Robert Bennett

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I listened to this particular debate for a while. I have a few observations. I am not prepared to make a significant economic statement. I will be doing that at some point during the debate. But I think I will respond to a few comments that have been made. If I may quote Paul Samuelson in a recent article in Newsweek and the Washington Post, he said most of the debate about jobs that is currently going on is bogus, and he makes the point that if a President could create jobs, the unemployment rate would be permanently at 3.2 percent. If a President could create jobs, every President would. If a Congress could create jobs, every Congress would. No one wants to go home and address his constituents at a time when jobs are difficult. The fact remains, however, that the Congress or the President cannot, with a wave of the hand or the passage of legislation or the adoption of a political slogan, create jobs. Jobs are created in the economy. Jobs are created because of two things: There first must be accumulated wealth, accumulated capital of some kind, and then there must be someone who holds that capital who is willing to take a risk. All wealth is created by the combination of accumulated capital and risk taking. When we tax people, we tax their accumulated capital. We have to do that. We should do that. I am not suggesting in any sense that taxes are not appropriate, but if we tax capital too much, capital flees. It goes some place else. If we regulate risk taking too heavily, it goes some place else or it is killed altogether. As a consequence, if we are going to have jobs, we want an economic situation where accumulated capital is allowed to work and where risk takers are rewarded for their risk and where they receive the incentive necessary to compensate them for the risk they take. I do not mean to be overly personal, but I hear people talking about two things. One, they talk about small business and how wonderful small business is, and then they talk about millionaires and how millionaires should be willing to sacrifice a little of their money so everybody else can have a job. It is very interesting that those who talk about let's not make the tax cuts permanent then praise small business in the next breath. Perhaps they do not realize most of the tax returns that show income in excess of a million dollars are, in fact, the tax returns of owners of small business. Let me give my own personal example to illustrate the point. I have done it before, but I have discovered since I have come to the Senate, there is no such thing as repetition in the Senate. We always give every speech as if it is brand new. Before I came to the Senate, I was the president of a privately held corporation that filed its taxes under the S section of the Tax Code. Therefore, it was known as an S corporation. It used to be called a subchapter S corporation, but they changed the law a little and it is now just an S corporation. When that phrase is used, people's eyes glaze over and they say, what does that mean? Well, it is very simple. If the corporation earns $1 million and it has 10 shareholders, instead of the corporation paying taxes on that $1 million, as an S corporation it pays no taxes, but each of its 10 shareholders, assuming their shareholdings are equal, pays taxes on $100,000. Why would any shareholder want to do that? Very simple. It avoids double taxation. If the corporation made $1 million, had 10 shareholders and it paid taxes, it would pay taxes at 36 percent. The Federal Government would get 36 cents out of every dollar it earned. At the time I was doing this, the top tax rate was 28 percent. By saying, all right, we are going to register as an S corporation so the corporation does not pay any taxes on the $1 million, it comes to the 10 shareholders and each one of us will pay taxes on our share of the earnings, which in my case was 28 cents, that is a very significant difference--the difference between paying 28 cents on every dollar you earn and 36 cents on every dollar you earn. During the period of time Bill Clinton was President, that number went up to 42. I had said before if we had started that company at a time when the effective tax rate was 42 percent, we probably would not have survived, but because we started it during the Reagan years when the top individual tax rate was 28 percent, we got to keep 72 cents out of every dollar we earned. What did we do with that? We put it back into the corporation and we created jobs, real jobs. The company had four full-time employees when I joined it as the chief executive--not a very big company, frankly, not a very big deal. It eventually grew to 4,000 jobs. The reason it had that kind of momentum as a small business is because we only paid 28 cents back to the Federal Government out of every dollar we earned. We put the 72 cents into growing the business and from a base of 4 jobs we created 4,000 jobs. If we add up all of the income taxes that were paid by those 4,000 employees and the corporate taxes that were paid by the company when it finally went public and ceased to be an S corporation, it became a C corporation, and the taxes that were paid by the suppliers of our company and the taxes that were paid by their suppliers and all the rest of it, we come up with a very large number that came into the Federal Government because that company was started. As I said in the beginning, it was started because of two things: accumulated capital and risk taking. How much accumulated capital did we have? We borrowed $175,000 from the bank. It was the bank's capital. That was our accumulated capital. How big a risk did we take? Every one of us signed away everything we owned in the form of a personal guarantee to make that company go. After about 9 months of operation, I remember the principal shareholder of the company saying to me, Bob, are we going to make it? Are we going to survive? I said to him, well, it depends on whether we get repeat business. We sold a product that had a year's life and the question was would the people at the end of the year come back and buy the product at the end of the year. I said, if we get 55-percent repeat business, we are going to survive. If we get less than that, your next phone call has to be to a real estate broker because you are going to have to sell your house. The bank is going to show up and take everything you own. On that pleasant note, we went ahead with the business. It turned out we got more than a 55-percent renewal rate. We got a 95-percent renewal rate and the business doubled. It continued to grow and we funded it with internally generated funds because we were able to keep 72 cents out of every dollar we earned and put every dime of that 72 cents back into the business. Because we were an S corporation and the profits we were earning showed up on our individual tax returns, I filed tax returns that showed I was earning over $1 million a year. Now, in fact, my salary as the CEO of that company was $140,000, but there was the other million that was added to it as my share of the company's earnings reported on my personal income tax return. If we go to the chart that was shown by the Senator from Michigan, I would be one of those who would be earning $1 million a year. In fact, my take-home stayed exactly the same at the $140,000 figure. The rest of it was all a bookkeeping entry. We did it because we wanted to avoid double taxation and because we wanted to take advantage of the fact that the effective rate for individuals was lower than the effective rate for corporations. We built the business and we created the jobs because the tax situation was as I have described it. We hear all of these comments about how wonderful small business is and how small business is the engine that is driving the economy, and they are right. We hear all of these comments about how small business is where the new jobs are, and they are right. It is interesting that almost unanimously those who represent small business are saying to us, keep the President's tax cuts in place. If you do not, you will stifle small business. On this floor we are seeing our colleagues say, let's let the millionaires pay for the things we want to do, let's take a little off the top from the millionaires and then we can afford all of these wonderful Federal programs we want to fund, all of the time while we are saying, gee, we are spending too much money, but we should spend more money here and we should spend more money there and we should spend more money in the other place. And where are we going to get it? Well, we will let the millionaires pay it. Then they say, all of this will help small business. The small businesspeople are saying, we are the millionaires and it is not coming to us in personal income, it is showing up on our tax returns in K-1 forms filed to deal with an S corporation, and you are stifling job growth, you are stifling small business if you do it this way. We do not hear from the real small business man and woman. We hear from those who say, I am speaking for small business while I am saying small business is wonderful, and at the same time I am saying increase the taxes on those small business men and women who have sole proprietorships or S corporations or limited liability corporations. The other point I want to make in this debate has to do with jobs. We are hearing over and over, where are the jobs? Once again, it is the President's fault. President Bush has presided over the loss of more jobs than anybody since Herbert Hoover. He must have done it deliberately is the implication. As I said at the outset, Paul Samuelson said if a President knew how to create jobs, we would never see the unemployment rate go above 3.2 percent. What is the basis of the creation of jobs? Let me give a statistic. When economic activity goes up, obviously there is a need for more jobs. There is a need for more people to work at businesses, at firms that are involved in the economic activity growing. So the economic activity has gone up. We had a great year in 2003. The gross domestic product grew by 4.3 percent, which in historic terms is terrific. The President said we will get good growth if we have these tax cuts, and we have gotten good growth. We have added something like $3 trillion to $4 trillion worth of wealth on the stock market--and that involves over 50 percent of our population. The stock market is not just for the privileged few at the top now. Teachers' pensions, labor union pensions, veterans' pensions, people who have invested for their children's college funds--over half of Americans are now invested in the stock market. They have seen, since the President's program went into place, an increase in the overall value of the stock market in the multiple trillions of dollars. This is not a small accomplishment. But where are the jobs if GDP is at 4.3 percent, historically a high position? The stock market has come back, creating a tremendous amount of accumulated wealth, and where are the jobs? There is another statistic that answers the question we need to pay attention to. In 2003, once again GDP increased by 4.3 percent. Normally that is a time when you would see the creation of many jobs. However, in that same year productivity increased by 4.4 percent: a staggering number in historic terms. But the net effect is that it was higher than GDP. Whenever productivity grows faster than the economy grows, something we don't like happens and that is we lose jobs. For all of the efforts on this floor and in the White House and in the Federal Reserve to get the economy growing, to get the traction in the recovery growing--and we produced a year of 4.3 percent growth in 2003--with that strong growth, we lost 60,000 jobs. The reason was productivity grew at 4.4 percent while GDP was growing at 4.3 percent. Some will say the solution to the problem is to get productivity down, to have GDP growing and productivity falling. That, of course, is a prescription for long-term economic disaster. The most significant thing we want to do in our economy is keep it as productive as possible, to have productivity growing rapidly here so we can outgrow the rest of the world. That is what America has done for 100 years or more. Go back to the middle 1800s and look at the productivity figures for the then leading economy in the world, which was Great Britain, and the productivity figures for the young upcoming country in the world, which was the United States. You see that over the years the United States had a higher productivity than Great Britain by about a half a percent. That was enough, over the decades, and then the century, to see America eclipse Great Britain and see Great Britain ultimately disappear as a major world economic factor. America now stands as the strongest economy in the world. We do not want our productivity to go down. The thing that has happened in this recession and recovery, something that has not happened before, is that through the quarters of recession and recovery productivity remained strong. Productivity simply means you are getting more value out what the workforce is producing. You are getting more goods; you are getting more services; you are getting more to sell. If you can get more out of the workforce in this fashion, it means ultimately your society has a higher standard of living and your consumers pay less for the goods they use. But if productivity is growing faster than the economy is growing, that means you are getting that result, higher standard of living and lower cost, with fewer people. This is the real dilemma we are facing that is not being discussed when we talk about economics. The real dilemma we are facing is how do we get the GDP to grow faster than productivity I believe productivity will come down from the high of 4.4 percent that we saw in 2003. I don't think that is sustainable. I think the GDP will eventually cross over the line so the GDP is growing more rapidly than productivity does, and when that happens the jobs will automatically come into play. They will appear. It will not be because of anything we do or not because of anything President Bush does or of anything that a potential President Kerry might do. It will happen because the economy is strong enough that the GDP will grow faster, that productivity will be passed by the GDP number. Whoever holds office at that time, be he or she, Republican or Democrat, will take full credit for it. They will say, since it happened on my watch, I did it. But let us, at least for a moment, in the rhetoric of this election year, pause and recognize what is happening. We are in the midst of the information revolution. It is as fundamental to changing the economy as the industrial revolution was in the late 1800s. We have not yet learned quite how to cope with it and deal with it. But the potential for good for our citizens, and for the world, is enormous. I don't want to peddle fear and pessimism because, in fact, we should be optimistic and excited about the future that this represents to us. It will be filled with challenges, just as the industrial revolution brought enormous challenges. But it will be filled with opportunity and it should be filled with optimism. I close with this observation. If we had been having this debate 100 years ago, in 1904 instead of 2004, and some economist with a great, clear crystal ball had come before us and told us the following we would all have panicked, but it would have been true if he had said this 100 years ago. He would have said: Sixty-nine percent of America's labor force works on the farm; 69 percent of America's labor force is involved in agriculture, which is civilization's oldest economic activity. One hundred years from now, in 2004, that number will be two. Yes, you heard me, it is now 69 percent; 100 years from now it will be 2 percent. If that were all he had said, the sense of panic would be enormous. Of course, he would have been accurate because agricultural jobs now have gone from 69 percent of the labor force to 2 percent. What in the world have we done with all of those people who are out of work? The industrial revolution took hold and their productivity became greater and greater and greater, and today the 2 percent of Americans who are involved in agriculture produce more food and fiber than Americans can possibly eat or wear, even though obesity is our largest health problem. We have to export food to keep the farmers busy and only 2 percent of our working force is in agriculture. We have enormous productivity. Here is another statistic and cautionary tale in that same situation. The percentage of workers involved in manufacturing has been going down, just like the percentage of workers involved in agriculture for 50 years--not just in this country but all over the world. As we now see the percentage of workers going down in manufacturing and we get all excited because it is going down in one President's term, or in the 8 years of Bill Clinton, or in the first President Bush's term, or in Jimmy Carter's term, or wherever it might have been going down, it has been going down on a steady basis for over 50 years here and in Europe and in every other industrialized country in the world. What have we done with those workers? How have we been able to find jobs for them? The son of the steelworker who no longer has a job because about 10 percent of the number of steelworkers is necessary to run a steel mill now compared to the number that was necessary when we had open hearth furnace steel mills, the sons and grandsons of those steelworkers who worked in the open hearth furnaces are now working for Microsoft, or Verizon, or in a startup that will become the next e-Bay, or whatever company you want to speculate. They are earning more money than their grandfather and their father earned, and they are providing for their families better. We are in the midst of the information revolution, as I said, that is transforming the economy as fundamentally as the industrial revolution did. As we deal with this recession and this recovery and talk about what we need to do, let us understand the environment in which we are operating. There are many things we don't know about the information revolution. There is much to understand before we can make sound policy. But we come back to a fundamental truth which was true during the agricultural age, which was true during the industrial age, and which is true now during the information age; that is, in order to get economic activity, growth, and wealth creation, you need two things--accumulated capital and the willingness to take a risk. If we can always remember those two fundamentals--that all growth and all wealth comes from the combination of accumulated capital and taking a risk--we will make wise decisions. If we fall for the siren song that says the way to deal with our problem is to share the wealth and take the accumulated capital and spread it all around in a way that nobody then has any risk--Karl Marx suggested that and we have seen what has happened to the economies that followed his economic advice--we will kill the goose that has been laying golden eggs in this country for over 240 years. That is a dramatic condemnation of some of what I have heard on the floor, and it is over the top. But, frankly, much of what I have heard here on the floor is over the top. Let us stay with the basics. Let us do our tax policy in a way that encourages accumulation of wealth. Let us do our regulatory policy in a way that encourages the taking of risks. Then as the wealth is created by the combination of accumulated capital and risk taking, let us devise a tax system that does not kill the golden goose but that does take out of the economy the money we need to deal with the proper role of government. I am not one who says we shouldn't have taxes. I am not one who says people shouldn't pay their fair share. I am not one who says just because you are successful you should be left alone. But my fundamental goal is a tax system that functions to raise enough money to pay for the legitimate needs of government, not one that picks winners and losers, not one that tries to set social policy by tax incentives. Let social policy be set by Congress. Let the taxes be drawn in a way that produces the greatest efficiency in the economy. Then the gross domestic product will grow more rapidly than productivity, even though the information age will keep productivity high. At that point the jobs will start to come and we will have done our jobs. We cannot create jobs. The President cannot create jobs. But what we can do is create an economic circumstance where jobs are discouraged and economic activity is dampened. When that happens, we will all pay the price. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. BENNETT. I recognize fully the level of revenue currently coming into the Federal Treasury is at a distressingly low historic point. But I go back again to a comment that Chairman Greenspan once made to a group of us. I am not sure whether the Senator from North Dakota was present. It fits in with the area of agreement that we have. He said to us: You can set the level of spending just about wherever you want. You can pass a law and be pretty sure spending will be where the law says it will be. You cannot set the level of income where you want. That is a function of the economy. If we look at the period which we all look back on with such great satisfaction--that is, the years in which we were in surplus--one of the major reasons we were in surplus was that the economy unexpectedly, according to the computers at CBO, produced far more revenue than CBO scored. This came as a result of the balanced budget agreement, the agreement entered into with the Republican Congress and the Democratic President after the 1996 election, an agreement that the Speaker of the House in 1995 tried to enforce with heavyhanded political methods and got himself in trouble in 1995. But after the election, the leadership of the Senate and the House and the leadership in the White House with President Clinton sat down and we got the balanced budget agreement, the balanced budget proposals, and in that process the Congress insisted, the President resisted but finally agreed to cut the capital gains tax rate. The CBO scored the amount of revenue we would get from that tax cut. The actual revenue, I believe, was five times as great as CBO scored it. No one had anticipated the rivers of cash that would come in. Now, rivers of cash came in, in my view, because there was capital tied up in mature investments that wanted to find more entrepreneurial kinds of investment but believed that it could not move it--that is, the owners of capital believed they could not move it with the capital gains rate of 28 percent. When the capital gains rate came down to 20 percent, they figured that was enough to allow moving the capital out of mature investments and into entrepreneurial investments and we saw Federal revenue go above 22 percent of gross domestic production, which I don't think has ever happened before. Now we are in a recession. There are no capital gains. The revenue has gone down into the teens in percentages of gross domestic production. The recovery, historically, can be depended upon to take care of that and the more the recovery persists, the more Federal revenue as a percentage of gross domestic production will rise. I thank the Senator for his courtesy and will not continue this dialog because I am intruding on the good will of others, but I appreciate the opportunity to have engaged in this exchange.

Mr. BENNETT. Give me a third opinion. If I could make a quick comment without the Senator losing his right to the floor.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, if I could respond, I have no idea if what I pay is what I legitimately owe or not because the Tax Code is so impenetrable I did not get an answer out of two different people as to what the amount is. I pay the amount my tax preparer tells me I owe and so far the IRS has accepted that as legitimate.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I agree with the Senator about the size and terrifying nature of what we are facing with retirement of the baby boomers. But I disagree with him about the connection between this budget and that kind of disaster. I feel even as we are running surpluses right now, the disaster that is facing us is exactly the same size regardless of where we are right now. My question to the Senator is when he references the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, with whom he and I both have had this discussion--we know how strongly Chairman Greenspan feels--is the Senator not aware Chairman Greenspan is of the opinion that the President's tax proposals did indeed help produce the recovery in which we now find ourselves, and indeed Chairman Greenspan has endorsed making the President's tax proposals permanent? Is the Senator aware of the fact Chairman Greenspan, even as he warns about the same things the Senator and I agree upon in terms of the problems of the future, says in the present context making the President's tax proposition permanent is a good idea?

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Arizona for the time and for the opportunity to address this issue. Let me make one statement at the beginning that I think needs to be made on the political rhetoric that is surrounding this issue. I am not questioning the patriotism of those who are complaining about, disagreeing with, or even attacking the President. I question their accuracy. I question their wisdom. But I am not questioning their patriotism. I think that needs to be made clear because in the debate over this war, there has been rhetoric that, in my opinion, has gone over the top. The former Vice President with the blood rushing to his face and the veins standing out on his neck screeched before a crowd which has been repeated on the television that the President has betrayed this country. You can disagree with George W. Bush. That is legitimate and proper and in an election year expected. But you should not accuse him of being a traitor. You should not accuse him of treason. I want to make it clear again that as I disagree with those who are attacking the President, I am not attacking their patriotism or their love of this country. But I do disagree with their wisdom and with their accuracy. In the speeches that have just been given, we have had a lot of conversation about what I would consider past history. I am not going to get into that; that is, what did we know about weapons of mass destruction? What did the inspectors know? What should we have done here? What should we have interpreted there? I will leave that to the historians themselves to sort out. A debate on those issues becomes an attempt simply to bash the President and avoid the fundamental issue. The fundamental issue that we have to face as Senators, as policymakers, is what do we do now? We are in Iraq whether you voted for the resolution, as Senator Kerry and Senator Edwards did and as I did, or whether you voted against it, as Senator Durbin did. Debating the wisdom of that at this point is merely an exercise in avoiding the reality of the situation with which we find ourselves faced now. What do we do now? The large majority of this body along with a large majority of the Members of the House of Representatives, and the unanimous vote in the Security Council of the United Nations took us to war. What do we do now? That is the fundamental question that we should be addressing and that we should be facing. Oh, say some, no, no. The fundamental question is whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction. And, since there were not, the real question is, Did the President lie? Well, let us look at the situation we are facing now with respect to weapons of mass destruction. The question is not are there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and did the President lie? The question is, What happened to the weapons that everybody knew were in Iraq, and has the President taken proper steps to protect us from them? When I say the weapons that everybody knew were in Iraq, whom do I include in that? The first person to convince me there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State to President Clinton. She met with us here in the secure room of the Capitol; the room where we get top secret briefings from the highest possible level. It was in that room that Madeleine Albright sat down with the Members of the Senate and laid out the irrefutable evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and justified to us the Clinton administration's determination that they would go to war, and they did. Bombing another country is an act of war, and the Clinton administration, in 1998, in response to the irrefutable evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, took the United States to war. We did not invade Iraq with troops, but certainly dropping bombs in the quantity and regularity with which we dropped them in 1998 is an act of war. We did it unilaterally. We did it without consulting the United Nations. We did it without talking to the French or the Germans in the way that some of the President's critics say we must. We did it because we knew Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. David Kay and his inspectors have been to Iraq, and they say they cannot find warehouses full of weapons of mass destruction, which raises the fundamental question that most people are not addressing. What happened to them? Where are they? We know he had them. We went to war to deal with them. What happened to them? I think there are four possible answers to that question. First, one that has been raised by President Clinton himself, we got them all in the bombing. President Clinton said we didn't know how many we got. We could have gotten all of them. We could have gotten none. But we did our best to try to destroy them. One answer to the question of why David Kay was unable to find weapons of mass destruction when he got into Iraq with his inspectors is the possibility that we got them all in the bombing and had no way of knowing that. No. 2, the second possibility raised by David Kay and others is that they were trucked out of the country. They went off the border to Syria or someplace else. They are still in existence. They just aren't still in Iraq. We don't know the answer to that. But that is a possibility. Possibility No. 3, they were destroyed by Saddam Hussein himself. Someone would ask why would he want to do that. Look at the man. Look at what he did. Look at his record. He believed that the United States would, in fact, not invade. We had bombed in the first gulf war. We had bombed in 1998. He believed we would bomb again but that we would not invade, or, if we did invade, we would not topple him. After all, we didn't topple him last time. Pressure from the French, pressure from the Germans, said don't go ahead with this. He could very well have believed that the international community would put enough pressure on President Bush that the United States ultimately would stop short of removing him, particularly if inspectors from the U.N. got into Iraq and discovered there were no weapons of mass destruction. Therefore, he could have destroyed them himself on the assumption that he would stay in power and then, as soon as the inspectors were gone, he could reconstruct his weapons program, reestablish weapons of mass destruction, and be right back where he was before we took the action in 1998. That is the third possibility. The fourth possibility is that they are still there. There is the possibility that we haven't been able to find them but they are still there. That is a very serious question, one that is being ignored by everybody who is debating the question of whether Bush went to the United Nations the right way, or whether he said the right things, or whether he read the right intelligence. Those questions are minor compared to the consequences of answering this question. Let me pose it again and go through the four possibilities and give you my answer. What happened to the weapons of mass destruction that everybody in the world knew he had? We destroyed them in the bombing, or they were taken over the border to someplace else, or Saddam Hussein himself destroyed them in order to fool the inspectors, or they are still there. My answer is I believe all four. I believe we destroyed some in the bombing. I believe some got over the border. I believe he dismantled some of his programs, and I believe there are some still to be found. That means, if I am right, there is work to be done to help make the world safer that is not being done while we are being distracted by an irrelevant debate that is best left to historians. There is possibly still a threat out there that we are not addressing because we are paying so much attention to the questions of what kind of intelligence did he read and did he have the right 16 words in the State of the Union Message. We waste our time on that when we are facing this far more serious and obvious question. What happened to the weapons that we knew he had? We should not rest easy until we have an answer to that question. Which of the four or combination of the four possibilities really applies? The real question we are facing as we look ahead to November-- and make no mistake, this debate is all about looking ahead to November--is what will the United States do after the Presidential election is over? How will we proceed in Iraq once the determination has been made as to who will control our foreign policy for the next 4 years? That is the fundamental question the American voters need to be debating. That is the question they need to pay attention to as they make up their minds as to whom they will support in this election. The choice is fairly clear. We can only guess about the future, but the best indication of the future lies in the actions of the past. President Bush has made it pretty clear what the future would be with respect to Iraq if he prevails in November. President Bush has made it clear if he prevails in November, we will stay the course in Iraq. We will stay in Iraq until we have succeeded in our goal, which is to plant in Iraq a self-governing, westward-looking, open society where private property rights are respected, where the rights of individuals to vote and control their destiny are preserved, and where free market principles will prevail; an Iraq that will stand as an example to the rest of the Middle East that freedom, democracy and capitalism can indeed thrive there. President Bush is an optimist who believes those things are so fundamental in the human spirit that they can survive in an Islamic background. There are pessimists around who say no, the Muslims can never live in democracy. The Muslims can never live in freedom. President Bush is an optimist who says, I don't believe that--without trying to change their religion or attack their culture. I believe they will respond to freedom and the Americans will stay there until we have achieved the goal of planting freedom there. That is the answer to the question of what will happen in Iraq if George W. Bush wins this election. That is an easy answer to give because his past resolve and his past determination have been very clear. The second question, of course, is what will happen in Iraq if President Bush loses the election and we get a new steward in charge of our foreign affairs. That question is a little harder to answer because we do not have as clear a track record. On the assumption that the junior Senator from Massachusetts will become the President if President Bush loses the election, we do have the signposts indicating what he would do if he inherited the situation we now have. He said on ``Face the Nation,'' the first thing he would do is go to the United Nations and apologize. I am not quite sure for what he would apologize, but he has indicated the first thing he would do is to go to the United Nations and apologize. If I may quote the columnist for the New York Times, Tom Friedman, who spoke to a group in Europe. They turned to him after the weapons of mass destruction question arose and asked, Are you now prepared to apologize for your defense of Bush and your support for this war? He said something like this: Well, let me see. We have removed Saddam Hussein, one of the most brutal dictators of the world, found in the process that he had slaughtered at least 300,000 of his own people whom he had buried in mass graves. We know he is responsible for a million more deaths in the two wars he started with his neighbors over the last 12 years. We know he supported terrorism, down to the detail of paying $25,000 to anyone who would wrap himself in dynamite and blow himself up just so long as he could take another human being with him, and that he kept his people in absolute degradation and subjugation for 38 years. Now he is gone with his torture chambers and his secret police and his brutality, and I am supposed to apologize for that? I am not quite sure what Senator Kerry might say to the U.N. when he goes to apologize, but apparently what he will say, as I try to gather from the speeches he has given, is the United States should no longer act unilaterally, that we should get international support before we go forward in an event like this, and presumably he would then say to the U.N. we are where we are, the responsibility now of building the kind of Iraq George W. Bush envisioned--I give Senator Kerry the credit of assuming he is in favor of that kind of Iraq--the responsibility for building that kind of Iraq now lies with you, United Nations. We in America are going to show a little humility--that is another word he used--show a little humility on this issue and turn it over to you and let you take over the responsibility of producing the results we all want in Iraq. If that is, indeed, his program--and I assume we will find that out as the election goes forward--I make these observations. Number one, the United Nations has no force with which it can provide security to the Iraqis. There is no United Nations army. There is no United Nations police force. There are no United Nations federal marshals or any other kind of enforcement facility you might think of. The only force the United Nations can ever use is the force that would be provided to it by its member states. The United Nations can pass resolutions, the United Nations can threaten people, but the threats carry no force unless the member states of the United Nations respond to the U.N. resolutions and can go forward. That is the point President Bush made when he spoke to the United Nations and said to them, if you won't enforce your resolutions, we will. I don't think we need to apologize to the United Nations for enforcing their resolution 1441 that passed by a unanimous vote in the Security Council and which David Kay has now said Saddam Hussein was in complete violation of. That is something we should remember as we have this debate. The history is not all that comforting to me. Koffi Annan sent a group of U.N. folk into Iraq to help with the nation building and here is the series of events that occurred. The head of the U.N. mission showed up and took possession of a building where he was going to operate. The Americans showed up and put their armored vehicles around the building. He came out and said, No, that is too militaristic. You Americans are too quick to show force. We are the United Nations. We come in peace. Get rid of the armored vehicles. The American commander, after arguing with this fellow, said all right, and he got rid of the armored vehicles, but he spread concertina wire through the courtyard, and the U.N. head of the group came out and said, get rid of that. You are too militaristic. We are the United Nations. We are not the United States. We are not here to show military force. We are here to help build the country. Finally, the Americans took away the concertina wire and the next day a truck bomb drove across the courtyard, blew up the building and killed the man who had said, I don't need this kind of protection. After this, Koffi Annan said, get them out of there. We can't provide their security. We can't keep them safe. I welcome the United Nations involvement. I hope we get the United Nations involvement, but I don't think that track record speaks very well for the idea that the first thing we should do about dealing with the problem in Iraq is to go to the United Nations and show some humility and apologize. The number one civil right which all of us desire more than anything else and that is most essential in Iraq is the right to walk down the street without being shot, the right to walk out in public without being beaten over the head. To establish security is the first responsibility of civilization. Security in Iraq is being provided by the American military and its allies in the Iraqi forces. George W. Bush, for all of the mistakes that have been made, and all of the difficulties that have been encountered, has demonstrated America's resolve to provide this civil right to Iraqis. The United Nations has fallen short in this category. This is the fundamental question all of us should look at: Instead of debating whether the President looked at the right piece of intelligence, whether the committees had the right information, whether this or that or the other was looked at and was not, the real question is, where do we go from here. We are where we are, regardless of how we got here. Where do we go from here--the question the American people will decide in November. I close with this anecdote or comment from Bernard Lewis. Bernard Lewis probably knows more about this region than any other academic in America. He has spent more time studying it, and has written books on it. He spoke to a group of us, and he was an optimist. He agreed with President Bush that democracy could be planted in the region and we should stay the course until we do it. He made this comment. He said: Listen to the jokes. In the Middle East, the only form of expression that is not censored is the jokes. And this is the joke that is going around in Iran, right next to Iraq. Two Iranians are talking. The first Iranian is complaining about how bad the government is, how bad things are. The second Iranian says: Yeah. They go back and forth, saying: What are we going to do? Where are we going to turn? Finally, the second Iranian says: I know. What we need is an Osama bin Laden. The first Iranian says: Are you crazy? That would make things that much worse, and the second Iranian says: Nope. If we had an Osama bin Laden, then the Americans would come and save us. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in the Middle East who are watching what we are doing in Iraq in the hope that, in the words of the joke, the Americans will ``come and save us.'' We have set our hand to the plow to that particular assignment. We should not turn back now. We should back our President and his resolve to see this through until freedom, prosperity, and self-determination are established in Iraq, from which it will then spread, change the Middle East, and ultimately transform the world.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I object.

Mr. BENNETT. I have listened with interest to the Senator from New York and will respond to several of the things she said. I notice the chairman of the Appropriations Committee in the Chamber. I do not wish to intrude on his time unduly because he is the real expert on this process and can explain why we are where we are far better than I can. I do have personal reactions to several of the comments the Senator from New York has said. She talks about things that have not been passed by the Senate and gives two examples--country-of-origin labeling and vouchers--and says we are ignoring the will of this body. But what she does not comment on and may not realize is that in both these instances, the House of Representatives took a diametrically opposed position to that which was taken by the Senate. The purpose of conference is to deal with that kind of a challenge. I will talk about the country-of-origin labeling because I was personally involved in it. The House of Representatives said: Absolutely, we are going to kill this program. The Senate said: Absolutely, we have to keep this program. There is not a lot of room for negotiation between those two positions. For her to say it is terrible, what came back from conference was not what the Senate passed and somehow we did it because the administration told us to do it ignores the fact that the House of Representatives has exactly the same amount of power under the Constitution as the Senate. And they took a very firm position. What we came up with, in conference, and I was the one who suggested it so I have direct knowledge, was a compromise that said we will not take the House position and kill this program, but since the House will not take the Senate position and implement it immediately, let's simply delay the effective date to give us time to figure out a way to make it work, if it is possible to work. I don't consider that under cover of darkness. I don't consider that a violation of what we learned in civics class about the way to resolve problems between the House and the Senate. I think it is a legitimate position that comes to a compromise between the House's firm statement and the Senate's firm statement and says we will keep the law, which is what the Senate wanted, but we will delay the implementation, which is not quite what the House wanted. I view that as a win for the Senate position. I am a little bit troubled to have the Senator from New York say we have violated the spirit of the Constitution with this kind of a compromise and this kind of accommodation between the two. I have said this before and undoubtedly will again. I learned from my father when he served in this body this truth: We legislate at the highest level at which we can obtain a majority. Many times the process of getting to a majority is not pretty. Many times things are done which in civics class people would get very upset about, but in order to get a majority to get the thing done, this is where we are. This bill represents the highest accommodation of all the interests we can arrive at for which we could obtain a majority. One other comment that I would like to make with respect to the Senator from New York and her constant repetition that all we did in this conference was buckle under to the will of the administration; all we did was accept the administration's position and over and over again; we ignored our responsibilities as the legislative branch and said whatever the king wants we will give him. This is the rhetoric we get. I have not been here as long as many Members and certainly not as long as the chairman of the full committee who will speak next but I have been here long enough to have been in a number of Appropriations Committee conferences, most of them under the previous administration, the Clinton administration to which she referred, and I tell my constituents, in every conference of the Appropriations Committee on which I have sat--and there are a number of them--when the Clinton administration was in power, the Clinton administration made its wishes very much known. And in every instance the veto threat that came out of the Clinton administration was, if you do not increase spending above the amount you are talking about in this bill, the President will veto it. There were times when we gave in to that pressure from the administration. We felt it so necessary to pass the appropriations bills and fund the Government that we would grit our teeth and say, all right, we will, even though it was not adopted in either House we will, in fact, increase spending in order to avoid a veto threat. The veto threats we have heard out of the Bush administration have been the other way. The veto threats out of the Bush administration are, these spending numbers are too high and we have to cut them down in the name of fiscal responsibility. I make that point because one of the things being said in this political season is that the Republicans have given up on fiscal responsibility; the Republicans are responsible for the runaway spending. I have been there. I have been at the conference committees. I can assure all Members that this administration is no more active in the conference committees than the previous administration, and all of the pressure out of the previous administration was to increase the spending whereas the pressure out of this administration has been to try to get the spending under control. I simply want to get that information clearly on the record as we go into this political season. With that, I yield the floor so we can hear from the other Senators.

Mr. BENNETT. I agree with the Senator from Iowa and my ranking member. There is a long history of the Rural Economic Development Grant and Loan Program being a very effective tool to provide capital for many worthy job creating projects. I concur that the Department should release the funds sitting in the cushion of credit account to qualified applications as quickly as possible. polio eradication

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I will not take a great deal of time. I don't need to because all that needs to be said about Bill Roth has been said. My wife and I had the privilege of going with Bill and his wife to Romania. We traveled with them to other countries throughout Europe talking about NATO and other issues. In that process, we became well acquainted with two of America's finest public servants. But on that occasion, they became two of our best friends. I join with all of the people from Delaware and all of the colleagues in the Senate in paying tribute to Bill Roth, saying goodbye to him for his service, and extending my warmest sympathy and condolences to Jane for the loss of her husband as well as recognition of her service to this country. What a remarkable couple. America, as well as the State of Delaware, has been very well served for their willingness to participate in the public arena.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I would like to be allowed to speak very briefly about Senator Roth as well. I don't have a prepared statement. Could I go for 1 minute between Senator Carper and Senator Specter?

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, this past Saturday, November 22, 2003, the Senate passed the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003. Section 214 of the conference report, entitled ``Affiliate Sharing,'' adds a new requirement for a notice and an opportunity for a consumer to opt-out of receiving solicitations from a person based on information that has been shared from an affiliate of that person Several exceptions to the notice and opt-out requirement are included in the bill. The first, and most logical one, is an exception for a business sending solicitations to its own customers. The conference report defines this as a ``pre-existing business relationship.'' The conference report further defines categories of relationships that qualify as a ``pre-existing business relationship'' and directs the regulators, including the Federal Trade Commission, to use their regulatory discretion to deem any ``any other pre-existing customer relationship'' as qualifying for the definition that may be appropriate but not clear from the statute. The first category of relationships that the conference report definition of ``pre-existing business relationship'' lists is a relationship based on ''a financial contract between a person and a consumer which is in force.'' ``Financial contract,'' however, is not defined and it is not clear on its face what the term describes. In any case, I believe the operative concern is that it must be a contract in force. As a conference, I believe the conference report intends that the term ``pre-existing business relationship'' includes a contractual relationship between a consumer and a person, where the consumer has requested the provision of a good or service, or affirmatively registered to receive a service, whether or not a fee is assessed. Certain business models, such as those in the online world, do not follow the traditional fee for services model that characterizes the brick and mortar world. Financial consideration may not exchange up front with a customer, or at all for that matter. Accordingly, I urge the regulators to factor in new and innovative business models when issuing the regulations implementing section 214 of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003, particularly with regard to the definition of ``pre-existing business relationship.''

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, as this debate goes forward, it is beginning to take on somewhat of a formulae pattern with one side saying, There are some good things in this bill, but it is so bad that we must do nothing, and the other saying, We have problems; there may be some bad things in this bill, but we have to move forward. Both sides agree the bill is not what individual Senators might prefer, but the way the argument comes down on one side or the other as to the balance. I am reminded of the statement my father used to make when he served in this body. He said: We legislate at the highest level at which we can obtain a majority. With the Senate as equally divided as this one, with only a one-vote margin between the parties, obtaining a majority is very difficult. I pay tribute not only to the chairman of the Finance Committee, but to the ranking member of the Finance Committee who, in a bipartisan fashion, obtained a majority within that committee and brought a bill that has now obtained a majority in the House of Representatives, however close that was, and is on its way to obtaining a majority in the Senate. As the debate has gone on, those who are saying, No, this bill is more bad than it is good, seem to have another mantra that I have heard over and over again. That mantra is this: This bill will destroy Medicare. Indeed, there are some who have gone so far as to say that it is the motive and purpose of the Republicans in this matter to destroy Medicare. I have had some say the Republicans have hated Medicare ever since it was established, and they want to kill it, and this bill is somehow a Trojan horse aimed at killing Medicare from the inside. I reject the notion that the Republicans are trying to kill Medicare. I think that is ridiculous. I don't think there is any indication that is the case, never has been, but it is part of the political mantra that we hear over and over again. More importantly, I want to address the question of the present health of Medicare absent this bill. We hear over and over again: Medicare is wonderful; we can't tinker with it in any way. The best thing we could do is just take a prescription drug program and put it into the present Medicare mix. Some of the provisions that are in this bill are innovative. Some of the provisions that are in this bill tinker with this wonderful program that everybody loves. I would suggest to those who have that particular point of view that they should go out and spend some time dealing with Medicare as it presently is constituted, not in the theory of a committee hearing, but on the firing line with providers. Let me give you a few anecdotes out of the real world that have convinced me that while I believe the Federal Government should have the responsibility that it has adopted with respect to Medicare, I do not believe that the present Medicare system is so wonderful that it should not be tinkered with. Example No. 1: As I have held town meetings around my State, people come to me and talk about their problems. I am sure every Senator has the same experience. Very often, the problems they talk about have to do with Medicare. A woman came to me and said: I have finally figured out how to deal with Medicare. It struck me as a little bit strange that she should be talking about Medicare because she didn't strike me as being old enough to worry about Medicare. Then she made it clear; she handles her mother's financial affairs. So she said: On behalf of my 85-year-old mother, I handle all of her relationships with Medicare. She said: Again, I finally figured out how to handle it: I throw away everything unopened, and then once a month, I call the Salt Lake Clinic and say: How much do I owe you? She said: I am a professional. I am a college graduate. I am an educated woman. I am probably at the top of my powers in terms of my career. I cannot understand anything that comes from Medicare. I open these envelopes, and I try to read what it has to say. It is absolutely impenetrable, and I spent time trying to figure it out; I spent time trying to work it through and finally I adopted my present strategy. Once again, I throw away everything unopened. I don't even bother to look at it, and then at the end of every month, I call the Salt Lake Clinic--which is where her mother gets her health care provided--and I say: How much do I owe you? They give me a number, I write out a check, and life is simple. She said: I may be overpaying, I may be underpaying, but who knows? Indeed, I don't think there is anybody on the planet who knows how much the bill really should be. She said: I decided that the peace of mind that comes from being able to handle this in this kind of fashion is worth whatever financial discrepancies there might be. That does not sound to me like a program that is working so well that we can't do a little tinkering with it or a program that is going so smoothly that we can't try some innovation. Our friends on the other side of the aisle are so horrified that this bill calls for some health savings accounts. I say to them: What are they afraid of? That they will work? Are they afraid the health savings accounts might demonstrate that there is a different way to deal with this, a way that is a little more straightforward, a way that does not involve the mountains of paperwork and the tremendous bureaucracy connected with it? Example No. 2: I have a daughter of whom I am enormously proud who has a master's degree in speech therapy. After she graduated with that degree from George Washington University, she went to work in a nursing home. This daughter is a very enthusiastic young lady. Some might even suggest she is a little bit excitable. I would not, as her father, make that kind of a charge, but I have heard some who have suggested she gets excited. She had been on the job, I imagine, a week, maybe a week and a half. She called me. The call came in as calls from my children usually do: Just as I am getting ready to go to bed. I am so delighted to hear from my children that I do not resent the fact that they prevent me from getting the amount of sleep I would normally like. They can call any time. When she called and I answered, she said: Dad, you are a Senator. You have got to fix Medicare. I said: OK. Calm down. Tell me what you are talking about. Then she described the details of the difficulty she was having in her first job in this nursing home trying to provide therapy for seniors who were having serious problems with respect to Medicare. She made this fascinating statement to me. She said: Dad, do you know who the highest paid person in this facility is? Well, I would have assumed it would be the administrator. No. Well, if it is not the administrator, then the most skilled doctor. I can see that a doctor might be paid more than an administrator. She said: No. The highest paid person in this facility is the woman who is in charge of handling Medicare regulations. I stopped to think about that for a minute. That means the skill required to understand all of the regulations relating to Medicare is in shorter supply and therefore can command a higher salary than the skill necessary to administer an entire facility or the skill necessary to provide medical services from a skilled physician. She gave me an example. She said there was a senior in that facility who was having some problems swallowing. The doctor looked at it. The doctor said, I do not understand what the problems are, and called the speech therapist. My daughter, the speech therapist, came in and said: Yes, I understand the problems connected with this. It is fairly straightforward. It is fairly normal among seniors. Here is the way you deal with it. She needs this kind of therapy to deal with her swallowing problems. They are not just minor problems. They could affect her ability to eat and ultimately her ability to live because she needs the nourishment. So my daughter said: This is what needs to be done. Well, the relatives of the woman who had the swallowing difficulties said: Absolutely not, until we are sure Medicare will pay for it. We cannot have this kind of procedure and therapy prescribed unless we are sure it is covered by Medicare. If Medicare will pay for it, then grandma can have it, but if Medicare will not pay for it, we are not paying for it, no. My daughter, in her innocence, first time on the job, said: Let me find out. So she made the inquiry, Will Medicare cover this particular treatment? Three days later, she gets an answer. It took that long to wade through all of the regulations, and all of the rest of it, by this person who was the highest paid person in the nursing home, to figure it out. My daughter has had the tragic experience of having patients die on her, patients whom she believed she could have helped but was unable to help because of the delays built into dealing with all of the complexities connected with Medicare. She said, again: Dad, you are a Senator. Fix it. I said: Well, it takes a little more than one Senator to fix this. Then she made a very interesting statement. She said: I cannot admit to any of my coworkers in this facility that my father is a Senator because they will be so outraged that my father is a Senator and is not doing anything about fixing Medicare. So I suggest to those who say Medicare is so sacrosanct that we cannot try anything new, they ought to spend a little time dealing with patients and providers to discover that Medicare has become a bureaucracy of incredible impenetrability and needs to be addressed. This bill addresses some of those problems. The most significant one, of course, is the fact that Medicare as it currently stands does not provide reimbursement for prescription drugs. Now that is a scandal. Every other health program in this country immediately recognized, as it came along, the shift in the way medicine is practiced in this country, but because Medicare is written by the Congress, it is not flexible enough to make that kind of shift. We now have prescription drugs that prevent hospitalization, that prevent the necessity for operations and surgical procedures, but Medicare will not reimburse for that even though ultimately it would save tremendous amounts of money. The reason: Medicare is the best Blue Cross/Blue Shield fee-for-service indemnity plan of 1965 frozen in time. It is almost like a bad movie, a Woody Allen movie where he sleeps for awhile and comes back 40 years later. Medicare has not kept up with the changes in the way medicine is practiced. It has not kept up with all of the things that happen outside of Medicare, in the private world, that happened just because the administrators of the plan look at what is happening in the practice of medicine and say we need to change the plan to adapt to the way medicine is practiced. Medicare cannot because it has to be changed by Congress, and every time Congress comes along and says we need to try to make some of these changes, we run smack into the political reality that there can be some political hay made by standing up to defend Medicare, by saying the other side is trying to destroy Medicare. The scare tactics of this kind of campaign are something with which we are all familiar. One of my colleagues on this side described a conversation she had during the 2000 election with her aunt who was in her nineties. Her aunt said: I am not sure I can vote for George W. Bush. The Senator said: Why not? She said: Well, he is going to destroy my Social Security. Wait a minute, said the Senator. Governor Bush has not talked in any sense about your Social Security. He is talking about the future. He is talking about the teenagers. He is talking about the 20-somethings who are just coming into Social Security. Oh, no, said the woman in her nineties, he is going to destroy Social Security and Medicare. Because she had seen television ads that suggested that any attempt to try to improve, modernize, change, or help either Social Security and Medicare meant destroy, meant we are against it. We are hearing those same kinds of arguments today. Any attempt on the part of the Finance Committee to improve, change, innovate, experiment, or move in any direction other than the 1965 model is somehow an attempt to destroy. Well, it is not. I think we all understand that. But that makes for a great bumper sticker. It makes for a great television 30-second sound bite to attack anybody who wants to try anything new as being against the old and, therefore, trying to destroy the whole program. I have problems with this bill, as does every other Member of this body one way or the other. There are lots of things in it that I do not like and lots of things in it that I think will make the problem I have just described worse, make Medicare even more impenetrable than it is now, but I intend to vote for it. I intend to vote for it with enthusiasm, and I ask my colleagues to do the same thing, because for the first time since 1965, it is at least willing to break down some of the walls that have been built around this program. For the first time since 1965, it is at least willing to try and see if we can get a little experience with a few things that can move us into the 21st century. I am sure I will be attacked in my election this November as being one who voted to destroy Medicare by virtue of this vote, by those who will want to continue to raise the specter that any kind of innovation or change is an attack at the fundamental program. But let us understand the most important thing we are faced with here. Let us understand if we do nothing, if we preserve this program as it currently exists, it will destroy itself. This is not a partisan statement, this is not some conclusion Republicans have come to and Democrats dispute. The demographics are irresistible. What is happening in our country as we become older and older, as the good health care that we are receiving makes us live longer and longer, that demonstrates a financial situation that is unsustainable. If we do nothing with Medicare in the name of preserving Medicare, we watch Medicare self-destruct. That is inexorable. There is no way around it. I would have suggestions that would go far beyond what this bill does in moving us away from the present paradigm of Medicare into a world of innovation, change, and experimentation, not because I want to destroy Medicare but because I want it to survive. If you leave it on its present course, it is not going to survive. There are a few halting steps in the right direction in this bill. We need more of them. We cannot stop with this bill. The Congresses of the future will have to deal with this problem, and it will only get worse the longer we delay taking those steps. So I say let's take those steps now. Let's start with this bill with the full understanding, and with eyes wide open, that the future is going to bring us back to this issue again and again. The demographics are inexorable. They are going to require changes in the next Congress and in the Congress after that and in the Congress after that. They are going to force us to get out of the mindset that we have had since the 1960s, and that has nothing to do with who is in the White House or who controls the Senate in a partisan fashion. Those demographics are there. They are bearing down on us. The quicker we can understand that and begin to think in new ways, begin to experiment with new methods, the sooner we will solve the problem, not only for our existing seniors but, perhaps more important, for the baby boomers who are becoming seniors. We have to think in a new fashion or they will run into a demographic brick wall that will see this program self-destruct regardless of what we do. So, as I say, for that reason, with all the problems I see in the bill, I am going to vote for it, and I am going to hope that future Finance Committees and Ways and Means Committees will move us in the direction of innovation and experimentation so we can boldly begin to find solutions to the problems that we face.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce legislation authorizing the title transfer of certain features of the Provo River Project, UT, from the Bureau of Reclamation to non-Federal ownership. This title transfer will provide many benefits, both directly and indirectly, for both the local government and the Federal Government, including economic, environmental, recreational, and safety benefits. The facilities to be transferred are the Provo Reservoir Canal and associated lands and structures, the Salt Lake Aqueduct and associated lands and structures, and a 3.79 acre parcel of land in Pleasant Grove, UT. The Provo Reservoir Canal is a large, open, mostly unlined, 21.5 mile long canal that was constructed by the United States in the 1940s. The water transported through the Provo Reservoir Canal is used principally for municipal and industrial purposes. The Salt Lake Aqueduct is a 41.7 mile long, 69 inch diameter pipe, constructed by the United States and completed in 1951. The Provo River Water Users Association recently constructed a $2 million office and shop complex on the Pleasant Grove property, without the use of Federal funds. Title transfer will facilitate the use of tax-exempt bond financing and low-interest loan financing for needed improvements. Currently, there is no Reclamation program for rehabilitating aging Reclamation facilities. Federal ownership of the facilities to be improved prevents low interest loans by others. On the Federal level, the transfer would eliminate the demands on limited Reclamation resources for the administration of the Salt Lake Aqueduct and the Provo Reservoir Canal. It is anticipated that following title transfer, needed improvements would be made. For example, the Provo Reservoir Canal will be enclosed to provide for the conservation of water, improved water quality and security, the construction of a public trail system on top of the canal, and to eliminate the hazards of an open unlined canal in an urban environment. The critical importance of eliminating the safety hazard of an open canal in an urban setting was recently reinforced by the tragic death of two young men who unfortunately were lured by the thrill of attempting a swim through the canal to the other end. The enclosure of the canal would eliminate this safety risk and hopefully prevent any others from making a similar mistake. The transfer has significant local support, including Utah County, Salt Lake County, Sandy City, Salt Lake City, Lindon City, Draper, Pleasant Grove City, Orem City and American Fork City. I look forward to working with the Metropolitan Water District of Salt Lake and Sandy, the Provo River Water Users Association, and all interested parties to make this title transfer a success.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce legislation authorizing the title transfer of certain features of the Provo River Project, UT, from the Bureau of Reclamation to non-Federal ownership. This title transfer will provide many benefits, both directly and indirectly, for both the local government and the Federal Government, including economic, environmental, recreational, and safety benefits. The facilities to be transferred are the Provo Reservoir Canal and associated lands and structures, the Salt Lake Aqueduct and associated lands and structures, and a 3.79 acre parcel of land in Pleasant Grove, UT. The Provo Reservoir Canal is a large, open, mostly unlined, 21.5 mile long canal that was constructed by the United States in the 1940s. The water transported through the Provo Reservoir Canal is used principally for municipal and industrial purposes. The Salt Lake Aqueduct is a 41.7 mile long, 69 inch diameter pipe, constructed by the United States and completed in 1951. The Provo River Water Users Association recently constructed a $2 million office and shop complex on the Pleasant Grove property, without the use of Federal funds. Title transfer will facilitate the use of tax-exempt bond financing and low-interest loan financing for needed improvements. Currently, there is no Reclamation program for rehabilitating aging Reclamation facilities. Federal ownership of the facilities to be improved prevents low interest loans by others. On the Federal level, the transfer would eliminate the demands on limited Reclamation resources for the administration of the Salt Lake Aqueduct and the Provo Reservoir Canal. It is anticipated that following title transfer, needed improvements would be made. For example, the Provo Reservoir Canal will be enclosed to provide for the conservation of water, improved water quality and security, the construction of a public trail system on top of the canal, and to eliminate the hazards of an open unlined canal in an urban environment. The critical importance of eliminating the safety hazard of an open canal in an urban setting was recently reinforced by the tragic death of two young men who unfortunately were lured by the thrill of attempting a swim through the canal to the other end. The enclosure of the canal would eliminate this safety risk and hopefully prevent any others from making a similar mistake. The transfer has significant local support, including Utah County, Salt Lake County, Sandy City, Salt Lake City, Lindon City, Draper, Pleasant Grove City, Orem City and American Fork City. I look forward to working with the Metropolitan Water District of Salt Lake and Sandy, the Provo River Water Users Association, and all interested parties to make this title transfer a success.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. I would say I almost never agree with Reverend Sharpton, but I have seen the diligence with which he and other civil rights leaders have pounced upon any politician who has ever dared hint at any kind of racial slur or attack on an African American. At least he has shown this degree of consistency, that he has now spoken up against those who are Democrats who may have been guilty of a racial slur, and come to the defense of an African American, even though he disagrees with her. I think it appropriate for us to note that. I appreciate the Senator's yielding to me for the opportunity to make that comment.

Mr. BENNETT. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I will answer the Senator from Louisiana.

Mr. BENNETT. I am unaware of how many nominees did not get out of committee. I am unaware of what may have happened prior to a nomination coming to the floor. But I do know I would allow a vote on every nominee who comes to the floor, regardless of which party it may be or regardless of which President might put that nominee forward. And I would agree with Al Sharpton or anyone else who called for an up-or- down vote, without a filibuster, on any nominee, any judicial nominee who has come forward. There is no question but nominees get lost in committees. There is no question nominees get held up by holds and other activities. But once a nominee has been cleared by a majority vote of the committee and placed on the floor, that nominee is entitled to an up-or-down vote. I have always held that position. I always will hold that position. It is for that reason I will support the Frist-Miller rule change that will make that position very clear. I do not care who the President is, under the Constitution he or she has the right to make nominations. The Senate handles those nominations. I understand sometimes those nominations will be stopped in committee. But once the committee has voted by a majority vote to put the nomination on the floor, whether it is my President or someone else's President, I will always support and always have supported the notion that that individual is entitled to an up-or-down vote.

Mr. BENNETT. May I respond?

Mr. BENNETT. I am interested to hear the Senator make the point that an up-or-down vote is what we are asking for. The Senator was in the Chamber when the cartoon was displayed with highly offensive racial characteristics attributed to the judge from California. I ask the Senator if he is aware that this African-American woman, who in my opinion has been slandered, has been the subject of comment by Al Sharpton, one of the candidates for President. Al Sharpton said he disagrees with the woman and believes she is not qualified to sit on the bench but that she is entitled to an up-or-down vote. Is the Senator aware of Mr. Sharpton's comment on that?

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, we have compared numbers around here, particularly the number of 168 to 4 over and over again. I make it clear that these two numbers are not in the same ballpark; that is, this is not 168 who have been approved and 4 who have been disapproved. There has been no vote disapproving the 4. Rather, it is 168 who have received a vote in the tradition and the precedent set and maintained for 214 years. The Constitution was ratified in 1789, and from that time forward there has never been an instance where a judge reported out of the Judiciary Committee, or whatever committees preceded the Judiciary Committee in the existence of the Senate, never been a time when a judge whose name has come to the floor has been denied a vote until this year. If you take apples and apples, if you take the number of those reported to the floor and voted on until this year, the number was 2,372-0 for 214 years. Whether it was under control of the Democrats or the Republicans, this body never denied a reported nominee a vote. Some of those who got votes got defeated, but no one who was reported was denied a vote until this year. We talk about the law. We talk about the Constitution. One of the parts of the law as I understand it becomes established is the question of precedent, 214 years of precedent, 2,372 cases of precedent upset in this Congress by the Democratic leadership. A lot of people have called a lot of people names during this debate. I don't want to do that. I was urged to do that just before I came over here by some who said: Why don't you say the kind of things about them they are saying about you or their nominees? Mix it up. I don't want to do that because I don't think that is useful. What I would like to urge on the Senate on this occasion is that we go back to a proposal that was made some years ago by the Democrats, specifically, Senator Lieberman and Senator Harkin, a proposal endorsed by Senator Daschle, that said let us eliminate the filibuster for nominees, start out with a 60-vote cloture motion, followed up with a second cloture motion at a lower level, follow it up with another cloture motion at another level, and so on. The Republicans did not endorse that. I am, today, rising to endorse that. I am today rising to say, we thought that rule change was not necessary because we thought the precedent would hold. But the precedent has now been broken. The precedent did not hold. The time has come to recognize the wisdom of Senator Lieberman and Senator Harkin and Senator Daschle and others to change the rules. The vote we will have tomorrow on what is now called the Frist-Miller proposal is a vote to endorse the wisdom and farsightedness of Senator Lieberman, Senator Harkin, and Senator Daschle in previous Congresses. And the practical effect of passing Frist-Miller will be to establish in the Senate rules a 214-year-old precedent that has been broken in this Congress for the first time. The effect would be to establish in the Senate rules a precedent that has held up 2,372 times, and has only fallen in this Congress. It will be a vote to make a bipartisan solution to a problem that has spawned far too much acrimony, far too much controversy. It will be a permanent solution to this matter. It will not solve the question of Miguel Estrada who was tired of having his reputation trashed and decided to withdraw and thus deprive the United States of the opportunity to have the services of a man who excelled academically, who excelled professionally, who, though he was appointed to the Solicitor General's office by the first President Bush, was maintained in that office for several years by President Clinton because they thought he was that good. Today he has been attacked on this floor as a lemon, someone who deserved to be rejected. We have fallen to that level of discourse, and we should avoid that level of discourse. Let us adopt a bipartisan solution which Republicans previously blocked. This Republican is prepared to repent. This Republican is prepared to say, OK, I recognize the wisdom of Senator Lieberman's proposal. I am willing to endorse it. Now it is before us once again. Let us not kill it just because it bears the name Frist-Miller instead of the names Lieberman-Harkin as it originally had. Give Members an opportunity to put the bitterness, the wild and sometimes excessive statements behind us and move forward in the future as we have done in the past for 214 years to see to it that any nominee who makes it through the committee process and gets reported to the floor gets voted on, whether he or she is a Republican or a Democrat, Hispanic or an African American, a Roman Catholic or a Jew or whatever the situation. If he or she survives the committee process and comes to the Senate floor, he or she deserves a vote in the same tradition that we have followed for 214 years. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, on Veterans Day, it is fitting to pause, remember and recognize the contributions of those who have defended America throughout our history. Today, I would also like to recognize a man who risked his life to save his fellow marines in the horrific World War II battle for Iwo Jima. Historian David Kennedy, in his book ``Freedom from Fear,'' describes the battle of Iwo Jima: The twenty-one-thousand-man Japanese garrison had honeycombed Iwo's basaltic ridges and Suribachi's ashen flanks with reinforced concrete-and-steel bunkers and stuffed them with artillery, antiaircraft guns, mortars, and machine guns. They were so well and deeply entrenched that seventy- two days of aerial bombing and three days of naval shelling barely scratched them. At first light on February 19 two divisions of marines, each man carrying up to a hundred pounds of gear, stepped from their amphtracs onto Iwo's beaches and sank to their boot-tops in the powdery mixture of sand and volcanic ash. Vehicles, including tanks and half- tracks, soon bogged down in the quicksand-like topping of pumice and cinder that blanketed the island. From the Japanese bunkers and pillboxes a hellish rain of shells and bullets pelted the beaches, where the marines seemed to be moving in slow motion through the sucking sand . . . The battle ground on . . . with unmatched barbarity. Japanese soldiers stubbornly refused to surrender. When the fighting ended at last in late March, only a few hundred Japanese, mostly wounded, had allowed themselves to be taken prisoner. From February 19 to March 25, 1945, 6,140 Marine and Navy soldiers were killed on Iwo Jima and 17,372 were wounded. Nearly two of three soldiers who fought on Iwo Jima were killed or wounded. Twenty-two Marines and four corpsmen received medals of honor. During those terrible days of February and March of 1945, George E. Wahlen was a medical corpsman. James Bradley, in the book, Flags of our Fathers said this: . . . In the European theater, my dad (a navy corpsman) would have worn a red cross on his helmet and expected the Germans to spare him as a noncombatant. And he would have been unarmed, according to the Geneva Convention. but the Pacific theater was different. . . . The Japanese on Iwo Jima had been trained to look for corpsmen by identifying their telltale medical pouch--and shoot them on the spot. Without a corpsman to save the wounded, the Japanese knew, their kill ratio would be much higher . . . Though seriously wounded three times in 26 days, corpsman George Whalen refused evacuation and repeatedly defined heavy mortar and rifle fire from the enemy to find and treat his wounded comrades. Disregarding his own safety, he continued to cross open terrain under fire to aid his friends, until he was so badly wounded, he could no longer walk. Even then, he carried on, crawling across the ground through the raging battle to administer aid to yet another fallen comrade. For his unselfish and steadfast courage, and for ``conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty.'' George Wahlen was awarded the Medal of Honor, and is Utah's only living recipient of that rare recognition. We are all familiar with the language of military honors, but, in these challenging times, where American soldiers and sailors, airmen and marines, once again are serving in foreign lands and showing the same gallant spirit of sacrifice and courage in the face of battle, we need to hear it again. I would like to quote from Mr. Wahlen's citation: Painfully wounded . . . he remained on the battlefield, advancing well forward of the front lines to aid a wounded marine and carrying him back to safety despite a terrific concentration of fire. Tireless in his ministrations, he consistently disregarded all danger to attend his fighting comrades as they fell under the devastating rain of shrapnel and bullets. . . . When an adjacent platoon suffered heavy casualties, he defied the continuous pounding of heavy mortars and deadly fire of enemy rifles to care for the wounded, working rapidly in an area swept by constant fire and treating 14 casualties before returning to his own platoon. Wounded again . . . he gallantly refused evacuation, moving out with his company the following day in a furious assault across 600 yards of open terrain and repeatedly rendering medical aid while exposed to the blasting fury of powerful Japanese guns. Stouthearted and indomitable, he persevered in his determined efforts as his unit waged fierce battle and, unable to walk after sustaining a third agonizing wound, resolutely crawled 50 yards to administer first aid to still another fallen fighter. By his dauntless fortitude and valor, Wahlen served as a constant inspiration and contributed vitally to the high morale of his company during critical phases of this strategically important engagement. His heroic spirit of self-sacrifice in the face of overwhelming enemy fire upheld the highest traditions of the U.S. Naval Service. James Bradley, in an article in the Wall Street Journal on November 10, 2002, considered the phrase ``Uncommon Valor was a Common Virtue'' in his search to learn the story of his dad, and others at Iwo Jima. Mr. Bradley wrote: Corpsman George Wahlen was injured in the eye and shoulder, but patched himself up secretly so he would not be evacuated. When an exploding shell shattered his ankle, leaving his foot dangling and all but disconnected from the leg, he shot himself with morphine, taped up his ankle, and crawled back to the fight with one good eye, one good arm, and one good leg. Corpsman Wahlen had to be dragged off the field of battle. ``Why?'' I asked. He answered, ``I just did what anyone else would have done in the situation.'' . . . I thought to myself, ``If uncommon valor was so common on Iwo Jima, why can't I find the Rambos of my imagination?'' All I could find were humble guys who insisted they hadn't done much . . . But I realized then that what my dad's life and words, and the words and lives of these other heroes, were trying to tell me, was that it was all about common virtue. My dad and his comrades were men of common virtue before Iwo Jima, on Iwo Jima, and after Iwo Jima. Their actions and lives were consistent . . . I realized that the key to my dad's life was the attitude of common virtue he practiced throughout his days. . . . My dad, running through bullets on Iwo Jima, doing his duty in the Pacific. My dad having the patience to teach me, a young son, how to tie his shoes. My dad, just lending a hand in his community. . . . And I am confident that if my dad were here to read these words about common virtue being the root of heroism, he would shake his head in agreement and say: ``It's as simple as that.'' Mr. Wahlen has demonstrated common virtue throughout his life and continues to do so. He did not end his service on Iwo Jima. Following World War II, true to the code of what Tom Brokaw called ``the greatest generation,'' he went on to serve his country in two more wars and to dedicate countless volunteer hours in following years to the service of his fellow veterans. It is to honor this fine and humble man, who would be the last to claim such an honor for himself, that I am proposing to change the name of the Department of Veterans Affairs' Medical Center in Salt Lake City, UT to the ``George E. Wahlen Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center.'' Senator Hatch and I introduced this legislation, S. 1815, last week. This is a proper and fitting thing to do, not only because of Mr. Wahlen's accomplishments and service, but also because he is beloved by his fellow veterans. This is made clear by the unanimous support I received in support of this change from all of the State commanders and directors of Utah's veterans' organizations and State and Federal agencies: the American Legion, the Disabled American Veterans, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the VA Regional Office, the Utah Division of Veterans Affairs, and the VA Medical Center itself. When carrying the 2002 Olympic Torch George Wahlen said, ``It's an honor, but I feel like I'm representing all the veterans in the State of Utah.'' He has represented veterans so often over the last 30 years. In this circumstance, we honor George Wahlen, as a veteran, a Medal of Honor recipient, a man of both valor and virtue, and as a representative of all of the veterans who have served their country. Many veterans who returned as heroes are often uncomfortable with the designation of heroes. James Bradley, in Flags of our Fathers, recounted a story where his third grade teacher referred to James's father as a hero and wanted him to come and speak to his class. He recounts the exchange with his father: ``Jim, your teacher said something about heroes . . .'' I shifted expectantly in my chair, waiting to hear some stories of valor. Instead he looked me directly in my nine- year-old eyes, signaling that he'd like to embed an idea in my brain for the rest of my life. He said ``I want you to always remember something. The heroes of Iwo Jima are the guys who didn't come back.'' Today, we remember those who came back and those who didn't--those who didn't come back from Iwo Jima, from Guadalcanal, from Normandy, from Vietnam, from Korea, from Afghanistan, from Iraq. While words fail to make an adequate tribute to those who lost their lives and paid a price in sacrifice for what we enjoy today, I will borrow from what has already been written. In 1940, Winston Churchill spoke to the House of Commons in relation to the Battle of Britain. He said, ``Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.'' There are heroes that never came back. There are heroes that did. Let us not forget.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, the fiscal year 2004 Agriculture, Rural Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act includes appropriations for the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Review of the Food and Drug Administration to continue important vaccine and biological product research activities. Support of these research activities is essential for keeping CBER scientists and medical reviewers up-to-date and knowledgeable of the breakthrough science of vaccine and biological product research and development. Being involved in this cutting edge research better equips CBER scientists and reviewers with the best scientific-based tools for reviewing and regulating the safety and efficacy of live-saving vaccines and other biological products. During our subcommittee and Committee deliberations, many colleagues shared my concerns about the emergence of SARS, West Nile Virus, monkey pox, antibiotic resistant staphylococcal infections in hospitals, and other naturally-occurring infectious diseases in the U.S. I believe there is a need to expedite the development and licensing of new vaccines and biologicals to protect our citizens from these naturally- occurring infectious diseases. As with recent efforts and increased appropriations to augment research, regulatory testing and scientific capabilities of the FDA to assist in combating bioterrorism threats, I endorse FDA's continued support of those capabilities at the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research to combat the public health threats from naturally-occurring diseases. It is my view that continued support of these capabilities will better enable the Center to recruit and retain highly-qualified, motivated scientists and medical reviewers for vaccines and other biological products. In past years, CBER scientists engaged in laboratory and clinical research, which greatly improved their understanding of the science, their mission of assuring the safety and efficacy of the products under review by FDA, the medical needs of patients, and alternative products available. This understanding resulted in a more efficient and rapid agency licensing processes for many new products, which presented complex scientific, medical and public health issues. For example, CBER reviewers deeply involved in relevant laboratory research were responsible for the complex yet expeditious regulatory review and licensing of the four combination diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis (DTaP) vaccines and the four Hib (meningitis) conjugate vaccines during the last decade. Past CBER research has significantly contributed to technology transfer and benefited the public through the development of assays and reagents, which would otherwise be too costly and time-intensive for industry to duplicate. This research has facilitated the expedited testing, development, and availability of several important licensed vaccines for the prevention of life-threatening pediatric diseases and is critical for others currently under development for licensing in the future. Mr. President, I urge the Administration to provide sufficient funding in fiscal year 2005 for continued CBER research. These appropriations are essential for expediting not only the development and availability of licensed counter-bioterrorism vaccines and biological products, but also for those intended for the prevention and treatment of naturally-occurring infectious diseases, such as SARS, West Nile Virus and HIV-AIDS.