just as it will help disasters all over the country. It would be another big help if the EPA did not make it worse. That means stepping back to take a look and realizing that we have maybe 50,000 contractors who would need to be certified to work on up to 750,000 buildings in Tennessee. Many of them are flooded; many of them are not flooded. But we cannot get all that done in the next few days, and people cannot afford $37,500 fines for a violation. Most Tennesseans do not want to pay a few thousand more dollars to fix their flooded basement or their flooded house. The repairmen and contractors and painters need the work. The construction industry that has about a 22-percent unemployment rate right now--that is more than twice what the overall unemployment rate is nationwide. So the EPA rule needs to adjust the implementation or execution in some sensible way so we can endorse the lead paint rule, but we can do it in a way that does not seriously disadvantage Tennesseans damaged by the flood. The Collins amendment deserves the support of the Senate, and I am glad to have the opportunity to add my support to her efforts.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I was not on the floor when the Senator from Maine made her remarks about the EPA's lead paint rule, but she and I have discussed it numerous times, and I wanted to congratulate her for her leadership and persistence on seeing the impracticality of what the Environmental Protection Agency is trying to do. She discussed this in the Appropriations Committee, she has discussed this with Senator Feinstein, the Chairman of the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, and with me--I am the ranking member on the Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior--and as more of us paid attention to what Senator Collins was saying, we found a significant problem in our own States. Of course, the lead paint rule is a good idea. The idea is that for structures that were built before 1978--they mostly have lead paint-- any work done by a repairman or contractor or painter that disturbs 6 square feet of lead paint must be done by someone who knows how to do it safely. This is especially important to children under 6 and to pregnant women. So we want to do that. But in the State of Tennessee, it is a special problem to impose and enforce this new rule requiring contractors to be certified where we have just had severe flooding in our State that affects 52 counties, from Nashville to Memphis. This is the single largest natural disaster since President Obama took office. People who hear me say that, say: Well, Senator Alexander, haven't you heard about the gulf oilspill? Yes, I have heard about that, but that wasn't a natural disaster. The biggest natural disaster we have had since President Obama took office is the flood in Tennessee, affecting 52 counties. One of the reasons you haven't heard as much about it is because a lot of other things have been going on in the world, including the gulf oilspill, but another reason you have isn't because Tennesseans are busy cleaning up and helping each other and not complaining and looting, so it doesn't make a lot of news. But the mayor of Nashville says there is $2 billion of damage just in that city alone. There was water 10 feet high in the huge Opryland Hotel, where 1,500 people had to be rescued and taken to a high school gym. There was 2 feet of water on the Opryland stage. There are 11,000 structures in Nashville alone which have to be repaired as a result of the flood. So I think you can see where I am going, Mr. President. This isn't just a problem in certifying these EPA inspectors in ordinary times. We have 11,000 structures in Nashville, 900 in Millington, 300 in Dyersburg--maybe it is the reverse, but those are 2 other small towns and counties. People are going into their basements, they are taking down drywall, they are repairing their air- conditioning, they are repainting, they are cleaning up and getting back on their feet. This is a special problem because we only have 3 EPA trainers to certify up to 50,000 contractors who might have to be working on these homes. In fact, we have over three-quarters of a million structures in Tennessee--that is, 750,000--which are homes or childcare centers or schools or other buildings that were built before 1978 that would be covered by this rule. So having a good rule is one thing; having a thoroughly impractical application and implementation period is another. And then to do it in the middle of a flood which is the largest natural disaster since President Obama took office is tone-deaf to reality. So I have asked the EPA to delay the implementation and enforcement of its rule until September if a contractor registers for a training class. I am a cosponsor of Senator Collins' amendment, and I think it is very important that the Environmental Protection Agency hear what Senators from all around the country are saying, especially in our State of Tennessee where we have thousands of repairmen, painters, and workmen who need to go to work on tens of thousands of homes, and we don't want to have a risk where they may have to pay a fine of $37,500 for each violation. There are a lot of them who don't make $37,500 in a year. We are not talking about Wall Street financiers here; we are talking about workmen, repairmen, and painters who are helping people dig out after a huge natural disaster. So Senator Collins has not only done the State of Maine a service by her persistence, intelligence, and leadership on this issue, but she has done a service for every citizen in the State of Tennessee in 52 counties who have been damaged by the severe flooding of the year 2010. So I thank her for her leadership and say to her that I am proud to be a cosponsor of her amendment, and I pledge to her--insofar as I am able as the ranking member of the Appropriations Interior Subcommittee--to work with other Senators on both sides of the aisle to try to get some commonsense implementation plan for this lead paint rule--a good rule, a bad plan. Thousands of people are going to find that they can't repair their homes or that if they do, it will cost them thousands of dollars more because the repairmen they need to work on their homes can't get certified by the EPA because there are only three trainers in the whole State of Tennessee to do the job. I thank the Presiding Officer, and I yield the floor.

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

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, as the U.S. Ambassador to Japan Mike Mansfield once said, ``the U.S.-Japan relationship is the most important bilateral relationship in the world, bar none.'' About a month ago, China Daily ran an article in which they compared the United States' nuclear program to Rip Van Winkle, the legendary American folk hero who fell asleep for 20 years after a night of carousing with Henry Hudson's men in the Catskill Mountains. ``A thunder from China has woken up Uncle Sam, like Rip Van Winkle, from a 20-year nap, to a different world,'' boasted the China Daily article. ``This world is in the midst of a Green Revolution. It is the biggest sea change since the Industrial Revolution, and Uncle Sam has slept too long to take the lead in this new movement.'' I am not sure that this is really the case, but the point in well taken. Out of fear and mistrust, and after a few bad accidents, the U.S. 30 years ago decided to put aside construction of new nuclear powerplants. Our domestic nuclear industry still kept plodding along, learning to operate the plants we had more efficiently and trying to sell new plants abroad. But overall we atrophied. Our nuclear construction capabilities withered while other countries' capabilities flourished. And so here we are, 30 years later, with a much smaller nuclear industry that is missing critical parts, like the ability to manufacture the largest components. Meanwhile the rest of the world kept moving forward. And recently, we have started seeing something new--the entrance into the nuclear market by countries that are considered low-cost manufacturers, like China and South Korea. When China recently bought Westinghouse AP1000 reactors from Toshiba, they insisted on getting all the engineering specifications as well. It is no secret what they are planning. They are going to reverse-engineer the reactor and come up with their own design. In another 5 years, don't be surprised to see the Chinese marketing their own reactors around the world. Also look what Korea has accomplished. Before 1996 they only built imported reactors in Korea, from companies like Westinghouse and Areva. Then they took an old design from Combustion Engineering, an American company, and came up with the APR1400. Last year the Koreans shocked the world by beating out Areva and Westinghouse for a $20 billion contract to build four new reactors in the United Arab Emirates. What is going to happen when China enters this market? I suspect in 20 years the Chinese will be selling nuclear reactors in Wal-Mart. Now there are two ways of looking at this. One is to say this is a world of cutthroat competition and that if China wins then Japan and the United States and everyone else must lose as well. That is one interpretation. But the other way to look at it is to say we are all improving each other's game and that all this competition helps turn us all into better players. And that is where international competition helps. If other countries start making progress in a technology, we soon realize we had better emulate them. We saw this with the auto industry. There was a time when America's big three--Ford, Chrysler and General Motors seemed invincible in a way nothing could ever change. Each year they competed to see who could put the biggest tailfins on their new models and nobody ever gave a thought to quality control or gas mileage or whether the car would fall apart after 50,000 miles. Then these strange new companies named Toyota and Datsun and Honda started to enter the market. Their cars weren't all that stylish but they were small and efficient, got good gas mileage, and ran like tops. You didn't have to ``fix or repair daily,'' as they used to say about Ford products. And some people bought them. But they still didn't rival the big American manufacturers. Then the oil crisis arrived and all of a sudden those cars that could get 30 miles to the gallon started to look awfully good. Well, you know the rest of the story. Toyota recently passed General Motors as the largest car company in the world. GM is in Federal receivership. Half the cars sold in America are made by foreign companies. But of course the traffic flows the other way as well. Nissan will be building its new all-electric Leaf in my home state of Tennessee and we are very happy to have them as a good corporate neighbor. There is a certain irony to all this as well. A lot of the concern for maintaining quality that made Toyota and Honda and Nissan such great companies came from a man named W. Edwards Deming, a college professor who developed a lot of ideas in the 1950s about maintaining quality in manufactured products. Deming never attracted much attention in this country but he found a receptive audience in Japan. This led to the tremendous emphasis on quality that made Toyota and other car companies such a huge success. It wasn't until NBC ran a documentary in 1980 entitled ``If Japan Can, Why Can't We?'' that Americans became aware of what Deming had done for Japanese manufacturing. One of the first American companies to turn to him for advice was Ford Motors. That is one of the reasons why Ford has now gone from the old ``Fix or Repair Daily'' to become what is arguably America's strongest auto competitor. So we have taught each other a lot about auto manufacturing. Now what can we learn from each other about nuclear power? Well, the first thing to note, I think, is that while China gets 2 percent of its electricity from nuclear and America gets 20 percent, Japan gets 30 percent. In terms of shifting to nuclear, Japan is ahead of us. At the same time, the U.S. still leads all countries with 104 operating commercial reactors, one-fourth the world's total. That great building spree from 1970 to 1990, when we constructed about 100 reactors in 20 years, still stands us in good stead. But it isn't going to last forever. There are now 55 reactors under construction around the world in 13 different countries, including one in Japan with four more likely to start. Meanwhile, American reactors are aging fast and we are just getting ready to break ground on our first new reactor in 30 years. By the way, I should mention that South Korea leads both our countries with 35 percent of its electricity from nuclear. One place where Americans can feel proud is the way we run our reactors. The entire industry now operates at 90 percent capacity. That means reactors are up and running more than 90 percent of the time. Many of them now go for almost 2 years without shutting down. And when they do shut down it is for refueling, which used to take 3 months and is now done in only 5 weeks. We have learned a lot about efficiency and quality control and getting things done on time. Japan runs its fleet at 75 percent capacity and France is just behind us at 85 percent. But that is a special case. The French are now the world's biggest net exporters of electricity and still have so much nuclear capacity that they often close down their reactors for the weekend. You know how much the French like their weekends. Once again, though, I have to note the Koreans are running their reactors at 95 percent, so we all have something to learn there. We have figured out how to run reactors efficiently and ultimately that means cheaper. We also run our reactors safely. Since the Three Mile Island Incident we have improved our safety record and reduced risk at our nuclear reactors. The American nuclear industry is proud to say that there has never been a death from a nuclear incident at an American reactor. We have learned that safe does not have to equal expensive. What about new technologies? Our Secretary of Energy, Stephen Chu, has recommended that the United States find a niche in mini-reactors, the so-called ``nuclear batteries.'' He's willing to concede that the Japanese and the French and the Koreans and possibly the Chinese will effectively compete against us for sales of large traditional reactors. But maybe we can specialize in these 25-to-300-megawatt reactors that can be assembled at the factory and shipped to the site where they are put together like Lego blocks. I think mini-reactors are a great idea. You could power a whole town of 20,000 people with something that could be buried 60 feet underground and refueled every 30 years. But I wonder how quickly we are going to be able to move into this market? It's taking us 5 years to get a design approval through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC has told one manufacturer they do not even have time to consider small reactors because they are so involved in looking at big ones. If there is real money to be made in the field of mini-reactors, won't other countries jump in well before we do? Toshiba already has a model they are offering to isolated Alaskan villages. The Russians have one they are barging into Siberian villages. We had better get going or we will be left behind there as well. One area in which nearly everyone seems to be progressing is fuel reprocessing. The United States gave up reprocessing in this country in the 1970s. In retrospect, I think that it was a mistake. We thought we were saving the world from nuclear proliferation. It was a noble experiment, but it wasn't very practical. We thought if we didn't isolate plutonium in this country nobody else would be able to figure out how to manufacture it and rogue nations wouldn't be able to acquire nuclear weapons. Well, North Korea has developed a nuclear weapon and they didn't do it by stealing American or someone else's--plutonium. They simply built their own reactor and manufactured weapons themselves. Iran is doing the same thing with enriched uranium. Nuclear technology is no secret anymore. Controlling nuclear proliferation is going to be a diplomatic task, not a technological one. While America has hung back from reprocessing, however, Japan and other countries have forged ahead. The Japanese have been burning excess plutonium in mixed oxide MOX fuel at several reactors. Now they have built the world's first reactor designed specifically to burn MOX fuel, at Hokkaido. The French do the reprocessing and the first boatload of MOX fuel just made it back to Japan from France without being hijacked by rowboats from Greenpeace. This is all plutonium that will never find its way into nuclear weapons. In the U.S., we have been turning swords into ploughshares. In an agreement struck in 1996 by Senators Sam Nunn, Pete Domenici and Richard Lugar, the United States has been purchasing enriched uranium from Soviet weapons stocks and blending it down for use in American nuclear reactors. Half our reactor fuel now comes from the program, meaning 1 out of every 10 lightbulbs in America is lit by a former Soviet weapon. Another place where America remains on the cutting edge is in basic research. We have designed generation III reactors, which are much more simplified and oriented toward safety. Now we are looking for a fourth generation of reactors that will make reprocessing much easier. One of the ideas on the drawing board is the ``Traveling Wave'' reactor, which will consume its own waste and burn for up to twenty years without refueling. America's favorite innovator, Bill Gates, has invested in a company that is exploring the Traveling Wave. If Bill Gates is embracing nuclear, I think it's safe to say America will soon be back in the game. But we need to continue our commitment to basic science research. We must rebuild our industrial capacity and continue producing a skilled workforce for the future. We need to start building new reactors in America and we need to bring the next generation of reactors to market to recognize the benefits of full-recycling. It all starts with learning from our experience and the experience of other nations like Japan. So these two nations as well as others--are prepared to move forward together in the great nuclear renaissance that is sweeping the world. Japan is on the cutting edge of reactor construction and reprocessing technology and I hope we will soon be able to join them by expanding our own nuclear fleet and adding our research capabilities. We have come a long, long way in 70 years since the closing day of World War II when scientists unlocked the energy buried at the heart of the atom. Nuclear power has since been used for threats, it has been used for destruction, and it has been used to frighten humanity into confronting the idea that we might be capable of destroying ourselves and the planet along with us. But I think right now we can safely say that these two nations are poised on the edge of an era of cooperation when we will turn the benefits of nuclear power to the greater good of all mankind.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, there is no bigger, no more heart- wrenching, no more inspiring story today than what happened in Nashville in the 48 hours on May 1 and 2, over that weekend, when 2 to 4 inches of rain were expected and up to 17 inches came. As a result of that--from the Opryland Hotel outside Nashville to the Millington naval station near Memphis--all across Tennessee there have been devastating floods. It is, according to the Weather Service, a 1,000-year rainfall event. I do not know how anybody knows what a 1,000-year rainfall event is-- that is a long time--but this was not a 20-year flood or a 100-year flood, this was a 1,000-year rainfall event that overtook the people of Tennessee. As a result, our Governor, Phil Bredesen, has asked the President to identify 52 counties--from the Nashville area to all the way across our State to the Mississippi River--as disaster areas. The President has responded swiftly. Forty-two of those 52 counties have been designated as disaster areas. Some people say to me: Well, there has not been so much news about this Tennessee flood. There are two reasons for it. One is, there has been a lot of other news. Greece has been collapsing. A bomber tried to blow up Times Square. There is turmoil over immigration in Arizona. There is the gulf oilspill which threatens to be the worst in history. But it is important for the American people to know the Tennessee flood last weekend is by far the largest disaster in our country since President Obama came into office, except for the oilspill in the Gulf of Mexico, and it may be that the Tennessee flood affects more people than what is happening in the Gulf of Mexico. The other reason we have not heard so much about it is this: Tennesseans have been busy cleaning up and helping each other instead of complaining and looting. So people are hurt. Thousands of people are hurt. But they are going about their business helping themselves and helping others in remarkable and inspiring ways. I have many images from over the last few days of the visits I have made in Tennessee: being at the Bellevue Community Center on Saturday morning, where there were dozens of volunteers in red T-shirts that were headed out in teams to help people in that area whose homes have been devastated; the image of 502 soldiers from Fort Campbell--those are the most deployed soldiers in America--yet the commanding officer gave them a day's leave, and 502 of them formed teams and cleaned up three neighborhoods in Clarksville-Montgomery County. I spent an hour that same day with Mayor Bowers and Congresswoman Blackburn and the team that is responding in Montgomery County, and it is an impressive response. I would say the same for Governor Bredesen of Tennessee and Mayor Dean of Nashville, whose metro services have worked overtime. This is true all the way across our State to Dyer County--badly hurt; thousands of people have homes damaged there--to the Navy's principal personnel and recruiting station at Millington, just outside Memphis, where the Secretary of the Navy saw personally, on Saturday, the damage that had been done there. According to the Tennessean, the American Red Cross had recorded more than 1,300 volunteers by Friday. Whole congregations, on Sunday, showed up en masse to help at places such as Cross Point Community Church, which had more than 1,600 members of the congregation on Saturday. Hands-On Nashville saw more than 5,100 volunteers log more than 19,000 hours to help out across the city by Saturday. Our own church, Westminster Presbyterian Church, in Nashville--we had a lot of people going down to help with Katrina and in Gulfport after those disasters--will be the center for people coming in to help the people in Tennessee. If you go through Nashville today--or other parts of Tennessee, all the way down to Memphis--you will see thousands of front yards littered with damage from the basements of homes. FEMA has been on the ground from the beginning, and I thank them for their prompt response. Unfortunately, we have worked with them before on tornadoes and other disasters, so they know Tennessee pretty well. By Saturday morning, 16,000 persons in Tennessee had registered with FEMA, and there had already been 750 inspections. I talked with the sheriff of Montgomery County Saturday night. He was flooded out, but he had been in touch with FEMA. He was already registered. He had arranged for his inspection. He was very well satisfied by that. Channel 4--Nashville television--had a telethon on Thursday night. Vince Gill and a group of stars raised $2 million in the Nashville area for the victims of the flood. Taylor Swift gave $500,000. Bud Adams of the Titans gave $400,000. So people in large and small ways are pouring out their hearts and their help and their money to help one another. As we look forward--this is not a time to complain. I did not hear anybody complain this past week. As I said before, maybe that is why there is not so much news about this. But as we look ahead, I want to make sure in the future we make sure we do the best possible job of handling floods, particularly that we have clear and correct information about the rising water, and that we communicate it as broadly as we should. We have learned how to do that with tornadoes. Using the media, we can tell you whether a tornado is coming across your house in 14 minutes in a remarkable set of cooperation between the National Weather Service and the media broadcasters. I have asked Chairman Boxer and Ranking Member Inhofe of our committee, the Environment and Public Works Committee, to look at perhaps holding a hearing on how well the Army Corps of Engineers and other Federal agencies and State agencies are delivering accurate, clear information to businesses and individuals who might be hurt by the rising water. This morning, I flew up to Nashville with a person from Sumner County who was trapped in a Chevrolet Blazer with her 12-year-old son and her husband and nearly killed except they were rescued by emergency services. Another person on the plane lives on a high hill near River Road, and the National Guard helicopters landed four times in her front yard to rescue 50 people who could not get out except in that way. I have talked with Colin Reed, who is the chief executive officer of the Opryland Hotel, who had to make an evacuation order. They evacuated 1,500 guests rather than risk what happened during Katrina because the water suddenly came into the Opryland Hotel--many people are familiar with that--and the water became 10 feet high. It is still several feet high there. So there is a lot of long-term damage, and I want to make sure we have clear and consistent information. I would have to add, I thank the Congress for approving my request over the last few years for additional funding to make two of the four dams on the Cumberland River safer. If they had not been made safer, their water levels would have been lower and tons more water would have poured into the Cumberland River, creating millions of more dollars of damages and perhaps taking lives. I am simply here this morning to say I am very proud of Tennessee, from Nashville to Memphis. There is no bigger, more heart-wrenching, more inspiring story than of these thousands of Tennesseans who have suffered a 1,000-year flood, thousands of whom have losses they understand will not be fully made whole. But they are busy--not looting, not complaining--they are cleaning up and they are helping one another. As the days go on, I will be meeting with Senator Inouye and Senator Cochran to make certain the Federal accounts that fund FEMA, economic development, the Community Development Block Grant, and other projects and accounts in the Federal Government that respond to natural disasters have enough money in them to meet the Federal part of the responsibility. But so far the President, his Cabinet, and others have been doing very well. The Governor of Tennessee and the mayors across our State have been doing extraordinarily well. But the people, who are the real heroines and heroes, are the men and women of Tennessee who have been hurt, or their neighbors who have been busy cleaning up and helping one another. I thank the Acting President pro tempore, and yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I congratulate the Senator from Alabama for his comments and for his proposal, which he described as a Republican proposal. Of course, what all of us hope is that it becomes a bipartisan proposal as our friends on the other side look carefully at it. That is what happened with the big bank bailout provision we worked on yesterday. Senator Dodd and Senator Shelby worked for a while, Senators Corker and Warner had worked before that, and we came up with a conclusion that all but five Senators agreed to. Now we have moved to address two of the other major deficiencies in the Dodd bill that we have wrapped up in one proposal here, and it is really wrapped up with the central issue that is before the American people. President Obama said in September of last year that the health care bill was a proxy for a larger issue about the role of government in Americans' lives. The President was exactly right about that, and we have seen the issue of government's role over and over again. I don't think it will change between now and the November election. In fact, the President said at our health care summit that is why we have elections, and I think he is correct about that. We have seen a Washington takeover of banks; we have seen a Washington takeover of car companies; we have seen a Washington takeover of many aspects of health care; we have seen a gratuitous Washington takeover of student loans. In this financial regulation bill, instead of dealing with the high jinks of big banks, we are going to take over Main Street lending and, on top of it, create a new czar or czarina to make decisions about millions of transactions across America that are on Main Street. So what Senator Shelby's proposal offers--and we hope it receives the same kind of bipartisan consideration that the resolution authority or the big bank bailout discussion did yesterday that we finally agreed on--is that we would like to change this bill in two ways. Republicans would like to say: Let's take Main Street lending out of it. The Senator from Connecticut, Mr. Dodd, said it is not in there. But the language makes it look as if it is in there. It looks like we're about to start regulating your daughter's dentist bill, the plumber, and the store owners up and down Main Street who give you flexible credit. In other words, if you say: You can pay me over time--it looks as if Congress is going to start regulating that transaction. That is going to make credit harder to get because the dentist or the plumber or the store owner is going to say: I'm not going to fool with it. I don't want to be regulated by some Washington bureau, so if you want to buy my goods, go to the bank and get some money or get another credit card. And you know what that is going to do? That's going to slow down the economy. That's going to make jobs harder to create because it is going to make credit harder to obtain and credit harder to offer. Making credit harder to get is not what we need at this time. We just had the reports of the economic growth of our country during the first quarter. It was 3.2 percent. That is not very good. I can vividly remember flying on a helicopter with President Bush when I was Education Secretary in 1992, and the economic growth of the third quarter of the year was better than that; it was 4.2 percent. And Bill Clinton beat George Bush, Sr., on the ``It's the Economy, Stupid'' campaign. So 3.2 percent is not going to cut it for our country. Most economists say that if our economy continues to grow over the next year, through 2010, at the same rate it grew in the first quarter, the unemployment rate will not change. The unemployment rate will still be about 9 or 10 percent at the end of this year, as it is today. What can we do to change that? Well, we have to create an environment for job growth. We have done pretty good in creating job growth in Washington. The one place the stimulus has really worked is in Washington, DC. Salaries are up. Jobs are up. There are plenty of new jobs around here. But out across America, we are not creating enough new jobs, and too many of the things we are doing here make it harder to create new jobs. The health care bill makes it harder to create new jobs because it imposes taxes on job creators and it imposes taxes on investors. Tax increases make it harder to create new jobs. Running up the debt--the President's budget doubled the debt in 5 years and tripled it in 10 years--makes the economy less certain and it makes it harder to create new jobs. And the threat of creating a czar or czarina in Washington, DC, and a new bureau to supervise and make Main Street lending more difficult and expensive makes it harder to create new jobs. We should take it out of the bill. If the Senator from Connecticut, who is one of our finest Senators, and is well intentioned, wants Main Street lending out of the bill, let's just take it out of the bill. Let's don't leave in there the possibility that someone might come along and interpret ``significantly'' involved financial activities to include the plumber and the dentist. This has attracted the attention of a lot of people from Tennessee: community bankers, credit unions, and the National Federation of Independent Businesses. They are talking about office suppliers, jewelers, health professionals, and furniture stores who are all concerned with this bill. The NFIB estimates that about 50 percent of small businesses let you pay over time. In other words, they offer you credit. They make special arrangements. They say: OK, we know you don't have all of the cash right now. You might not want to run up your credit card or maybe your credit card is near the limit, so we will sell you whatever we have to sell you or we will provide the service you need. You can pay us in 6 months. You can pay us in 5 months. Well, under this bill, if you offer payment plans you could be ``significantly'' involved in financial activities. Then this czar or czarina in Washington, DC, is going to be regulating you. You might be a very small business and you might not have a lot of extra money to fill out regulatory forms, but you are going to be filling out forms and suffering more regulations. And you are going to be offering less credit and credit will be harder to get up and down Main Street. If our real intention in this body on both sides of the aisle is to not interfere with Main Street lending, then let's actually do that. That is what the Republican amendment--which we hope becomes a bipartisan--does. Then there is the second big idea that is in this Republican amendment. So far as I am concerned--we don't need another czar. This bill is supposed to be about big banks, about financial high jinks on Wall Street, about this recession we are in, and about issues that will change the regulations in a sensible way that will avoid as many future recessions as possible and, at the same time, about creating an environment in which we can grow the largest number of good new jobs. But suddenly, we have this new Washington agency not only possibly regulating Main Street lending but creating an unaccountable person at the top to write the rules and the regulations. When I say ``unaccountable,'' that means she or he is just over here at the Fed. Once confirmed by the Senate, this person has no boss. This person doesn't report to the President, doesn't have to come before Congress for appropriations, and has a steady stream of money and really unlimited authority. There is nothing to keep this new czarina or czar from writing the kinds of regulations and rules that got us into trouble in the first place with housing. Nothing to keep this person from writing rules that might encourage irresponsible home ownership. That is what we had before. So the Dodd bill might encourage irresponsible borrowing. So the second major idea in the Republican amendment is, let's make this person accountable. The President appoints a Director who is confirmed by the Senate, but this person would be in the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. This Director would be accountable to other people appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate and would have to come before the Congress multiple times annually to give us a chance to inquire about things. I have come to the floor today to say we made an important step in the right direction when we worked on the first part of this bill yesterday across party lines. We addressed one of the five issues we need to deal with. The issue of, what to do with banks that are too big to fail and get the rest of us into trouble, has been addressed. But we have four more big issues to deal with here and other smaller issues. Two of the big issues are addressed in this Republican amendment. One is: let's not take over Main Street lending and make it harder to loan money, harder to get money, and harder to create jobs. No. 2 is: let's not create another czar in Washington. The last thing we need is another Washington takeover and another Washington czar. We hope our amendment will attract significant bipartisan support, and then we can move on to the other important questions in this legislation. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, the business before the Senate this week is financial regulation reform. It is hard to pick what the business should be this week. There is so much going on that is of great concern to so many of us. We have a briefing this afternoon on the dimensions of the oilspill in the Gulf of Mexico. Those of us in Tennessee are deeply concerned about the 1,000-year rain--an event that only happens every 1,000 years or so, according to some of the engineers in the Army Corps--that has wreaked havoc on middle Tennessee and which is beginning now to hurt west Tennessee. Also, we have the Arizona immigration debate, which the distinguished Senator from Illinois was discussing a little earlier. We have a new START treaty the President has asked us to consider. Just around the corner, we have a nomination coming for a vacancy on the Supreme Court of the United States which will dominate, as it should, the attention of this body for 2 or 3 months or so until it is thoroughly considered. Of course, the American people would like for us to focus on jobs. I have great respect for the Democratic Governor of Tennessee who was quoted in the Wall Street Journal yesterday saying the following: ``If I have 100 conversations with people, 95 of them will be about jobs and none of them will be about cap-and-trade and none of them will be about bank reform,'' said Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, a conservative Democrat, in an interview. That is according to the Wall Street Journal. Financial regulation reform is the current topic and financial regulation is important. The importance of it is that this is a country that produces, year in and year out, about 25 percent of all the money in the world. We sometimes forget how privileged we are in our standard of living. We are just about 5 percent of the people of the world, but 25 percent of the wealth of the world is created here. It is because entrepreneurs have an advantage. They can create new jobs one right after the other. Our well-being is not measured by the number of jobs we lose. It is measured by the difference of jobs we create and the number of jobs we lose. The problem we have right now is we are not creating enough new jobs in the United States of America. We need to focus on doing that. One aspect of that is the kind of system of financial regulation we have. All of us were appalled by some of the hi-jinks on Wall Street that helped lead us to the great recession in which we find ourselves and for which we had to take extraordinary action. The purpose of the financial regulation bill should be to minimize the possibility of those [Wall Street] hi-jinks occurring again, but at the same time, to leave an environment in the United States where we can create the largest number of good, new jobs. When I say ``we,'' I do not mean the government. We have had too much attention on creating government jobs. The one place the stimulus has worked is Washington, DC. Salaries are up here. There are more jobs here. The place where the stimulus is not working is out across the country where, if we continued with the economy over the next year at the rate of growth it had in the first quarter, which was 3.2 percent, we are told the unemployment rate at the end of the year will still be about 9 or 10 percent. Why? Because we are not creating enough new jobs in the private sector. As we deal with financial regulation, we must be careful to leave an environment in which we can continue to create jobs, which is why there are five major issues that have come toward us. I heard someone on television this morning say: There go the Republicans. They want to slow down the financial regulation bill. They cannot agree on it in the Senate. What we want to do--especially after the health care debate--is provide some checks and balances to make sure we have a good bill. These are the issues that are before the American people on this bill: Is there a Washington takeover of Main Street lending? Community banks, credit unions, plumbers, and dentists say there may be. We need to make sure there is not. The last thing we need to do is make it harder to get a loan in Nashville or Manchester or Knoxville or San Antonio. Because if you cannot get a loan, you can't hire a person, you can't invest in something, and you can't create a new job, and the economy does not move. That is the first issue: Is there a Washington takeover of Main Street lending. The second issue: What about this czarina or czar? What about this person the President would appoint to be in charge of millions of transactions in the consumer bureau? Unlike our other independent agencies, this person would barely be accountable to the President and would not be accountable to the Congress. Doesn't that lead to the possibility that this person could write some rules and regulations unaccountably and might make the same sort of mistake we made when we encouraged people to buy houses who could not afford to pay for them-- which most agree is the principal event that led us into the great recession that we now have? And that nearly led us into another depression, which brings us to the third issue: Why are we not dealing with the big housing agencies? Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have about as much debt outstanding as the United States does, and we taxpayers implicitly guarantee their debt. In the health care debate, it was said: We do not add to the national debt with this bill. But we did not include doctors--we did not include paying doctors in the health care bill. That would be about like my going to the Congressional Budget Office and saying: Tell me how much it is going to cost to run the University of Tennessee for the next 10 years, and the Congressional Budget Office might say to me: With or without the professors? If I wanted a low-ball number, I would say: Oh, give me a number without paying the professors. That is what we got in the health care bill. We left out $200 billion or $300 billion. The President's budget says it is $371 billion over the next 10 years because we assumed that we would not increase pay for doctors to serve Medicare patients, which would create for them a 21- percent cut in pay. And for those Medicare patients, it begins to create a health care bridge to nowhere because no doctors are going to see them if they are not properly reimbursed. We are doing the same thing in financial regulation reform when we leave out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Why are we leaving them out? It is not because they didn't make a contribution to the big recession we are in. Everyone agrees they did. The Democrats are leaving them out because if Democrats put them in, we would have to deal with the $200 billion, $300 billion or $400 billion cost in the current year. According to the Wall Street Journal today, the Congressional Budget Office says the deficit would be about $291 billion bigger in 2009. So, Congress is going to put them in the drawer or put them under the table or act like they aren't there, and say to the American people: Hooray, we fixed financial regulation, but we're not dealing with housing? When we fix financial regulation without addressing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac it's like not paying doctors when we pass a comprehensive health care bill. That is a third issue. There are a couple more issues. One is the so-called derivatives issue. The so-called derivatives issue is a complicated issue for many people, but the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation says the bill before us may actually create less regulation for these complicated transactions rather than more. This is an area in which we want to make sure we do not make a mistake. Then there is the so-called big bank bailout provision. Most Americans don't want a provision in the law that allows or encourages big banks to take risks that cause them to fail and take the rest of us down with them. So, the point of our debate ought to be to make sure in our financial regulation reform that we don't provide incentives for big banks to take imprudent risks that will cause them to fail and hurt us because they are so big. How are we making progress on this issue? As the Republican leader has said, we have Goldman Sachs and Citibank that have said they like the bill. I would say there are a number of people worried about the bill. I am hearing from community banks, credit unions, auto dealers, dentists, furniture retailers, plumbers, and candy companies with concerns. A New York Times article says: ``Senate Financial Bill Misguided, Some Academics Say.'' That was yesterday. A Professor at MIT says, `` . . . we need to proceed about this in a much more deliberate and rational and thoughtful way.'' That is what we would like to do. A professor at New York University says leaving out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from the discussion is ``outrageous.'' FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair warns against new curbs on bank trading that I just mentioned. My point is that this is an opportunity for us on the Republican side and those on the Democratic side to take an important piece of legislation--not such a visible piece of legislation today because we have issues from immigration to the oilspill to the flooding in Tennessee--vastly important for our country and work together to make it better. Some progress, I understand, is being made on one of the five provisions. That is the too-big-to-fail provision. We will see what Senator Shelby has to say on that. But that still leaves the question of whether we ought to have an independent czarina or czar. That still leaves the question of whether we are dealing properly with derivatives. That still leaves the question of whether we ought to leave out of a financial reform bill the two great housing agencies that are just sticking there in front of us like a sore thumb, reminding us we have not done our job if we don't include them. And of great importance, why can't we simply have a provision in the bill that eliminates any possibility that we have a Washington takeover of Main Street? It is not the business of this bill to make it harder to extend and get credit up and down Main Street America. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a series of articles.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, are we in morning business?