Lamar Alexander

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I congratulate the Senator from Colorado on what we call in the Senate his maiden address. I also had the privilege of hearing Senator Udall's speech when he made his on renewable energy. I was glad to hear these today. The Senator from Colorado has focused on a subject he has worked on hard and which is central to every part of our ability to improve our schools. It is one recognized by our new Education Secretary who, I think, is President Obama's best new appointee. It is the question of how do we reward outstanding teaching. Every time we deal with education, we are ultimately reminded that it boils down to the parent and the teacher. What the parent cannot do, the teacher has to step in and finish. In so many cases, whether it is a gifted child or a child who hasn't been read to at home or a child with disabilities or a child who needs a music lesson, it takes a gifted teacher to do the best job to help the child reach his or her potential. We are still, as the Senator said, 50 or 60 or 70 years behind in recognizing that our country has changed and that women have many opportunities outside the home. We cannot trap them into teaching. We need to attract them and keep them, as well as outstanding men. Senator Bennet has been successful in his work in Denver and in finding ways to initiate that. The Secretary wants to do that. I worked on that in Tennessee. I have said to the Secretary of Education if he leaves after 4 or 8 years having left a legacy of many different ways of improving ways to reward outstanding teaching, he will have done more than all of the other secretaries of education put together. As Albert Shanker once said, ``If we can have master plumbers, we can have master teachers.'' Again, I congratulate the Senator from Colorado for his focus on education in his maiden address. I was happy and privileged to be on the Senate floor to hear that.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. That is a very honest response, and I accept that. But the point is there are three conferees from the Senate, including Senator Gregg who was opposed to including reconciliation. So if the Senator from North Dakota had said no, maybe he would not have been a conferee, but there would not be reconciliation in this Budget Resolution. Let me move to something more bipartisan than that. Tribute to Tom Ingram Mr. President, on May 1, Tom Ingram is leaving his post as chief of staff for the Alexander office and as staff director of the Senate Republican Conference. I know what it is to be a staff member of the Senate, having come here in 1967 as Senator Howard Baker's legislative assistant. That is back when each Senator only had one. I know that staff members are the lifeblood of this institution, that they regularly come and go, and that we Senators are grateful for their service. But Tom Ingram's service for the Senate and for me personally is a good deal more than the usual coming and going. Tom and I first met in 1966 when I was a young volunteer on Howard Baker's Senate campaign and Tom was an even younger reporter for the Nashville Tennessean. The Tennessean was then such a Democratic newspaper that it was said that Tom was the first reporter ever assigned by that newspaper to cover a Republican candidate on a regular basis. In fairness to the Tennessean, there had not been much to cover. Senator Baker in 1966 became the first Republican Senator in Tennessee history. We had not elected a Republican Governor since the Harding sweep in 1920. In 1974, Tom served as press secretary for what could only be described as my upstart campaign for Governor of Tennessee. We did pretty well for some young guys, winning the primary over more established figures, but losing the general election. That was the Watergate year. There were only 12 Republican Governors left in America after that debacle, and I figured my political career was over at a very young age. But in 1978, as things tend to do in politics, times changed, and I was elected Governor, walking a thousand miles across Tennessee in a red and black plaid shirt. Tom this time was my successful campaign manager. He then managed my transition into the Governor's office, served as chief of staff and deputy to the Governor for 5 years. Then he left to form a very successful business in Nashville. During his business career, he found time to help establish my office when I became president of the University of Tennessee. He did the same when I became the first President Bush's Education Secretary. The long and short of it is, when Tom Ingram has been around, I have done my best work, and perhaps so has he. We know each other so well that we operate independently toward the same goal and get twice as much done than either of us could do working alone. One of Tom's gifts is team building. An Ingram-led staff is fun to be a part of, and it is a purposeful group. He has made sure that each of us, Senator included, remember who hired us. For example, the entire Washington staff and State staff spent 3 days in Memphis a couple of weeks ago making sure that we understand as much as we can about the people and the needs of our State's biggest city and biggest county. As Tom leaves to reenter the private sector, he has taken time to make sure that the new staff is well led and well organized, and for that I am especially grateful. Tom's greater contribution may have been to the Senate as a whole. He has helped our Republican conference develop a clearer message. And working with Bob Russell, Senator Mark Pryor's chief of staff, he created a bipartisan chiefs of staff group that has been more successful at working across party lines than their bosses have been. The Senator from Illinois and I are part of a group of Senators from both parties that meets on Tuesday mornings. There are 8, 10, 15, 20 of us sometimes. But more than half the chiefs of staff get together on a regular basis as part of this bipartisan alliance, which is a remarkable number in this already over-organized and busy place. Tom Ingram came to the Senate expecting to stay a few months. He is leaving after 6 years. I am grateful to him for that, and the Senate is a better place. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record an article about the bipartisan chiefs of staff organization from Roll Call which appeared on March 10, 2009, and an article about Tom's work that appeared in the Knoxville News Sentinel last year.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for a couple of minutes to comment on Senator Bennet's speech.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, do you remember a few years ago when our Congress got mad at France and banned French fries in the House of Representatives cafeteria? We Americans have always had a love-hate relationship with the French, which is why it was so galling last month when the Democratic Congress passed a budget with such big deficits that it makes the United States literally ineligible to join France in the European Union. Of course, we do not want to be in the European Union. We are the United States of America. But French deficits are lower than ours, and their President has been running around sounding like a Republican, lecturing our President about spending too much. Now the debate in Congress is shifting to the size of your electric and gasoline bills and to climate change. So guess who has one of the lowest electric rates in Western Europe and the second lowest carbon emissions in the entire European Union. It is France again. What is more, they are doing it with a technology we invented and have been reluctant to use: nuclear power. Thirty years ago, the contrary French became reliant on nuclear power when others would not. Today, nuclear plants provide 80 percent of their electricity. They even sell electricity to Germany, whose politicians built windmills and solar panels and promised not to build nuclear plants, which was exactly the attitude in the United States between 1979 and 2008, when not one new nuclear plant was built. Still, nuclear, which provides only 20 percent of all U.S. electricity, provides 70 percent of our pollution-free electricity. So you would think that if Democrats want to talk about energy and climate change and clean air, they would put American-made nuclear power front and center. Instead, their answer is billions in subsidies for renewable energy from the Sun, the wind, and the Earth. Well, we Republicans like renewable energy too. We proposed a new Manhattan Project, for example, like the one in World War II, to find ways to make solar power cost competitive and to improve advanced biofuels from crops that we do not eat. But today, renewable electricity from the Sun, the wind, and the Earth provides only about 1.5 percent of America's electricity. Double it and triple it, and we still do not have very much. So there is potentially a dangerous energy gap between the renewable energy we want and the reliable energy we need. To close that gap, Republicans say start with conservation and efficiency. We have so much electricity at night, for example, we could electrify half our cars and trucks by plugging them in while we sleep without building one new powerplant. On that Republicans and Democrats agree. But when it comes to producing more energy, we disagree. When Republicans say build 100 new nuclear powerplants during the next 20 years, Democrats say, well, there is no place to put the used nuclear fuel. We say, recycle the fuel--the way France does. They say, no, we cannot. We say, how about another Manhattan Project to remove carbon from coal plant emissions? Imaginary, they say. We say, for a bridge to a clean energy future, find more natural gas and oil offshore. Farmers, homeowners, and factories must have natural gas, and the oil we will still need should be ours instead of sending billions of dollars overseas. They can't wait to put another ban on offshore drilling. We say incentives. They say mandates. We say keep prices down. Democrats say put a big, new national sales tax on electric bills and gasoline. We both want a clean energy future, but here is the real difference: Republicans want to find more American energy and use less. Democrats want to use less, and they don't want to find much more. They talk about President Kennedy sending a man to the Moon. Their energy proposals wouldn't get America halfway to the Moon. We Republicans didn't like it when Democrats passed a budget that gave the French bragging rights on deficits, so we are not about to let the French also outdo us on electric and gasoline bills, clean air, and climate change. We say find more American energy and use less--energy that is as clean as possible, as reliable as possible, and at as low a cost as possible, and one place to start is with 100 new nuclear powerplants. Mr. President, I wish to ask unanimous consent that following my remarks an article from the Washington Post and an article from the Maryville ALCOA Daily Times be printed in the Record, which I will describe for a moment.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, the article from the Washington Post is written by James Schlesinger and Robert L. Hirsch. James Schlesinger was the first Secretary of Energy, and he established the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Robert Hirsch is a senior energy adviser today, and he managed the Federal renewable programs. Their article is entitled ``Getting Real on Wind and Solar.'' Here is the last paragraph of the article I am including: The United States will need an array of electric power production options to meet its needs in the years ahead. Solar and wind will have their place, as will other renewables. Realistically, however, solar and wind will probably only provide a modest percentage of future U.S. power. Some serious realism in energy planning is needed, preferably from analysts who are not backing one horse or another. The other article from the Maryville ALCOA Daily Times on April 27-- today--is from my hometown. This is my hometown newspaper, and it is about a plant that means a lot to me. It is an ALCOA plant--the Aluminum Company of America plant. My father worked at the south plant until he retired. I went to school on an ALCOA scholarship. During World Wars I and II, there were as many as 12,000 and 13,000 people in our east Tennessee area who worked at ALCOA with good wages. It changed the lives of three generations of families who lived there. It would have been impossible for us to have the good schools, the good jobs, the good communities we have had without the good wages paid by the Aluminum Company of America. Here is the headline: ``ALCOA hopes new power contract will bring smelting restart.'' Ninety-five years after ALCOA Tennessee Operations fired up its first potline-- That is to make aluminum-- and seven weeks after the company shut down its last potline, the question remains: Will aluminum ingots ever roll out of the south plant again? What will make the difference for these ALCOA plants that have provided good wages and good jobs to thousands of families in Tennessee? The price of electricity. The newspaper says: The deal that ALCOA is looking for is a long-range power contract with the Tennessee Valley Authority that will allow the Tennessee smelting operations to be cost competitive when metal prices rebound. When we talk about electricity, the only cost some people talk about is driving up the cost so we will use less of it. That is the idea of a carbon tax. That is the idea of driving up the price of gasoline so people will buy less of it. But if we drive up the price of electricity in Tennessee--if TVA raises its prices to ALCOA--that plant will never reopen again and those hundreds or even thousands of jobs will never come back again. I was visited recently by a number of big companies in Tennessee that are concerned about the price of Tennessee Valley Authority electricity. They say they may not be able to stay there unless it gets more competitive. Residential rates are relatively low--average to low--but rates for companies are not low. Ironically, we are celebrating in Tennessee the arrival of two big new industries which make polysilicon, which is the material that goes into the solar panels that you put on the top of your house. Those two new plants, one of which will go in Clarksville, TN, and one of which will go in Cleveland, will each use about 120 megawatts of power when they open. From the beginning, they will be among the largest customers of the Tennessee Valley Authority for electricity. They will be using, as I said, 240 megawatts of low-cost, reliable electricity produced by coal, nuclear, and hydropower in our region. They could not rely on the one wind farm that exists in the Southeastern United States, which is in Tennessee and which only produces 5 megawatts of unreliable, expensive power--because the wind blows much of the time at night, when TVA already has 7,000 megawatts of extra power. So the solar plants that we need for the renewable energy of the future will have to rely today on coal, nuclear, and natural gas. It is important, as we debate the so-called renewable electricity standard, as we talk about climate change and clean energy--and I have had legislation on those subjects every congress that I have been a Senator--to realize that cost is important if we don't want to keep jobs from going overseas and if we want people to be able to afford their electric bills. I mentioned that TVA's electric rates are average to low, but last December, 10 percent of the electricity customers of the Nashville Electric Service said they couldn't afford to pay their bills. When we come down here and start talking about proposals that are going to drive up the cost, and when we say we are going to deliberately drive up the cost, I think that is the wrong policy. We are an inventive country. We can conserve. We can double the number of nuclear powerplants we have. We can double the energy research that we are doing on solar and other renewable energies, and we can do it with the objective of having low-cost electricity. That is the way to keep our jobs. That is the way to avoid poverty. That is the way to produce the largest amount of clean electricity for the future. We need a bridge to a clean energy future. Yes, of course, that includes renewable energy, but it is only 1.5 percent of what we have today. So to talk about driving the price up and relying on a national windmill policy, for example, to drive this big productive country is unrealistic. I thank the President, and I yield the floor. Exhibit 1 [From the Washington Post, Apr. 24, 2009] Getting Real on Wind and Solar (By James Schlesinger and Robert L. Hirsch) Why are we ignoring things we know? We know that the sun doesn't always shine and that the wind doesn't always blow. That means that solar cells and wind energy systems don't always provide electric power. Nevertheless, solar and wind energy seem to have captured the public's support as potentially being the primary or total answer to our electric power needs. Solar cells and wind turbines are appealing because they are ``renewables'' with promising implications and because they emit no carbon dioxide during operation, which is certainly a plus. But because both are intermittent electric power generators, they cannot produce electricity ``on demand,'' something that the public requires. We expect the lights to go on when we flip a switch, and we do not expect our computers to shut down as nature dictates. Solar and wind electricity are available only part of the time that consumers demand power. Solar cells produce no electric power at night, and clouds greatly reduce their output. The wind doesn't blow at a constant rate, and sometimes it does not blow at all. If large-scale electric energy storage were viable, solar and wind intermittency would be less of a problem. However, large-scale electric energy storage is possible only in the few locations where there are hydroelectric dams. But when we use hydroelectric dams for electric energy storage, we reduce their electric power output, which would otherwise have been used by consumers. In other words, we suffer a loss to gain power on demand from wind and solar. At locations without such hydroelectric dams, which is most places, solar and wind electricity systems must be backed up 100 percent by other forms of generation to ensure against blackouts. In today's world, that backup power can only come from fossil fuels. Because of this need for full fossil fuel backup, the public will pay a large premium for solar and wind--paying once for the solar and wind system (made financially feasible through substantial subsidies) and again for the fossil fuel system, which must be kept running at a low level at all times to be able to quickly ramp up in cases of sudden declines in sunshine and wind. Thus, the total cost of such a system includes the cost of the solar and wind machines, their subsidies, and the cost of the full backup power system running in ``spinning reserve.'' Finally, since solar and wind conditions are most favorable in the Southwest and the center of the country, costly transmission lines will be needed to move that lower-cost solar and wind energy to population centers on the coasts. There must be considerable redundancy in those new transmission lines to guard against damage due to natural disasters and terrorism, leading to considerable additional costs. The climate change benefits that accrue from solar and wind power with 100 percent fossil fuel backup are associated with the fossil fuels not used at the standby power plants. Because solar and wind have the capacity to deliver only 30 to 40 percent of their full power ratings in even the best locations, they provide a carbon dioxide reduction of less than 30 to 40 percent, considering the fossil fuels needed for the ``spinning reserve.'' That's far less than the 100 percent that many people believe, and it all comes with a high cost premium. The United States will need an array of electric power production options to meet its needs in the years ahead. Solar and wind will have their places, as will other renewables. Realistically, however, solar and wind will probably only provide a modest percentage of future U.S. power. Some serious realism in energy planning is needed, preferably from analysts who are not backing one horse or another.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I congratulate the Senator from Florida on his comments. He is exactly right, there is a major fault along the Mississippi River near Memphis, TN. There was a massive earthquake in the early 1800s that created Reelfoot Lake. The earthquake was so profound that the Mississippi River actually ran upstream in order to do that. One eyewitness to that was Davy Crockett, who was on a bear hunt that winter up in northwest Tennessee. He wrote about it in his autobiography which was intended to be his Presidential campaign autobiography. It never quite worked out. But we take it very seriously. The University of Memphis has a center dealing with earthquakes. We will be very interested in his proposal. I was glad to have a chance to hear about it.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I wish to speak on behalf of a motion to instruct the conferees, which I have here. Do I need to send this to the desk?

Mr. ALEXANDER. I will speak on behalf of it and send it at the appropriate time. This should be a relatively easy motion for our colleagues to support because it simply instructs the conferees to support a position that the entire Senate adopted unanimously. That provision during our budget debate was to accept the position of maintaining a competitive student loan program that provides students and institutions of higher education with a comprehensive choice of loan products and services. I ask the Chair if she will let me know when I have 2 minutes remaining.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I send to the desk my motion to instruct conferees.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I say to the Senator, thank you very much. I accept that. All the motion does is instruct the conferees to do what the Senate has already unanimously agreed to do to preserve the competitive student loan system.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Chair. Madam President, there are three reasons in support of maintaining a competitive student loan system. The first is that 12 million students rely on it today in New Hampshire, in Tennessee, in North Dakota--all across our country. Second is that now is not the time to be creating a new half- trillion-dollar national bank that would run up the debt, a bank that would replace 2,000 private lenders, and make $75 billion in new loans a year. That is not a proper function of the U.S. Department of Education. And third, the cost savings that is alleged is--and I will be gentle in my words--a trick on students to make Congressmen look good. What we are going to be doing if we do not preserve this choice is saying to all the students who get a loan that we are going to take money from them and then give it to other students so that Congressmen can go home and brag that he or she has increased the amount of the Pell grants. Let me be specific in what I say. I was the U.S. Secretary of Education in 1991 and 1992 when we created something called the Direct Loan Program. We have a federal student loan program. Most people who go to college are familiar with it. About two-thirds of the students at our 6,000 different institutions from the University of New Hampshire to the Nashville Auto Diesel College to Harvard to San Francisco State have a Federal grant or a loan. When you get a student loan, you take it to the institution of your choice. We now have 2,000 lenders who help provide all those different kinds of loans. They give financial aid counseling, they give interest rate deductions, they help students and families plan on how to pay for college. In other words, they service the loans and then the Government supports that by guaranteeing almost all of the loans. We set up a separate program which we called direct lending. That was, you could come straight to the Government to get your loan. In other words, we created a government bank run by the Department of Education. We said to the students and to the institutions: You make the choice. You may either have a private student loan guaranteed by the Government through your local bank or financial institution, or you may come to the U.S. Department of Education to get your loan. We have had more than 15 years of experience with that now, and what have the students and institutions said? Three out of four say we like the regular student loan program, we like the choice, we like the private lender. Since we are getting the loan, we like the idea of going to a bank to get a loan because that is what banks do. If you want a car, you go to a car dealer. That may be changing. You may have to go to the Department of Treasury to get a loan the way the country is going. For 15, 16 years we market tested this and so we have that direct loan program. The situation right now is we have 12 million students at 4,400 different institutions getting $52 billion in loans by their choice from banks instead of from the Government. One-fourth get it from the Government. It has been that way for a long time. What the President's proposal wants to do is to take all those choices away from the students and say: Line up outside the Department of Education to get your student loan, all 15 million of you. There will be 4,400 institutions and 12 million students who may not like that. Second point. Is a national bank a good idea? We read in the paper that the Government is going to take stocks in the biggest banks. So we are going to nationalize the banks. Then we read in the paper the Government is going to take stock in General Motors and Chrysler-- hopefully that is not true--so we are going to have the Government deciding what kind of car we are going to be making, what kind of plants we will have, where the plants are going to be. I cannot think of a worse organization to do that. This is a proposal to say: All right, now the Government is going to be your bank. It is going to be the bank for your student loans. We are going to create a new national bank. It would have over a half trillion dollars in outstanding student loans. It would make 15 million student loans every year, $75 billion in loans a year. We will run all this out of the U.S. Department of Education, a wonderful Department. I was myself there for 2 years. But what do we know about being a national bank? Not very much. Andrew Jackson would roll over in his grave about the idea of a national bank of this size. My final point. This proposal, with all due respect, is a trick on students to make Congressmen look good, and here is why. The budget we originally got said we will take $94 billion in savings and we will spend it on Pell grants. Let's think about that a minute. Common sense will tell you that the Department of Education is not going to know more, is not going to be able to replace 2,000 lenders at a cheaper cost. That simply is not going to work. That is what common sense would tell you. The Congressional Budget Office has told us that in order for the Department of Education to administer these loans, it would cost about $28 billion over the next 10 years. That is the computation I have made. They estimate that the cost of administering the current Direct Loan Program is about $700 million a year. So if they did them all, that would be at least $2.8 billion a year. Conservatively speaking, you don't have $94 billion in savings; you have 94 minus 28. So you have around 66. So you have $66 billion that goes somewhere out to banks, maybe to reduce loans, maybe to reduce interest rates, maybe to administer the loan program. But the bottom line is, if the Government takes this program over, it is going to be borrowing money at one-half of 1 percent and loaning it out to 15 million students at 6.8 percent. Borrowing at one-half of 1 percent and loaning it out at 6.8. On every student loan--and I hope all 15 million students listen to this--your friendly Government is going to take back 6.5 percent of the 6.8 percent interest you are paying. What is it going to do? The Congressman or Congresswoman can go home to Tennessee or wherever and say: I increased Pell grants. But they won't tell you: I took money from this student to give it to that student. That is not the way to do it. What we should do, if that spread is too high right now, is let's cut it down--

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

Mr. ALEXANDER.--if the savings is estimated at $90 billion. We know it is closer to 60. Maybe it is 20, maybe it is 30, maybe it is 35. Maybe we should lower the interest rate to 3 or 4 percent or 5 percent or whatever is the appropriate rate. But that does not justify creating a national bank in the Department of Education to try to handle 15 million loans. So my argument, Madam President, is this: There are colleagues on both sides of the aisle--and there are a number of Democrats--who strongly support the idea of competition and choice in higher education. That is why we have the best higher education system in the world. We have competition and choice all the way through it. The grants and the loans don't go to colleges; they go to the students, and the students choose the college. They can go to Nashville Auto Diesel College if they want or they can go to Harvard; it follows them to the school of their choice. They ought to be able to go to the lending institution of their choice and not line up outside of the Department of Education to get 15 million loans every year. That is not right. It is not the way our country ought to work. So the first is to preserve choice for the 15 million students who now have it at 4,400 institutions. The second reason is, let's not be creating another nationalized asset in America. We need to be thinking of ways of getting the Government out of the private sector. I mean, this recession is not for the purpose of the Government taking over every auto company, every bank, all the student loans, and every business that is in trouble. We need to be thinking of ways of going the other direction. That is the America we know. That is the America we want. So we don't need a new national bank. Arne Duncan is the new Secretary of Education. I think he is the President's best appointee. He ought to be working on paying teachers more for teaching well, creating more charter schools, helping states create higher standards. That is his agenda. I don't think he came from Chicago to Washington to be named banker of the year, which is what he would be doing if he became a national bank president for student loans. That is what this proposal would do unless the Senate sticks to its position. Finally, I don't want to be a part of any situation which has Congressmen and Senators playing a trick on 15 million students and saying: I am going to borrow money at a quarter of 1 percent and loan it to you at 6.8, and then I am going to take credit for giving the rest of it away. I think that will come home to roost, and it ought to come home to roost. I appreciate the opportunity to make this motion to instruct, and I hope it will come to a vote. I hope it has the kind of bipartisan support it had before. I hope the President will think of all the other things there are to do that need attention, such as fixing the banks, getting credit flowing, restoring the auto companies, and leave the student loan system to continue to work in the way it should work.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Thank you very much, Mr. President. So on Earth Day my suggestion is that, as we celebrate the day, we should ask what is our energy policy--Is it a national clean energy policy? Is it a national renewable energy policy? Is it a national windmill policy?--we should recognize there is a potentially dangerous gap between the renewable energy we want and the reliable low-cost energy we must have, and between now and then we must build a strong bridge to a clean energy future. We can agree on conservation, but during that time we will need 100 new nuclear plants, we will need offshore drilling for oil, and fast, because we need the gas and we can't electrify all of our cars as quickly as we might like. Earth Day is a day for celebration, but it is also a day for realism. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, today is Earth Day, a day of celebration of the environment and the landscape of the great American outdoors. The President is on his way to Iowa to visit a windmill factory. It is also a good day for us in the Senate to ask, ``exactly what is our energy policy in the United States and what should it be?'' Is it a national clean energy policy; or is it a national renewable energy policy; or is it a national windmill policy? It makes a difference. Because in terms of electricity, we use about a quarter of all the electricity in the world, and our computers and our homes in the summer and winter and our factories all depend upon a generous supply of reliable, low-cost electricity. That is what we need. I believe this is our policy, and I believe most on the Republican side believe this as well, and I hope many on the other side do too. I believe that what we should do for the foreseeable future is to produce American energy, and use less energy, and that we ought to do it as cleanly as possible, as reliably as possible, and at as low a cost as possible. Let's see if that is what we are actually doing and if that is what the legislation we are considering would actually do. Nothing has captured the media's attention, nor the attention of those of us who are elected to office, quite so much as renewable energy. I heard the Presiding Officer make what I believe was his maiden speech on the floor of the Senate on this subject not long ago. And the President of the United States--President Obama--has talked about powering our electricity by capturing the energy of the Sun, and the wind, and the Earth. We will be considering, within a few weeks, legislation that would require all our electric utilities to generate a portion of their electricity from a very narrowly defined group of energies--mostly the Sun, the wind, and the Earth--and we have huge subsidies, especially for windmills--billions of dollars by taxpayers. That is the subject of another speech, but last year we added another $13 billion or $14 billion in subsidies over the next 10 years that we would be giving to banks and wealthy people and others who are wind developers. The total number is in the $25 billion to $26 billion in taxpayer money that is now going just to subsidize wind turbines. The subsidies are huge. As a country, we have gotten infatuated with energy from the Sun, the wind, and the Earth. I went to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory a year ago and talked about the importance of a clean energy future for our country, and among the suggestions I made was that we have a new Manhattan Project (like the World War II project that created the atom bomb), or a series of mini Manhattan Projects, and that they would be directed toward such things as making solar cost competitive within 5 years. Solar energy costs three or four times as much as other energies, so the technology needs to be improved. Also, we should make advanced biofuels more of a reality. In other words, making fuel from crops that we don't eat so we don't distort the food market. We have made some progress on renewable energy, but there is a potentially dangerous energy gap facing us in America because, today, renewable energy from the Sun, the wind, and the Earth produces 1\1/2\ percent of all the electricity we use. The President wants to double that. Well, that is 3 percent. What if we tripled it? Well, that is on up to 5 or 6 or 7 percent. What about the other 90 percent? How are we going to heat our homes and cool our homes and how are we going to keep prices low enough so our factories and jobs will stay here rather than going overseas? It will be a long time before electricity or energy from the Sun and the wind and the Earth can power this big country of ours. There will be a gap between the renewable energy we want and the reliable, low-cost energy we must have. Congressman Heath Shuler of North Carolina and I are co-chairs of the Tennessee Valley Authority Congressional Caucus. We went to Knoxville last week and held a very interesting forum on the renewable energy options in the Tennessee Valley Authority area. One of the two big plants that make polysilicon, which is essential for solar, provided testimony. We are very glad to see that in Tennessee. But each of those plants uses 120 megawatts of power. They will become almost immediately TVA's largest, or among their largest, customers. They need large amounts of low-cost, reliable electricity to make solar panels. Today, of course, the kind of energy President Obama wants to use only produces 1.5 percent of that needed by the United States. We need low- cost electricity for all jobs, not just green jobs. Here is what we found that was promising--solar especially. I mentioned it cost a lot more today and that it takes up a whole large area. A nuclear powerplant might take up one square mile. The equivalent amount of solar power might take up 10 times that much area. But nevertheless, our State and the Oak Ridge Laboratory and the University of Tennessee are focused on doing our best to try to make solar cost competitive, and we should redouble that effort in this country. We should be spending our money on energy research and development for that purpose. For example, we heard about underwater river turbines. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission says there may be 30,000 megawatts of electricity that could be produced by turbines in the Mississippi River. That would be pretty good, if it works, because the river runs all the time, unlike the Sun, which only produces energy when the Sun shines. Of course, you can't store energy from the Sun. People overlook that sometimes. You have to use it when it happens. The wind often blows at night, when we don't need it. But the river runs all day long--old man river does--and if it can produce that kind of energy, that would be promising. Biomass may help. The Southern Companies are building a plant that would have about 100 megawatts. In our part of the world, a bad choice would be wind turbines. We have one wind plant. The problem with it is, No. 1, the wind doesn't blow, at least not enough to make much electricity. It blows 18 percent of the time in the case of TVA's one wind farm--the only wind farm in the southeastern United States. Second, much of that is at night, when TVA has about seven nuclear powerplants worth of electricity that is unused. So TVA is wasting, in my opinion, $60 million on big wind turbines that it could be spending on conservation, nuclear power, and pollution control equipment. More than anything else, we do not want to see giant, 500-foot wind turbines on top of the most beautiful mountains, we believe--with all respect to the Senator from New Mexico--the most beautiful mountains at least in the eastern part of the United States. Boone Pickens was asked if he was going to put wind turbines on his ranch? He said: No, they are ugly. If they are too ugly for his ranch then they are too ugly for the Great Smokey Mountains, and they are the wrong choice for us. Solar? Yes. Underwater turbines? Yes. Biomass? Yes. There may be others, but there are good choices and there are bad choices. The bridge to the future for clean energy means this. While we do all we can on research and development to find a way to make solar cost competitive, to find a way to create advanced biofuels, we are still going to need a lot of power. Based on what we saw in the TVA region, you could start with conservation. We use 143 percent of the national average, per person, of electricity in Tennessee. We waste a lot of electricity. If we just used the national average, that would be the same as four new nuclear plants, five coal plants the size of Bull Run and nine natural gas plants such as the ones TVA is building in Jackson. So we start with conservation. If we are talking about fuel, the simplest and easiest thing to do on Earth Day is to recognize we could electrify half of our cars and trucks in America--that might take 20 years--but without building one single new powerplant, not one nuclear plant, not one coal plant, not one windmill on a mountaintop. We don't have to do that because, in TVA's case, they have 6,000 or 7,000 megawatts of unused electricity at night when we are all asleep and the factories are not working. So plug your car in at night at cheaper rates, bring in a lot less oil from overseas, save billions of dollars. That would take care of us for the next 20 years. That would be a smart decision to make on Earth Day. But the other thing we need to do is recognize that, if we care about clean air, and especially if we are worried about global warming, as I am, that we have to take nuclear seriously. Nuclear plants in America produce only 20 percent of our electricity but they produce 70 percent of our carbon-free, mercury-free, nitrogen-free, sulfur-free electricity. Let me say that again. They are only 20 percent of our electricity but they are 70 percent of our clean electricity. So in the Tennessee region especially, we should not be wasting money on windmills where the wind doesn't blow and it desecrates the environment. We should be spending money on making coal plants cleaner through pollution control. We know how to do that, except for carbon. We should also build more nuclear plants and retire the dirtiest coal plants. That is the smart thing to do. And we should emphasize conservation. My point today is simply this. I think all of us want to make sure we have a stable energy future. A stable energy future means plenty of reliable, low-cost electricity so we can heat and cool our homes and keep our jobs from going overseas. And we want to make sure it is clean. So our goals should be to produce more American energy, to make us more energy independent by electrifying our cars, to make coal clean, and to use wind and solar when it is appropriate to do that. But if we truly want to make a difference, we should build 100 new nuclear powerplants in the next 20 years, at least five or six a year, because that is the best way to have clean air. That is the best way to have low costs. And we should launch another mini-Manhattan Project and reserve a Nobel Prize for the scientist who can get rid of the carbon from existing coal plants, because coal provides half our energy. We know what to do about nitrogen, mercury, and sulfur. But we have not figured out what to do about carbon. If we did, India would also do it, China would also do it, the rest of the world would do it, and we could have low-cost energy. I mention low cost because so often we talk about new forms of energy as if cost didn't matter. It matters to the executives who met with me yesterday from the TVA region. TVA's residential rates are low, relatively. But the industrial rates are not. If they are too high, those jobs move out of our region, maybe overseas. And last December the people in Nashville, our capital city, did not think the residential rates were so low because 10 percent of them said they were unable to pay their electric bill in December because it was too high.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 15 minutes in morning business, and would the Chair please let me know when I have 2 minutes left.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, tomorrow is Earth Day, and it is a good day to save our mountaintops. I live in east Tennessee, near the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Millions of Americans visit us every year because of the natural beauty of our landscape. They do not come to Tennessee to see the smog, they do not come to Tennessee to see creeks polluted by mountaintop mining, and they don't come to Tennessee to see ridgetop wind turbines that are three times as tall as our University of Tennessee football stadium, which, with their transmission lines, would create a junkyard in the sky. The American landscape is a part of our environment. It is essential to the American character. From John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt to Lady Bird Johnson, generations of Americans have worked to protect the landscape. Some of the same groups that have worked hardest to protect the landscape are neglecting it in pursuit of remedies for climate change. I am working with three Democratic Members of Congress to try to protect the American landscape. The first is Senator Tom Carper of Delaware. He and I are introducing legislation to put stiffer controls on sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury emissions from coal plants. We have the technology to make the air cleaner, and we should be using it. There is no need to delay dealing with sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury while we figure out what to do about carbon. Secondly, Senator Cardin of Maryland and I have introduced legislation to ban the practice of blowing off the tops of mountains and dumping the waste in streams to mine coal. Coal is essential to our energy future. I hope we will reserve a Nobel Prize for the scientist who finds a way to deal with the carbon from existing coal plants. But we will create many more jobs by saving our mountaintops to attract tourists than we will by blowing them up to find coal, especially because our State produces less than 2 percent of the Nation's coal. Finally, Representative Heath Shuler of North Carolina and I hosted a forum in Knoxville highlighting the Tennessee Valley Authority and their choices for renewable energy. Conservation and nuclear power are realistic options for clean electricity for our region, and we should move ahead aggressively with both. But solar power, for the longer term; underwater river turbines in the Mississippi River; biomass, such as wood chips; and methane from landfills are all good choices for renewable electricity as well. On the other hand, the idea of polluting our landscape with 500-foot wind turbines and their transmission towers is preposterous. It makes no sense to destroy the environment in the name of saving the environment, especially since the wind only blows about 18 percent of the time at TVA's one wind farm. And much of that is at night, when TVA already has thousands of unused megawatts of electricity that we could be using. TVA should take the $60 million it is spending to buy about 5 megawatts of unreliable wind power and instead buy 10 compact fluorescent light bulbs for every TVA household, which, if used, would save about 920 megawatts of reliable power--the equivalent of an entire nuclear plant. Senator Carper and I will host a roundtable this Thursday in the Capitol on our legislation to establish stiff standards for sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury. The Tennessee Valley Authority needs to go ahead and put sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury controls on all its large coal plants that it intends to keep open. But TVA actions alone will not be enough to give us clean air in the Great Smoky Mountains and in Tennessee. We need strong national standards, such as those in our legislation because so much of our dirty air blows in from coal powerplants in other States. During each of the 2-year Congresses in which I have been a Senator, I have introduced legislation to curb pollutants from coal plants, including carbon. Tomorrow is Earth Day and a good day to save our mountaintops. The way we should do that is to have stiffer controls for cleaner air, to ban mountaintop removal for coal mining, and to stop the practice of wasting ratepayer dollars for ridgetop wind turbines that destroy the landscape, which is also an essential part of the American environment. I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. I would say to the Senator from North Dakota that all of us have noticed the courage of his constituents, the citizens of North Dakota, and we admire that courage and their resilience in the face of such adversity. Senator Corker and I saw this same thing in the faces of the men and women in Murfreesboro, TN, who were suddenly hit with a tornado in the springtime. While the size of the disaster was not comparable to the size of the disaster in North Dakota, it was to those families of that kind of disaster. So I appreciate his comments and our thoughts and prayers go out to the families in North Dakota. Association of American Universities About 1 hour ago I spoke to the Association of American Universities, which is a group which includes many of our finest public and private research universities, some of them in the State of North Carolina, I might note. I would like to say to my colleagues on the Senate floor and to our country what I said to them in a private meeting. I told them that not long ago a few of us in the Senate had supper in the majority leader's office with former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who was completing a year as a scholar-in-residence at the Library of Congress. One of us asked Dr. Cardoso what memory he would take back to Brazil about his time in the United States. He replied unhesitatingly: The American university. The greatness and the autonomy of the American university. There is nothing in the world quite like it. The United States doesn't only have the best universities in the world, it has almost all the best universities in the world. A recent ranking by Jiao Tong University in Shanghai ranks 35 universities among the top 50 in the world, 8 among the top 10. Higher education, says commentator Fareed Zakaria, is America's best industry. Along with our national laboratories, managed by the Department of Education, our research universities have been our secret weapon in developing many of the competitive advantages that make possible the high American standard of living. In the midst of our pride about our universities, I suggest we remember the warning George Romney, then president of American Motors, gave Detroit's automakers a half century ago: Nothing is more vulnerable than entrenched success. At that time, the big three automakers didn't just make the best cars in the world, they made almost all the best cars. But the automakers didn't listen to George Romney. We know the rest of the story. The Japanese and others perfected smaller, fuel-efficient cars, and today we are bailing out the automakers that didn't listen. American higher education today would do well to heed George Romney's warning of 50 years ago, and so should the rest of us, since our country's success depends so much upon the quality of our colleges and universities as well as upon our access to them. I suggest, therefore, we begin by addressing our research universities. I propose that the national academies assemble a distinguished group of Americans to assess the competitive position of American research universities, both public and private, and then respond to the following question: What are the top 10 actions, in priority order, that Congress, State governments, and the universities themselves could take to assure the ability of the American research university to maintain the excellence needed to help the United States compete, prosper, and be secure in the global community of the 21st century? I hope this proposal sounds familiar. It is a narrower version of the request I, along with a bipartisan group of Senators and Congressmen, made in 2005, when we asked the national academies to respond to this question: What are the top 10 actions, in priority order, that Federal policymakers could take to enhance the science and technology enterprise so the United States can successfully compete, prosper, and be secure in the global community of the 21st century? The academies responded to that request by creating a distinguished commission, headed by Norman Augustine, which reported within 10 weeks from its first gathering a list of 20 recommendations, along with strategies to achieve them. That report was entitled ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm.'' After a great deal of bipartisan work in this Chamber and in the House, Congress and the President produced the America COMPETES Act of 2007, which included many of the Augustine Commission recommendations and established a blueprint for maintaining America's competitive position. That blueprint provided a helpful basis for additional funding that became available earlier this year. I can still remember the afternoon in the spring of 2005, when I sat through a long Senate Budget Committee meeting. What was bothering me most and what I heard that day was that the uncontrolled growth of entitlement programs--mainly Medicare and Medicaid--would squeeze out essential investments in education and research critical to the Nation's prosperity. I had seen this as well during the 1980s, when I was Governor of Tennessee, as I struggled, as has almost every Governor since, to pay the growing cost of Medicaid, as well as prisons and public schools, and still have funds left to support quality in higher education. Those struggles have become a losing battle for public universities. My own research shows that over 6 years, between 2000 and 2006, total State higher education funding has gone up 17 percent, while average tuition at public 4-year institutions has gone up 63 percent, and State funding for Medicaid has gone up 62 percent. In a 2003 study of funding of public universities, Thomas J. Kane and Peter Orszag, now Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Obama administration--and he spoke to this same group of university presidents this morning--suggested the quality of students and the compensation of faculty has declined significantly at public universities relative to private universities. They concluded: Taken together, the results suggest a startling and troubling deterioration of the relative quality of public universities. The most recent set of state budget cutbacks, if anything, will accelerate this trend . . . as a result, the traditional model of higher education finance in the [United States] with large state subsidies to public higher education and modest means tests grants and loans from the federal government is becoming increasingly untenable. The recent stimulus package with support for higher education offers some relief but only temporary. Here is how Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen described the situation in his budget address on March 23. The Governor said: Higher education presents a challenge. Under the rules we have been given, they are getting a lot of the Tennessee stimulus money; He means higher education. they not only won't have to make cuts, but cuts they have already taken in Tennessee have been restored; about $100 million extra in this fiscal year. Yet when this money ends 21 months from now, our campuses will suddenly need to begin operating with about $180 million less in state funding than they had this year. More than most other areas, higher education has dodged a bullet and [they have] bought some time, but there is a great deal of work to be done to recognize and streamline for a much leaner future . . . That was about 2 weeks ago. I considered asking that this new national academies report be only about the pressures on public research universities, but that would have set up competing recommendations and presented an incomplete picture. Private universities have their challenges, too, especially during this recession. But the changing role of State support for public research universities and its impact on quality deserves special attention in the report I am suggesting. I also believe a portion of the academies' assessment should include the relationship or lack of relationship of our research universities to our 17 Department of Energy national laboratories, which employ more than 30,000 scientists. These labs, three of which were founded during the Manhattan Project in World War II, are also secret weapons in our Nation's strive for competitiveness. I have seen firsthand how the alliance between the University of Tennessee Knoxville and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory has produced joint professorships, distinguished scientists, centers of excellence, and a thriving science alliance between the two campuses. During the next few days, I will meet with National Academy of Sciences President Ralph Cicerone and discuss with him creating a formal bipartisan letter of request to the national academies and how the academies will respond to that request. One way Congress could improve the quality of higher education is to stop overregulating. I voted against the new higher education bill enacted by Congress last summer because, after 3 years of work, the Senate spewed forth a well-intentioned contraption of unnecessary rules and regulations that wastes time and money that ought to be spent instead on students and improving quality. At the close of the debate, I carried onto the Senate floor--to be accurate, I asked my staff to bring on the floor and some of the pages--a stack of boxes as tall as I am that contained the rules and regulations for the 6,000 higher education institutions that accept Federal grants and loans. Senator Mikulski, who has agreed to work with me to try to reduce the number of these regulations, came over and stood by the stack, and the stack was a foot taller than she. The former president of Stanford has estimated that these regulations cost institutions--from Harvard to the University of North Carolina to Duke to Vanderbilt to the University of Tennessee and the Nashville Auto Diesel College--7 cents for each Federal dollar to do the busy work to fill out paperwork to comply with the regulations. The bad news is, the new law we passed doubles the rules and regulations with 24 new categories and 100 new reporting requirements. These new requirements include a total of 54 so-called college watch lists, which I believe will be too confusing for families to understand, and complicated rules involving textbooks which will only prove that Members of Congress have no idea how faculty members prepare courses. Most of these complications of rules, including graduation rates in 48 different categories, disaggregation of student-reported data by 14 racial, ethnic, and income subgroups, and employment rates of graduates of institutions, will leave college administrators scratching their heads and create thousands of new jobs for people to fill out forms. All this will be put on the Web, and most of it will be shipped to Washington, DC, for someone to read. Having once been the Secretary of Education myself, I do not know who will read all these reports and all these new regulations, and I don't know what they would do about them if they did read them. The academies, in the report I am suggesting, may also suggest that Congress and States make changes in the way we fund and regulate research universities, but much of the heavy lifting will have to be done by the universities themselves. They are the ones who should be most concerned about George Romney's warning: There is nothing more vulnerable than entrenched success. I guarantee that if some of the recommendations are going to have to do with additional funding, Members of Congress and State legislators are going to be asking what universities are doing to reduce costs, especially the cost of attending university. At the American Council on Education meeting in February, I said that what I hear in Congress every time the issue comes up is, every time we increase Pell grants, colleges raise tuition. That is what my colleagues say to me. That is one reason why, in exasperation, Congressmen and Senators pile new rules on already overregulated colleges. I suggested in February that university administrators might want to be ready with a concrete explanation of what they are doing to reduce costs before asking for more money. I offered two suggestions: One, that colleges offer some--not all, but some--well-prepared students the option of a 3-year baccalaureate degree, cutting one-third the time and one-fourth the cost from a college education; and, two, that community college be free for well-prepared students. I cited to them a group of Tennessee counties and businesses in northeast Tennessee that make up the difference between the cost of the community college and Federal and State scholarships for qualified local students. Two weeks ago, I visited a university president in Nashville who actually listened to what I had to say in February. On April 13, Randy Lowry, at Lipscomb University in Nashville, announced a new 3-year option for some qualified students, a plan for veterans to attend tuition free, and a plan to make it easier and cheaper for community college students to attend Lipscomb. Taking into account the student earnings during the year that he or she is in the workforce instead of attending the university, President Lowry estimates that a Lipscomb graduate with a 3-year degree might avoid up to $50,000 in debt. In offering a 3-year option, Lipscomb has good company in Hartwick College in New York, Judson College in Alabama, Bates College in Maine, and Valparaiso in Indiana. In February, the State of Rhode Island decided to create a pilot program for a 3-year degree model. It may seem like a simple, even inconsequential request to ask the national academies to tell us the top 10 actions Congress, States, and research universities need to take to maintain university excellence, but my experience is that most ideas fail in Washington for lack of the idea. We have plenty of planners, publicists, and politicians to run with a good idea. I look forward to the idea: the recommendations in priority order--one set for Congress, one set for the States, one set for the research universities themselves. There is no reason these recommendations should not have the same impact the ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm'' report had and continues to have. And remembering George Romney's warning of a half century ago, there is nothing more vulnerable than entrenched success. We should all hope this new report from the National Academies does have that impact. Madam President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, on March 27 colleagues of Congressman Jimmy Duncan from the House of Representatives gathered in Knoxville to celebrate the naming of Lincoln Memorial University's John J. Duncan, Jr. School of Law. This is an appropriate honor both for Congressman Duncan and for the university. The proposed Duncan School of Law received Tennessee Board of Law Examiner approval last month. This allows its graduates to be eligible to sit for the bar exam in Tennessee. LMU has already submitted a letter of intent to pursue accreditation for the proposed law school. It hopes to begin admitting students and begin classes in August of this year. That first class will consist of approximately 75 part-time students. The full-time program will begin in fall 2010 and consist of another 125 students. Congressman Duncan earned his journalism degree at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and his law degree at George Washington University. He has served as Captain in the U.S. Army National Guard and practiced law in Knoxville. In 1981, when I was Governor of Tennessee, I appointed Jimmy Duncan as State trial judge. He served until 1988 and I was always proud of that appointment. It is especially appropriate to combine the names of President Lincoln and the Duncan family. President Lincoln proposed creating the university as a gesture to the mountain people who fought with the Union in the Civil War. The Duncans, like the Alexanders and many others, were early Scotch-Irish settlers who remained loyal Lincolnites even though the State of Tennessee seceded from the Union. So have been most of the people in the Second Congressional District that Congressman Duncan and his father have served. The district has elected only Republicans to the Congress since Abraham Lincoln was President. President Lincoln once said that education ``is the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in.'' Naming Lincoln Memorial University's law school for Congressman John J. Duncan, Jr., unites two great traditions that will encourage educational excellence in our region.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I am pleased that the Senate unanimously approved my amendment to maximize college affordability and access by helping to preserve competition and choice in the student loan program. I look forward to working with my colleagues to preserve the Federal Family Education Loan--FFEL--program as a viable program for students and institutions of higher education. My amendment is very straightforward and it calls on the Congress to maintain ``a competitive student loan program that provides students and institutions of higher education with a comprehensive choice of loan products and services.'' We know that institutions of higher education like the ability to choose which program to participate in, and 73 percent of schools choose to use the FFEL program. I think that we should maintain that ability of institutions to choose which program to participate in so that we can give them, and their students, the best options, the best services, and the best programs. The President's budget proposes to originate all new student loans in the Direct Loan program, which is a proposal that I do not support. When I was U.S. Secretary of Education, I opposed the creation of the Direct Loan program because I felt that the Federal Government shouldn't be in the business of being a bank. I still feel that way. The problem with the government operating as a bank is that we would have to borrow a lot of money and add to the Federal deficit. The FFEL program last year generated $52.9 billion in loans, while the Direct Loan program generated $21.8 billion. If we were to move all of the FFEL loans to the government's loan program, that's a lot more debt to add to our books. I don't think we should do that right now when we know that the FFEL program is working. I also thought that the Federal Government wouldn't be able to manage that many loans very effectively or efficiently for the students, and I haven't changed my mind on that. There are 6,000 colleges and universities, and over 15 million loans each year to students and parents. The Department of Education can't manage that many loans, nor should they. It is a massive undertaking that calls on over 30,000 people throughout our Nation working for banks, guarantors, and nonprofit lenders. We don't need to increase the Department of Education staffing by 30,000 people, so I don't see why we should move all of the loans and operations to that agency. As the president of one of our lenders in Tennessee recently wrote in the Knoxville News Sentinel, ``Nationalizing the student loan industry would be the equivalent of the government taking over the parcel shipping industry and doing away with FedEx and UPS, relying entirely on the U.S. Postal Service.'' We can't afford to take that risk when we are dealing with students. In the past week we have all heard from many of the institutions of higher education in our States favoring the continuation of the FFEL program. My amendment does just that, and it sends the message that the U.S. Senate supports giving colleges and universities--and ultimately parents and students--the choice which student loan program works best for them.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, this is the runaway debt limit amendment. It says 60 Senators have to agree before a budget can raise our national debt to more than 90 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, which this budget does every single year. We saw this week the leverage a lender can have over a borrower when the President of the United States fired the president of General Motors. Well, China, Japan, and Middle Eastern oil countries already own $1.4 trillion of U.S. debt. So vote yes on the runaway debt limit amendment if you do not want China, Japan, and Middle Eastern oil countries telling the United States how to run our business in the same way our Government is telling General Motors how to run its business.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. President, I understand I have 60 seconds.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, if I may ask the Senator from New Hampshire, who will be the mortgage holder on that debt in 20 or 30 or 40 years?

Mr. ALEXANDER. Guatemala, the Philippines, Aruba. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senator from New Hampshire and I be allowed to engage in a colloquy for the remaining minutes we have.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Lots of times Members of Congress sort of make fun of Europe and make fun of France and say: Well, that is French. We don't want to be French. It is embarrassing to stand here and say the situation exists where, if the United States were applying to be a member of the European Union, our annual deficit level would be too high to be admitted. We would be unable to qualify for the entire 10 years projected in this budget if we were to choose to do that.