Robert Bennett

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, in executive session, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to consideration of the following nominations, reported by the Judiciary Committee: Daniel Bryant, PN 214; Larry Thompson, PN 200; reported by the Banking Committee: Grant Aldonas, PN 216, Robert Hubbard, PN 264, Kenneth Juster, PN 192. I further ask unanimous consent that the nominations be confirmed, the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table, any statements relating to the nominations be printed in the Record, the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action, and the Senate then return to legislative session.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. If there is no further business to come before the Senate, I now ask unanimous consent the Senate stand in adjournment under the previous order.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Energy Committee be discharged from further consideration of S. 821 and that the bill be referred to the Committee on Environment and Public Works.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, we have had a lot of conversation on the floor in the last week about education, and given that education is the No. 1 issue before us and the one that, according to the polls, is the No. 1 issue on the minds of most Americans, I think that is appropriate. So I am going to join in that conversation and make some comments on education tonight. I trust I will have an opportunity to make some comments on education a little later on as the debate proceeds. Members of this body have heard me before talk about my experience as far as education is concerned. It was the educational issue that got me back into public life. I was enjoying a career as a businessman at a relatively prosperous organization. I was the chief executive officer, so I got to make a lot of decisions. For example, I got to choose what kind of health care I had. None of the other employees got to do that, the way the health care system works in America, but I did because I was the chief executive. I got a phone call from the chair of the Utah State Board of Education asking if I would serve as a member of the strategic planning commission for that body, and I agreed. Then she called back a little later and said, ``We want you to chair.'' I said, ``Well, all right.'' So I became chairman of that planning commission and immersed myself in issues of education. It was a wonderful experience. The most distressing part of it is that happened over 10 years ago, and as I sit here in this Chamber and listen to the debate on education, it hits me that nothing has changed. The issues that were prominent 10, 15 years ago are still the issues we are dealing with, and that is very depressing. I go back to a comment that was made to me by one of the employees of the Utah State Board of Education when we were talking about changes that needed to be made. He said to me, ``Bob, don't be so hard on us. We are changing. We are changing a little bit all the time. It is just that we are not changing as fast as you want us to change. Some of the things you are asking us to do, it will take us 15 years to do.'' I stopped and pointed out to him that 15 years is longer than it takes a child entering school in kindergarten to graduate from high school. I said, ``In other words, you are saying if we come to the conclusion that this is the right thing to do, no one currently in Utah schools will get the benefit of that. A whole 15-year cycle could go by and somebody could enter kindergarten and graduate from high school without getting the benefit of something we decide now has to be done.'' The depressing thing is that conversation took place close to 15 years ago and we are still having the same debates around here. I have put up a chart, which the Senator from Maine, Susan Collins, has used. I want to refer to it again because we need to reinforce a fundamental truth. The source for the chart is the National Center For Education Statistics, in the Digest of Education Statistics. The red line is expenditures on education in 1999 dollars. So these are constant dollars adjusted for inflation. Back in 1971, this is where they were, and now you see the line goes up. This is where they are today. It is roughly double the dollar amount. Here are the reading scores; it is absolutely flat. The yellow line is the fourth grade; it is absolutely flat. The eighth grade is also absolutely flat. The 12th grade is absolutely flat. We keep spending more and more money on education and keep getting exactly the same results. The former Senator from New York, Mr. Moynihan, once made a comment while looking at a chart that was even more distressing than this, where the expenditures per pupil were going up and reading scores were going down, and with his sense of humor and sense of irony he said, ``Maybe we can postulate that spending more money on education causes education to get worse, because that is the trend line. The more we spend, the worse things are.'' Well, this chart indicates, at least, that the more we spend, the more things stay the same. If we are satisfied with what we are getting in education right now, then all we should do is leave things exactly as they are but spend more money on them. We will get exactly the same results we have been getting for the last 20 years. We will spend more money and we won't get anything any better. Unfortunately, as I listen to speeches in this Chamber, particularly the speeches from those who are disappointed with President Bush's proposal, I discover that there is an interesting attitude in Washington: If a program is good, Washington says spend more money on it. If a program is bad, Washington says spend more money on it. They don't seem to differentiate between one situation and the other because they have a one-size-fits-all solution, which is to spend more money. It makes us feel good to spend more money. It makes us feel good to be able to go home to town meetings and say, as I have said--I fall into the same category when somebody starts attacking me on education--I have voted to increase the budget on education every time since I have been in the Senate. That kind of shuts them up. They can't attack Senator Bennett for being anti-education if he promises to keep spending more money on education. They never ask me the fundamental question: What have you done to change the system so that it gets better? What have you done to change the system so that the reading scores start to go up? Well, that is a little harder. It is much easier to say, well, I voted to spend more money, and send me to Washington and I will vote to spend more money. President Bush wants to spend more money on education. A lot of people say, boy, that is unusual for a Republican. The Democrat reaction is, we want to spend even more money than President Bush wants to spend, and we are back in the same Washington trap, which is, if it is a good program, spend more money on it; if it is a bad program, fix it by spending more money on it. We need to get away from that. We need to break out of that syndrome and say: Let's not spend more money; let's spend smarter money; let's begin to demand a return on our investment; let's begin to say this is not good enough and we are not going to give you more money until we can be convinced that the money we are spending is producing better results. That brings me smack into the issue that has been discussed today, which is fully funding title I. That is a great political hot button: we must fully fund title I. That is why it is not working. That is why we are not getting the effectiveness. We have only funded it to this level, and we should be funding it to that level. That is a great way to put off this decision. That is a great way to continue doing what we have been doing without facing the fundamental question, which is, Why has title I not been effective? Is there a possibility there is a reason other than the fact that we have not been spending enough money on it? Oh, that is very hard to discuss in Washington because, as I say, the all- purpose answer to everything is, fund it; spend more money on it. Have we ever looked at title I to determine if there are other reasons why it is not as effective as it is supposed to be, other reasons besides money? The last comprehensive study of title I and how it works was made in 1994, 7 years ago. We have been flying blind for 7 years. For 7 years we have been going on faith. I believe in faith. I will yield to no Member of this body in my faith in a religious concept to which I have made a very firm and solid commitment. But when it comes to things that are not of the spiritual world, I want some proof. I want something besides just blind faith. I think in 7 years we ought to be able to come up with some assessments and some understanding of how things are going that will cause us to spend our money smarter. We now have a President who is saying, let's test the results school by school and monitor who is doing well and who is not. I come out of the business community. That is a little like saying, let's start to keep books on our sales. Instead of just saying, well, we have a sales force, let's spend money on sales, let's start to keep track of which salesman or saleswoman is performing better than which other one. To a businessman and businesswoman, that is just obvious. You do not make an expenditure until you have an assessment of how things are going. You do not hire somebody or give somebody a raise or hand them a bonus until you have at least some understanding of how well he is doing. If you have somebody who is not doing very well, you do not give him a bonus. You try training him; you try motivating him; you transfer him to another position where he might be better suited; but you do not automatically say, Well, you are not doing it very well, but the way to solve your problem is to give you more money. That is the attitude in education: We do not really care whether you are doing well or not. All we know is we can feel good about spending money on education because we are all for education. The core of the Bush proposal is assessment of results. The core of the Bush position on education is to find out where we are. The driving force behind everything he is pushing is understanding what is happening, and that is so threatening to people who are committed to life as it has been, the status quo, that they can all find reasons to complain about it. One of the reasons to complain about it that I have heard is that it is going to cost money. Hey, we cannot spend money on assessments; we must spend money in the traditional way to get the traditional results. Some say, All right, we will go along with the assessments as long as the Federal Government pays for it. We should not put that burden on the States. We should not insist the States measure where they are without paying them to measure where they are. I ask the question, What responsible State superintendent is not anxious to conduct assessments right now? I can say that with some validity because in my home State of Utah, they are already doing the assessments. They are paying for it with State dollars. Why? Because they have come to the same conclusion that President Bush has: If you are going to spend the money smarter, you have to understand what is going on. So it is intelligent stewardship on the part of the State board of education in Utah for them to take precious money in the State and spend it on assessing where people are, what is happening, what are the outcomes, how well are we doing. One of the questions I will raise when the amendment comes up that says we have to have Federal funds to pay for the assessment is this one: What happens if the State is already paying for the assessment? Does it still get the Federal funds that it would otherwise get or are you going to penalize the States that are doing the right thing now by saying we will not give you the money and, thus, reward the States that are avoiding assessments by giving them the money? These are issues that are very different from the standard Washington answer which is: Just give them the money; just spend the money. No, we need to know where we are. One of the first places that we should start in assessments is appropriately title I. Yes, title I money and title I circumstances are very controversial. We have not had a complete analysis of how well that has been doing since 1994. Let's start to assess title I. Before we say the magic words ``fully fund,'' let's ask the magic question: What are we funding? Are we funding failure? We do not know. Are we funding mediocrity? We do not know. We are funding a wonderful sounding goal, but are we funding results or are we funding failure? Let's find out. Let's do the assessments. Let's spend the money to find out what is happening with title I kids, how it could be done better, how it could be done smarter, how it could be done quicker, and then I am perfectly willing to vote for the money. I am perfectly willing to spend the money if I know it is being spent on something that will get results. My history as a businessman was that I was willing to take a risk with the shareholders' money. Some of the shareholders did not like it. They wanted business just as it was always done: Don't try anything new; don't launch any new product, that is risky; don't try to break into any new market, that is expensive. A business that takes that position is a business that dies over time. When I was running our business I tried some new products and some of them failed badly. They were expensive. I tried to go into some new markets and it turned out to be really stupid--heavy investiture with little or no return. But some of the products revolutionized the company. Some of the new territories we entered turned into vast new opportunities and overall, by being willing to try and assess and, yes, spend more money, we grew the company from a few hundred thousand dollars a year to a $400 or $500 million business. You say schools are different; you are not trying to grow the school or trying to be entrepreneurial. I am not trying to grow the school, but I am trying to grow the trim lines and see that after 20 years of being flat, can't there be a wiser spending of money. If you want to get the results you are getting, keep doing what you are doing. That is a fundamental truth they teach in business school. If you want to keep getting the results you are getting now, keep doing what you are doing now. If you want different results, you have to do something different. That, ultimately, is the challenge of the Bush proposal on education. It has taken a little while for a lot of people to understand that, for a lot of people to come to grips with that. President Bush is proposing something different. How threatening that is. How unsettling. How disturbing. The President of the United States is saying we are not getting what we need to get; let's try something else. And he is willing to spend for it. The amount of money that the President has proposed as an increase in education spending is more than the Clinton administration ever proposed. So no one can say he is being cheap about this. No one is saying he is not willing to put his money where his mouth is, to use the language of the gambling community. He is willing to put up the money. But he is saying, I don't want to spend it in the same old ways; I want to try something new. I am willing to fund the experiment, but I want to find out if we can't do it better. In order to find out if we can't do it better, we have to start making assessments and then we have to pay attention to what the assessments tell us. Boy, is that revolutionary. Is that scary. Track what is happening as we spend this money in different ways and then pay attention to what that tracking says. No, the President's opponents say, it is all too threatening. It is all too different. Better fall back into the old political ruts we have been in forever in this town, which is, pick up the slogan, pick up the good-sounding title, and paste money on it. Then go home and brag to your constituents that you are pro-education. After 20 years of doing that, there has been no progress. Maybe it is time we did something different. Not ``maybe''--it is definitely time we did something different. Let me ask this question rhetorically. Suppose the Bush program doesn't work. Suppose we spend all of this money that President Bush is trying to get us to spend in different ways and the reading scores stay flat. What have we lost? What has that cost been compared to business as usual? Yes, President Bush can be faulted for spending that extra money on education and not getting any tangible results. But I suggest if we go the route many in this Chamber want to go, which is to say ``don't change the system in any fundamental ways, but do raise the money,'' we will get exactly the same result. Everybody will feel good about it, except the kids. That is where I want to end up because that is where the primary focus should be. That is the fundamental issue of education--the kids. We don't fund education in this country to make politicians feel good, or at least we shouldn't. We don't fund education because we want to maintain the sanctity of those buildings that we put up or because we want to provide employment for the teachers, the aides, the janitors, and the school lunch people. Boy, they would all be in the unemployment ranks if we did not keep funding education. That is not why we fund education. We fund education for one purpose and one purpose only: to empower our children to function effectively in society. Put in place whatever subdefinition you want. We fund education to empower our children to become good citizens. We empower our children to become good wage earners. We empower our children so they can become good parents. Put whatever subset you want, but the fundamental reason we fund education, the only reason we fund education, is so that our children will be able to function effectively in society, in whatever role they have. For far too long the focus of educational funding and educational reform and educational structure has been the system and not the children. I went through that when I was in my situation as chair of the strategic planning commission that I mentioned. Over and over again, everybody who came before me talked about ``the system.'' This is how we tweak the system; this is how we change the structure; this is how we work on the organization. I kept saying, Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Your focus is in the wrong place. Your focus should be on the children. They would say, Sure, sure, sure, that's right. Now, let's go back. In order to fix things we have to change the structure, we have to change the organization, we have to change the reporting relationship. No, no, no, I would say. Your focus isn't on the children. Finally, I came up with this analogy. It is imperfect, but I hope it makes the point. I remember when the big three auto manufacturers had one common enemy, the one thing they were absolutely united on. That enemy was named Toyota. They were determined they would do everything they possibly could to see to it that Toyota did not enter the United States; that Toyota cars were stopped at the shore and not allowed to come in. Toyota was so threatening to them, they even came to the Congress and asked for legislation that would have effectively kept Toyota out. Why was Toyota so threatening? There was a fundamental difference in focus. General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler were focused on the car. What does the car look like? How does the car drive? What is the engine in the car? What can we change in the car? The whole focus was on the car. Toyota came to America with the focus on the driver. What does the driver want? Well, they did a little surveying and they discovered that the driver wanted, among other things, reliability in the car. They didn't want it to break down after 20,000 miles. The driver wasn't as interested in style as he was in stability. Toyota said, Find out what the driver wants and then design a car that fits it. By focusing on the driver, they made cars smaller so they could fit in parking lots. By focusing on the driver, they made cars cheaper to operate so you didn't buy as much gasoline. They found a ready market in the United States for their cars. Fortunately, the American manufacturers were not successful in keeping Toyota out, and the pressure of the competition of Toyota made the American cars substantially better. The American manufacturers decided they had better focus on the driver, too, and each manufacturer picked a niche of drivers and began to produce products that would fit those drivers and they began to prosper and discovered that Toyota was not going to put them out of business. They had a shift in their focus: one group focusing on the car, the other group focusing on the driver. The group focusing on the driver was winning until the other group started focusing on the driver as well. I use that analogy to say, You people are focusing on the car. You are focusing on the school building. Should it be painted blue or yellow? How many rooms should it have? What kind of air conditioning should we have in the school? What kind of landscaping should there be? What should be the structure of organization? Should the principal have one aide or two aides? You are focusing on the system. Who is focusing on the kids? It is just possible that the kids are going through this school, this system you have built and created, and they are not being empowered to function effectively in society. What do the kids need to function effectively in society? As soon as you put your focus on that, you may discover a very different kind of school needs to be constructed around the needs of the children. That is what President Bush is talking about. Let's make some assessments of what is happening with the students and then see if, from those assessments, we can create a system that will meet those needs. If we can, we can start to see these test score lines on this chart begin to come up along with the expenditure line. President Bush is not afraid to raise the top line, the expenditures. We Republicans are not afraid to do it with him. But we don't want to do it focusing on the system. We want to do it focusing on the child. So when somebody says fully fund title I, my question is, How is title I helping the children? How is title I working? Well, we don't know. Why don't we know? Because the last study that has been done on the effectiveness of title I was done in 1994. All right, I have gone around the argument. I do not want to repeat it one more time. But I do want to summarize it and make the point one more time. This is a fundamental crossroads for the Senate, the Congress, the Government as a whole. Are we going to keep doing what we have always done, which gives us a warm, personal, political feeling and political cover when we go home, by saying we spent more money on education, to prove how much we love education? Or are we willing to take the risk that President Bush is asking us to take, to say the time has come to think about doing it differently? The time has come to think about spending the money differently. The time has come to make assessments and evaluations that will help us direct the money more intelligently. The time has come, instead of congratulating ourselves on the fact that we make the red line go up, to say, Let's hold ourselves accountable for the fact that the blue and the green and the yellow lines have not budged in 20 years. That is the challenge President Bush has given us. I hope we are equal to it. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. How much time is available on our side?

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I would be happy to discuss that with the Senator, but the Senator from Oklahoma is asking for the regular order.

Mr. BENNETT. I ask the Senator from Connecticut why he did not address at all the impact of his amendment on the President's tax cut long term. As I said in my remarks, the amount in my amendment and the amount in the Democratic amendment for a short-term stimulus is exactly the same. But the effect of the Democratic amendment would be to cut the total amount of the Bush tax cut down to $746 billion. I ask the Senator from Connecticut why he did not comment on that effect, and if he has a comment now.

Mr. BENNETT. I yield myself 3\1/2\ minutes and reserve the remainder of the time for the Senator from New Mexico. Mr. President, the senior Senator from Texas has a great line. He says: Don't argue about facts; look them up. You can argue about opinions, but do not argue about facts. The former senior Senator from New York, Mr. Moynihan, used to say: Everybody is entitled to his own opinions but not to his own facts. That is why I went to the Treasury Department to try to get the facts on the debt. I have heard people quote this, quote that. I went to the people who manage the debt. They said to me, as they began the conversation: We have been managing debt for over 200 years. We know how to do it. I have the numbers. I will be glad to discuss them with any Senator. Fundamentally, this is what it comes down to: The amount in the next 10 years of national debt that cannot be paid off without paying a premium, factually, is roughly $800 billion. Alan Greenspan, before the Budget Committee, talked about 70-something. I round up to $800 billion. The Treasury agrees with that number. However, they say we cannot go to that absolute number because we have to have some debt to help cash management. If I can put it in the context of a family, you may have paid off all your mortgages and paid off all your debt, but the paycheck and the bills don't always correspond exactly in time, so you pay the bills with a credit card, which is debt. You may pay the credit card completely off every 30 days, but you have some debt to manage your cash situation, and the Treasury does. I said: How much money are we talking about? And these Treasury officials who have no political ax to grind said: We have to have about another $300 billion for cash management purposes on top of the amount of debt Alan Greenspan was talking about. If you add 800 to 300 you get $1.1 trillion, which is the number President Bush has been talking about. Those are the facts. We can look them up. We can have differences of opinion on everything else, but let's not keep fudging those facts. The President's proposal with respect to debt paydown is the responsible, proper proposal. It should not be factually challenged. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, may I be notified when there are only 13 minutes left on our side?

Mr. BENNETT. I thank the Chair. Amendment No. 216, As Modified

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my amendment be modified. I send a modification to the desk.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I have listened with interest to the statements of the Senator from Illinois, who says we need to kick-start the economy. He went on at great length quoting Senator Domenici and President Bush about how we absolutely need to do this, perhaps ignoring the statement by the Senator from Oklahoma that my amendment includes the amounts he says will kick-start the economy. The issue is not, Do we both agree that there must be something to kick-start the economy? The issue is whether or not, having kick- started it, we then try to kill it at the back end. Let's make no mistake about what this amendment is about. This amendment is not about stimulating the economy in the short run, because Republicans and Democrats agree, and my amendment has exactly the same numbers in it as the amendment on the other side. The disagreement is on what happens on the back end. In the name of stimulating the economy in the short term, they want to kill the tax cut in the long term. That is what this is about. It may be couched in other kinds of rhetoric, but basically this is a further attempt on the part of the Democrats in the Senate to see to it that President Bush will not get his tax cut, so that the headline in the Washington Post will be ``Bush Suffers A Defeat.'' That is what they are after. This is not about the economy. This is not about paying heating bills for poor people in Illinois. This is about the political victory of the Senate Democrats to get the headline that says ``Bush Suffers A Defeat.'' Look at the numbers. The total effect of the underlying amendment, to which my amendment is a second degree, would be to cut, over a 10-year period, the total size of the tax cut by $418 billion. Right now, if the Harkin amendment is not overturned on reconsideration, the tax cut has been scaled down from the $1.6 trillion President Bush asked for to $1.1 trillion. If this amendment passes, that will be scaled down further to $746 billion, which is below the number the Democratic leader offered in the first place as the logical size of the tax cut. This is a stealth attempt to make sure, in the name of stimulating the economy, that the tax cut gets cut, and cut, and cut. I suggest that there are other amendments lying in the weeds which, added to this one, will bring it down even lower than the 746. That is a prophecy; prophecies can be wrong. One thing is not wrong is the 746 number. If the underlying amendment passes, the total size of the tax cut is cut to 746. That is what this is all about. We talk about stimulating the economy, and we need to do it now. Once again, my amendment has exactly the same numbers the underlying amendment has. Make no mistake: We are not debating stimulating the economy. We are debating eviscerating the Bush tax cut. I wish I had this better than secondhand. It was reported to a group of us yesterday. The source given was Alan Blinder. I am prepared to be corrected if it is wrong. It makes sense. It is right, and I will share it with the Senate with those caveats around it. Alan Blinder said, if you want to stimulate the economy and you pass a long-term rate structure reduction, the net benefit is 1, whatever 1 is. We are on a scale now. If you do a quick fix kind of stimulus, the net benefit to the economy is, compared to 1, .5. If you do a complete rebate of sending out checks, the net effect on the economy is .3. We are willing to talk about something that, on the scale I have just described, would be a .5, but we are not willing to sacrifice the 1 in order to do it. We are not willing to kill the most fundamental and beneficial stimulus for the economy, long term as well as short term, in the name of a short-term stimulus that makes for good speeches but bad economics. We hear a lot of class warfare rhetoric. We heard it again from the Senator from Illinois: We must take care of the little people; we must do something, not for the rich, we must do something for the people at the bottom. Every time we have had testimony before the Banking Committee, on which I sit, or the Joint Economic Committee, on which I am now vice chairman, from Chairman Greenspan or other distinguished economists, the question comes up: Who benefits the most when the economy is sound and doing well? The answer is always: The people at the bottom. The best thing we can do for the people at the bottom is see to it that the economy is structurally sound and growing. The best stimulus is to see that the people who control capital have confidence in the future. They will start making the capital investments that create the jobs. They will start putting in place the structural pattern that they have interrupted because they have lost confidence. And that can come by the passage of the Bush tax cut, which may or may not have any immediate stimulation in terms of the people in Illinois the Senator refers to, but will have the kind of impact that will produce both short-term stimulus and long-term stability. That is what this debate is all about. Are we going to get excited about the short-term stimulus being the only thing to do and kill the long-term stability on the basis that we don't know what the numbers are going to be? Or are we going to do both in a prudent fashion? I hear a lot of talk about the heating bills. I suggest to the Senator from Illinois and other Senators that if they want to deal with heating bills, they ought to deal with the energy crisis and not try to fiddle round with taxes. But that is another debate for another time. Let me address one other point that keeps coming up. We must pay down the national debt. Both sides want to pay down the national debt. Let us not pretend that is an exclusively Democratic position or an exclusively Republican position. Let's not go through the motions of saying we are the ones who want to pay down the national debt. Let's ask the question: How much national debt can we prudently pay down? Once again, the numbers make it clear that the Bush tax proposal is a prudent and intelligent attack on the national debt that will bring us to the place where we want to be in an intelligent fashion. I spent some time with officials from the Treasury Department. I don't have time in this debate to go into it in detail; I will at some future point. These officials, quite frankly, if we want to put a political cast on it, are holdovers from the Clinton administration. I got the numbers directly from the Treasury. I didn't get them from a columnist. I didn't get them filtered through staff. I got them directly from Clinton-appointed officials at the Treasury Department. I am absolutely satisfied that the level of debt being paid down by the Bush tax cut is prudent and fits perfectly with the numbers they have given us. These numbers are reality. These numbers are not projections. These numbers are very clear. We don't have time now, in the restricted agreement we have, for me to go into these numbers in any great length. Fundamentally, we must understand this. If we pay down the debt too rapidly, we will have to go to holders of the debt that are not yet maturing and say: Will you give us the opportunity to pay you in advance? For that, we need to pay them a premium. Right now, 42 percent of the debt is held by foreign sources. The largest chunk of that is held in Japan. This has been going up dramatically. People say: Does that mean foreigners are buying more of our debt? No. It means the debt is being paid down among American holders, and foreign holders are hanging onto it. That is why the percentage of foreign holders of the debt is going up. The total debt is going down, but their total numbers are staying about the same. I don't want to be in the position of going to foreign holders of the debt and saying to them we want to pay them a premium to buy their debt back early, just to satisfy some political rhetoric and political points. I conclude as I began. This is not a debate about whether we will have a short-term stimulus because the numbers in my amendment are identical to the numbers in the Democratic amendment. This is a debate about whether or not we kill the Bush tax cut long term. As long as we understand that, as long as we understand that the effect of the underlying amendment would be to bring the size of the tax cut down below the level the Democratic leader has endorsed, we will understand what we are talking about. Otherwise, we will waste our time in rhetoric about short-term stimulus, when there is, in fact, no difference. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, on my time, may I ask the Senator from Connecticut a quick question? I ask unanimous consent that that be allowed.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. BENNETT. I ask unanimous consent the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, may I inquire as to what the time situation is.

Mr. BENNETT. And on the other side?

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, on behalf of Senator Frist, I ask unanimous consent that Dr. Ken Bernard, a fellow in Senator Frist's office on loan from the Public Health Service, be granted privileges of the floor during the duration of the debate on the budget resolution.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I am proud to join the Senator from Vermont today to introduce the Artist-Museum Partnership Act. This important legislation will remove an unfortunate inequity in our tax code by allowing living artists to deduct the fair-market value of their art work when they contribute the work to museums or other public institutions. As the tax code is currently written, art collectors are allowed to deduct the fair market value of any piece of art donated to a museum. At the same time, if the artist who created that work of art were to donate the same piece, he or she would be allowed to deduct only the material cost of the work, which may be nothing more than a canvas, a tube of paint, and a wooden frame. This inequity has created a disincentive for artists who would otherwise donate their work to museums. The solution is simple: treat collectors and artists the same way. This bill will do just that. While this bill will certainly help artists, the real beneficiaries are museums, historians, and most importantly, the general public. This change in the tax code will increase the number of original pieces donated to public institutions, giving scholars greater access to an artist's work during the lifetime of that artist, as well as providing for an increase in the public display of such work. Museum-goers will have a greater opportunity to learn not only from the master artists of past centuries, but also from artists who are at the forefront of their fields today. I want to thank Senator Leahy for his work on this bill. He and I have introduced similar legislation in the past, and we hope that our colleagues will see this bill for what it is a reasonable solution to an unintentional inequity in our tax code. I urge my colleagues to support this common-sense legislation. The fiscal impact of the Artist- Museum Partnership Act on the federal budget will be minimal, but the benefit to our nation's cultural and artistic heritage cannot be overstated. This minor correction to the tax code is long overdue, and the Senate should act on this legislation to remedy the problem.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I am proud to join the Senator from Vermont today to introduce the Artist-Museum Partnership Act. This important legislation will remove an unfortunate inequity in our tax code by allowing living artists to deduct the fair-market value of their art work when they contribute the work to museums or other public institutions. As the tax code is currently written, art collectors are allowed to deduct the fair market value of any piece of art donated to a museum. At the same time, if the artist who created that work of art were to donate the same piece, he or she would be allowed to deduct only the material cost of the work, which may be nothing more than a canvas, a tube of paint, and a wooden frame. This inequity has created a disincentive for artists who would otherwise donate their work to museums. The solution is simple: treat collectors and artists the same way. This bill will do just that. While this bill will certainly help artists, the real beneficiaries are museums, historians, and most importantly, the general public. This change in the tax code will increase the number of original pieces donated to public institutions, giving scholars greater access to an artist's work during the lifetime of that artist, as well as providing for an increase in the public display of such work. Museum-goers will have a greater opportunity to learn not only from the master artists of past centuries, but also from artists who are at the forefront of their fields today. I want to thank Senator Leahy for his work on this bill. He and I have introduced similar legislation in the past, and we hope that our colleagues will see this bill for what it is a reasonable solution to an unintentional inequity in our tax code. I urge my colleagues to support this common-sense legislation. The fiscal impact of the Artist- Museum Partnership Act on the federal budget will be minimal, but the benefit to our nation's cultural and artistic heritage cannot be overstated. This minor correction to the tax code is long overdue, and the Senate should act on this legislation to remedy the problem.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I was interested to hear Senator Thompson say we are in uncharted waters, facing unknown results that we don't fully appreciate. That is the theme of my comments. I go back to another philosopher, Mark Twain. I can't quote him exactly, but he has been quoted as saying something to the effect that ``prophecy is a very iffy profession, particularly with respect to the future.'' That is where we are. We are all trying to divine what is going to happen in the future if McCain-Feingold passes, as I expect it will, and if it should be signed and upheld by the Supreme Court. What would we face? Well, I read in the popular press that on the Democratic side, one of their leading campaign attorneys is telling them if McCain-Feingold passes, the Democrats can kiss goodbye any chance of gaining control in the Senate in the 2002 election. That should cause everybody on this side of the aisle to stampede and vote for it. However, there is an equally qualified observer who has spoken to our Members and has said if McCain-Feingold passes, the Republican Party will go into the minority and stay there for 25 years. Now, obviously, one or the other of these has to be wrong in terms of what is going to happen at the election. But neither one of these observers is an unqualified observer. The reason they have come to these two differing conclusions is that each one is looking at this issue through the prism of his own self-interest. If the Democratic campaign lawyer sees the destruction of the Democratic Party and the Republican campaign consultant sees the destruction of the Republican Party, I submit to you, as murky as our crystal ball may be, the chances are that they are both right--that we are going to see, as a result of the passage of this bill, not the destruction of the party--I won't go to that extent, but certainly a dramatic diminution of party influence in politics in this country. One very practical example that we can expect is the scaling down, if not the elimination, of party conventions because party conventions now are financed entirely with soft money which, under this bill, would become illegal. So we may see party conventions disappear altogether, or we may see them become very truncated affairs, which the media may decide is not worth covering. This would be good news for an incumbent President. This would be bad news for a challenger trying to prevent a President from seeking a second term. He would be denied the opportunity of exposure that comes from a party convention. One of the things we will not see as a result of the passage of McCain-Feingold is the elimination of corruption in politics. Corruption comes from the heart of the receiver, not the wallet of the giver. If an individual is corrupt, he is going to stay corrupt, whether or not the ``speech police'' are watching him. He is going to find some way to remain corrupt and to game the system to his advantage. The person of integrity is going to remain a person of integrity, regardless of how many people come waving bills at him to try to get him to change his position solely on the basis of money. Integrity and corruption does not come as a result of participation in the political process. Integrity and corruption come from the way you were raised, from the way you make your decisions, from the hard commitments you make along the way in life. There are corrupt people in entertainment and there are people of integrity in entertainment. There are corrupt people in the media and there are people of integrity in the media. There are corrupt people in politics and there are people of integrity in politics, and they will not change on either side just because we pass a bill. So that is the one prediction of which I can be confident. On these others, we are guessing. I let my imagination run. If the political conventions disappear or become seriously truncated as a result of the passage of this bill, and if I were a special interest group with an unlimited wallet, I would anticipate holding a major convention of my own and invite certain favored speakers. I would gear it in such a way as to get maximum media attention, and those speakers could then get media attention that would come out of attending that convention. I do believe that we are going to see an increase in political spending of soft dollars on the part of special interest groups in different and inventive ways that we at the moment cannot anticipate. Once again, in the newspaper there is a story of a fundraiser. He signed it himself. He said: Those of us on K Street are already figuring out ways to get around McCain-Feingold and use our soft dollars in a fashion to influence the political situation. We are going to see, I am sure, an increase in Harry and Louise kind of advertising. Those of us who were on the floor through the debate on President Clinton's health care plan know how powerful those soft dollars were. We know how many those soft dollars were, and we know how totally outside the ambit of McCain-Feingold those soft dollars were. If McCain-Feingold says you cannot give those soft dollars to a party to pay its light bill, well, OK, we will give the soft dollars to Madison Avenue to influence politics in other ways. One of the other ways the parties are going to be seriously disadvantaged by this bill is in candidate recruitment. Senator Frist is the chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. When he goes out and tries to convince a reluctant candidate to challenge a Democratic incumbent, one of the first things that candidate says is: If I do this, will you be there for me? Senator Frist can say now: Yes, we will commit X amount of activity in your behalf. Please, come do this. Do this for the party. Do this for your country. Come do it, and we will be behind you. Senator McConnell has already laid out the financial implications of McCain-Feingold in terms of the amount of money that would be available to the senatorial committee if we had nothing but hard dollars based on actual experience. As Senator Frist goes out to recruit candidates, or as Senator Murray goes out to recruit candidates on the other side, she is going to find her ability to attract candidates into this situation will be severely reduced. The ultimate answer is: We want you to run, but when it comes to financial support, you are on your own; you are not going to get any significant help from the national party in any way because we simply cannot do it. We have to use our hard dollars for things for which we used to use soft money. We simply are not going to have the resources that we would like to have to help you. We will see many outstanding candidates decide they do not want to run under those circumstances. Make no mistake about it, those in the press gallery who have been talking about the present system being an incumbent protection act, wait until we pass McCain-Feingold and I guarantee you an incumbent will really have to foul his nest in order to lose. This virtually guarantees that no challenger of any consequence will be able to raise the money and produce the organization to take on an entrenched incumbent because the restrictions are so severe that they will not be able to do that. What does this have to do with the amendment? Simply this: At least as a result of the Wellstone amendment for which I voted, there is a degree of equal damage to the special interest groups. With the Wellstone amendment in the bill, the bill does not unilaterally damage parties and leave special interest groups totally free. Oh, it does leave special interest groups huge loopholes, but it at least, on the advertising phase, says the special interest groups have the same kinds of problems as the parties. People said to me: Why in the world did you vote for the Wellstone amendment when it is clearly unconstitutional? I voted for it with my eyes wide open. I believe it is unconstitutional. I believe the other parts of the bill that it seeks equality for are equally unconstitutional. But I thought if the time should come, through some dark miracle, that McCain-Feingold survives the White House, the Supreme Court, and gets into the public stream, I do not want the loophole that the Wellstone amendment closed to stay open. If they are going to find some of it unconstitutional, I want them to find all of it unconstitutional. I want that loophole plugged. If, indeed, we have the circumstance before the Court where the Court says the Wellstone amendment is unconstitutional, so the special interest groups are off the hook, but all of the corresponding pressures on parties are constitutional so that parties are under this kind of restriction, we are going to see a distortion in the political world that none of us is going to like. I am supporting this amendment that says if the Supreme Court says, OK, we are going to strike down the Wellstone amendment as unconstitutional, as I hope they do, then we are going to strike down all the rest of it as unconstitutional because it all goes together, it fits together; it is a legitimate pattern. I happen to think it is a total pattern of the violation of the first amendment. I have said before I think if James Madison were alive, he would be appalled at the debate, let alone the outcome. I have been ridiculed for that by members of the press who somehow think it is kind of funny to talk about the Founding Fathers, but I still believe the Federalist Papers are the best guide we can have as to how we make public policies around here. As we look into our crystal balls, murky as they may be, we have to try to understand what the consequences will be if this bill passes and becomes law. I think the consequences are as I have stated: Parties will be seriously disadvantaged, special interest groups will be advantaged. But I do not want that to be done by the Supreme Court. I want the Supreme Court to tell us, all or nothing. If the Supreme Court says an intrusion on first amendment rights is legitimate when you are dealing with political parties, then that intrusion ought to be legitimate when you are dealing with special interest groups. If, on the other hand, they say, no, the first amendment is so precious that we are going to leave it alone as far as special interest groups are concerned, why should they not then be required to say, we will leave it alone with respect to political parties? Since when did the Constitution make a difference between the way people assemble themselves in their right of assembly and their right to petition and say: If you assemble yourselves in your right of assembly and right to petition in a political party, we are going to treat you one way, but if you assemble yourselves in your right to assemble and right to petition in a special interest group, we are going to treat you a different way? The possibility exists that might happen if this amendment is adopted. If this amendment is adopted, then the Supreme Court will have to make the fundamental decision: Are they going to amend the first amendment by upholding McCain-Feingold, or are they not? If they decide they are not, then they are not across the board. They cannot do it selectively. To me, that is the kind of outcome with which Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay would all agree. I make no apologies for calling them to this argument because I think this argument fundamentally is about the preservation of their handiwork which all of us in this Chamber have taken an oath to uphold and defend. I do not take that oath lightly. I know my fellow Senators do not take that oath lightly. We should talk about it in those terms. I plead with my colleagues to think in those terms and, therefore, to support this amendment.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, as I listened to the Senator from New York give a hypothetical circumstance, I am reminded of the statement that I was taught by a lawyer. As the Chair and my colleagues know, I am unencumbered by a legal education, so I have to defer to those who have been to law school, but I am told that one of the factors in law school they teach is hard cases make bad law. The Senator from New York has described a theoretical, highly unlikely, hard case. If we were to legislate entirely on the basis of that theoretical circumstance, we would make bad law. I am interested to hear the Senator from Minnesota go on at great length about how few people give in these upper ranges. For the Senator from New York to be talking about many people giving $40,000 to many candidates every year flies in the face of the actual circumstance and experience about which the Senator from Minnesota talks. As I say, I cannot comment on the legality of the cases that have been cited. But as an outside observer, listening to it, I simply say we had a theoretical hard case which would, if we followed it, make bad law. Let me comment on why I am in favor of the Thompson amendment. As the Senator from Tennessee indicated earlier, I am one who would be delighted to see all limits disappear for a variety of reasons that I have stated over the years about campaign finance and its challenges. Let me run through a historic demonstration of why the green bars on the Senator's chart keep going up. I got chastised in the press the other day for quoting Founding Fathers and talking about the Founding Fathers--as if they were irrelevant. Quite aside from the philosophy, there is much we can learn from the Founding Fathers because every one of them was a very practical, very real politician. They had to run for election, too. They understood the political process. As I pointed out, George Washington won his elections by buying rum punch and ginger cakes for the assembled electorate. That is how they did it in those days. James Madison refused to do it and got defeated. So this issue is not new. But when they were writing the Constitution, George Washington, as the President of the Constitutional Convention, never spoke except when he recognized one or the other delegates to the convention--except on one issue and that issue was how big congressional districts should be. The original proposal was that a congressional district should represent 50,000 people. The motion was made; no, let's cut that down to 30,000 people. George Washington stepped from his chair as President of the Constitutional Convention to endorse the idea that it be cut down to 30,000 because, he said, a Representative has too much to do if he has to represent as many as 50,000 people. That is just too big for a congressional district. So it was written into the original Constitution, 30,000, with, of course, the understanding that Congress could change that. I now come from the State that just by 800 people missed getting a congressional seat in the last redistricting. Our State has the largest congressional districts, therefore, of any in the country--roughly 700,000 people per congressional district. So if you want to talk about inflation in campaigns, go for a House campaign that, in George Washington's day, had to go for a population of 30,000 people to, today, where the seat represents 700,000 people-- more than 20 times increased. So it is not just inflation of money; it is inflation of challenge to meet that many people. How do you do it? You do not do it shaking hands. You do not do it speaking to Rotary Clubs and Kiwanis Clubs. You do not do it by holding town meetings. The only way you can reach 700,000 people for a congressional seat, and 10 times that or more in many Senate seats, is to buy time. That is the only way you can do it. There is no other physical way to let the people of your State know who you are, unless you are an incumbent who has already had 6 years of free publicity, a sports hero--and we are getting more and more of those in Congress and some of them are pretty good Members of Congress, but they would not be Members if they had not had their names emblazoned on the front pages of the papers, a circumstance that is worth millions. If somebody wants to start from scratch, run from obscurity, they have to raise a lot of money because they have not been on the sports pages and they have not been on the front pages. They have not had all the free exposure. If they are not wealthy, they have to raise a lot of money. Raising money becomes harder and harder to do if you have a limit on the amount you can raise that does not grow with inflation and does not grow with the number of people in your district. The days when Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas could go around the State of Illinois and hold debates where thousands of people would come and stand in the Sun for 3 hours listening to them are over. We do not have that kind of attention being paid to politics today. When I run a campaign ad, I do not have to just compete with my opponent. We talk as if all the campaign advertising is between two opponents. When I run a campaign ad, it has to compete with the Budweiser frogs. It has to compete with all the other ads that are out there that will crowd it out as far as public attention is concerned. I can't just say here is where I am, and put my ad up and my opponent says here is where I am and put his ad up because people are turning off the ads. They are going into the kitchen for a sandwich while the commercials are on. I have to have so many that I cut through the clutter of all the competition that has nothing to do with politics. And that means I have to raise a lot of money. It becomes harder and harder to do that if the limits do not grow, either with inflation in money or with inflation in the population I represent or with inflation in the amount of competing advertising that is there. In my first race, we bought ads on all of the network stations, and I thought we were reaching the public. Then my ad adviser came to me and said we were getting killed in the ad war. I said: What do you mean? We are doing fine. He said: You are not on cable and your opponent is on cable. I hadn't thought about cable. I don't have cable in my house. So we had to buy ads on cable. The number of outlets keeps increasing and the number of challenges to meet those outlets keeps going up. Yet we stick with a limit of the amount we can raise in the face of all of these increases. So it only makes sense to index the amount we spend, not only to inflation of dollars but index to the inflation of the challenge that we face in spending those dollars to reach the voter because you get less and less bang for your buck, even if the number of bucks goes up according to monetary inflation. I support this amendment. It is only common sense. It will not lead to the kind of theoretical disaster about which the Senator from New York talks. It will only make it possible, slightly easier, for challengers to get a little traction against incumbents. I still think it is not easy enough and I quote again the primary example of a challenger who took on an incumbent and knocked him off, which was Eugene McCarthy in 1968, who went to New Hampshire against an incumbent President and won enough votes in the New Hampshire primary to cause Lyndon Johnson to resign the race and announce he would not run. Understand how he did that; that is how McCarthy did that. He got five people to give him $100,000 each. So he went to New Hampshire with a war chest of $500,000 in 1968. In today's money, that is $2 million or more. Under today's rules, he could not begin to do that. Under today's rules, for him to raise $100,000, he would have to go to 100 different people and do that five times over. His chances of getting that done would be very slim. So I endorse this amendment. I am happy on the occasion of campaign finance reform to finally be in agreement with my friend from Tennessee on something relating to this bill. I hope we reject all of the theoretical arguments and live in the real world where this amendment makes enormous good sense.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. That is correct.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I listened with interest to the comments of the Senator from Connecticut. I am convinced that if he wants to offer an amendment to the Domenici amendment that says these amounts we are talking about for self-funded candidates also apply to incumbents who have those amounts in their existing campaign funds, I would be happy to support such a modification of the Domenici amendment.