Robert Bennett

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent I might be allowed to speak as in morning business for up to 7 minutes.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Madam President, we have just confirmed a district judge, and I am delighted with that action. It is an action I wish we would take more often around here. Last night, the Judiciary Committee refused to send to the Senate Judge Pickering, who was nominated for the circuit court. I wish to make a few comments with respect thereto, and do it in the shadow of the confirmation vote we have just had. When this session of Congress began, the Senator from Vermont, who now chairs the Judiciary Committee, made it clear he had an extra- constitutional test he would apply to every judge. That is, he insisted we have the statement of the American Bar Association before us before we even consider a judge. I use the term ``extra-constitutional'' rather than ``unconstitutional,'' as some commentators have, because the Senator has every right to turn to any group or any area he wants in order to make his decision, but a requirement that a judge be recommended by the American Bar Association is not in the Constitution. Therefore, it is an extra-constitutional test. When Judge Pickering came before the Judiciary Committee, he passed that extra-constitutional test. He was chosen and designated as being well qualified by the American Bar Association. Yet he was voted down by the members of the Judiciary Committee. Some of them said he had racist views. Yet the African Americans in his home State came forward in great numbers to insist that this judge did not have racist views. Indeed, these African Americans who knew him better than African Americans outside of his State insisted he was an excellent judge and an excellent choice for the circuit court. Nonetheless, he was still not sent to the Senate for a vote. What this means is that the chairman of the Judiciary Committee has an additional extra-constitutional test he is applying to nominees. As he said before, it is his right to put whatever test he wants. But I hope, in courtesy to the Senate, that he and the other members of Judiciary Committee who voted against Judge Pickering will disclose their extra-constitutional test. They did at the beginning of the session. They said, in response to the President, they would not consider him until we have a rating from the American Bar Association. That is an extra-constitutional test we will openly and directly apply. It is clear from what has happened to Judge Pickering that there is now another extra-constitutional test being applied in secret, that is being applied in camera, and that is being applied in the dark. Those of us who are unaware of what it is are, therefore, unable to discuss it and unable to talk about it or direct our concerns toward it. Therefore, I formally ask the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mr. Leahy from Vermont, to tell us what the extra- constitutional test that he applied to Judge Pickering is. The newspapers say he has to pass muster from groups such as People for the American Way. I would rather not get the information from the newspapers. I would rather not have a journalist tell me what is on the Senator's mind. I would rather have the Senator tell us as openly and directly as he can at the beginning of this session what it is he requires before he will vote for someone to come out of the Judiciary Committee for a Senate vote. It is only fair that we and the constituents in Vermont understand what the test is that the chairman of the Judiciary Committee is applying. At the moment, we are left in the dark. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. I thank the Chair. Mr. President, my plea is very simple and can be stated in 1 minute: We must, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, think anew and act anew, recognizing that in the cyber-age, many of the attitudes we have had about warfare, about vulnerability, about opportunity have to be thought through entirely differently. If we can understand that and put aside some of our old prejudices and old ideas about technology and about regulation, we will be on the road to the prosperity and security we need. If we cling to the old ideas, the old paradigms with respect to information sharing and antitrust activities, we are in for serious trouble. So in 1 minute, that is my message. Let us think anew, let us act anew, and let us recognize the technological age has changed everything. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I appreciate the opportunity of sharing with my colleagues a summary of what happened in the Salt Lake games that took place the first 2 weeks in February, where the world came to Utah and was received in the spirit of the Olympic flame. The Olympic Games are one of the few events, if indeed not the only event, where the world comes together in a non-political arena. There was substantial effort that went into these games, both on the part of the people of Utah and the Federal taxpayer. So I think it is appropriate that we have a summary and report to this body on that experience. If I may, I would like to begin with some numbers. I know that is usually not the way to begin a public speech that you want anybody to listen to, but there are some numbers that outline the scope of these Olympics that I think are irreplaceable as an example of what went on. These were the largest Winter Olympics in history, and Salt Lake City was the largest city to host a Winter Olympics. In the past, they have always been held in relatively small ski villages. This is the first time a major metropolitan area has been chosen as the host of the Winter Olympics. Some will argue with that and say Sarajevo was a major city, but Salt Lake City is the largest city that has ever been host to a Winter Olympics. It was the largest number of athletes who have ever come to a Winter Olympics--2,500. They came from the largest number of countries ever represented at the Winter Olympics, 78, and they competed in the largest number of events--also 78. We kept adding sports to the Winter Olympics for this experience. Three and one-half billion people watched the opening and closing ceremonies that were held in the Rice-Eccles football stadium at the University of Utah. Sixty-seven thousand people signed up to be volunteers--the largest volunteer pool ever created. Only 24,000 of them could be accommodated. One of the interesting statistics--I don't have the final number--but far into the games, I was told, that of those 24,000 volunteers, only 77 were forced to withdraw for one reason or another: A health problem, a family emergency, what have you. The volunteers were a spectacular part of these Olympics. There were 9,000 credentialed media that showed up to cover the Olympics. It was, as I say, the largest Winter Olympics in history. In recognition of the size of the Olympics, it was declared for the first time as a National Special Security Event under Presidential Decision Directive 62. That directive, issued in the Clinton years, established national security events where the Secret Service would take the lead in managing the security. This is the first time the Olympics have ever been designated a National Special Security Event. The zone of security for the Olympics covered over 900 square miles from Provo to Ogden. That was the largest coordinated area the Secret Service and other law enforcement people have ever been asked to guard--perhaps with the exception of the District of Columbia as a whole. Even at the State of the Union Message, you don't have an area as large as the area covered by these Olympics. In order to meet the challenge of this security responsibility at these Olympics, we had 1,100 FBI agents, we had 2,000 Secret Service agents, and there were law enforcement officers from 48 different States. As I went through one venue, I noticed on the sleeve of one of the law enforcement officers the badge of the Police Department of Gallup, NM. Law enforcement officers from 48 States came to help their Utah colleagues provide security for the games. Over 2,400 Utah law enforcement officers gathered from all over the State. There were also 2,400 military personnel--primarily National Guardsmen who came from six different States. And there were 2,200 fire and emergency response individuals. This was an incredible army of security personnel assembled to provide security for the athletes and spectators. What did they handle? There were over 3.5 million spectators who went through magnetometers during that 2-week period--3\1/2\ million people processed on a time-frame. There were some who didn't get to their events on time. But overwhelmingly the ticket holders got to their events, went through the magnetometers, and were properly screened. There were 80,000 spectators processed each day through the magnetometers at Olympic Square. There were over 1,000 trucks processed carrying 250,000 tons of material and product. They were processed. They were screened. They got where they needed to go on time. It was an incredible security and logistical performance. When the Attorney General was out there, I was with him, and we were checking in advance the security preparations. At one of the venues, the officer briefing us summarized how good the security really was. As he said to the Attorney General, if you are going to get anywhere near this venue during the Olympics without a credential, you are going to have to be a moose. What happened in terms of the threat as a result of this security activity? By comparison--the Atlanta Olympics were the last that were held in the United States--in Atlanta, they routinely had between 100 and 200 bomb threats every single day by people who felt confident enough to mount some kind of hoax, or threat, or attempt to disrupt-- 100 to 200 every day. In the Salt Lake Olympics, there were a little over 100 of those threats through the entire 2-week period. Those are the statistics that give you the size and scope of what we were dealing with--the size and scope of the effort. In an effort to make sure we were getting our money's worth and that we were on top of things, I visited the venue. I went to the Olympic Village where the athletes were. That was a self-contained city of 3,500 people--the 2,500 athletes plus 1,000 coaches and other team officials. It had its own badge, it had its own health clinic, it had its own dining hall and even its own movie theater. This village had its own post office, bank, dry cleaners and convenience store--it was self-contained. Then I went to the media center, which was another city. As I said, there were over 9,000 accredited journalists there. Here is a city with its own store and bank as well as facilities for getting on-line, filing stories, and all of the things necessary for the media. I visited the Public Safety Command Center where over 64 different agencies were located, coordinating all of their efforts. I went to the joint intelligence center where all of the intelligence agencies--not only from our country, the CIA, the NSA, the DEA but also from other countries--were gathered together sharing intelligence information about what kind of threat they might see. There was the joint information center where all of the information officers were gathered so that if there were any kind of an incident that came up, everyone would know about it instantly and be able to coordinate their responses. I visited the Olympic Square and the Medals Plaza and, of course, every one of the athletic venues. Out of all of this, the basic question that I think we should be addressing in the Congress is, What is the legacy of the Salt Lake City games? What is the lasting result of having held this event? I want to highlight a few of the items that came out of what I have described from all of the visitations I made. The first legacy that is the most obvious is the degree of security expertise that has come out of this experience. As I said, I went to the security center and saw these 64 agencies in a room not the size of this chamber. They were sitting at a computer roughly every four feet, side by side, watching the computer screens and manning their stations 24 hours a day throughout the entire 17 days of the Olympics. That meant that anything that came up in the form of any sort of threat would be instantly known in real time and simultaneously to all 64 agencies. I was interested to note the labels that were on the little cardboard folders on the top of each computer. Here was a computer with a label on it that read ``FEMA.'' It was reassuring to know that the Federal Emergency Management Administration was present. Next to it would be one that read ``FBI''--that was reassuring--and on through a number of other Federal agencies. In addition, there were various State agencies--the Utah Highway Patrol, the local police agencies, and county sheriffs departments; the Davis County Sheriff's Department. One label caught my eye which demonstrated to me just how significant an effort this was. There was a label that said ``U of U Police Department.'' The University of Utah security guards were in the same room with the Secret Service and FEMA, because if something happened at the University of Utah--the place where the athletic village was located--the University of Utah police would have to be the first responders. But they were in the same room and were getting the same information that FEMA was getting--FEMA if it was a major fire; that the FBI was getting if there was a major law enforcement challenge; and that the Secret Service was getting if there were some kind of a threat to the President. All were in the same room. All were coordinated. It was a seamless effort, from the Secret Service at the top, all the way down to the smallest--I will not say lowest; smallest--local law enforcement agency. Nothing like this has ever been accomplished before and, certainly, nothing on the scale like this has ever been accomplished before. The legacy that comes out of this is a degree of expertise and understanding of coordination in law enforcement that can be used as a template for homeland security and homeland defense. I have made reference of this to Governor Ridge, when he was here, and said, ``You need to look very carefully at the experience of the Salt Lake Olympic games. It will give you guidance that will be absolutely invaluable as you struggle with the problem of divided jurisdiction among law enforcement agencies.'' While I was there, the man who was running the center turned to me and he said: Senator, this is boring. Nothing is happening. In the security business, boring is good. I smiled a little at that because it did look as if nobody was doing anything. Then he made an interesting comment. He said, ``Senator, we think that a number of groups that would otherwise have come to Salt Lake City in an attempt to disrupt the Olympics or do even more serious damage. These groups scoped out the security pattern we had here and decided to stay away.'' Indeed, he cited one activist group that, on their Web site, instructed all of their supporters around the country: Stay away. They're ready for us in Salt Lake. If you show up, you will be immediately taken care of. There is no point in coming. So the games went on flawlessly from a security standpoint because of the incredible coordination that went on, from the Secret Service down to the smallest local law enforcement agency. That is the first legacy that will come out of the Salt Lake City games: that degree of expertise, that understanding of how things should be done. In connection with that legacy, I have to acknowledge the work of Brian Stafford, the Director of the United States Secret Service, who personally paid a significant amount of attention to these games. He was in Utah a number of times. Mark Camillo, the special agent in charge, practically became a citizen of Utah. He has been out in Utah for the last 24 months. The FBI, of course, under the leadership of Director Mueller, should be congratulated for an outstanding job. Bob Flowers, who is the head of the Utah Olympic Public Safety Command, was a very significant player in all of this. His right hand person, Dave Tubbs, Executive Director of the Utah Olympic Public Safety Command, deserves further commendation and congratulations. These are the people who created this legacy from which the nation will draw benefit for years to come. The second legacy that comes out of these Olympics are the facilities that were built. There were already ski facilities in many places in Salt Lake, but now we have built facilities that were not there before. For example, the ice skating oval in Kearns; the luge/bobsled/skelton track and the ski jump at Utah Olympic Park--those things were created and upgraded for the Olympics. I had lunch with the President of the U.S. Olympic Committee, Sandra Baldwin. She said to me, ``All of our speed skaters historically have come from Wisconsin.'' That is a little bit of an overstatement, but she backed down and said, ``All right, most of them have come from Wisconsin.'' Why? Because that is where the best training facilities are for speed skating. We expect now that many of our gold-medal- winning speed skaters will start to come from not only Utah but the entire western United States. Then the comment made by some athletes at the lunch, and they were not necessarily Utahns, ``Salt Lake City is easy to get to. Salt Lake City is accessible by a majority airport. It is a major city with hotel and places to stay. Athletes from all over America can come to Salt Lake City to train far more easily than they can in existing training facilities.'' One of the legacies of these games will be better prepared, better trained American athletes. These games set the record for Americans winning medals at the Winter Olympics. I expect that record will be broken in the future because of the legacy of the Salt Lake Olympic Games. In the process of creating those facilities, we produced yet another legacy. I will talk about what was one of the more controversial aspects of the Olympic facilities: the creation of the men's and women's downhill at Snowbasin. In order for that to happen, there had to be a land exchange so that Earl Holding, who owned the Snowbasin facility, could get the land necessary to create the venue that worked so well in the Olympics and that everyone saw on television. The Forest Service owned most of the land Mr. Holding needed. The Forest Service said, ``We would be willing to deed that land to Earl Holding, but we don't want money in exchange. We want other lands.'' The Forest Service identified 11,000 acres of land in the State of Utah which, for management purposes, they wanted to acquire. An appraisal was done. The 1,300 acres they deeded to Earl Holding in financial terms was worth the same amount as the 11,000 acres the Forest Service acquired. So even though the Forest Service acquired 8 or 9 times as many acres as it gave up, in financial terms the swap was equal. A careful appraisal was made by the Government to assure that the interest of the public was protected. Without going into the details, this was the legacy that the Forest Service has as a result of that land swap. In a report they filed in May of 2000, they summarize what they received as a result of the land swap that was stimulated by the Olympics: 15.3 miles of perennial streams, 21.5 miles of intermittent streams, a 23-mile reduction in the boundaries that they have to police, consolidation of ownership, and the elimination of the threat of development of these lands. They have acquired suitable habitat for threatened and endangered species--both plant and wildlife--as well as habitat for big game calving and fawning, in both summer and winter. They acquired three miles of existing road access that they did not have before, and there are 3.5 miles of existing four-wheel-drive road to be evaluated in Box Elder County, and 15.5 miles of existing trail access was acquired, along with a wide variety of dispersed recreation opportunities, again, for both winter and summer. I spoke with the Forest Service personnel as I did my visits to the Olympic venues, and they told me how delighted they were with the way the Snowbasin venue had been developed. They said it was the finest development they had seen and one which they would hope would be a model for other entities who would deal with Forest Service land. But they also described to me how delighted they were at the legacy of better management of Forest Service lands in Utah that comes as a by-product of the Olympics. Housing, another legacy from the Olympics is that there will be more low-income housing in Utah as a result of efforts necessary to provide housing for Olympic guests. Frankly, we did not get as much low-income housing in Utah as I would have liked. We did not get as much as we originally thought we would get when we embarked on this program. However, one aspect of the housing that needs to be talked about has to do with housing on Indian reservations. Housing was provided for the press in manufactured units. They came straight from the factory. They were assembled on the place, and they became the housing units for people in the press. They were also at a distant venue in Soldier Hollow, where they were used for housing Olympic athletes who needed to stay there rather than at the Olympic Village. The Olympics are over. What do you do with this housing? Because it is manufactured housing and can be shipped easily, these houses are now in the process of being dismantled and sent to Indian reservations in the State of Utah to provide affordable housing for Native Americans. That is another one of the legacies of these Olympics. We have a security legacy. We have an athletic facilities legacy. We have a land management legacy, and we have a housing legacy. We should all be proud of that and grateful for that. There is one more legacy that may be, while intangible, more important than those I have previously mentioned. Let me give an anecdote to illustrate my point. We, of course, were as warm with visitors from foreign countries. As they went around Salt Lake City, as they talked to the volunteers, they had an experience in America. One of them described it this way, ``After September 11 and then the war and the attacks in Afghanistan, we had the feeling that the Americans stood astride the world and we expected, when we were coming to America for the Olympics, that the Americans would be pretty cocky, that the Americans would be lording over the rest of us the fact that they were in charge, that the Americans could do whatever they wanted anywhere in the world, and now you are coming to our Olympics, and the Americans would be filled with overweening pride and a little bit of hubris.'' They went on to say, ``We have come into this Olympic atmosphere and found nothing but warmth, graciousness, willingness to be helpful, to reach out, and to form relationships around the world. We have found none of the pride and haughtiness we expected. We go away from these Olympics with a different view of America and Americans than we had before we came. We will spread that view in our home countries.'' In many ways, that is the most important legacy to come out of these Olympics. Coming against the backdrop of September 11th, it was the coming together of people from 78 nations, of 9,000 journalists, to a nonpolitical arena and to find the humanity, the friendship, the fellowship, and the open nature of human beings regardless of their country that will bless the world. After September 11, there were proposals to cancel the Olympics. I remember having a conversation with Mitt Romney, President of the Olympics, about that possibility. I said, ``What will happen if you cancel the Olympics?'' He said, ``The first thing that would happen is we will go bankrupt. There will be hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of default because we can't pay our bills unless we get the revenue from actually putting on the games. We can't cancel the games. More importantly, we must not cancel the games because that would send a signal to the terrorists that they truly had won.'' Nonetheless, there was the shadow of what would happen if the games went forward hanging over it. A number of my colleagues in the Senate expressed their concern about that. We went forward with the games. Not only did we provide safe games in the way I have described, we provided warm, gathering, closing-of- wounds, reassuring kinds of games that told the world we are all still one family. Enormous thanks belong to a number of people for producing that legacy. Mitt Romney, of course, stands first as the CEO who took over a situation that was challenging and produced the result I have described, along with his chief operating officer, Frazier Bullock. I want to thank the American people for their contributions and the sense of total American participation. Driving around Salt Lake City, I saw a lot of strange buses from a lot of places I did not recognize. Finally, I saw a familiar bus. I thought: Oh, this is a hometown bus. Then I realized it was a Washington metrobus, not a Salt Lake City UTA bus. The buses came from all over the country. On our light rail in Salt Lake, the cars are all white. Suddenly, there were a bunch of yellow cars. I wondered from where they came. The answer was, Dallas, Texas. The folks in Dallas, Texas, sent us their railroad cars to supplement ours for our light rail system. This was truly an American effort that produced the legacy of goodwill and good feelings around the world. I thank the American people for their help. I want to thank Governor Leavitt, the Governor of Utah; Bob Garff, chairman of the Olympics-- they all deserve special thanks. One individual I will single out, whom many of you have met, is Cindy Gillespie. She was vice president of the Salt Lake organizing committee who handled governmental relations. She was superb at it. She also represented a source that we all found valuable. She did the same job for the Atlanta games. She brought an institutional memory of what the challenges had been in Atlanta that helped us do things a little differently in Salt Lake. Finally, among my colleagues, I must acknowledge the Senate's leading supporter of the Olympic movement, Ted Stevens of Alaska, who put his full energy in backing these games. I am sure he had some residual regret that the games did not go to Fairbanks but came to Salt Lake City, but he threw himself into support of the Olympics in a manner that was truly heroic. And other Senators: Senator Inouye, who took over chairmanship of the defense subcommittee when there was a change in leadership, was every bit as supportive as Senator Stevens. I want to thank Senator Byrd the chairman of the Appropriations Committee for his help. Also Senators Gregg and Hollings, who had the responsibility of funding the requests that came from the President with respect to the Justice Department and the FBI. Senators Campbell and Dorgan for their help in providing adequate funding for the Secret Service. I want to also thank all of my Senate colleagues for their great support. The support for the Olympics was very broad based. Finally, while I am thanking, I must acknowledge that the Clinton administration could not have been more supportive, and could not have done a better job in seeing to it that these were in fact America's Olympic Games. When the Clinton administration left office and the Bush administration came into power, the transition was seamless. The same support that came out of the White House and all aspects of the administration made a very significant difference. It is that final legacy, that the support of America has been recognized around the world, and that the goodwill of America will radiate from these games around the world, that is the legacy for which I am the most grateful. It was summarized at the closing ceremonies by Jacques Rogge, the new president of the International Olympic Committee. You may know that in the past it has been the habit of the president of the International Olympic Committee to give a scorecard, a report card of how well the Olympics has done. The comment that has always been looked for at every Olympics before is when the president of the IOC stands up and says, ``You have given us the finest Olympics ever.'' That is what all of us in Salt Lake were hoping we would get, that accolade. Jacques Rogge said, three or four days before the closing ceremony, he would not say that. He said, ``I am going to remove that tradition from the IOC. Every Olympics is different. I am not going to create that expectation, and I tell you in advance, don't be expecting that.'' So he came and he gave his formal closing remarks. They were written in the program and they were wonderful. But he ad-libbed, as he was caught up in the same spirit of good will throughout the world that I have described as the Olympic's most important legacy. And off of his prepared remarks, he turned to all of us and he said: People of America, Utah, and Salt Lake City, you have given the world superb games. That is a legacy of which all Americans can be proud. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Madam President, we are about to finalize and pass on to the President a bill on campaign finance reform. Anyone who has followed the proceedings during the years knows that I have been opposed to this since I first came into the Chamber back in 1993. I remember participating in an all-night filibuster against it, which Senator Mitchell forced us to go through. My hour, as I recall, was something between 1 and 2 in the morning because I didn't have enough seniority to have an hour that was more compatible with my sleeping patterns. I have done everything to see to it that this bill does not become law, for one very fundamental reason: I believe it is clearly unconstitutional. It violates both the spirit and the letter of the work of James Madison. I have quoted Madison on the floor, but I have been unsuccessful. It is clear to me now that the law is going to pass. It is, in all probability, going to be signed. I want to take a moment or two to outline, in the spirit of some prophecy, what I think is going to happen as a result of the bill. I have tried to be as objective as possible and set aside my deeply felt conviction that this bill violates what Madison was telling us in the tenth Federalist about appropriate government. The first thing that is very clear is that this bill will weaken--I won't go so far as to say ``destroy,'' as some others have said--both political parties. Neither party will be able to raise the money to pay the lights, run the overhead, keep the operation going and, at the same time, participate significantly in the campaigns of its members. By banning so-called soft money, we guarantee that each party will have to raise hard money to keep its overhead going and, therefore, be unable to put as much money and as much muscle into individual campaigns. This means that special interest groups which can raise this money have raised this money and will continue to raise this money and will play an increasing role in political campaigns. That is, the vacuum created by pushing down the role of parties will be filled by special interest group money. We are already seeing this. I have seen it in my home State of Utah. The net effect of it will be that candidates will increasingly lose control of their own campaigns. We saw an example in Utah, where candidate X was attacked by a special interest group over a particular issue. Candidate Y, who normally would benefit from that kind of attack, in fact, was appalled at the attack and did everything she could to stop it because she felt, correctly, that it was reflecting on her. The voter could not differentiate between the source, whether it was from a special interest group or the political campaign. All the voter knew was that these ads were unnecessarily nasty, unnecessarily antagonistic, attacking candidate X. They took it out on candidate Y. They blamed her for the attacks, and she was powerless to do anything about it because special interest groups have the right to run their own campaigns. As a result of the passing of campaign finance reform, she would be even more powerless to defend herself against that kind of circumstance because she could not call on her national party for assistance. The party will be prevented from providing the kind of help that is currently available. So, as I say, the net effect will be to increase the power of special interest groups in campaigns and to decrease the abilities of a candidate to manage his or her own campaign. The next thing I see coming out of this is, of course, a plethora of lawsuits, because the bill is very badly written, it is badly drafted, and it creates a whole series of vague references to the relationship between the national party and the State party, Federal money, State money, what can be done by a State party to try to advance its candidates; and what happens if the State party spends money in a way that somehow is deemed to advance a national candidate, or Federal candidate? Let's have a lawsuit. Let's be in court. Let's have all kinds of disputes. Once again, by limiting the amount of money that parties can raise, it will drain off party money to handle legal bills. So, once again, the party will be less capable of defending its own candidates in the political arena. Now, at the moment, my judgment is that there are more special interest groups involved in issue advocacy campaigns who support Democrats than there are who support Republicans. I have seen one study--I have no idea how accurate it is--that indicates that in the last Presidential campaign there was about $300 million, total, spent on both sides. If you take the money allocated to the parties, the Republican Party outspent the Democratic Party. But when you add in the issue advocacy money spent by special interest groups, most of it was on the Democratic side of the ledger, so the total, according to this one study, suggested that you got to rough parity between the two sides in the election. Now, I think the initial effect will be--if it is true there are more special interest groups supporting Democrats--you will see a financial benefit for the Democrats through that special interest group, if indeed the money spent does benefit them. Once again, we come back to the example I described in Utah, where the money spent by the special interest group damaged the candidate it was supposed to help, because the candidate had no control, no input, and had lost control of her campaign. Let's assume, for the moment, that all of the money spent by the special interest groups on behalf of Democratic candidates is well spent and produces a benefit for the Democratic candidates. There will be an attempt--and I suspect overtime it will be successful--for Republicans to create special interest groups to balance that. We will, once again, get to the point of rough parity because money and politics abhor a vacuum. We will have just as much money spent on politics as we have now. The difference is that it will be channeled either through existing special interest groups, most of which, as I say, benefit the Democrats, or newly created special interest groups to counter that, created to benefit the Republicans. Once again, the total impact will be that candidates and parties will lose control over their elections. I hope the time does not come, but I think it is possible, where candidates and parties become almost insignificant in political campaigns; where political campaigns are fought between major special interest groups and candidates simply sign up with which interest group they are going to endorse and then sit back, watch the money get spent, and watch the results come in, with our historic political parties significantly weakened, a candidate's ability to manage his own campaign significantly degraded, and ultimately politics in this country the worst as a result of the passage of this legislation. I lay that down, Madam President, as my view of what is going to happen. The bill will be passed. If the bill is signed, then we can all wait and see. I hope I am wrong. I hope the reformers are right and we will enter a new era of magnificent good feeling about politics. My expectation is that, as has been the case with most reform efforts until now, we will see things get worse rather than better. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNETT

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

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. The Chamber seems to be filled with congratulatory messages. We are congratulating ourselves that we have finally acted, when, in fact, all we have done is the least possible, minimum, lowest common denominator kind of action, and we have demonstrated our inability to act on any kind of visionary plan. The majority leader says he will be happy to bring this subject up again if there is an indication that we can get something upon which we can agree. There is an indication that we can get something upon which we can agree, that we can get something that is a compromise, that we can get something that cuts across party lines. That is the proposal made by the Centrist Coalition. I have been a member of the Centrist Coalition, and its predecessor names of the group, ever since I came to the Senate in 1993. We started out holding meetings in Senator John Chafee's hideaway. John Chafee was the founder of this group. He said, let's reach across party lines and see if we can't put partisanship aside and come up with some kind of a solution. We have had our good moments. We have had our disappointing moments. But we have hung together as a group, even as the membership has changed in the years since I have been here. The Centrist Coalition, involving Democrats and Republicans, involving people of very strong positions on the liberal side of issues and very strong positions on the conservative side of issues, have said: For the good of the country, let's see if we can't fashion a package that makes sense. And the majority leader will not allow a vote on that package. He will not allow us even to debate it. He will not allow us to bring it up. He will not allow people who were not part of the Centrist Coalition to offer amendments. Then as he shuts the process down, he says: I am open to any suggestion from anybody. I will take him at his word, and I have a suggestion for him. I say to the majority leader, bring up the Centrist Coalition stimulus package backed by Republicans as well as Democrats. Put it on the floor and allow it to be amended by those who say it isn't wonderful; allow the normal parliamentary procedure to go forward; and then allow it to come to a vote. I suggest to you that if the majority leader really believes we need a stimulus package, if he is really true to his word that he is open to any suggestion, if he really does want to move in this direction, that is the way he should go. But he has not allowed that. He has not allowed a vote. Let us understand that. There is a proposal. It is not a series of rehashed tax ideas, as the Senator from Rhode Island suggested, about some of the things people on this aisle wanted to put in. It is something worked out by a group of Republicans and Democrats acting in good faith and in consultation with the White House--reaching out beyond the Congress to get the opinion of the President of the United States, and receiving from the President the comment that, well, it is not exactly what I want but I would be willing to sign it. It seems to me this is an extraordinary moment in cooperation, reaching out, and resolution that the majority leader will not allow to come up. This is an extraordinary opportunity which the majority leader will not allow to happen. I hope the majority leader reconsiders. I hope he recognizes that taking a strong partisan position on one side, or taking a strong partisan position on the other side, has been proven ineffective; that he recognizes that there are those of us who have spent time talking to each other across the aisle outside of the partisan straitjacket who have reached out in an effort to find a compromise that makes sense, who have crafted something that we think will pass and the President has indicated he will sign, and that this is available to the majority leader and to the country if the majority leader will simply allow it to come to a vote. Mr. President, as you and others know, my father served in this body for 24 years. My first experience here was sitting up in the family gallery as a teenager watching the Senate operate as I tried to understand it. My father said something that was very profound. When people would say to him, why didn't you do this or why didn't you do that, he would say: We legislate at the highest level at which we can obtain a majority. I think there is a majority for the centrist package. I ask the majority leader to let us find out.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. I understand my friend from Michigan has a comment he wishes to make. I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed to yield to him for 2 minutes, and then I retain my right to the floor.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, yesterday there was an article in the newspaper that caught my attention. I hope sincerely that the article was incorrect. All Members have had the experience of being quoted in the newspaper and wondering where the reporter got the information that was the basis of the story. I hope that is the case with this article. It was reported in the State of New Jersey a new set of history standards have been adopted and that textbooks in New Jersey high schools dealing with American history will now fail to mention the names of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, or Thomas Jefferson. Further, it said the word ``war'' had been removed from the textbooks and in its place we have the word ``conflict,'' and there would be no discussion of wars. Mr. President, I hope this is incorrect. It indicates that at least someone in New Jersey is prepared to make that State an isolated island of ignorance about American history. To think we can bring citizens into maturity in this country without their having any understanding of, indeed, no mention of, the names of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and the other Founding Fathers is absurd. One of the best-selling books currently in the marketplace is the history of John Adams by David McCullough. On the dust jacket of the book, McCullough says, accurately, we as Americans cannot know too much about our Founding Fathers. We must never forget them. We must always learn as much as we possibly can about them. I would say to those who are supporting this position in New Jersey schools, how are you going to explain to your students the fact that we take the Fourth of July as a holiday in this country if you are not going to tell them anything about the Revolutionary War? If you cannot even use the word ``war,'' how are you going to explain to these students that the country honors those who founded it and who fought that war; if you can't tell them the name of the commander of the Continental Army and the forces on the American side of that war because you think that name somehow no longer matters? How are you going to describe what happened on the Fourth of July if you cannot use the name of Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, that was proclaimed to the country on that day? How are you going to explain to high school students who decide they are going to enter public service, and take an oath of office, that they are swearing to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States when you will not have been able to describe the Constitutional Convention, the President of which was George Washington, and one of the leading figures in which was Benjamin Franklin, if you have exorcized the names of Washington and Franklin from your textbooks? What meaning does the oath of office have if you cannot explain where the Constitution came from or describe the convention that created it? How are you going to describe some of the major problems that have existed in this country stemming from the great battle that was the Civil War, that went across five Aprils, and divided this country in a fundamental way that has taken us a century or more to heal? No, we can't discuss that. We can talk about conflicts, but we will not discuss the leaders of that war. We will not discuss many of the problems of that war because it isn't politically correct to raise those issues anymore. We have talked about history in this Chamber before. There have been those who have been trying to rewrite our history, trying to change it and shape it and slice it and dice it in ways that become politically correct in today's mode of conversation. You cannot do that and be accurate to the requirement of telling the truth about what really happened. That is Orwellian. We read the novel by George Orwell, ``1984,'' in which the hero of the novel spent all of his time at his job changing the past. He worked for the Ministry of Truth and his job was to go back and correct the record so as to rob the present society of a true understanding of the past in the name of the state, thus the adjective ``Orwellian'' entered our language. What is being proposed in New Jersey is Orwellian. It is stupid and it needs to be condemned. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Madam President, I rise to offer some guidance to the Secretary of the Treasury on the regulatory authority assigned to him by the Congress with the recent enactment of H.R. 3162, ``The Patriot Act of 2001.'' As a member of the Senate Banking Committee, I authored an amendment to that legislation's anti-money laundering title, title III, the ``International Money Laundering Abatement and Financial Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001,'' which was included in the final legislation as signed by the President at Sec. 311. My amendment directs the Secretary of the Treasury to promulgate regulations defining ``beneficial ownership of an account'' for purposes of Section 5318A and subsections (i) and (j) of Section 5318 of the Bank Secrecy Act. I would like to offer some guidance to the Secretary of the Treasury concerning the Secretary's determination of ``reasonable'' and ``practicable'' steps for domestic financial institutions to ascertain the ``beneficial ownership'' of certain accounts as provided in Section 311 of the bill. Section 311 of this legislation authorizes the Secretary of the Treasury to require domestic financial institutions and agencies to take one or more of five ``special measures'' if the Secretary of the Treasury finds that reasonable grounds exist to conclude that a foreign jurisdiction, a financial institution operating outside the United States, a class of international transactions, and/or types of accounts is of ``primary money laundering concern.'' The second measure would require domestic financial institutions to take such steps as the Secretary determines to be ``reasonable'' and ``practicable'' to ascertain beneficial ownership of accounts opened or maintained in the United States by a foreign person, excluding publicly traded foreign corporations, associated with what has been determined to be a primary money laundering concern. In both Section 5318A(b)(1)(B)(iii) and (b)(2), the Secretary is given the authority to require steps the Secretary determines to be ``reasonable and practicable'' to identify the ``beneficial ownership'' of funds or accounts. Neither the phrase ``beneficial ownership'' nor the phrase ``reasonable and practicable steps'' is defined in the legislation, and there is no single accepted statutory or common-law meaning of either phrase that the legislation is meant to incorporate. During the 106th Congress, the issue was dealt with by the House Banking Committee, which favorably reported H.R. 3886, which contained provisions nearly identical to those contained in Section 311 of H.R. 3162, but without the mandatory rulemaking requirement which my amendment added this year. Both in the 106th Congress and again this year, the concern has been expressed that this lack of statutory definition conceivably could result in a rule or order under either Section 5318A(b)(1)(B)(iii) or (b)(2) that requires financial institutions to identify all beneficial owners of funds or of an account, which in turn might result in some circumstances in clearly excessive and unjustifiable burdens. As the author of the amendment requiring the Secretary to undertake rulemaking in this area, I am sensitive to this concern, and I would expect the Secretary to address it when implementing this act, including when making determinations under the following provisions: (1) Section 5318A(a)(3)(B)(ii), which requires the Secretary to consider, in selecting which special measure to take, ``whether the imposition of any particular special measure would create a significant competitive disadvantage, including any undue cost or burden associated with compliance, for financial institutions organized or licensed in the United States;'' and (2) those above-referenced provisions that permit only those steps that the Secretary determines to be ``reasonable and practicable'' to identify the beneficial ownership of accounts or funds, which provisions impose an enforceable constraint on the substance of any rule or order under either Section 5318A(b)(1)(B)(iii) or (b)(2). In addition, Section 5318A(e)(3) requires the Secretary to ``promulgate regulations defining beneficial ownership of an account'' for purposes of Section 5318A and subsections (i) and (j) of Section 5318. This is the Bennett amendment. Section 5318A(e)(4) gives the Secretary the authority, inter alia, to ``define . . . terms for the purposes of'' Section 5318A ``by regulation.'' I would strongly encourage the Secretary to define the meaning of the phrases ``beneficial ownership'' as well as ``reasonable and practicable steps'' for the purposes of Sections 5318A(b)(1)(B)(iii) and (b)(2), through formal rulemaking subject to notice and comment, taking due consideration of the potential impact of such regulations on smaller institutions, and on all institutions, with an eye toward balancing regulatory burden, legitimate privacy interests, and the ability of United States financial institutions to compete globally. To the extent the Secretary opts for informal guidance on ``reasonable and practicable steps,'' I would urge informal consultation with interested parties. Specifically, I would note that several agencies have issued regulations or supervisory guidance defining the term ``beneficial owner'' or outlining what constitutes reasonable steps to obtain beneficial ownership information, in each instance for the issuing agency's own purposes. See, e.g., 17 C.F.R. Sec. 228.403; 26 C.F.R. Sec. 1.1441 1(c)(6); 28 C.F.R. Sec. 9.2(e); Letter re: Public Securities Association (Sept. 29, 1995) (SEC staff ``no action'' letter addressing 17 C.F.R. Sec. 240.10b 10); Guidance on Sound Risk Management Practices Governing Private Banking Activities, prepared by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (July 1997); and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency Bank Secrecy Act Handbook (September 1996). These sources may be instructive for the Secretary in providing definitions of the phrases ``beneficial ownership'' and ``reasonable and practicable steps.''

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Madam President, as the Senator from Connecticut has said, title I is not working as well as we had anticipated. One of the rules of life is that if you want to keep getting the same results, you keep doing the same things. This is the first significant change in title I in its philosophy and approach that we have had in many years. It rewards effort and it brings equity. If we want to have true education reform, we vote for the Cochran-Landrieu amendment.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Madam President, yesterday Senator Kyl and I introduced the Critical Infrastructure Information Security Act, CIISA, which is designed to minimize a dangerous national security blind spot by: one, protecting voluntarily shared critical infrastructure information; two, providing critical infrastructure threat analysis; and three, encouraging proactive industry cooperation. Critical infrastructures are those key sectors such as financial services, telecommunications, transportation, energy, emergency services, and government essential services, whose disruption or destruction would impact our economic or national security. On September 11, 2001, America suffered a senseless strike, where America's commercial air space was ``weaponized'' and turned viciously against its financial and defense establishments in an infrastructure attack that resulted in staggering losses. About 85 percent of the United States' critical infrastructures, telecommunications, energy, finance, and transportation systems, are owned and operated by private companies. If our critical infrastructures are targets, it is the private sector that is on the front line. Thus, we have to think differently about national security, as well as who is responsible for it. In the past, the defense of the Nation was about geography and an effective military command-and- control structure. However, now prevention and protection must shift from the command-control structure to partnerships that span private and government interests. The American economy is a highly interdependent system of systems, with physical and cyber components. Preventing, detecting, responding, mitigating, and recovering from attacks to these systems requires an unprecedented exchange of information. It is essential to remove unnecessary barriers that prevent the private sector from sharing information. Because in many cases, releasing sensitive information into the public domain could have extremely negative consequences for business, it is understandable why the private sector is reticent to share this information with the Government as it is not protected. The Critical Infrastructure Information Security Act, CIISA, is intended to clear the way for increased critical infrastructure information sharing and improve threat analysis for these infrastructures. The bill seeks to increase the two-way sharing of information between the Federal Government and the private sector by first, protecting information voluntarily shared by the private sector, and second, requiring the Government to send analysis back to the private sector. It also encourages information sharing within the private sector so industry can better solve its own problems. CIISA outlines a process by which critical infrastructure information, information which would not normally be shared due to its sensitivity, can be submitted to one of 13 designated Federal agencies with a request that the information be protected. Such a request would mean that this information will not be disclosed even in a response to a request under the Freedom of Information Act, commonly known as FOIA. FOIA has helped make a transparent government. Initially enacted in 1966, FOIA establishes for any person, corporate or individual, regardless of nationality, presumptive access to existing, unpublished agency records on any topic. CIISA does not change FOIA in any way. In fact, it seeks to protect information which would not be in the public domain in the first place and if publicly released, could interfere with, disrupt, or compromise critical infrastructure operations. CIISA will protect voluntarily shared information without diminishing Federal transparency. Access to information is essential to our democracy. However, it is important to realize that the ability to make a request under FOIA does not apply only to American citizens interested in seeing what the Government is doing. Corporations, associations, foreign citizens, and even foreign governments have the same access. There are no limitations on FOIA even during times of war. Furthermore, the narrow provisions provided in CIISA are nothing new. Congress has on 40 other occasions created certain classes of information that are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. In order to ensure the uniform protection of voluntarily shared information, CIISA requires the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to establish procedures for the Federal agencies to receive, acknowledge, mark, care, and store voluntarily submitted critical infrastructure information. Today, there is no uniform standard of care under FOIA. CIISA requires that information and analyses from the Federal Government be shared back with the private sector in the form of notifications, warnings, and strategic analyses. The bill requires a Federal agency receiving voluntarily submitted critical infrastructure information to make reasonable efforts to do the following: one, analyze the information; two, determine the tactical and strategic implications for such information; three, identify interdependencies; and four, consider conducting further analysis in concert with other Federal agencies. Following this analysis, a Federal agency may issue warnings regarding potential threats to: one, individual companies; two, targeted industry sectors; three, the general public; or four, other government entities. Federal agencies must take appropriate actions to prevent the disclosure of the source of any voluntarily submitted critical infrastructure information that forms the basis for any warnings. CIISA also requires the President to designate an entity within the executive branch to conduct strategic analyses of potential threats to critical infrastructure; and to submit reports and analyses to information sharing and analysis organizations and the private sector. These analyses draw upon this information submitted to the Federal Government by the private sector, as well as information from the Federal Government, such as national security and law enforcement information. The President is also required to submit a plan for developing strategic analysis capabilities in the Congress. When competitors work closely to address common problems, antitrust concerns always surface. Security in a networked world must be a shared responsibility. To encourage the private sector to find solutions to common security problems, CIISA provides a narrow antitrust exemption, not unlike that of the Information Readiness Disclosure Act or the Defense Production Act. Information sharing and analysis organizations formed solely for the purpose of gathering and analyzing critical infrastructure information and to help prevent, detect, mitigate or recover from the effects of a problem relating to critical infrastructure, will be exempt from antitrust laws. Again, this exemption only applies to the activities specifically undertaken to address infrastructure problems. The antitrust exemption will not apply to conduct that involves or results in an agreement to boycott any person, to allocate a maker, or to fix prices or output. The threats to our critical infrastructure are varied. Some of those threats are physical; some may come from cyberspace. From wherever they come, the private sector and Government each has different vantage points. It is my hope that this bill will help both entities work together to reduce the blind spot. I thank Senator Kyl for his interest and leadership on this issue.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I thank the Chair and I thank my colleagues for an illuminating debate. With some trepidation, I am going to take a page out of the book of the senior Senator from West Virginia and talk about Roman history for a moment because I think it is appropriate in this circumstance. The Roman Empire was the dominant military power for many centuries, and it was the dominant military power for two reasons: one was technology and the other was training. In order to become a Roman legionnaire, I understand it took 14 years of training to learn the technology. Now, it may sound strange in today's world to call ``technology'' what the Romans used in their military, but the Romans carefully studied the art of war and came up with a technology that was new and unique in their time. They had a large shield with which they could protect themselves against the initial blow of the enemy, and then they devised a short sword which could go around the shield and into the back of the soldier with whom they were involved in close combat. They found the short sword was technologically better than the long sword, and the combination of training with the shield and the short sword gave the Roman legions military dominance over all the world. Why is that relevant? We are talking about technology. We are not talking about training. We are not talking about the ability of the American military and the American planners to use the available technology better than other people can use it. It is a point which must be made as we go through this debate because we are having the debate as if the technology by itself constitutes military superiority, as if a single export of a single item of technology to a country that wishes us ill would automatically and immediately change the military balance between us and that country. That simply is not true. The American military is not at risk because of the potential export of computing power from American firms. The American military is as powerful as it is because of the combination of the technology that it employs plus the strategic expertise, the military doctrine and the training and implementing of that doctrine that goes on in the American military and that requires years to implement, just as it did back in the days of the Roman Empire and the training of a legionnaire. The barbarians in Roman times could easily duplicate a short sword. That was technology that they could reproduce in their own foundries. They didn't quite know how to use it. They didn't know how to use it in conjunction with the shield. The possession of the physical attributes of the shield and the sword did not create a military that could attack and destroy the Roman legions. The same is true of computer power today. The mere possession of computer power by a nation that wishes us ill does not automatically mean they have the power to take on the American military establishment and defeat it. The other factor here that is different from the Romans that we have to focus on has to do with the speed with which technology is changing. The Romans dominated the world for centuries with the shield and the short sword. But the Senator from Arizona has bemoaned the fact that computer power that would have been improper, indeed illegal, to export just 3 years ago, is today being exported all over the world. Three years constitutes two cycles in what is known as Moore's law. Computing power doubles every 18 months. That means that which was considered to be a supercomputer just 3 years ago has been replaced in the normal course of industrial technology by a computer that has doubled and then doubled again, four times as powerful, so that which is now being allowed to be exported without controls, which would have been controlled 3 years ago, is not only being exported, it is obsolete. Nobody wants it, except in a way I will describe in just a minute. This is the rate of the marketplace in which we are living today. It is not slowing down. If anything, it is accelerating. I quote from President Bush: The existing export controls forbid the sales abroad of computers with more than a certain amount of computing power. With computer power doubling every 18 months, these controls have the shelf life of sliced bread. They don't work. It is interesting the most powerful computer available now in the standard marketplace--and even this statement is now obsolete; it was true maybe 6 or 9 months ago--the most powerful computer available to the general public came from Japan, not from America, and was available in a toy, PlayStation 2. The computing power of PlayStation 2 was sufficient to drive the entire missile control system of the Chinese military as it existed at the time of the Cox report. Are we going to say we would prohibit American firms from exporting computers that have the same power as the toy PlayStation 2, in an effort to deny that ability to the Chinese, when they can walk into Toys R Us, anywhere in the world, and pick it up for a few hundred dollars. That is what is happening in this world of technology. We turn our backs to that reality if we say somehow we must prevent the Americans from exporting this kind of thing even though the foreigners are producing it and selling it all over the world. John Hamre, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said to me in a conversation about this, toward the end of his term with the Department of Defense, and I am paraphrasing: My realization that we are on the wrong side of this issue came when it suddenly occurred to me that if we continue to prevent Americans from being in the world market, we are hastening the day when the American military will have to go to foreign suppliers for the latest technology because American suppliers have been damaged. The Senator from Arizona said we must not arm our enemies or that our enemies should not be armed by the United States. I say we should not get ourselves into a position where the United States must go to foreign sources for the technology it needs to arm itself. But if we say to American manufacturers, you cannot play in the world market except on a time-delayed basis, you cannot compete with companies in Germany, Britain, Japan, and, yes, China because there are computer manufacturers that are making machines with high levels of MTOPS in China trying to get into the international market--if we say to the Americans, you cannot compete in the international market with these foreign firms except with a delayed time fuse created by the government, we are saying, ultimately, that the leadership of technology will go from the United States overseas, and the American military will be faced with a very difficult situation, a very serious Hobson's choice. They will have to decide either we use American technology that is behind the curve because the American firms have been damaged by their inability to compete in the international marketplace and thereby to sell in a larger marketplace and thereby to cut their costs by virtue of increased sales or we have to go overseas to buy that technology. That is not a choice I want the Secretary of Defense 5 or 10 years from now to have to make. I want the Secretary of Defense 5 to 10 years from now to be in the position he is now, to say the leading technology sources are American and that is where I will go to buy. The days are over when American technology companies manufacture solely for the Defense Department. They manufacture for dual use everywhere. I remember a time when the telephone system in the Pentagon was completely secure because it was run entirely by the Defense Department. Those days are over. When the Secretary of Defense picks up the telephone now he is connected to Verizon. Why is that the case? Because Verizon has developed better technology using the marketplace of both the military and the private sector. It is more reliable than the old defense system was, and it is cheaper. When the Defense Department goes out to buy computer chips, they don't buy them from a source solely dedicated to defense contracting. That was the norm in the 1950s and the 1960s. I remember giant corporations that produced nothing but defense technology. They did all of their research for the Defense Department. They had only one customer and that was the Defense Department and everything was focused there. It was also very expensive. Now when they develop a new chip or a new technology they offer it to the Defense Department the same time they offer it in the civilian market. It is the profits they make in the civilian market that subsidize the work they do for the defense market, bringing costs down for everybody, and increasing the technical ability of the products they make. If we say to them, artificially, you cannot sell these products anywhere but in the United States, even though your principle competitors in the borderless economies of the world are selling their products everywhere else, as well as in the United States, we are handicapping these American firms to a point that will ultimately become a national security issue for the United States, that will ultimately take us to the situation that Secretary Hamre was worried about where the Defense Department will have to choose between American manufacturers forced to be behind the curve internationally or foreign manufacturers located offshore. We may not like this situation but that is where we are and we are not going to go back. The borderless economy is a reality of the future. It cannot be turned back. We have to accept this new reality and say the best national security step we can take is to keep American technology firms absolutely in the forefront, and the best way to keep them in the forefront is to give them the opportunity to compete in the largest possible market that they can. That is why this bill is so important. That is why this bill has significant national security implications that cannot be ignored. But, once again, let us remember as we get concerned about the military applications of this technology in other countries, that the American military is as strong as it is not solely because of its technology but because of the entire structure of technology, strategy, and training that has been built around it. There are others who recognize that everything is changing in the way that I have described. We have the letter from Secretary Powell, from Secretary Rumsfeld, as well as Secretary Evans, all three of them saying this is the new reality and endorsing the bill. But let me describe how the new reality comes along to make these past controls obsolete. This information is available everywhere in the world. Once again, it is a borderless economy. We cannot keep it secret. This is published in Scientific American, an article of August of 2000. It is called ``The Do-It-Yourself Supercomputer.'' Scientists have found a cheaper way to solve tremendously difficult computational problems: connect ordinary PCs so that they can work together. It is a wonderful story. The authors of the article describe how they created what they called the stone soupercomputer, only they spelled it S-O-U-P-E-R, after the old fable about stone soup. We all remember hearing that as children: two fellows come to town and they are going to have a big bowl of soup, and they get a big caldron, put water in it and then put stones in it. The villagers gather around and ask: How are you going to get soup out of stones? Oh, they say, this is wonderful. We will have the most wonderful soup in the world. Do you want to contribute something to it? Someone says: Is it really going to be that good? Oh, yes. We'll give you some of it. So someone puts in a little carrot to see if that will help the stone soup. And someone says I have a little bit of beef that I can put in. And at the end you have the wonderful soup that, frankly, didn't cost the makers of the soup anything. They talk about the stone soupercomputer because they were faced with a computing challenge that would require traditional supercomputers and they could not afford a supercomputer. So they thought, what if we took existing computers and linked them together, like the villagers bringing their various vegetables and linking them together? Could we create a supercomputer? If I can quote from the article: In 1996 two of us (Hargrove and Hoffman) encountered such a problem in our work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. We were trying to draw a national map of ecoregions, which are defined by environmental conditions: All areas with the same climate, landforms and soil characteristics fall into the same ecoregion. To create a high resolution map of the continental United States, we divided the country into 7.8 million square cells, each with an area of 1 square kilometer. For each cell we had to consider as many as 25 variables, ranging from average monthly precipitation to the nitrogen content of the soil. A single PC or work station could not accomplish the task. We needed a parallel-processing supercomputer--and one that we could afford. So there is the problem. It is the kind of daunting problem that we have learned to solve with computers. What did they do? Going back to the article: Our solution was to construct a computing cluster-- If I can interpolate, listen very carefully to what they used here, in view of the comments of the Senator from Arizona about the necessity of quality. Back to the quote: . . . using obsolete PCs . . . that would otherwise be discarded. Dubbed the Stone SouperComputer because it was built essentially at no cost, our cluster of PCs was powerful enough to produce ecoregion region maps of unprecedented detail. Other research groups have devised even more capable clusters that rival the performance of the world's best supercomputers at a mere fraction of their cost. So here is a situation where they not only used PCs rather than a supercomputer, they used PCs that were obsolete, that would otherwise have been discarded. But they were able to string them together in such a way as to duplicate the power of the supercomputer. I ask unanimous consent the entire article be printed in the Record at the conclusion of my remarks.

Mr. BENNETT. How would you feel if you were the manufacturer of a computer that could compete internationally with the best the Japanese, the Chinese, the Germans, the Dutch or the British could offer and you were told: No, you cannot export that until this long regime of analysis has gone on because it might be used to duplicate the outcome of a supercomputer, and you saw that people were using obsolete computers to produce the same result? The reality is, we find ourselves in an age that, as recently as 5 years ago, and certainly as recently as 10 years ago, we could never have imagined. This bill before us is an attempt to bring the law into some kind of congruity with reality and say we have to make the opportunity for American computer and high-tech firms to compete in the world marketplace and thereby prosper as friendly as possible. We have a national security obligation to see to it that the American firms retain their lead, the lead that has been established at great expense and great effort by American research firms, by American universities, by the inventiveness of American entrepreneurs and American programmers. We must not deny them the opportunity to compete in the world market on the same basis as every other country's entrepreneurs can compete because, if we do, we run the risk of having them fall behind to the point that America will ultimately end up being as dependent on foreign technology as we are currently dependent on foreign oil. That is not something we want to have happen. That is something that has been driving me, at least, in my analysis and sponsorship of this kind of effort. I congratulate my friend from Wyoming, Senator Enzi, for the leadership he has taken in the Banking Committee to pull together the concepts that are involved in this into a piece of legislation that will do the job. I have no doubt that we are going to have to visit this again, maybe within 3, 5, certainly 10 years. Because the technological landscape is going to change just as dramatically in the next 10 as it has in the last 10. But I listen to those who are opposed to this bill recite circumstances that are 3 years old, 5 years old, 8 years old. I do not challenge their motives, their patriotism, or their determination to do the right thing. They are as determined to do the right thing as I hope I am. But I do think that the world is changing so rapidly around us and this portion of the economy is changing so rapidly that we must recognize that and respond appropriately and accordingly. Finally, in the report from the General Accounting Office that came in December of 2000, which was stimulated by the concerns of the Senator from Tennessee, with whom I worked to see that the GAO would give us this report, we read the following: The current system of controlling the export of individual machines is ineffective in limiting countries of concern from obtaining high performance computing capabilities for military applications. In addition, . . . using MTOPS to establish export control thresholds is outdated and no longer a valid means for controlling computing capabilities. That summarizes my position. We are ineffective with the controls that exist now in limiting rogue countries from getting the technologies they would need. Our security is dependent not on this ineffective kind of control; our security is dependent upon the overall expertise of the American military, which, as the Roman legions, is dependent on training and strategy every bit as much as the technology they have. For that reason, I will support this bill as it stands and resist amendments to it. I appreciate the efforts on the part of the Senator from Wyoming and the Senator from Maryland as they work to see that this bill becomes law. I yield the floor. Exhibit 1 [From Scientific American, Aug. 2001] The Do-It-Yourself Supercomputer scientists have found a cheaper way to solve tremendously difficult computational problems: connect ordinary pcs so that they can work together (By William W. Hargrove, Forrest M. Hoffman and Thomas Sterling) In the well-known stone soup fable, a wandering soldier stops at a poor village and says he will make soup by boiling a cauldron of water containing only a shiny stone. The townspeople are skeptical at first but soon bring small offerings: a head of cabbage, a bunch of carrots, a bit of beef. In the end, the cauldron is filled with enough hearty soup to feed everyone. The moral: cooperation can produce significant achievements, even from meager, seemingly insignificant contributions. Researchers are now using a similar cooperative strategy to build supercomputers, the powerful machines that can perform billions of calculations in a second. Most conventional supercomputers employ parallel processing: they contain arrays of ultrafast microprocessors that work in tandem to solve complex problems such as forecasting the weather or simulating a nuclear explosion. Made by IBM, Cray and other computer vendors, the machines typically cost tens of millions of dollars--far too much for a research team with a modest budget. So over the past few years, scientists at national laboratories and universities have learned how to construct their own supercomputers by linking inexpensive PCs and writing software that allows these ordinary computers to tackle extraordinary problems. In 1996 two of us (Hargrove and Hoffman) encountered such a problem in our work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee. We were trying to draw a national map of ecoregions, which are defined by environmental conditions: all areas with the same climate, landforms and soil characteristics fall into the same ecoregion. To create a high-resolution map of the continental U.S., we divided the country into 7.8 million square cells, each with an area of one square kilometer. For each cell we had to consider as many as 25 variables, ranging from average monthly precipitation to the nitrogen content of the soil. A single PC or workstation could not accomplish the task. We needed a parallel-processing supercomputer--and one that we could afford! Our solution was to construct a computing cluster using obsolete PCs that ORNL would have otherwise discarded. Dubbed the Stone SouperComputer because it was build essentially at no cost, our cluster of PCs was powerful enough to produce ecoregion maps of unprecedented detail. Other research groups have devised even more capable clusters that rival the performance of the world's best supercomputers at a mere fraction of their cost. This advantageous price-to- performance ratio has already attracted the attention of some corporations, which plan to use the clusters for such complex tasks as deciphering the human genome. In fact, the cluster concept promises to revolutionize the computing field by offering tremendous processing power to any research group, school or business that wants it. beowulf and grendel The notion of linking computers together is not new. In the 1950s and 1960s the U.S. Air Force established a network of vacuum-tube computers called SAGE to guard against a Soviet nuclear attack. In the mid-1980s Digital Equipment Corporation coined the term ``cluster'' when it integrated its mid-range VAX minicomputers into larger systems. Networks of workstations--generally less powerful than minicomputers but faster than PCs--soon became common at research institutions. By the early 1990s scientists began to consider building clusters of PCs, partly because their mass-produced microprocessors had become so inexpensive. What made the idea even more appealing was the falling cost of Ethernet, the dominant technology for connecting computers in local-area networks. Advances in software also paved the way for PC clusters. In the 1980s Unix emerged as the dominant operating system for scientific and technical computing. Unfortunately, the operating systems for PCs lacked the power and flexibility of Unix. But in 1991 Finnish college student Linus Torvalds created Linux, a Unix-like operating system that ran on a PC. Torvalds made Linux available free of charge on the Internet, and soon hundreds of programmers began contributing improvements. Now wildly popular as an operating system for stand-alone computers, Linux is also ideal for clustered PCs. The first PC cluster was born in 1994 at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. NASA had been searching for a cheaper way to solve the knotty computational problems typically encountered in earth and space science. The space agency needed a machine that could achieve one gigaflops--that is, perform a billion floating-point operations per second. (A floating-point operation is equivalent to a simple calculation such as addition or multiplication.) At the time, however, commercial supercomputers with that level of performance cost about $1 million, which was too expensive to be dedicated to a single group of researchers. One of us (Sterling) decided to pursue the then radical concept of building a computing cluster from PCs. Sterling and his Goddard colleague Donald J. Becker connected 16 PCs, each containing an Intel 486 microprocessor, using Linux and a standard Ethernet network. For scientific applications, the PC cluster delivered sustained performance of 70 megaflops-- that is, 70 million floating-point operations per second. Though modest by today's standards, this speed was not much lower than that of some smaller commercial supercomputers available at the time. And the cluster was built for only $40,000, or about one tenth the price of a comparable commercial machine in 1994. NASA researchers named their cluster Beowulf, after the lean, mean hero of medieval legend who defeated the giant monster Grendel by ripping off one of the creature's arms. Since then, the name has been widely adopted to refer to any low-cost cluster constructed from commercially available PCs. In 1996 two successors to the original Beowulf cluster appeared: Hyglac (built by researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and Loki (constructed at Los Alamos National Laboratory). Each cluster integrated 16 Intel Pentium Pro microprocessors and showed sustained performance of over one gigaflops at a cost of less than $50,000, thus satisfying NASA's original goal. The Beowulf approach seemed to be the perfect computational solution to our problem of mapping the ecoregions of the U.S. A single workstation could handle the data for only a few states at most, and we couldn't assign different regions of the country to separate workstations--the environmental data for every section of the country had to be compared and processed simultaneously. In other words, we needed a parallel-processing system. So in 1996 we wrote a proposal to buy 64 new PCs containing Pentium II microprocessors and construct a Beowulf-class supercomputer. Alas, this idea sounded implausible to the reviewers at ORNL, who turned down our proposal. Undeterred, we devised an alternative plan. We knew that obsolete PCs at the U.S. Department of Energy complex at Oak Ridge were frequently replaced with newer models. The old PCs were advertised on an internal Web site and auctioned off as surplus equipment. A quick check revealed hundreds of outdated computers waiting to be discarded this way. Perhaps we could build our Beowulf cluster from machines that we could collect and recycle free of charge. We commandeered a room at ORNL that had previously housed an ancient mainframe computer. Then we began collecting surplus PCs to create the Stone SouperComputer. a digital chop shop The strategy behind parallel computing is ``divide and conquer.'' A parallel-processing system divides a complex problem into smaller component tasks. The tasks are then assigned to the system's nodes--for example, the PCs in a Beowulf cluster--which tackle the components simultaneously. The efficiency of parallel processing depends largely on the nature of the problem. An important consideration is how often the nodes must communicate to coordinate their work and to share intermediate results. Some problems must be divided into myraid minuscule tasks; because these fine-grained problems require frequent internode communication, they are not well suited for parallel processing. Coarse-grained problems, in contrast, can be divided into relatively large chunks. These problems do not require much communication among the nodes and therefore can be solved very quickly by parallel-processing systems. Anyone building a Beowulf cluster must make several decisions in designing the system. To connect the PCs, researchers can use either standard Ethernet networks or faster, specialized networks, such as Myrinet. Our lack of a budget dictated that we use Ethernet, which is free. We chose one PC to be the front-end node of the cluster and installed two Ethernet cards into the machine. One card was for communicating with outside users, and the other was for talking with the rest of the nodes, which would be linked in their own private network. The PCs coordinate their tasks by sending messages to one another. The two most popular message-passing libraries are message-passing interface (MPI) and parallel virtual machine (PVM), which are both available at no cost on the Internet. We use both systems in the Stone SouperComputer. Many Beowulf clusters are homogeneous, with all the PCs containing identical components and microprocessors. This uniformity simplifies the management and use of the cluster but is not an absolute requirement. Our Stone SouperComputer would have a mix of processor types and speeds because we intended to use whatever surplus equipment we could find. We began with PCs containing Intel 486 processors but later added only Pentium-based machines with at least 32 megabytes of hard-disk storage. It was rare that machines met our minimum criteria on arrival; usually we had to combine the best components from several PCs. We set up the digital equivalent of an automobile thief's chop shop for converting surplus computers into nodes for our cluster. Whenever we opened a machine, we felt the same anticipation that a child feels when opening a birthday present: Would the computer have a big disk, lots of memory or (best of all) an upgraded motherboard donated to us by accident? Often all we found was a tired old veteran with a fan choked with dust. Our room at Oak Ridge turned into a morgue filled with the picked-over carcasses of dead PCs. Once we opened a machine, we recorded its contents on a ``toe tag'' to facilitate the extraction of its parts later on. We developed favorite and least favorite brands, models and cases and became adept at thwarting passwords left by previous owners. On average, we had to collect and process about five PCs to make one good node. As each new node joined the cluster, we loaded the Linux operating system onto the machine. We soon figured out how to eliminate the need to install a keyboard or monitor for each node. We created mobile ``crash carts'' that could be wheeled over and plugged into an ailing node to determine what was wrong with it. Eventually someone who wanted space in our room bought us shelves to consolidate our collection of hardware. The Stone SouperComputer ran its first code in early 1997, and by May 2001 it contained 133 nodes, including 75 PCs with Intel 486 microprocessors, 53 faster Pentium- based machines and five still faster Alpha workstations, made by Compaq. Upgrades to the Stone SouperComputer are straightforward: we replace the slowest nodes first. Each node runs a simple speed test every hour as part of the cluster's routine housekeeping tasks. The ranking of the nodes by speed helps us to fine-tune our cluster. Unlike commercial machines, the performance of the stone SouperComputer continually improves, because we have an endless supply of free upgrades. parallel problem solving Parallel programming requires skill and creativity and may be more challenging than assembling the hardware of a Beowulf system. The most common model for programming Beowulf clusters is a master-slave arrangement. In this model, one node acts as the master, directing the computations performed by one or more tiers of slave nodes. We run the same software on all the machines in the Stone SouperComputer, with separate sections of code devoted to the master and slave nodes. Each microprocessor in the cluster executes only the appropriate section. Programming errors can have dramatic effects, resulting in a digital train wreck as the crash of one node derails the others. Sorting through the wreckage to find the error can be difficult. Another challenge is balancing the processing workload among the cluster's PCs. Because the Stone SouperComputer contains a variety of microprocessors with very different speeds, we cannot divide the workload evenly among the nodes: if we did so, the faster machines would sit idle for long periods as they waited for the slower machines to finish processing. Instead we developed a programming algorithm that allows the master node to send more data to the faster slave nodes as they complete their tasks. In this load-balancing arrangement, the faster PCs do most of the work, but the slower machines still contribute to the system's performance. Our first step in solving the ecoregion mapping problem was to organize the enormous amount of data--the 25 environmental characteristics of the 7.8 million cells of the continental U.S. We created a 25-dimensional data space in which each dimension represented one of the variables (average temperature, precipitiation, soil characteristics and so on). Then we identified each cell with the appropriate point in the data space. Two points close to each other in this data space have, by definition, similar characteristics and thus are classified in the same ecoregion. Geographic proximity is not a factor in this kind of classification; for example, if two mountaintops have very similar environments, their points in the data space are very close to each other, even if the mountaintops are actually thousands of miles apart. Once we organized the data, we had to specify the number of ecoregions that would be shown on the national map. The cluster of PCs gives each ecoregion an initial ``seed position'' in the data space. For each of the 7.8 million data points, the system determines the closest seed position and assigns the point to the corresponding ecoregion. Then the cluster finds the centroid for each ecoregion--the average position of all the points assigned to the region. This centroid replaces the seed position as the defining point for the ecoregion. The cluster then repeats the procedure, reassigning the data points to ecoregions depending on their distances from the centroids. At the end of each iteration, new centroid positions are calculated for each ecoregion. The process continues until fewer than a specified number of data points change their ecoregion assignments. Then the classification is complete. The mapping task is well suited for parallel processing because different nodes in the cluster can work independently on subsets of the 7.8 million data points. After each iteration the slave nodes send the results of their calculations to the master node, which averages the numbers from all the subsets to determine the new centroid positions for each ecoregion. The master node then sends this information back to the slave nodes for the next round of calculations. Parallel processing is also useful for selecting the best seed positions for the ecoregions at the very beginning of the procedure. We devised an algorithm that allows the nodes in the Stone SouperComputer to determine collectively the most widely dispersed data points, which are then chosen as the seed positions. If the cluster starts with well-dispersed seed positions, fewer iterations are needed to map the ecoregions. The result of all our work was a series of maps of the continental U.S. showing each ecoregion in a different color. We produced maps showing the country divided into as few as four ecoregions and as many as 5,000. The maps with fewer ecoregions divided the country into recognizable zones--for example, the Rocky Mountain states and the desert Southwest. In contrast, the maps with thousands of ecoregions are far more complex than any previous classification of the country's environments. Because many plants and animals live in only one or two ecoregions, our maps may be useful to ecologists who study endangered species. In our first maps the colors of the ecoregions were randomly assigned, but we later produced maps in which the colors of the ecoregions reflect the similarly of their respective environments. We statistically combined nine of the environmental variables into three composite characteristics, which we represented on the map with varying levels of red, green and blue. When the map is drawn this way, it shows graduations of color instead of sharp borders: the lush Southeast is mostly green, the cold Northeast is mainly blue, and the arid West is primarily red. Moreover, the Stone SouperComputer was able to show how the ecoregions in the U.S. would shift if there were nationwide changes in environmental conditions as a result of global warming. Using two projected climate scenarios developed by other research groups, we compared the current ecoregion map with the maps predicted for the year 2099. According to these projections, by the end of this century the environment in Pittsburgh will be more like that of present-day Atlanta, and conditions in Minneapolis will resemble those in present-day St. Louis. [see Stone SouperComputer's Global Warming Forecast] the future of clusters The traditional measure of supercomputer performance is benchmark speed: how fast the system runs a standard program. As scientists, however, we prefer to focus on how well the system can handle practical applications. To evaluate the Stone SouperComputer, we fed the same ecoregion mapping problem to ORNL's Intel Paragon supercomputer shortly before it was retired. At one time, this machine was the laboratory's fastest, with a peak performance of 150 gigaflops. On a per-processor basis, the run time on the Paragon was essentially the same as that on the Stone Souper- Computer. We have never officially clocked our cluster (we are loath to steal computing cycles from real work), but the system has a theoretical peak performance of about 1.2 gigaflops. Ingenuity in parallel algorithm design is more important than raw speed or capacity: in this young science, David and Goliath (or Beowulf and Grendel!) still compete on a level playing field. The Beowulf trend has accelerated since we built the Stone SouperComputer. New clusters with exotic names--Grendel, Naegling, Megalon, Brahma, Avalon, Medusa and the Hive, to mention just a few--have steadily raised the performance curve by delivering higher speeds at lower costs. As of last November, 28 clusters of PCs, workstations or servers were on the list of the world's 500 fastest computers. The LosLobos cluster at the University of New Mexico has 512 Intel Pentium III processors and is the 80th-fastest system in the world, with a performance of 237 gigaflops. The Cplant cluster at Sandia National Laboratories has 580 Compaq Alpha processors and is ranked 84th. The National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy are planning to build even more advanced clusters that could operate in the teraflops range (one trillion floating-point operations per second), rivaling the speed of the fastest supercomputers on the planet. Beowulf systems are also muscling their way into the corporate world. Major computer vendors are now selling clusters to businesses with large computational needs. IBM, for instance, is building a cluster of 1,250 servers for NuTec Sciences, a biotechnology firm that plans to use the system to identify disease-causing genes. An equally important trend is the development of networks of PCs that contribute their processing power to a collective task. An example is SETI@home, a project launched by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley who are analyzing deep-space radio signals for signs of intelligent life. SETI@home sends chunks of data over the Internet to more than three million PCs, which process the radio-signal data in their idle time. Some experts in the computer industry predict that researchers will eventually be able to tap into a ``computational grid'' that will work like a power grid: users will be able to obtain processing power just as easily as they now get electricity. Above all, the Beowulf concept is an empowering force. It wrests high-level computing away from the privileged few and makes low-cost parallel-processing systems available to those with modest resources. Research groups, high schools, colleges or small businesses can build or buy their own Beowulf clusters, realizing the promise of a supercomputer in every basement. Should you decide to join the parallel- processing proletariat, please contact us through our Web site (http://extremelinux.esd.ornl.gov/) and tell us about your Beowulf-building experiences. We have found the Stone Soup to be hearty indeed.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce legislation that would amend the Central Utah Project Completion Act, CUPCA, as originally enacted in 1992. CUPCA re-authorized and provided funding for the completion of the Central Utah Project, CUP, a project that develops Utah's share of water from the Colorado River for use in ten central Utah counties. The CUP was originally authorized in 1956 as part of the Colorado River Storage Project Act and includes five units. The Bureau of Reclamation began construction of this project in 1964. However, in 1992 CUPCA conferred CUP planning and construction responsibilities to the Central Utah Water Conservancy District, which has cultivated an excellent working relationship with the Office of CUP Completion in the Interior Department. The legislation I am introducing would amend CUPCA to clarify the relationship between the Department of the Interior and the CUP by ensuring that the Secretary of the Interior continue to retain full responsibility for the CUP after the completion of the project's construction phase. It only makes sense that the decisions regarding future operations and maintenance, contract negotiations, and program oversight functions of the Interior Department are consistent with the cooperative decisions made during the project's planning and construction stages. As such, language is needed to clarify the Secretary's further involvement. Since 1992, numerous changes in the project have occurred to better reflect contemporary water needs. Certain project features were downsized or eliminated while other water management programs grew in size. The 106th Congress, in an effort to address these changes, approved a CUPCA amendment that allowed unused funding authorization resulting from the redesign of the Bonneville Unit to be used ``to acquire water and water rights for project purposes including in stream flows, to complete project facilities authorized in this title and title III, to implement water conservation measure . . .'' In light of the continuing need to address the redesign replacement projects originally designed in the sixties, my legislation would again extend the unused authorization provision to all CUP units. Finally, this legislation also extends a CUPCA provision that authorizes the Secretary of the Interior to accept prepayment of parts of the project's Municipal and Industrial repayment debt. The original provision's expiration was to occur in 2002 for reasons relating to the Federal Budget scoring process. This provision has enabled the Central Utah Water Conservancy District to prepay over $138 million to the federal treasury, while also avoiding unnecessary interest charges. The legislation introduced today would remove the 2002 expiration provision and extends the provision to allow the repayment of obligations associated with projects relating to the Uinta Basin. The water supplied by CUP's many water diversion projects is crucial to the livelihoods of Utah's rural residents and to Utah's burgeoning population. I believe that legislation will serve to better facilitate the timely, economically responsible, and fiscally efficient completion of the Central Utah Project.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce legislation that would amend the Central Utah Project Completion Act, CUPCA, as originally enacted in 1992. CUPCA re-authorized and provided funding for the completion of the Central Utah Project, CUP, a project that develops Utah's share of water from the Colorado River for use in ten central Utah counties. The CUP was originally authorized in 1956 as part of the Colorado River Storage Project Act and includes five units. The Bureau of Reclamation began construction of this project in 1964. However, in 1992 CUPCA conferred CUP planning and construction responsibilities to the Central Utah Water Conservancy District, which has cultivated an excellent working relationship with the Office of CUP Completion in the Interior Department. The legislation I am introducing would amend CUPCA to clarify the relationship between the Department of the Interior and the CUP by ensuring that the Secretary of the Interior continue to retain full responsibility for the CUP after the completion of the project's construction phase. It only makes sense that the decisions regarding future operations and maintenance, contract negotiations, and program oversight functions of the Interior Department are consistent with the cooperative decisions made during the project's planning and construction stages. As such, language is needed to clarify the Secretary's further involvement. Since 1992, numerous changes in the project have occurred to better reflect contemporary water needs. Certain project features were downsized or eliminated while other water management programs grew in size. The 106th Congress, in an effort to address these changes, approved a CUPCA amendment that allowed unused funding authorization resulting from the redesign of the Bonneville Unit to be used ``to acquire water and water rights for project purposes including in stream flows, to complete project facilities authorized in this title and title III, to implement water conservation measure . . .'' In light of the continuing need to address the redesign replacement projects originally designed in the sixties, my legislation would again extend the unused authorization provision to all CUP units. Finally, this legislation also extends a CUPCA provision that authorizes the Secretary of the Interior to accept prepayment of parts of the project's Municipal and Industrial repayment debt. The original provision's expiration was to occur in 2002 for reasons relating to the Federal Budget scoring process. This provision has enabled the Central Utah Water Conservancy District to prepay over $138 million to the federal treasury, while also avoiding unnecessary interest charges. The legislation introduced today would remove the 2002 expiration provision and extends the provision to allow the repayment of obligations associated with projects relating to the Uinta Basin. The water supplied by CUP's many water diversion projects is crucial to the livelihoods of Utah's rural residents and to Utah's burgeoning population. I believe that legislation will serve to better facilitate the timely, economically responsible, and fiscally efficient completion of the Central Utah Project.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. I am happy to yield. Might I inquire of the time I have remaining?

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I thank the majority leader for his courtesy and accommodation. I appreciate the opportunity to speak at this time. I have been told by a number of my colleagues they appreciate the fact that I have the opportunity to speak because it gives them a half hour so they can go back to their offices and do something worthwhile. Some of them, as they said that, promised to read my remarks in the Record. I am very grateful for that indication. Mr. President, I hold the seat from the State of Utah that was held for 30 years by Reed Smoot. Senator Smoot rose to be the chairman of the Finance Committee and was one of the leading powers of this body. He did many wonderful things. He was an outstanding Senator in almost every way. However, he had the misfortune of being branded in history because of his authorship of the Smoot-Hawley tariff, which stands in American economic history as something of a symbol of the isolationist- protectionist point of view. I have said to Senator Smoot's relatives, who are my constituents, with a smile on my face, that I have to do my best as a militant free-trader to remove the stigma of protectionist from this particular seat. I can say that all of Senator Smoot's relatives are equally as excited about free trade as I am, and they have indicated that they approve of that. I rise to talk in that vein because I think much of the debate that has gone on here would be debate that might go all the way back to Reed Smoot. There is a protectionist strain in our attitude towards trade in this country, and it is showing itself in this debate--a position that says, well, yes, we believe in free trade, but we can't quite trust our trading partners to do the right thing when free trade begins. Yes, we believe in allowing Mexican goods and services to enter the country, but we don't quite trust the Mexicans themselves to take the responsibility of providing those services. This is particularly focused now on the issue of Mexican drivers at the wheels of Mexican trucks. I am very interested that in this debate we are being told again and again that this bill does not violate NAFTA; that this is an issue about safety rather than an issue about NAFTA; this is not protectionist; this is not isolationist; this is not an obstruction of free trade; this is just about safety. Of course, if you frame the question about safety, what Senator wants to rise on this floor and be against safe trucks? What Senator wants to rise on this floor and say, I am in favor of massive highway accidents caused by unsafe drivers? Nobody wants to take that posture. Yet that is why the attempts have been made to frame the debate in that fashion--so that it will ultimately end up a 100-to-nothing vote in favor of safety. If we were to ask the Senate to vote solely on the issue of safety, it would be a 100-to-nothing vote. I would vote in favor of safety. Everybody is in favor of safety. However, the key vote I think came when the Senator from Texas offered a very short, one-sentence amendment that would have said nothing in this bill violates NAFTA. That amendment was voted down. Once again, nothing in this bill violates NAFTA, says the amendment. And the amendment gets voted down. How do we interpret that decision? We have to interpret that decision as saying that something in the bill absent that amendment does violate NAFTA. Otherwise, the amendment would have been adopted 100 to nothing because we say we are in favor of safety. We should say we are in favor of NAFTA. I can understand those who are opposed to NAFTA voting against that amendment. But NAFTA passed this body by a very wide margin. It was bipartisan. It was supported across the aisle. NAFTA ran into some trouble in the House but not in the Senate. NAFTA has always been strongly supported here. Why didn't an amendment that says nothing in this bill shall be allowed to violate NAFTA pass with the same wide margin? It must be that there is something in this bill that violates NAFTA and people do not want to get that exposed. They don't want to have the basis for a lawsuit and someone coming forward and saying because of the Gramm amendment that says nothing in this bill can violate NAFTA, this provision of the bill has to go, or that provision of the bill is in conflict and has to be removed. I think there is a prima facie case here, by virtue of the vote that has been cast, that this bill violates NAFTA. That is the position of the administration. The administration is not antisafety. The administration is anxious for proper inspection. Indeed, the Mexican Ambassador and other Mexican officials have said they are in favor of proper inspection and they don't want unsafe trucks rolling on the roads in America any more than we do. Stop and think about it. Would it be in the Mexicans' self-interest to send dangerous trucks into the United States to cause accidents in the United States? Would that be a wise foreign policy move for the Mexicans as they try to build their friendship with the United States? It is obviously in their self-interest to see to it that the trucks that come across the border are safe. The Mexicans are not stupid. They would not do something so obviously foolish as to send unsafe trucks here. So what are we talking about? We are talking about pressures within the American political system that want NAFTA to fail. We are talking about special interest groups inside the American political circumstance that want to keep Mexican influences out of America for their own purposes. These are people who were unable to defeat NAFTA in the first place. So they decide they will defeat NAFTA, or the implementation of NAFTA in the second place, by adopting regulations in the name of something that everybody agrees with, such as safety, that will produce the effect of destroying NAFTA and preventing NAFTA from taking place. We know how powerful some of those influences are within the American political circumstance. We have seen how some people around the world are reacting to the new reality of a borderless economy. Some people use the phrase ``globalization.'' I prefer to describe what is happening in the world as the creation of a borderless economy. We see how money moves around the world now quite literally with the speed of light. The old days when money was transferred in attache cases handcuffed to the wrists of couriers who went in and out of airports are over. You can transfer money by sitting down at a PC that is connected to the Internet, pushing a few buttons and a few key strokes, and it is done, so that international investors pay no attention to artificial geographic borders. They move money. They move contracts. They move goods around the world literally with the speed of light. Now, that upsets people. That upset some people in Seattle. They wanted to stop it, and they turned to looting, rioting, and civil disobedience in an attempt to stop it. From my view, that was a very difficult and unfortunate thing that happened in Seattle. The then- President of the United States was a little less convinced it was an unfortunate thing and said: Maybe we ought to listen to these people. Maybe there is something to which we ought to pay attention. It got worse. Now it has escalated to the point, in Genoa, where one of the demonstrators has been killed--killed because of his attempt to see to it that we go back to the days when there were firm walls around countries, when the borders meant protectionism, where we go back to the attitude that produced the Smoot-Hawley tariff sponsored by the Senator in whose seat I now sit. I do not mean to blame Senator Smoot because Senator Smoot was simply responding to the conventional wisdom of his day that said: If you keep all economic activity within your own borders, you will be better off. Senator Smoot, however well intentioned, was wrong. I remember one historian who said the Smoot-Hawley tariff, contrary to conventional wisdom, did not cause the Great Depression; it merely guaranteed that it would be worldwide because we had reached a point in human history where one must trade with somebody other than one's own tribe. There was a time when all trade took place in the same valley, among members of the same family, the tribe descending from a single patriarch. All of the trade took place there. Then they discovered they could do better if they started to trade with other tribes, but they stayed close to home. That mentality stayed with us. That mentality was behind the Smoot-Hawley tariff. That mentality is comfortable. That mentality makes us feel secure. It does not involve any threatening risk of dealing with strangers. It makes you feel really good when you are determined to trade only within your own tribe, but if you are going to increase your wealth, you are going to have to start trading with another tribe, and that means that artificial borders have to start coming down. The Smoot-Hawley tariff demonstrated the foolishness of trying to keep trade entirely within the borders of a single country. But there are those, whether they are at Seattle or Genoa or, frankly, some on the floor of the Senate, who still want to do that, who still want to say: We will not trade outside our borders. They fail to stop the treaties that say we will trade outside our borders, so they are saying: All right, if we cannot stop the treaty, we can at least stop the implementation of the treaty by adopting regulations that make it impossible for the treaty to work. The fact is, in the United States we produce more than Americans can consume. That comes as a great surprise to many husbands and wives who think their spouses can consume all there is to consume, but it is true. We produce more than Americans can consume. We produce more food than Americans can eat. No matter how fat Americans seem to get in all of the obesity studies, we still cannot eat all the food we produce. We have to sell this food to somebody other than Americans, and that means we have to deal with the borderless economy. As we have taken steps to do that, we have entered into these free trade agreements. We have to allow other people to come into our country with their goods and their food if we are going to send our goods and our food into their country. It is just that fundamental. I wish I could sit down with the demonstrators at Seattle and Genoa and elsewhere and explain that to them because, as nearly as I can tell, they do not understand that it is in their best interests to allow the borderless economy to grow, just as Senator Smoot did not understand, in his well- intentioned attempt to help the economy of the United States, that his protectionist stance was against his own best interests. We found that out in the United States. We paid an enormous price for the protectionist attitudes that dominated this Chamber and both parties in the 1930s. Understand that the Smoot-Hawley tariff was not jammed down the throats of a recalcitrant Democratic Party by a dominant Republican Party. It was adopted as proper policy all across the country: Let's not trade outside our own borders. Let's protect what we have here and not expose it to the risk that foreigners might, in some way, profit at our loss. As I say, the Smoot-Hawley tariff guaranteed that the Great Depression would go worldwide. We are smarter than that. We have treaties that are better than that. Frankly, I believe if Reed Smoot were still in this Chamber, he would endorse that; he would say: Learn from the mistakes of the past and move forward. He was that kind of a forward-thinking individual. But there are those, with regulations in this bill, who say: No. Since we couldn't defeat NAFTA, we will have to stop NAFTA another way. The administration has made its position very clear. They intend to live up to the requirements of the treaty that has been signed. They intend to see to it that the United States discharges its responsibilities. They have said the language in this bill does not do that. And the President, if absolutely forced to do it--which he does not want to do--if absolutely forced to, has said he will veto this bill and send it back to us to rewrite. I know of no one on either side of the aisle who wants that to happen. I know of no one who wants to have a veto. So under those circumstances, why aren't we getting this worked out? Why aren't we saying: All right, the President said he would veto it. The Mexicans have said they believe it violates NAFTA. Let's sit down and see if we can't work this out. We cannot be that far away. I understand meetings have gone on all night trying to work it out: Nope, we can't do it. We won't budge. I am told: Well, go ahead, vote for this. It will be fixed in conference. In my opinion, that is a dangerous thing to try to do. I hope that is what happens. That is what many of the senior members of the Appropriations Committee have told me: Go ahead, vote for it. Let it go through without a protest. We will fix it in conference. I hope they are correct, but I want to make it clear that as the bill gets to conference the process is going to be watched. There are people who are going to pay attention to what goes on. If indeed, by the parliamentary power of the majority, this gets to conference in its present language, let's not have it go to conference without any protest; let's not have it go to conference without any notification of the fact that in the minds of many of us, who are free trade supporters, this bill is a modern-day regulatory reincarnation of Smoot-Hawley. I do not mean to overemphasize that. It is not going to cause a worldwide depression. It is not going to do the damage that Smoot- Hawley did. But it is crafted in the same view that says: A special interest group in the United States, that has power in the political process in the Senate, that is opposed to implementation of NAFTA, can, by getting Senators to stand absolutely firm on language that clearly violates NAFTA, have the effect of preventing NAFTA from going into effect on this issue. So I hope everyone will understand the posture that I am taking. This bill, in my view, clearly violates NAFTA. The vote that was taken against the Gramm amendment signals that people understand that it violates NAFTA or the Gramm amendment would have been adopted overwhelmingly. I congratulate President Bush for saying, as the Executive Officer of this Government, charged by the Constitution with carrying out foreign policy: I will defend the foreign policy posture taken by the signers of NAFTA, and I will veto this bill, if necessary. My being on the floor today is simply to plead with all of those who are in charge of the process of the bill and the language of the bill, to understand that they have an obligation, as this moves towards conference, to see to it that the effect of the Gramm amendment that was defeated takes place; that the bill is amended in conference in such a way that it does not violate NAFTA and that we do not go back on our international commitments; that we do not return to the days of my predecessor, Senator Smoot, and export protectionism around the world.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I thank the Chair and the assistant majority leader for his courtesy. I want to conclude by commenting once again on the importance of the United States keeping its international commitment, a commitment made to Canada and Mexico to allow a free trade area to occur on the North American continent. It is in our own interest. It is the intelligent thing to do, and historically it will see to it that the economies of all three of these countries will benefit. Here is the first test we have of whether or not the actual regulations of NAFTA will be allowed to work in a way that benefits our neighbors to the south, even though it discomfits a powerful political group in the United States. If we fail that test, we will send a message to the Mexicans that says we didn't really mean it; we don't think you really should have equal status with the Americans. I can think of no more corrosive a message to send to the Mexicans than that one. That is why I think we must be as firm as we are trying to be in this debate of making it clear that we are going to hang on to this issue until it is resolved satisfactorily.

Mr. BENNETT. I am happy to yield for a question.

Mr. BENNETT. I say to the Senator from Texas, I think it would say that Mexican trucks coming into the United States, Canadian trucks coming into the United States, or American trucks going into Mexico would all have to comply with the requirements of the States in which they were operating, but that in the process of thus complying, they would not have to change their procedures to a situation different from the procedures that were considered acceptable on both sides. This is something that would require the Americans to say we will honor the Mexican Government's procedures just as we expect the Mexican Government to honor the American Government's procedures.

Mr. BENNETT. I say to the Senator, that would be my understanding of the part of the treaty which he has read.