Robert Bennett

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, reserving the right to object.

Mr. BENNETT

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

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. For the information of all Senators, the Senate will begin consideration of the bankruptcy bill starting at 2 p.m. Monday afternoon. The bill will be open for debate only during Monday's session. However, amendments are in order beginning Tuesday. Therefore, Senators can expect the first votes of the week on Tuesday.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the concurrent resolution and the preamble be agreed to en bloc, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H. Con. Res. 27 just received from the House.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Governmental Affairs Committee be discharged from further consideration of the nomination of Sean O'Keefe to be Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Further, I ask consent that the Senate proceed immediately to its consideration, the nomination be confirmed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, any statements relating to the nomination 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. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it adjourn until the hour of 2 p.m. on Monday, March 5. I further ask unanimous consent that on Monday, immediately following the prayer, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, and the Senate then begin consideration of the bankruptcy bill as under the previous order.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the joint resolution be read a third time and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and any statements relating to this resolution be printed in the Record.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to the consideration of H.J. Res. 19, which is at the desk.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, tonight we will hear from President Bush as he presents the budget. I remember when I first came to this town as a very young man back in the 1960s, one of my wise mentors commented that every President enjoys a honeymoon, and it lasts until he offers his first budget. Once we get down to the money, the platitudes stop; that is when the honeymoon ends. I suppose tonight we will see the end of whatever honeymoon President Bush is experiencing as people begin to disagree with his priorities with respect to the money. That is as it should be. We should get away from the generalities and, frankly, the hyperbole of the political campaign and down to the realities of governing as quickly as possible. I can't help but think back over my first experience as a Member of this body some 8 years ago when President Clinton presented his first budget. I was a brand-new Member of the minority. I had gone through the campaign with President Clinton. He and I had both campaigned on the same thing: Change. He, of course, wanted to change the Presidency; I wanted to change the Congress. He succeeded; I didn't. But I at least got elected back into a Congress where the Republicans were very much in the minority. In his campaign, President Clinton promised a middle-class tax cut. But when he stood before America on that first occasion and presented his first budget, he said things were so much different once he had gotten into the Presidency than he had thought they were when he was running for the Presidency he had to not only rescind his call for a tax cut but ask for a tax increase. One of the things I am looking forward to tonight is that President George W. Bush will not change from the position he took in the campaign. He promised he would campaign for a tax cut, for tax relief, and I understand tonight he will, in fact, propose that on which he campaigned--tax relief. He will propose a number of other things. We will go down them in the standard checklist, laundry list fashion of politicians, and say that is too much for this, that is not enough for that, we are in favor of this, but we want to amend that. And we will go down it as if this is a checklist that is cast in bronze. We will fight over the details. Again, I have learned that is what goes on around here. In fact, however, if we can step back from that process for a minute, we should realize the economy is not a checklist. The economy is a constantly shifting, constantly changing series of literally millions of priorities on the part of individuals. Individuals change jobs; individuals graduate from college; individuals start businesses; individuals see their businesses fail. Sometimes large corporations see their businesses fail. The best projections come to sometimes unpleasant surprises. Look, for example, at what was billed as the largest merger in the history of the automotive industry, Daimler and Chrysler. Daimler, the organization from Germany, thought they were buying the crown jewel of the American automobile industry in Chrysler, the most profitable of the big three in America, only to discover a few years later their projections had gone awry and they were facing mountains of red ink. Now they are scrambling to change. We are looking at the best projections we can find with respect to what will happen in the American economy over the next 10 years, and we are setting down some priorities as to how we will respond if, indeed, those projections come to pass. I make here a very bold prediction: The projections we have before us for the next 10 years will not be accurate. That is a very far limb I am going out on, I realize, but I feel confident with that. I will be even more specific: They will either be too good or too bad. We have never had the experience of any Federal agency making projections over the coming years with anything like the pinpoint accuracy we presume when we debate budgets around here. We stand here and we say this is so many billion too high for this and so many billion too low, and so on. Then reality comes in, and we are always stunned that it is different from our projections. When I first came here 8 years ago and debated President Clinton's first projections, we were being told with absolute certainty that we were facing budget deficits as far as the eye could see and we had to have this tax increase to deal with these overwhelming deficits. Now we are being told we are facing budget surpluses that will go on as far as the eye can see into the trillions of dollars. I happen to think we will, indeed, see surpluses but they will not be in the exact order of magnitude that our current projections say they will. They will be, I say with great confidence, either higher or lower. It is similar to the question someone asked of, I believe it was J.P. Morgan, when they said, ``What will the stock market do today?'' thinking he was the greatest expert on the stock market. He looked at his questioner with great sagacity, and he said: ``It will fluctuate.'' What will the economy do? It will grow or it will shrink, and it will do so in a pattern that is virtually impossible to estimate with the exactness that we get budget figures. To say the total surplus over the next 10 years will be exactly $5.6 trillion is an exercise in guessing--creative guessing, educated guessing, well-researched guessing, but it is still guessing. So as we get into the budget President Bush will give us, and as we go through the necessary exercise of adopting exact numbers, let us recognize that this is an exercise we go through every year. Every year we adjust the budget, every year we adjust our guesses, every year we try to do a little better than we did the year before, and every year we have a year's more hard data behind us that we hope will help guide us where we are going in the future. We now know, for example, when President Clinton said we were in a serious recession as we were adopting the budget in 1993, if we look back at the economic data, the recession in fact ended in 1991. It still felt like a recession, but we were, in fact, not in one. I think we took some steps that, in retrospect, we probably should not have taken on the basis of what things seemed to be rather than on the basis of what things were. All right, having said that, let me comment on what I see in President George W. Bush's budget. He is setting out his priorities. I think that is what we should focus on: What are the priorities that this President hopes this Congress will adopt as we look to the future. My own guess of the future surplus is that it is going to be better, in terms of Federal income, than $5.6 trillion. I think the $5.6 trillion number which has been adopted as the best summary of the various estimates is probably low. If I were the CEO of a business looking at this kind of forecast, I would say let's get fairly aggressive at trying to grow the business, let's get fairly aggressive at taking those steps that will prepare us for the prosperity that we think lies ahead. I think there are those who say: No, no, the $5.6 trillion number is too high; let us get very conservative; let us get very restrictive with what we do with the money in this budget. My own gut tells me that is the way to make sure we do not hit the $5.6 trillion, that we constrict the growth, and we see to it that this economy gets less rather than more in the future. But these are the President's priorities as I understand them. Let me just list them and then talk about whether or not it is a good set of priorities. His first priority has to do with improving our educational system. I think our educational system since the demise of the Soviet Union has become the No. 1 survival issue for the United States. If we do not get our educational system geared to the needs of the future, we will pay a huge price in the future. So his priority of improving education strikes me as the right budgetary priority, the thing that should be first. Next is protecting Social Security. That has become the Holy Grail of American politics. Every politician says he wants to protect Social Security. It is to be expected that President Bush will put it right next to education. Next, preserve Medicare. I have a little bit of a reaction to that language, ``preserve Medicare,'' because I have found that everybody who deals with Medicare in its present structure hates it. Oh, they don't hate the idea of having money to deal with their health care problem, but the structure is absolutely devastating. Yes, from a budgetary standpoint I think what the President is going to propose is wise. But I hope as we go through that process we can start talking about changing Medicare so human beings can understand it. Just a quick vignette: I have a constituent who came to me and she said: I am a very intelligent person, I think. I am a college graduate, and I have a professional life. I take care of my mother's medical problems, and my mother is on Medicare. She said: I am totally defeated by the paper that comes through the mail to me with respect to mother's Medicare, and I finally adopted this strategy. I throw everything away, and once a month I call the Salt Lake Clinic where my mother is being treated and I say, ``How much money do I owe you?'' And they give me a number, and I write them a check. She said that is the only way she can deal with the complexities that come out of Medicare. A much younger man who came to me when we were out in our home States celebrating Presidents Day said: My father just went on Medicare. I had no idea how disastrously complicated that really is and how far short of really meeting his needs it is. So let's not get carried away in the political rhetoric of preserving Medicare to think that the Medicare system as it is currently running makes any sense at all. Let us understand that if we are going to fund Medicare--and President Bush recommends that we do--we have the responsibility to do some fairly heavy lifting between now and the time that funding comes along, to examine the way Medicare is run. I hope Secretary Thompson, as the new Secretary of HHS, will take a long, hard look at HCFA and say what can be done to make the Medicare accounting process and examination of claims process intelligible to human beings because it is clearly not that at the moment. All right: Education, Social Security, Medicare--defense. One of the things we have seen over the last 8 years has been what used to be called the peace dividend. Ever since Ronald Reagan and George Bush's father, Bush the 1st, or Bush the 41st--whatever shorthand title we wish to put on him--ended the cold war and the Soviet Union disappeared, we have seen the defense budget as a percentage of gross domestic product decrease dramatically. We should see that happen. That is the peace dividend we should hope for. When President Clinton used to stand and say this is the smallest Government in a generation, basically he was talking about the Defense Department. All of the shrinking of civilian jobs in the Government, of which he was so proud, occurred primarily in the Defense Department. We got to the point where we went a little too far with that. Our defense budget is now a smaller percentage of the gross domestic product than it was prior to World War II. It is back to the 1939-1940 level. It is beginning to show. We do not need the kind of defense we needed during the cold war, but we need a defense that can deter anyone who would like to take us to world war III. It is appropriate that President Bush has listed that as his next priority. Improving health care. I have already talked about improvements I would like to see in Medicare. President Bush recognizes that this is an area where we need to spend more, not less. Interestingly, many Republicans say any kind of government expenditure is bad. They want to cut anything. And any budget cut that comes along, they immediately clear. This is an area where we should not be cutting because it is an investment that will, indeed, pay huge dividends in the future. I am delighted, as one who has supported doubling the funding for NIH and other basic research in health care, to note that President Bush is going to double the funding for medical research on such important health issues as cancer. I look forward to the country reaping the benefits of that kind of investment. The fact that President Bush can talk about that kind of an increase even as he is talking about presiding over a smaller government demonstrates that this is a man who has his priorities straight. This has been a Republican initiative right from the first. It started with Senator Connie Mack of Florida who has had personal experience with the ravages of cancer. He didn't just have a knee-jerk response to those experiences but began to look into what was being done at the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute, and came back to the rest of us and said this is good, sound investment. Hearings were held. Testimony was taken. We Republicans led the way on seeing to it that basic health research would be increased very substantially in this country because we recognized the dividends that would pass. I am delighted to note that President Bush is going to carry on that Republican initiative that began on the floor of this Senate with Senator Mack from Florida and is proposing this kind of an increase for NIH medical research. Next, the environment. We hear an enormous amount of conversation about the environment. We must cut back on this; we must do that, and so on. Frankly, if you dig into it, from my point of view, much of it is based on what is being called junk science. Junk science, to summarize it very quickly, is that science that is produced and then taken to the media rather than for peer review. Scientists come to a conclusion and then call a press conference rather than turning to other scientists to say where they went wrong. Once the media has hold of it and has spread it, then there is no calling it back. Then it gets set into the public mind, and the public culture is absolute truth. Those who try to catch up with it after the fact always have difficulty. We have seen examples of that. One that rankled the agricultural field was the excitement over the alar scare where film stars suddenly became scientists and testified before the Congress about all of the apples being tainted. Checking into it carefully and doing peer review indicated that, in fact, alar was not going to poison every man, woman, and child in the United States. But the scare had a tremendous impact on apple growers. Frankly, parents wanted kids to eat more apples. And it has taken a long time for the reality to catch up with that kind of junk science. When we are talking about the environment, let's not talk about junk science. Let's talk about some significant investments in the environment that make sense. President Bush is proposing fully funding the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which is a $900 million commitment, and he is giving EPA the second highest operating budget in its history which, for whatever it is worth, happens to be $59 million higher than the request from President Clinton. I am not at all impressed with the idea that we must spend more than President Clinton in a certain area. But since there are those in the media who think President Clinton was the example of how you fund efforts on the environment, I think it is important to point out that George W. Bush is not cutting back on that kind of commitment. Those are his priorities. Identify first; then the standard, Social Security and Medicare; a new one for the administration, which is defense, funding for health care research, and activities to protect the environment. Those are a pretty good series of priorities, in my view. But there are two others that are in this particular budget that are different from what we have seen. One is a commitment to pay off the debt. When I first got here 8 years ago, we were told with the same confidence that we are being told about surpluses how we would have deficits as far as the eye could see. Those deficits have disappeared. They have turned into surpluses because the economy has--surprise-- grown faster than anybody anticipated it would and registered those projections, inaccurate as that. As that is going on, we must continue to pay down the debt. George W. Bush said we will do that. It comes down to this: He says: These are my priorities; these are the priorities I recommend to the Congress. Once these priorities are fully funded, we have this much left over. And what do we do with the money left over? He says we do two things: First, we pay down the debt; second, we give whatever is left back to the people who have been overcharged for the Government services they have been buying with their taxes. I think that is an appropriate arrangement of the money. Here is the priority. Here is what we are going to spend it on. Yes, we are going to be spending more than we were spending in the past, but we still have this much left. What do we do with that which we have left? We pay our debts and we give money back to people whom we have overcharged. Could anything be fairer than that? Can anything be simpler than that? But the big fight, of course, is going to be on the last item--giving money back to those who have been overcharged. Who are they? Maybe the people who should get the money back shouldn't be the people who sent it here in the first place. Maybe the money should not go back to the people who were overcharged but to the people who never shopped in the first place. That would be the conversation we would have if this were a business. Of course, it wouldn't be cast in those terms because this is not a business. This is a government. As a government in a democracy, this means there are votes to be courted. There are special interest groups to be satisfied. When we get back to that area of money to be given back to those who have been overcharged, that is where the heat will come. That is where the rhetoric will come. That is where the shouting will come. That is where we will have our most bitter debates. I, for one, am encouraged by the fact that the heart of President Bush's tax plan is the reduction of the marginal rate. This is why. First, there is the question of fairness. Should anybody be required to pay more than a third of his or her income to the Federal Government? If you take a poll--there are those who live by polls in this Chamber--and ask the American people what should be the highest total anybody should pay, over the years the numbers have stayed pretty stable. It is 25 percent. Most Americans think no one should be forced to pay more than 25 percent of his or her income into the Federal Government. We are now close to 40. President Bush is saying no. Let's bring that number back to a third. Let's bring that number back to 33. I don't think that is unreasonable. I think it fits with where the American people think we ought to be. The second reason why I think we ought to bring down the top rate from roughly 40 to a third is because I recognize that it is in that area that the American entrepreneurial machine takes hold. Look at our counterparts in Europe. Japan: I have owned a business in Japan. I have been involved in a joint venture with companies in Europe. I know that in those countries they have many of the things we have. You think they are almost identical. They have big corporations. They have hard- working people. They have a well-educated workforce. The one thing they don't have that is almost uniquely American, with perhaps the exception of Hong Kong, is they do not have the entrepreneurial spirit. And where do the entrepreneurs fund their businesses? They fund their businesses--the growth, the new jobs, the new creation--at the edge of the marginal tax rate. If you bring the top marginal tax rate down from 40 percent to 33 percent, you are going to see a whole host of new industries, new enterprises, and new activities spring up that will make it possible for the higher end of the projection of what will happen in the economy come to pass. Mr. President, that is a brief overview of the President's proposal. I look forward to hearing him flesh it out tonight in his presentation to the joint session of Congress. I express my delight that we are going to hear this President stand true to the things he said during the campaign. It will be a refreshing change. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNETT

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

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I understand there have been speeches given this morning with respect to the military and the decision by President Bush to take a very serious look at what is happening in the military--a pause, if you will, in the funding and planning until we get our hands around exactly where things are. I want to comment about the wisdom of that particular approach. If I may, I want to go back to the most inconsequential military career perhaps in the history of America--my own. It will demonstrate what happens in the military and demonstrate the power of inertia because once something gets started in one direction, it continues in that direction until some outside force is put upon it. That is not just Newton's law of motion; that is the law of motion in government as a whole. I went into the military in 1957. I joined the Utah National Guard and was sent on active duty for training, first to Fort Ord, CA, and then, because my Guard unit was in the artillery observation business, to Fort Sill, OK. I went to Fort Sill, OK, to be trained in sound ranging. If that does not mean anything to you, Mr. President, I would not be surprised because sound ranging is a military skill that reached its apex of applicability in World War I. It had some applicability in World War II, very little in Korea, and virtually none in 1957 when I was trained in it. But the inertia of the military organization was such that no one had reviewed the pattern of training people in sound ranging. So going forward, as a body in physics, moving in the same direction, it continued in the same direction. I and my fellow classmates were put through a program on sound ranging. As it happened, I graduated first in my class. That is not as big an achievement as it might sound because I was the only member of the class who had been to college. I was a college graduate; the others were draftees who were high school graduates; and if I had not finished first, it would have been a disgrace. Having finished first, once again the pattern of inertia in the military decreed that I should become an instructor and that the next sound ranging course that would go through Fort Sill, OK, would be taught by me. This is very flattering, except that my time on active duty with the National Guard would expire before the next class would convene. I spent the remainder of my time in the day room, or at the post library, or doing other things because there was absolutely nothing for me to do. At the time I wondered: Doesn't anybody review these things? Doesn't anybody look at this and say: Wait a minute, this is a program that has long since outlived its usefulness, should be stopped, and we should just forget this? No, nobody did. I got so bored, I went in and volunteered to teach other classes and had to go back to school, if you will, on my own time to learn logarithms so that I could teach that mathematical skill to the surveyors in the school. Basically, this was the least distinguished and least significant military career in American history, but it demonstrates what happens when we allow inertia to take over. We allow the military to go forward in one direction, and we do not ever stop and say: Wait a minute, are we doing the right thing? Summarizing it another way, there are some historians who say the generals always fight the last war; they are always prepared for the last battle, not the battle that is to come. The cold war is over. That is a cliche. Like most cliches, it happens to be true. Much of our military is geared towards fighting the cold war. Much of our military is geared towards a circumstance where the military commanders involved are comfortable with the way things are going because they are the way things have been. The idea that there should be a careful look at where they are and a reassessment of the direction they are taking is a little bit threatening; it is unsettling; it implies uncertainty. The one thing many military men hate worse than anything else is uncertainty. As I was going through the airport, flying back for this week's session, a book caught my eye. Tom Clancy is the author. We all know Tom Clancy. The reason it caught my eye was his mention of a military officer who had helped him write the book, a man named Chuck Horner. I met Chuck Horner when he was the commander of the U.S. Space Command, a four-star general located in Colorado Springs. He was the commander of the air war in the gulf. He was the top Air Force officer with respect to the Gulf War. I found him fascinating, and when I saw his name on the cover of this book written by Tom Clancy, I decided to buy the book because I wanted to learn more about General Horner. The reason I found him fascinating, among other things, was this statement he made to me during the time I spent with him. He said: The Gulf War was the first war fought from space. Tanks got positioned by virtue of instructions that came from space. Colin Powell said this is the war where the infantryman goes into the field with a rifle in one hand and a laptop in the other. Even that is now obsolete because he would take a palm pilot instead of a laptop; a laptop would be too cumbersome. The Army, with its current advertising campaign, is beginning to talk about that. I am not sure it is the right advertising campaign--every soldier is an army of one--but it demonstrates how vastly changed things are. Against that background where those things not only have changed but are changing, doesn't it make sense for the Secretary of Defense to say it is time for us to pause in the direction we are going in our procurement, in our threat assessment, in our strength establishment, and look toward the kind of military we are going to need in the future? Isn't it time for us to take a break when we do not have an immediate military threat and reassess from top to bottom everything we are doing? I think it demonstrates the maturity of the Bush administration that Secretary Rumsfeld is engaged in this kind of activity. I think it demonstrates that the Bush administration has a very long-headed view of life; that they are not looking to this week or next week; they are not looking to the current polls; they are not looking to what might work in terms of a special interest group that has an attitude toward the military; they are saying: What does America need for the next decade? What kind of long-term decision can we make that will make America prepare for the different kind of threat we are facing? I think it means a military that will very quickly say we don't need any sound ranging classes, and we don't need any people sitting around with nothing to do. There is far too much to do in terms of planning and training and direction. I applaud President Bush for this decision, I applaud Secretary Rumsfeld for carrying it out, and I wish to make it clear that this Senator will do everything he can to support and sustain this effort. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I rise to support Senator John Ashcroft for Attorney General, and will outline some sound business reasons for this position. Senator Ashcroft has proven himself the friend of American consumers, investors, and businesses, especially in the high technology sector which has driven much of the prosperity of the last long economic expansion. His potential leadership in the Department of Justice has been hailed as especially good news by high tech businesses and investors, whose retirement and pensions rely on the health of the technology stocks that have recently taken a beating. Indeed, James Lucier of Prudential Securities recently wrote to investors, Technology investors got their Christmas present three days early on December 22 when President-elect George W. Bush named . . . John Ashcroft as his choice to serve as Attorney General . . . [W]e find it hard to imagine Bush choosing a potential attorney general with better qualifications than Ashcroft to restore investor confidence and dispel the more extreme, valuation-depressing fears of political risk at a time when Congress is set to take up a slate of complex issues with ample potential to raise blood pressures among the investor class.--Prudential Securities, ``Washington Research, Washington World,'' January 3, 2001, p. 1. In other words, according to some analysts, tech-sector investors who have been worried about their wealth or retirement security because of recent tech-stock losses can breath a little easier if John Ashcroft is confirmed as Attorney General. With so many Americans now relying on those investments, I think they need to understand that the partisan extremists fighting Senator Ashcroft could be putting at risk many Americans' economic and retirement security to satisfy their own political interests. His general approach of avoiding unnecessary regulation of and litigation against business will help foster a positive economic environment that is so important to all Americans. Senator Ashcroft has also played a role in helping consumers enjoy the benefits of technology. The same newsletter points out Ashcroft's role as Attorney General in Missouri authoring and filing an amicus brief joined by other state attorneys general supporting Sony Corporation's contention that consumers had the right to ``time-shift'' television broadcasts by taping on their VCRs in the famous Betamax Supreme Court case. He has worked to support the development of the Internet, to avoid taxes that would slow the growth of e-commerce; he has pushed to allow consumers and Internet users to use strong encryption to protect their privacy online, and to keep American companies at the forefront of encryption and software development. All in all, Senator Ashcroft's nomination and confirmation should be a boon to our economy, to investors, our businesses, and consumers. I would hope that consumers, investors, and all those who rely on a strong economy will make their support of Senator Ashcroft known to their Senators.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. I thank the Chair for the clarification. Mr. President, when I decided that I would run for the Senate, I had been out of any active kind of political involvement for close to 18 years. I left Washington in 1974, the same year Richard Nixon, the President in whose administration I served, left Washington. I remember being in a taxicab in Burbank, CA, on my way to an airport to come back to Washington to pick up my family when on the radio playing in the taxicab Mr. Nixon announced his resignation from the Presidency. At that time, I thought I would never return to anything connected with public life or politics and settled into a career as a businessman. But life has a way of changing things that we think are set in our lives. I found myself in 1991 contemplating a return to the political arena for the first time as a candidate for a serious office. I discovered in the 18-year hiatus since I had been gone that there were a number of issues I had not paid any attention to which were burning issues in the political arena of that time. One of them was clearly the question of the environment and the use of public lands. In Utah, we have a tremendous number of public lands. Indeed, two- thirds of our State is owned by the Federal Government, and a large percentage of that which is owned by the State government is given over to State parks and other State land uses. One of the most inspiring of those State parks is known as Dead Horse Point. It is a place where you can go out and look over a huge vista way down below and, for reasons which I don't understand, is named after a dead horse. As you stand on that point--Dead Horse Point--you get a picture of the grandeur that is available in southeastern Utah. As I went down in that area to look for votes, I discovered that one of the biggest controversies there was the question of an oil well built in an area that could be seen from Dead Horse Point. I went down there absolutely determined that I would do whatever I could to see to it that there would be no oil exploration anywhere in an area that might despoil or damage the glorious views of Dead Horse Point. When I got there, I found that the local Republican leaders were involved in the oil well. Indeed, the woman, whom I had not met before, who took me around and introduced me into that area, said her husband worked on the oil well and outlined for me what it meant to their family economically if something were to happen to close oil wells. I thought, Well, here I am caught between the economic impact that is benefiting their family and other families and the aesthetic impact of seeing to it that things must be done properly as well as to protect the environment. What am I going to do about it? Then she said something that was very appropriate and, frankly, rare among politicians. She said: Why don't we go look at it? Why don't you see firsthand what this is all about? I said: Fine. That was a good way to delay the issue and not have to announce my position while I would let her take me out and show me where the oil well was. The gentleman who had driven me down into that part of the State and I got into her pickup truck and we went out looking for the oil well. I say ``looking'' because you couldn't find it. If you didn't have a guide who knew her way very well, you couldn't find the oil well. You couldn't see it. To further complicate things, on that particular day it was a little bit overcast and there was not necessarily fog but some confusion in the atmosphere making it difficult for us to get our bearings from surrounding mountains. She was a native of the area, knew it very well, but got lost nonetheless. We made a wrong turn. We wandered around. She tried to get her bearings and finally, retracing our steps, she took us to the place where there was the oil well. We got out of the truck and walked out into an area maybe twice the size of the Senate Chamber. It had been bermed up around the area, possibly by a bulldozer, but the result was that the oil well was in the bottom of what you might consider a very shallow basin. That is why you couldn't see it. It was not the great derrick we think of when we think of the movie ``Giant'' and Some of the other visual depictions of drilling for oil. It was what is called a Christmas tree, a series of valves that come together. I had my picture taken standing on it, and the Christmas tree was no higher than I could reach. I could put my hand out on the top of this and stand there. This was the total visual impact of this oil well. It was painted in such a way as to blend into the surrounding flora, and it was at the bottom of a shallow basin. If you were more than 100 feet away from it, you couldn't see it. I realized that the idea it could be seen from Dead Horse Point maybe was true if you had a very high- powered set of binoculars and knew exactly where to look and maybe had some sort of laser device to help you aim, but that no one in the normal course of enjoying the outdoor experience of Dead Horse Point would ever see this oil well. I went away from the experience determined that I would support the oil well and the pumping of oil in that area to see to it that the people of that area would get some economic stability to their lives, knowing it could be done in an environmentally sensitive way that would see to it that visitors to Dead Horse Point would have no diminution of their outdoor experience in southeast Utah. I described this experience in this kind of detail for this reason: We are going to discuss the nomination of Gale Norton to be Secretary of the Interior. The opposition to Gale Norton as Secretary of the Interior comes from those who insist that her attitude toward the wise use of our natural resources in this country is so inimical to the idea of wilderness, environmental enjoyment, and environmental protection that she must be defeated. I suggest we need to, as a nation, go through the same kind of experience that I as an individual went through when I was trying to make up my mind on which side of this divide I would come down. I discovered that you can, in fact, if you are willing to look at the facts, come down on both sides simultaneously; they are not mutually exclusive. The wise exploitation of our natural resources in an environmentally sensitive way can and should go forward, and it need not--indeed, should not--impinge upon our national commitment to preserve that which is wonderful about the American environment, and particularly the American West where I come from. Those two can and should work closely together. I learned another thing out of that experience and out of my time in the Senate: The greatest environmental degradation comes in the areas that are the poorest. I was talking to a friend of mine who travels widely around the world for his jobs. He said: The worst pollution I have ever seen in my entire life in all the places I have visited is in Katmandu. It is one of the poorest places on the planet. The reason they have such tremendous pollution is that they don't have the money necessary to clean it up. We in America have the money, and we have spent the money, and we are continuing to spend the money to see to it that we can have this combination of what I have spoken: Sound economic activity, along with proper reverence for and preservation of our environment. The aspect of that balancing act is this: If we do things in the name of preserving the environment that has the effect of destroying our economic strength, paradoxically, that will come back to hurt the environment. Environmental protection of the kind we have embarked on as a nation costs money. Environmental preservation of the kind to which we have dedicated ourselves as a people is expensive. And the most pollution-free and the most scenically preserved areas in the world are those in the areas where people are the most economically strong. I say to those who view the nomination of Gale Norton with hostility, recognize that if you are so pure in your determination that nothing whatever can be done of an economic nature on public lands, you run the risk of damaging those public lands. If you do things that damage the American economy, you undercut the American ability to pay for environmental protection, just as the people in southeastern Utah, if they say absolutely no to any kind of oil exploration or pumping, run the risk of degrading the economy in that part of the State to the point where there can be no money for environmental protection. The two must go hand in hand. Not only can they go hand in hand, they must go hand in hand for the benefit of the environment. The Senator from Alaska has invited me and every other Member of this body to go with him to the Alaskan wildlife preserve, not to be sold a bill of goods, not to go up there with any predetermination. He is willing for us to come up under whatever sponsorship and attitude we might have and see for ourselves what drilling at ANWR really would mean. In other words, he has asked Members to do what I did in southern Utah: Look at it on the ground. See for yourself what it would mean. I intend to take him up on that, by the way, Mr. President. I believe when we do that, we can make a wise decision without going up determined, either for drilling or against drilling, prior to our visit. One other personal comment about all of these debates. I served in the Nixon administration when the question arose as to whether or not to build the Alaskan pipeline. We had all of the same debates then that we are having now. One that I heard over and over again was the statement that the building of the Alaskan pipeline would not only disturb but would ultimately destroy the caribou herd in Alaska because the pipeline went right through the caribou's traditional mating grounds: We must not allow this; the caribou are too important; the caribou are too vital to our heritage to allow anything to go forward. That argument did not prevail back in the 1970s. The pipeline was built, and now we can look back at it with nearly 30 years of experience and discover that the amorous urges of the caribou were not affected by the presence of a pipeline. Indeed, the caribou herd is now larger than it was when the pipeline was built, and caribou that have been born since the pipeline was built see it as part of their natural environment, having not been told in advance they were going to be against it, and enjoy the pipeline as their mating grounds. They rub up against the pipeline because it is warm and it is a opportunity for them to get warm in a hostile environment. And the caribou, as I say not being educated to the contrary, think this is a good thing. I think we can learn a lesson from that experience, the same lesson, again, that we can have proper preservation of the environment and economic development side by side. We need not have this wide schism. Finally, one last story that frames my approach to this nomination, this seems to be my day to go down memory lane. I go way back this time, to the time when my father served in the Senate and the issue before the Senate was the building of the Glen Canyon Dam, the creation of Lake Powell. There were those who opposed the building of the Glen Canyon Dam, just as there are those now who want it dynamited and taken down. One of the arguments for the Glen Canyon Dam was the need for electric power. There were those who said: This is ridiculous. We will never as a nation need that much electric power. We have plenty of power. The building of the Glen Canyon Dam with its hydroelectric facility will only depress prices because it will produce so much extra power that we will never, ever need. We can look back on that, with 40 years of experience, and realize that their projections of this Nation's power needs were wrong and that we clearly do need the power. But the interesting footnote of that debate was this: During that debate, people said: If we should be wrong and somehow, some way, the country should need that much extra power, we do not need Glen Canyon Dam and hydroelectric power. There is all that coal in the Kaparowitz Plateau, right next door, that could be burned to provide the power that we need. So let us not build the dam. If we should, by some strange circumstance, need that power, we can always burn the coal. That was the argument made while my father was a Senator, trying to get the Glen Canyon Dam built. By coincidence, when I became a Senator, President Clinton used the Antiquities Act to create a national monument on the Kaparowitz Plateau for the sole purpose of preventing us from burning that coal. In today's circumstance it is interesting to note that the coal in Kaparowitz represents enough power to heat and light the city of San Francisco for the next 100 years. Given where we are right now in the California energy crisis, that is an interesting circumstance. So I have given this history of my own involvement to make it clear why I am an enthusiastic supporter of Gale Norton. She understands that we can do both, we must do both, and we should do both--protect the environment and support the economy. I say to those who say no, no, no, she is too extreme, on one side or the other: Do what I did. Go to the ground. Look at it yourself and try to take a long view of the next 20 or 30 years and see what would be the result of Gale Norton's stewardship, for both the economy and the environment in that circumstance. Mr. President, I endorse her nomination. I will vote enthusiastically for it. I urge my colleagues to do the same.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I understand there is to be 3 hours of debate on this nomination to be equally divided, and my request is that I be allowed such time as I may consume and to make it clear to my colleagues that I have no intention of coming close to the hour and a half that is allocated for our side.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce my first bill of the 107th Congress, the ``Utah Public Lands Artifact Preservation Act of 2001.'' Utah's public lands are a treasure trove of the natural and cultural history of the west. Over a century of scientific exploration and research of these public lands have unearthed Native American artifacts, fossilized remains of prehistoric life-forms, and other objects of botanical and geological significance. Fortunately, these unique and remarkable finds now comprise a substantial portion of the collection of the University of Utah Museum of Natural History. The University of Utah Museum of Natural History collection contains more than one million objects and artifacts from the field of archaeology, botany, geology, paleontology, and zoology. It is one of the largest and most comprehensive collections in the region and is internationally significant. Over 75 percent of the collection was recovered from lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, National Park Service, United States Fish and Wildlife Service, and United States Forest Service. Currently the home of the Museum of Natural History is the library where I studied while I was a student at the University of Utah. Although I have fond memories of the time I spent in the library, it is an unfit home for the museum. As we all know, the needs of a library and the needs of a museum are very different. The current facility is not large enough to accommodate the museum's annual level of visitation. Additionally, space to display the collection is severely limited and the facilities to store the collection are unsuitable for a museum, Clearly, the Museum of Natural History needs an appropriate structure to exhibit, research, and house its collection. This legislation will result in an enhanced museum experience that will be more meaningful, educational, and accessible to the public and scientific researchers. Furthermore, the collection will no longer be jeopardized by inadequate facilities. The new museum will contain proper facilities for storage and research. I believe the strength of this project lies in the fact that its success will rely upon a public-private partnership among the state of Utah, the federal government, and hundreds of private individuals and foundations. Already, unprecedented support has been given by the Emma Eccles Jones Foundation for this project. I expect there will be many generous offers of support in the near future to make this project a success. I believe that this legislation is an exciting opportunity to showcase the many treasures that Utah's public lands contain. I look forward to working with my colleagues in the Senate and the new administration to pass this legislation this session.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce my first bill of the 107th Congress, the ``Utah Public Lands Artifact Preservation Act of 2001.'' Utah's public lands are a treasure trove of the natural and cultural history of the west. Over a century of scientific exploration and research of these public lands have unearthed Native American artifacts, fossilized remains of prehistoric life-forms, and other objects of botanical and geological significance. Fortunately, these unique and remarkable finds now comprise a substantial portion of the collection of the University of Utah Museum of Natural History. The University of Utah Museum of Natural History collection contains more than one million objects and artifacts from the field of archaeology, botany, geology, paleontology, and zoology. It is one of the largest and most comprehensive collections in the region and is internationally significant. Over 75 percent of the collection was recovered from lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, National Park Service, United States Fish and Wildlife Service, and United States Forest Service. Currently the home of the Museum of Natural History is the library where I studied while I was a student at the University of Utah. Although I have fond memories of the time I spent in the library, it is an unfit home for the museum. As we all know, the needs of a library and the needs of a museum are very different. The current facility is not large enough to accommodate the museum's annual level of visitation. Additionally, space to display the collection is severely limited and the facilities to store the collection are unsuitable for a museum, Clearly, the Museum of Natural History needs an appropriate structure to exhibit, research, and house its collection. This legislation will result in an enhanced museum experience that will be more meaningful, educational, and accessible to the public and scientific researchers. Furthermore, the collection will no longer be jeopardized by inadequate facilities. The new museum will contain proper facilities for storage and research. I believe the strength of this project lies in the fact that its success will rely upon a public-private partnership among the state of Utah, the federal government, and hundreds of private individuals and foundations. Already, unprecedented support has been given by the Emma Eccles Jones Foundation for this project. I expect there will be many generous offers of support in the near future to make this project a success. I believe that this legislation is an exciting opportunity to showcase the many treasures that Utah's public lands contain. I look forward to working with my colleagues in the Senate and the new administration to pass this legislation this session.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that I may proceed for an additional 2 minutes.

Mr. BENNETT. Now we are in a different situation in that we come into it even, 50/50. This time, the Democrats have not been so shy about saying, we will automatically give up control on each committee. And they have been very firm about saying that the committee ratios must be exactly the same. If I were in their shoes, frankly, I would probably be arguing exactly the same way. On the other hand, the Constitution has been cited here by the Senator from West Virginia, by the majority leader, and others, saying that the Republicans have the ultimate right to break the tie through Vice President Cheney after January 20. This creates what is sometimes called an immovable object facing an irresistible force, with both sides digging in and saying: This is what we absolutely have to have. And with the power of the filibuster, both sides have a nuclear weapon. To have come up with a resolution that is producing the kind of rhetoric we are now hearing on the floor this afternoon demonstrates the wisdom, the intelligence, and the skill of our respective leaders. I, for one, want to go on record congratulating them both and all of the Members of the Senate who are lining up behind it, even though there are those on both sides of the aisle who are terribly unhappy with the ultimate result. The fact that we have one that is now going to pass by unanimous consent is a tribute to our leadership. I wanted to express that here today.

Mr. BENNETT. Madam President, I had not realized when I came down to the floor that this was going to turn into a history class. But I have a little history to add to it myself, and I hope that it is appropriate. During our conference today, we talked about a previous situation where the Senate was close to this circumstance. The Senator from Oklahoma, Mr. Nickles, and I had an exchange about the facts in that situation. He had it different than I had it. So naturally, under those circumstances, you go check it out. I found out we were both right. So I would like to recite that to perhaps give us a historical setting of where we are. I have only served in this body for 8 years. But as I have indicated on the floor on other occasions, as a teenager I sat in the family gallery while my father served here. And this will perhaps shock everybody, but that was before Strom Thurmond was sworn in. I was in the Senate Chamber before Strom Thurmond was, if you can believe that. And it is true. The Republicans had just won the historic election of 1952. Dwight Eisenhower was the President. The Republicans won the Senate by the narrowest of margins, 49/47. Then, very quickly, Robert Taft was the majority leader. I still have memories, sitting in the family gallery, of watching Robert Taft--a man whose face is now in the lobby as one of the five greatest Senators in American history--prowling around in the back of this Chamber. One of the interesting things about it is that the Chamber looked exactly the same then as it does now, except that Trent Lott has now changed the color of the walls, I think wisely, in the television age. But very quickly in the Eisenhower administration, Wayne Morse found that his differences with President Eisenhower were irreconcilable, and he announced himself an independent. So you had 48 Republicans, 47 Democrats, and 1 Independent. Senator Morse insisted that he would not take his committee assignments from either party, he would take them from the Senate as a whole, and very quickly discovered that that kind of a stance meant he got no committee assignments, period. So he began caucusing with the Democrats with whom he was more ideologically aligned. Then Robert Taft died. He contracted cancer. He yielded the majority leader's position to Senator Knowland of California. Senator Taft fought the cancer gallantly for months, and then he died. There was a Democratic Governor in the State of Ohio, and Robert Taft was replaced by a Democrat. It suddenly became 48 Democrats, and 47 Republicans, with 1 Independent. That was the position Senator Nickles was trying to explain to me during the conference, and he was right. My memory was the first circumstance, and that was right. The difference was, we had had a death in there that I had forgotten. Now this was the situation: Because the Republicans had organized the Senate with 49 Senators to begin with, they had organized it with a Republican majority on every committee. They held that Republican majority on every committee until Senator Taft died, and it switched. At that point, Senator Morse--this I do remember--said, A, he had been elected as a Republican and, B, the Republicans controlled the administration and, therefore, in order to prevent the new President from being frustrated in his opportunities to get things through, he would, even though he had denounced his Republican party membership, vote with the Republicans on organizational issues, giving the Republicans 48, the Democrats 48, and with Richard Nixon in the chair giving the Republicans 49. Here is the key point. Under those circumstances, the Democrats said: We will not ask for a realignment of the committees. We will allow the majority that was there on the committees to be maintained through the balance of this Congress. So it was 48 Democrats, 47 Republicans, and 1 Independent, with the Independent vowing to vote against any organizational resolution the Democrats might bring forward, and of course Vice President Nixon would vote also that way, so the Republicans, even though they had only 47 seats, in a 96-seat Senate, maintained the chairmanships and a 1-vote margin on every committee. Now we are in a different situation.

Mr. BENNETT

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

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, the session is winding down. We are at a point where we are doing pro forma things. I have neglected to do something I think is important to do and that I have wanted to do. I will take the time available to us at the moment to fulfill my obligation. I wish to pay appropriate tribute to the senior Senator from New York, Mr. Moynihan, on the occasion of his retirement. I have already done this within the committee on which we jointly sit, but I think at a more formal setting it is also appropriate. I first met Pat Moynihan when I was serving in the Nixon administration. He was then a member of the White House staff. I was serving in the Department of Transportation. He was the President's primary enforcer, if you will, of improvements and efficiencies in the executive branch, particularly in domestic departments. We at the Department of Transportation were a little bit in awe, if not in terror, of the thought of Pat Moynihan showing up and checking on us to make sure we were doing things right. I remember one meeting in the White House where we were outlining what we wanted to do, that which I considered to be fairly bold, and listening to Moynihan saying: Well, in a Republican administration, this is probably about the best you could expect. He wanted us to be considerably bolder than we were. He wanted to go into directions of new initiatives that would have been very good for the country. In addition to this, he was one of the architects of Nixon's program of family maintenance which, had it been enacted over the objections of the Democrats, probably would have solved many of our welfare problems. Mr. Moynihan was well respected then. President Nixon later used him as Ambassador to the United Nations and Ambassador to India. When he was running for a seat in the Senate, even though he was a Democrat, I, for one, was rooting for him to win. I have just finished reading a book called ``The Trust,'' which is the history of New York City. I was interested to find that the editorial board of the New York Times almost unanimously decided that in that primary they were going to endorse Bella Abzug for the Senate seat in New York. Fortunately, the publisher of the New York Times, Punch Sulzberger, came to his senses long enough to dictate a New York Times endorsement of Pat Moynihan, and this body was spared the experience of having Mrs. Abzug as the Senator from New York. Senator Moynihan and I have disagreed about a number of issues since we have been here. We have debated on many issues and clashed many times, but we have served together in many areas. He was a member of the Senate Y2K committee, a committed, active member who scheduled hearings in his home State of New York. We went there often. I was always impressed and uplifted by the amount of bipartisan support he gave to that effort. He was always well informed and completely without guile or without bitterness. He now goes on to a career he loves, which is teaching. I have read some of his books and wish I could be one of his students. This country will hang on to Pat Moynihan as a major resource and a national treasure for the remainder of his life. But we in the Senate have been well served by having him here as our colleague. One last thing I will say about Pat Moynihan, which is little known but which demonstrates the man, there is a story going around in Washington that says when John F. Kennedy went down Pennsylvania Avenue in his inaugural parade, he saw how shabby the avenue was, and with that vision often attributed to the Kennedy clan, he said we must do something to clean up Pennsylvania Avenue, and the restoration of Pennsylvania Avenue then occurred. Well, in fact, from the scholarly writings of Pat Moynihan, we find that it was not John F. Kennedy at all; it was Arthur Goldberg, who was in that parade and saw that shabbiness of Pennsylvania Avenue, who pointed it out to President Kennedy and, to his credit, the President said, ``Yes, let's do something about it.'' But he probably gave it no more thought than that. The assignment of seeing that something was done to the Nation's most monumental avenue ultimately fell to a young staffer named Pat Moynihan. It was he who drove the effort to see to it that Pennsylvania Avenue was cleaned up from the pawnshops and the other shabby architectural edifices that were there to the monumental avenue that it is today. Interestingly enough, it was while he was chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, leaning on the public works side of that environment, where he led the effort within the Congress to see to it that the necessary money was appropriated to build the monumental buildings of which we are all so proud. So we have a lasting architectural legacy to the public career of Pat Moynihan right here in the District of Columbia. I, for one, shall miss him. But I look forward to staying in touch with him as he tells me that he is going to stay in the Washington area and teach. I hope that at some point, when my career in the Senate ends, he is still teaching and I can take one of his classes. It has been a great privilege to serve in the Senate with the senior Senator from New York.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, would the Senator from West Virginia allow me to have 3 minutes to comment on the remarks of the Senator from Nebraska?

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I have been remiss in not taking the floor to pay tribute to the Senator from Nebraska for his service here. The presentation we have had, although I disagree in some detail with some of the aspects of it, demonstrates how much we will miss him. The Senator from Nebraska has been a key figure in the group that has been known variably around here as the Centrist Coalition, or Chafee-Breaux, or the group that tries to get together across partisan lines and work things out. As I sat in the chair and listened to the Senator from Nebraska, I realized if he and I could sit down in a room, between the two of us-- and not have the White House there, and not have the leadership there of either House--we could arrive at a conclusion that I think he would be satisfied with, I would be satisfied with, and I think would be good for the country. I think that comes from the fact that he has a business background and I have a business background. In business, you are not as interested in ideology as you are in getting the thing solved. So I atone for my past failure and say publicly that this body will miss the Senator from Nebraska. This particular Senator considers him not only a good friend but a wise legislator, and I think the country has been well served as a result of his willingness to give these two terms to the Senate. I wish him well in whatever endeavor he undertakes in the future. I say to the Senator from Nebraska, if he should decide to seek the Presidency once again, I would cheer for the Democratic Party to choose him as their nominee. I may not vote for him, but I would feel more reassured if he were the alternative on the other side.