Robert Bennett

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, as in executive session, I ask unanimous consent that the 40 minutes of debate with respect to the nominations begin at 2:20 p.m. today, with the votes to occur at the expiration of that time.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts be authorized to meet to conduct a hearing on Wednesday, May 24, 2000, at 9 a.m., in 226 Dirksen.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Indian Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, May 24, 2000 at 9:30 a.m. to conduct a hearing on S. 611, the Indian Federal Recognition Administrative Procedures Act of 1999. The hearing will be held in the Committee room, 485 Russell Senate Building.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, May 24, 2000 at 9:30 a.m. to hold a hearing.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the full Committee on Environment and Public Works be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, May 24, at 9:30 a.m., to conduct a hearing to receive testimony on the Administration's Water Resources Development Act of 2000 proposal.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, May 24, for purposes of conducting a Full Committee business meeting which is scheduled to begin at 9:30 a.m. The purpose of this business meeting is to consider pending calendar business.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, May 24, 2000.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Armed Services be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, May 24, 2000, at 9:30 a.m., in open session to consider the nomination of General John A. Gordon, USAF to be Administrator, National Nuclear Security Administration, Department of Energy.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, as chairman of the legislative branch subcommittee of appropriations, I would like to take a few minutes to describe S. 2603, the legislative branch appropriations bill for the fiscal year 2001. The bill, as reported by the Appropriations Committee, provides for $1,721,077,000 in new budget authority exclusive of the House items. This is a $58,607,000 increase over fiscal year 2000. It is $146,770,000 below the President's request. The subcommittee's allocation is 1.8 percent above last year's funding level, which is the $43 million increase. We are being very frugal with the legislative branch. I think we are doing a responsible job of keeping the overall increase at a level that is defensible. We are not allowing the legislative branch appropriations to grow faster than inflation. We are not allowing it to grow faster than the population. And the demands that are made upon the legislative branch we are keeping under 2 percent. It was a challenge to draft a bill that stayed within this allocation because, as always happens, there was $20 million of new items that Congress committed to in previous years but which had not been funded. Therefore, they were not included in last year's base. If we were going to talk about an increase over last year's base, but we had $20 million worth of obligations that were not included in that base, we realized that it created a tension and a pressure on the committee. But that is what we have to do when we are dealing with budgets. I have dealt with budgets in the business world and understand that this is not an unusual kind of challenge. The mandatory increases that we have in the bill alone account for $54 million, exclusive of the House, on top of the situation which I have just described, Senator Feinstein, the ranking member, and I spent a great deal of time going over the accounts with our respective staffs and the increases that agencies have had over the last 4 years in an effort to find where we could best and most fairly cut without impacting employees. One of our goals was to see to it that no one was laid off as a result of the budgetary pressures on this year's bill. I am happy to say that we have met that goal in this bill. There will be no reduction in force as a result of the Senate's action, if this bill is adopted, and no employees currently working in the legislative branch will lose their jobs. The subcommittee's goal was to ensure that would be the case. There has been a great deal of discussion and concern in the press expressed over the House Appropriations Committee's first reported targets. Those targets were reported out of subcommittee with cuts of almost $105 million below the fiscal year 2000 level. It is my understanding that the House now plans in their legislative process to increase this bill by $85 million before it comes up for floor consideration. I hope those reports are accurate and that the House does, indeed, move in that direction. We do not want to criticize the actions of the other body in this body. We simply want to lay out what we think is the logical thing to do. I hope those who have been focused on the press reports of what was proposed on the other side of the Capitol initially will recognize that there is a great deal of legislative action that has to take place between initial proposals and final passage. Certainly we are doing our best on the Senate side to make a contribution to see to it that final passage achieves the goal that I have outlined; that is, the goal that says there will be no reduction in force in the legislative branch. S. 2603 includes an increase over last year's funding for every agency. That sounds better than it is for some agencies. The increase is truly only a token one--one-tenth of 1 percent increase. But, nonetheless, it is an increase to demonstrate, once again, that we are trying to treat everybody fairly, and that we are not trying to penalize one group in order to benefit another. The area that has had the greatest amount of public interest and press reporting is the amount of money being made available for the Capitol Police. The bill before the Senate will provide a 26-percent increase for the Capitol Police. If we are only going to have a one-tenth of 1 percent increase in some areas, that is where we will get the money to come up with the 26-percent increase for the Capitol Police. We do this because we believe security in the Capitol is a priority. We need to make sure the resources are available to the men and women who protect the Capitol, its visitors, the Members, and the staff. We had a tragic demonstration that security needs to be addressed with the shooting of the two officers who protected the Capitol against the deranged individual who came in with a gun after some imaginary threat he, and only he, could see. We had an example within the last week during a hearing in the House when a man threatened to kill himself with the jagged end of a broken bottle after approaching a Cabinet officer who was testifying at a hearing. He was subdued by a member of the Capitol Police and by a member of the security detail of one of the Cabinet officers involved. These incidents, coming along with increased frequency, demonstrate we have a security challenge in the Capitol. We want to make sure the Capitol remains open to the American people. I would hate to reach the point of other capitals in the world. I don't mean to pick this country out because I recognize they have enormous security problems of their own and I think they are acting responsibly, but I will share my experience when I first went to the Knesset in Israel and the kind of security I had to go through as a U.S. Senator in order to get into the Knesset. There were barriers, more barriers, and checks and police points, all the way through so that the members of the Knesset could conduct their business in security and freedom. In the United States, we run into our constituents, sometimes literally, virtually every day in the corridors of the Capitol. We enjoy that. The American people enjoy that. We want to continue doing that. I will be walking down the corridor on the way to a committee meeting and it is not at all unusual to have someone call out from the moving crowd, ``Hi, Senator Bennett'' or ``Hey, there's Senator Bennett.'' I stop and it is someone from Utah who is here with a school class, here with their family, here on a vacation, or here for a civics lesson experience. Walking through the Capitol, it is something of a thrill for a constituent to see their own Senator on his way to work. If I thrill somebody, they get thrilled easily. Nonetheless, it is the kind of experience that the American people enjoy and historically have had in their Capitol Building. We want to make sure that continues. The number of visitors each year is increasing more rapidly as the overall general population increases and as Americans get a little more money, a little more time, more leisure opportunities. I think it is wonderful they want to come to the seat of Government in the Capitol of the United States and see how it operates. As they come in these increased numbers, the tiny fringe of American citizens who represent a physical threat come also in increased numbers. Security is a priority. In this bill, we have made sure the resources will be available to provide that kind of security. As we have reviewed the security issue, we have made provisions in this bill for a fairly significant change in the way security is provided on the Capitol complex. We have provided transferring the police who currently service the Government Printing Office and the police who currently service the Library of Congress into the Capitol Police. Rather than having three different police forces in a small physical area, we will have only one. Since assuming the chairmanship of this subcommittee, I have been working towards this goal. I think we are now at the point where it makes sense to provide this unified force to provide seamless security. Until this time, the training for the police of the Library of Congress and the police at the Government Printing Office has been moving toward equity and par with the training given to the U.S. Capitol Police, so it will not be a big jump for these police officers to be in the same force. It will be an opportunity for many of the police officers in the two forces that are currently outside of the Capitol Police to increase their career opportunities because the Capitol Police Force is seen as a higher level of pay and benefits and opportunity than the two smaller forces. Additionally, it will mean we can bring the total security for the Capitol complex up to the level we want it at a faster pace because we need additional officers. Additional officers are not provided automatically by going out and hiring people. They have to go through a training period. By taking advantage of the pool of trained officers who are already there for the Government Printing Office police and the Library of Congress police, and perhaps bringing some of the new hires in at a level where the requirement is not as high as it is in the Capitol itself, we can increase the speed by which we can get to the level we seek. Some legitimate concerns have been raised about how this will work. The General Accounting Office has been cooperating with the subcommittee for quite some time in examining how it will work, but in the bill we provide for the General Accounting Office to prepare a report for the Appropriations Committee addressing those issues that have most recently been raised, giving us an understanding of how they can be dealt with. This provision was included at the request of Senator Feinstein who is particularly interested in the career path of the Capitol Police men and women themselves. I think it is a very wise addition. I thank the Senator for her initiative in its inclusion. It will ensure an orderly transition and protect the rights of the affected officers. I thank Senator Feinstein for her service as the ranking member on this subcommittee. She brings a particular flavor of experience to the subcommittee, having been an executive herself, as mayor of San Francisco. I have been an executive but not of an enterprise that big. Between the two of us, we have a good balance of the practical and administrative experience that is necessary as we deal with some of these administrative challenges. I thank the Senator for her service. I appreciate very much the support she has given. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I understand that the chairman of the full committee, Senator Stevens, is anxious to come to the floor to make a statement. I will suggest the absence of a quorum to allow him to come, unless the Senator from California has something that she wishes to say at this time.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, these amendments have been cleared on both sides. The first one is an amendment for the Sergeant at Arms to make $2.5 million of funds appropriated available until September 2003. The second is an amendment to raise the cap on the amount of private funds that can be provided to the National Garden. The third is an amendment to create a fund to allow for private funds to endow the Russian Leadership Program of the Library of Congress. And the fourth amendment is a technical correction to section 309.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, to make the record clear with respect to the statement that was made earlier about employees of the Government Printing Office not receiving an increase in this bill, Senator Feinstein and I have provided funds so those employees will receive the mandatory increases. It is a little bit confusing as to how the bookkeeping works. The dollar amount stays level, but because we researched the number of positions that had not been filled in previous years and we are funding those positions, we recognize the money that would go for those unfilled positions will be available for the mandatory increases for employees. I want to make sure the record reflects that. We are not, in fact, forcing those employees to go without their standard mandatory increases in this bill.

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, like other Members of the body, read this morning's paper and read the comments of the Democratic leader. I have heard the comments on the floor of some of our colleagues, including the current occupant of the chair, and the Senator from Idaho. Since it is somewhat of a slow day, I decided to add my voice to the voices that have been raised here, perhaps from a slightly different perspective. I know, in Senate terms, I am a relative newcomer. I am only in my second term. And around here, that counts for little more than being in your first term, but it does not put you in the rank of Senate historians or the old Senate ``bulls,'' as they used to be called. Nonetheless, if I might, I would like to go back and quote a little personal history because my first exposure to the Senate, up close and personal, came in the early 1950s. If I may reminisce with you, I remember sitting in the family gallery, night after night, when the Senate would be debating, listening to the oratory that went on and the clashes of opinion that would occur, and falling in love with the place. I was a teenager. My father had been elected in the election of 1950. I was here in the summer of 1953. Dwight Eisenhower was the President--the first time a Republican President had been in office since 1932. The Democrats were apoplectic about the idea that there was a Republican President, and carrying on with great frustration. I remember the towering debates--and they were debates. They were not speeches given to empty Chambers. They were debates between the two protagonists on the Finance Committee. Paul Douglas, the Senator from Illinois, would come down here and thunder against the terrors of the Eisenhower administration. I would listen, in the family gallery, as a Republican, and wonder if anybody could respond. Then Eugene Millikin would enter the Chamber, bad back and all. He sat there in that seat in front of me. It was very difficult for him to move because of his back. So when he would turn, he would turn his entire body, and it would be slow. I remember, clearly, Senator Douglas recognizing what had happened when Senator Millikin had come on the floor. Senator Millikin was the chairman of the Finance Committee. Senator Douglas said: The Republicans have brought up their heavy artillery in bringing in Senator Millikin. He said: In fact, I would even say they have brought their nuclear cannon. I sat in the family gallery and listened to this, and thought: What is going to happen now? Senator Millikin, with a few well-placed barbs, proceeded to destroy Senator Douglas' argument. And Senator Douglas got mad. He started complaining about the fact that the Senator from Colorado--because that is where Millikin was from--had as much authority in this body as he did, the Senator from Illinois. He pointed out how many people there were in Illinois and how few people there were in Colorado, and he got very indignant about it. I remember Millikin's response. He said: Mr. President, the Senator from Illinois is no longer opposed to the bill before us, he is now opposed to the Constitution. I must say, I am not surprised. With that, he turned on his heels and walked out, leaving Senator Douglas sputtering a bit. So I go back that far with my experiences with the Senate. I served in the Nixon administration as a lobbyist for one of the Departments. We did not call it that because under the law you are not allowed to lobby as a member of the executive branch; you conduct congressional liaison. Again, because my father was still a Member of the Senate, I had access to the family gallery. When my Department had a bill before the Senate, I would come and sit in the family gallery and watch the debate as the bills would pass--or not pass--and I remember very clearly the pattern of debate in those days. This is now in the late 1960s because I served in the Nixon administration, and President Nixon took office in 1969. Votes would be scheduled in advance, with a specific time. The time that sticks in my memory is that 11 o'clock was a fairly normal time for votes. We would get into the gallery around 10, because the debate would be winding up in anticipation of the 11 o'clock vote. Senators would start coming into the Chamber by 10:15. I would say, there would be 30 Senators in the Chamber listening to the final debate. By 10:30, the Chamber would be almost full, because at 10:30, Everett Dirksen, as the Republican leader, would stand up to give the Republican position, the final speaker prior to the vote. Everyone wanted to hear Everett Dirksen. He would go on for 15 minutes, until a quarter to 11. By this time, the Chamber would be completely filled-- every Senator in his or her seat. Then Mike Mansfield would stand up, with the tremendous respect and dignity that he had. If I may say so, without diminishing that respect, Mike Mansfield, as an orator, was no match for Everett Dirksen. He was not as fun to listen to, but he had an earnestness and a determination about him that made him a towering giant of this body. Then at 11 o'clock, when Mike Mansfield would be through, whoever was presiding would bang the gavel, and the Senate would proceed to vote, with every Senator sitting at his desk. I remember watching my father, who sat on the front row to the right, go up to the table and get a copy of the names of all of the Senators, and keep track of how they were voting himself. He would mark it off, as did all of the other Senators, just the way the clerk marks it off. The only time I have seen that happen since I have been in the Senate is when, during the impeachment trial, I went down and got one of those records, and I sat and made my own record of every Senator's vote in impeachment. I thought it was a significant enough event to revive that custom. Why am I going through this history? For one reason. Because I read in this morning's paper the accusation made by the Democratic leader that what the Republican majority leader has been doing these last few days is leading to the erosion of the history and sanctity of the Senate, leading to a destruction of this institution. I give you this history as my credentials, as one who wants to comment on this institution, who wants to talk about what is going on and what has gone on. No, I will not engage in a debate with the Democratic leader as to whether there was or was not precedent of what he has done. My friend from Idaho has done that, and that is appropriate. But I am not here to do that. I am here to talk about this institution and what has happened to it in the roughly 50 years since I sat as a teenager in the family gallery and fell in love with it. It is a little startling to me I can talk about that being nearly 50 years ago, but it was. As I say, I was a teenager. Now I am beginning to look forward to the time when I will be 70. I assure my constituents it is a long way away, but in fact it is in about 3 years. What has happened to the institution in a half a century of my observations of it? If I go back to the old institution--that is, the institution that I knew in those years--appropriations bills were the least controversial of any bills. Appropriations bills passed without discussion, debate, or confusion. The institution assumed that the Appropriations Committee knew what it was doing. The major debates were over authorization bills. Once something was authorized, it was the duty of the appropriators to come up with a legitimate amount of money, and there was no attempt to saddle appropriations bills with controversial riders or amendments. It simply was not done. The appropriations process was considered the most routine of any process that was carried on around here. Oh, there was partisanship in those days. There were bitter speeches, as the kind I have just described between Senator Douglas and Senator Millikin, but there was no attempt to use the rules of the institution to slow down the appropriations process for political benefit. It simply wasn't done. It was simply not considered acceptable in this institution. Now we do it. Now it happens. I can't put my finger on the turning point at which it happened, but I think I can identify one important point along the road, and it happened while I was in the Senate. In 1995, a gentleman for whom I have utmost respect as a political tactician and strategist, Newt Gingrich, made a serious miscalculation. I remember discussing it with him sitting over in what is now the Lyndon Johnson Room, as he came over from the House to tell us in the Senate what they were going to do in the House. They were going to deliver the coup de grace to the Clinton administration by forcing the President to accept a balanced budget agreement, and the reason they would force the President to do that is that they would use the appropriations process to put leverage on him. I remember a number of us saying to him, ``Well, Newt, what happens if the President doesn't cave?'' He said, ``What do you mean, if the President doesn't cave? This President not caving in? Are you kidding me?'' He went down example after example where President Clinton had caved under pressure from the Congress. He said, ``This will be the final example that we have taken control in the Congress, we have seized it from the executive branch, and we will make him a lame duck for the last 2 years of his term. This is the crucial moment at which the Congress demonstrates its power.'' I asked, and a number of others asked, ``Wonderful, Newt, but what if it doesn't work?'' He said, ``What do you mean, what if it doesn't work? Of course, it will work. What do you mean, what if he doesn't cave? Of course, he will cave.'' Speaker Gingrich, in a massive miscalculation, set in motion a series of actions that ultimately ended up in a partial shutdown of the Federal Government. As the shutdown went on, we Republicans did our best to try to explain that it was all Bill Clinton's fault. We did our best to say it was all the responsibility of the administration. And the press did its best to tell everybody it was all our fault. Ultimately, the Republican leader on this side, Bob Dole, stood here and said, ``Enough is enough, we are going to put the Government back to work.'' Senator Dole's instincts were right, and Speaker Gingrich's instincts were wrong, and the Republicans paid an enormous electoral price for Newt Gingrich's mistake in the 1996 election. We frittered away our opportunity to win back the Presidency, and we saw our margins in the House of Representatives go down in that election. I think that was a watershed event because I think the people in the White House discovered that if they could use the appropriations process to create a crisis that would be seen as a Government shutdown by the Republicans, they could get political advantage. The appropriations process has never been the same. The White House negotiators have been much tougher since that happened. The demands coming out of the White House have been much more significant, and the threat is: We will veto, we will veto, we will veto; the Government will shut down, and you Republicans will get blamed for it. You have to give us what we want. We have seen the appropriations power move from the legislative branch to the executive branch, under the threat of a veto and the threat of a Government shutdown. That is a sea change in constitutional structure and a sea change in politics that has happened while I have been in the Senate. That is part of what is going on right now. Right now, under instructions from the White House, the Democrats are saying: Let us do whatever we can to get ourselves in a situation where we can rerun the movie of 1995 in the fall of 2000. Look at how it helped us in the election of 1996 to keep Bill Clinton in office. Look at how it will help us in 2000 to get Al Gore into office. So an appropriations bill comes along: Let's do everything we can to slow it down. An appropriations bill comes on the floor: Let's do everything we can to increase the amount of debate time. We may end up voting for the appropriations bill, but that is not the point. It isn't a question of, do we vote for it or do we vote against it? It is a question of, how much can we slow it down so as to create the opportunity to rerun 1995 one more time? That is part of what is going on. Another thing that is going on that you never would find in the old Senate--again, by ``old Senate,'' I mean that time I saw during my father's 24 years here. It used to be that when the Senate voted on an issue, it passed or it failed, and it was done with. If it came back to be voted on again on the part of those who had lost, it came back in a new Congress when there had been an election and, presumably, people changed their minds. It never was the case that something was voted on again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again in the same Congress. They never used to do that. Certainly, they never used to do it with rollcall votes. I remember when Lyndon Johnson was the majority leader--this story has been told many times, but it is worth recounting here--a Senator came to him with an amendment, and Johnson said, ``Fine, we will accept it.'' The Senator said, ``I want a vote.'' Johnson said, ``No, you don't want a vote. We will accept it.'' ``No, let's debate it and have a vote.'' So they debated it, and it was defeated, with Johnson voting against it and using his power as the majority leader to kill it. The Senator came to him and said, ``You said you would accept this.'' Johnson said, ``Yes, but you didn't let me. You insisted on wasting the time of the Senate to have a debate and a vote, and I am telling you, you don't do that anymore. You don't do that ever again.'' The Senator learned. We have rollcall votes around here on everything. We will have a resolution to memorialize Mother's Day, and someone will ask for the yeas and nays, and we will spend a half hour voting, 100-0, and it slows everything down. Why do we do that? Well, maybe on Mother's Day we all want to be on record saying we are for Mother's Day. I will tell you why we do it--and, again, it is something that never would have been done 30 years ago. We do it to build a record for campaign purposes, not for legislative purposes. The Senate has become a campaign-focused organization rather than a legislative-focused organization. I will give you my own experience with this. When I ran in 1998, my opponent stood up before the crowds, on television, whatever, and said, ``Senator Bennett is pro-tobacco.'' Pardon me? ``Absolutely. Look at his record. He voted with the tobacco interests 12 different times.'' I did? I was there. I didn't remember voting with the tobacco interests once. ``No, he is lying about his record. Here it is.'' Then we go into the web site where he has all of this listed under the fetching title, ``What Senator Bennett Doesn't Want You To Know,'' and here is the list of all of my ``pro-tobacco'' votes. What were they? They were procedural votes, votes on motions to table, votes in support of the leader moving legislation forward. On the one tobacco vote that counted, which was a cloture vote on Senator McCain's bill, I was in the antitobacco forces; and, indeed, I had and used, during the campaign, letters thanking me for my strong antitobacco stand from the American College of Pediatric Surgeons, et cetera, et cetera. All of the people who were involved in the tobacco fight knew I was on their side. They knew the process around here well enough to know these 12 votes about which my opponent was talking were meaningless as far as the real issue was concerned. I will tell you what I said to him. We checked his FEC report, and I said to my opponent: You paid $20,000 to a computer firm to research my voting record and come up with this list. I recommend you call them and get your money back because you wasted it. They gave you wrong information. He said I was pro-liquor. He had a voting record that said I was in favor of alcohol. Pardon me? We got into it. We found out what the vote was that I supposedly cast that made me pro-alcohol. It had to do with Federal highway funds and the rights of the States to set their own levels of alcohol tolerance, and because I am in favor of States controlling that and voted against having the Federal Government dictate it, suddenly I had cast a pro-alcohol vote. He went on and on and on in this same vein. I understand what is going on here. Amendments are not being offered for legislative purposes. Bills are not being called up for legislative purposes. Recorded votes are not being called for because someone wants to improve the legislation. Records are being built on issues that can be misrepresented as serious challenges to incumbents. They are being brought up again and again and again so that people can stand up in a campaign and say that the incumbent voted wrong 17 times. Lyndon Johnson would not have stood for it. Everett Dirksen would have had a quip about it that would make everybody laugh. But it is now the way things are done in this institution. I said that I am responding to the suggestion of the Democratic leader that somehow what is going on here is destructive of the institution. I agree that what is going on is destructive of the institution. But I do not put it at the feet of the majority leader. I think it has historic roots that go back beyond this majority leader and that go back before the previous majority leaders. I don't know when it started happening, but we have come a long way from the day when the Senate would vote with a rollcall vote about 50 times in a session--that is how often my father voted on rollcall votes--a day when the Chamber would fill up to hear the debate because it was a significant vote. We have come a long way from that. The institution has become primarily a campaign platform. Let us make no mistake about it. What is going on right now in the Chamber is all geared to November and not in any sense geared toward legislation. It is not geared toward solving problems. It is not geared toward moving the Republic forward. It is all geared toward getting those multiple votes that a computer can find and then put it on a web site that can be used in a campaign speech on the part of the challenger. I agree with the Democratic leader that this cheapens the institution. I agree with the Democratic leader that it threatens the institution. But I disagree with him as to the solution. I think all Senators need to back away from the idea that the primary purpose of being in the Senate is to give campaign speeches, and back away from the idea that the primary function of coming to the floor is to do things that will give you an advantage in November and so you can misrepresent and attack an incumbent. There is a time for partisanship, and there is a time to be very firm about the position that you take. But there is also a time to recognize that the institution is threatened if you let partisanship get out of hand. It reminds me of the signature comment that comes to us out of the Vietnam War where, I believe, a captain was quoted as saying after a particular battle that it was ``necessary to destroy the village in order to pacify it.'' If it is necessary to destroy the institution of the Senate in order to make it part of my party's control, I want no part of that activity. In my own campaign, I have refused to engage in negative advertising. I want no part of what I call ``Carville-ism''; that is, the politics of personal destruction that has become so prevalent in the last 8 years. I want no part of it. I remember a man saying to me: If you do not go negative, you will not win the nomination. I said to him: The nomination is not worth it. I would rather retain my self-respect than gain a seat in the Senate. Fortunately, I have both. I say to all of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle--because Republicans campaign just as vigorously as Democrats--let's stop using the Senate as an institution solely for campaign purposes. Let's stop using the rules of the Senate that can allow votes and that can call up amendments solely for the purpose of creating campaign records. Let's recognize that the purpose of the Senate is for legislation, not campaigning. If we can do that, we will not get back to the days that I have described, but we will at least get towards them in the sense that this institution will survive, as we like to call it, ``the greatest deliberative body in the world'' and not ``the greatest campaign forum in the world.'' I thank the Chair for his patience. I thank my colleagues for their indulgence as I have taken this memory trip. But I hope that all of us will recognize that we have something to learn from the past and from the kind of institution this once was, and we have a responsibility to see to it that it does not degenerate into what it could be. I yield the floor.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I take the floor today to introduce the Ute-Moab Land Restoration Act, a proposal that enjoys great support from the State of Utah and many of my constituents. This legislation contains two major components that will enable the restoration of Ute Indian Tribal lands and the remediation of a uranium mill tailings site near Moab, Utah. The first component is the transfer of the Naval Oil Shale Reserve Numbered 2 (NOSR 2) lands east of the Green River to the Ute Indian Tribe. The lands that contain the NOSR 2 were taken from the Ute tribe in 1916 by the government to provide the Navy with a source of petroleum for oil-burning ships. This transfer will return these traditional homelands to the Ute tribe. Additionally, the return of these lands will spur economic development on the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation, home of the Ute Tribe. The increased economic development will include oil and gas production. It should be noted that the Ute Tribe has a history of environmentally responsible petroleum development on one of Utah's largest oil and gas fields. The bill also incorporates a provision whereby a nine percent royalty will be returned to the Secretary of Energy for the purposes of offsetting the cost of removing the Atlas tailings pile as I shall describe in a moment. I expect the tribe will give all future petroleum developments the same amount of care they have demonstrated in the past. The economy of the Uintah Basin will not be the sole beneficiary of the land transfer. There are numerous conservation provisions incorporated into the transfer. These provisions include the establishment of a quarter mile corridor along 75 miles of the Green River to conserve its scenic qualities and protections for wild horses and threatened and endangered plants life. The second component will facilitate the removal of the tailings from the Atlas uranium milling site across the Colorado River from Moab, Utah. It should be noted that the determination to locate the Atlas milling facility at MOAB was driven by encouragement from the former Atomic Energy Commission. Further, the Department of Energy (DOE) bears responsibility for approximately 56 percent of the 10.5 million tons of mildly radioactive debris left as a residue from the Cold War and our nation's effort to maintain its nuclear weapons stockpile. These tailings, produced from 156 to 1988, are currently leaching ammonia into the waters of the Colorado River. Additionally, the pile is a significant source of airborne radon. Both of these pollutants need to be addressed. In January of this year, Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson announced the intention of DOE to move the Atlas tailings pile to a remote location where this waste could be contained in a sealed cell. This proposal follows work done previously by DOE on 22 former uranium mill tailings sites. The legislation I am introducing today amends the Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act (UMTRCA) by adding the Atlas tailings site as the 23rd site for DOE remediation. I note that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission conducted a lengthy five-year environmental impact statement on the Atlas site. Its conclusion held that the site could be remediated in place by dewatering the pile, treating the ground water, and capping the tailings. Indeed, the NRC has appointed a trustee that is moving forward with this remediation process today. However, given the interests of the State of Utah and the people of Grand County, I am introducing this legislation so the tailings can be removed and treated in a more secure manner. I am concerned that securing the funding for this clean-up may be difficult. Therefore, I have a included a provision which will enable the NRC trustee to continue on-site remediation up to the point that DOE obtains the necessary appropriations to step up and take over the process. I believe this is the responsible approach to ensure that public health and the environment are protected regardless of the outcome of future appropriations. I look forward to working with my colleagues in moving this legislation forward and restoring these Utah lands. I ask unanimous consent that the text of the legislation be printed in the Record.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I take the floor today to introduce the Ute-Moab Land Restoration Act, a proposal that enjoys great support from the State of Utah and many of my constituents. This legislation contains two major components that will enable the restoration of Ute Indian Tribal lands and the remediation of a uranium mill tailings site near Moab, Utah. The first component is the transfer of the Naval Oil Shale Reserve Numbered 2 (NOSR 2) lands east of the Green River to the Ute Indian Tribe. The lands that contain the NOSR 2 were taken from the Ute tribe in 1916 by the government to provide the Navy with a source of petroleum for oil-burning ships. This transfer will return these traditional homelands to the Ute tribe. Additionally, the return of these lands will spur economic development on the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation, home of the Ute Tribe. The increased economic development will include oil and gas production. It should be noted that the Ute Tribe has a history of environmentally responsible petroleum development on one of Utah's largest oil and gas fields. The bill also incorporates a provision whereby a nine percent royalty will be returned to the Secretary of Energy for the purposes of offsetting the cost of removing the Atlas tailings pile as I shall describe in a moment. I expect the tribe will give all future petroleum developments the same amount of care they have demonstrated in the past. The economy of the Uintah Basin will not be the sole beneficiary of the land transfer. There are numerous conservation provisions incorporated into the transfer. These provisions include the establishment of a quarter mile corridor along 75 miles of the Green River to conserve its scenic qualities and protections for wild horses and threatened and endangered plants life. The second component will facilitate the removal of the tailings from the Atlas uranium milling site across the Colorado River from Moab, Utah. It should be noted that the determination to locate the Atlas milling facility at MOAB was driven by encouragement from the former Atomic Energy Commission. Further, the Department of Energy (DOE) bears responsibility for approximately 56 percent of the 10.5 million tons of mildly radioactive debris left as a residue from the Cold War and our nation's effort to maintain its nuclear weapons stockpile. These tailings, produced from 156 to 1988, are currently leaching ammonia into the waters of the Colorado River. Additionally, the pile is a significant source of airborne radon. Both of these pollutants need to be addressed. In January of this year, Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson announced the intention of DOE to move the Atlas tailings pile to a remote location where this waste could be contained in a sealed cell. This proposal follows work done previously by DOE on 22 former uranium mill tailings sites. The legislation I am introducing today amends the Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act (UMTRCA) by adding the Atlas tailings site as the 23rd site for DOE remediation. I note that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission conducted a lengthy five-year environmental impact statement on the Atlas site. Its conclusion held that the site could be remediated in place by dewatering the pile, treating the ground water, and capping the tailings. Indeed, the NRC has appointed a trustee that is moving forward with this remediation process today. However, given the interests of the State of Utah and the people of Grand County, I am introducing this legislation so the tailings can be removed and treated in a more secure manner. I am concerned that securing the funding for this clean-up may be difficult. Therefore, I have a included a provision which will enable the NRC trustee to continue on-site remediation up to the point that DOE obtains the necessary appropriations to step up and take over the process. I believe this is the responsible approach to ensure that public health and the environment are protected regardless of the outcome of future appropriations. I look forward to working with my colleagues in moving this legislation forward and restoring these Utah lands. I ask unanimous consent that the text of the legislation be printed in the Record.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, today Senator Harry Reid of Nevada and I are introducing bipartisan legislation with respect to the review period for the sale of high-performance computers. Both Senator Reid and I were hoping this legislation would not be necessary. We had planned it as an amendment to the Export Administration Act, but that act, for a variety of reasons, has been stalled here on the floor, and the issue is so important that we don't want to let it die. We are introducing this legislation in order to keep the issue alive and, if necessary, to provide a vehicle for producing the review that we think is necessary. Let me display a chart that demonstrates what is happening in the high-tech world of business computers. These are not the computers that we carry back and forth on the planes. You and I, as we fly back to our homes, have laptops and those laptops have amazing capabilities in them and represent the changes that are occurring in the computer world. If I can be personal for just a moment, at one point in my career, I was the head of a company that was grandly called the American Computer Corporation. We produced, among other products, a computer that was about the size of a washing machine. We were very proud of it. It had 10 megabytes of hard disc memory in it, and it sold for about $35,000. It was literally built in a garage, and we sold every single one we could make. Today, I have in my hand a computer that costs less than $500, which has far more power and capacity than that old machine we were so proud of, with its 10 megabytes of hard disc. The laptop I carry with me back and forth between here and Utah has more computing power in it today than the computers that controlled the space shuttle. I have been down to Cape Canaveral to the Kennedy Space Center. I have seen the space shuttle. The space shuttle computers that control the flight of that at this time are very highly technical instruments and are built throughout the entire airplane. They take up so much room that they are part of the superstructure of the airplane itself. Today, there is more computing power in the laptop that I carry than there is in that whole airplane. This is a manifestation of what the people in the computer world call Moore's law. Mr. Moore was one of the first CEOs of Intel. He propounded over 20 years ago Moore's law which says that every 18 months, the power of computers doubles for the same price; so that every 18 months, the computer that you had 18 months ago is now obsolete and the new one is twice as fast. Then, 18 months later the new one will be twice as fast as that one was. And 18 months later, the next new one will be twice as fast, and so on. Moore's law has held for over 20 years. Every 18 months the power of the computer doubles. Moore's law doesn't hold anymore--not because the power of the computer is not doubling but because the power of the computer is doubling in less than 18 months. It is doubling faster than Moore projected in Moore's law. This chart demonstrates what is happening in the world with what we call ``business computers.'' These are computers that are roughly the size of that old computer we produced that was the size of a washing machine, or a college refrigerator. Only now, these computers have the power and capacity that we used to think of in terms of the giant supercomputers that would fill this room. Thereby hangs the issue that has caused me and Senator Reid to join together and introduce this piece of legislation. When supercomputers, the huge machines that could do an enormous amount of computation work, were first invented, it was a matter of national security that they be kept out of the hands of America's enemies. So it was established by legislation that there would be a limit on the size of computers that could be exported because we wanted to make sure the supercomputers stayed in American hands. The limit that was placed on supercomputers was at the level of 8,000 MTOPS. I don't mean to be overly technical here, but we need to understand what we are talking about. MTOPS is an acronym for millions of theoretical operations per second. How many theoretical operations or calculations can the computer perform in a second? How many millions can it perform in a second? At the time this legislation was put in place, it said anything over 8 trillion theoretical operations per second constituted a supercomputer, and therefore it had to be protected from export. It had to be held in the United States, for national security purposes. We were the only country in the world that had a computer that could approach 8 trillion MTOPS, or millions of theoretical operations per second. That was then. This is now. I hold in my hand a device that is produced here in America by Intel that contains eight chips. And therein lies the tale that I want to talk about today. Just think of this. This, by the way, retails for about $900. It is part of the mother board of a traditional business computer today. The mother board is about 2 feet square. This fits on the mother board with all of the other chips that are in it. But this is the controller of all of that. And it has in it eight tiny chips. Here is the marketplace for this kind of computer worldwide. We have the figures. In 1997, worldwide, it is a little over 2 million. You see in the blue down below is the market in the United States, and the green is overseas. You can see that the market overseas is bigger than the market in the United States. The chart marches on with projections made by the Gartner Group out of Connecticut to the year 2002. We see, roughly speaking, that in that 5-year period--from 1997 to 2002--this market will quadruple. We are talking hundreds of billions of dollars per year of market. I want that understood as the matrix of what we are talking about here. This is the size of the market for a product of which this is the heart. Now let's talk about it in terms of export control on MTOPS. I hope we can tie all of these together. I realize this is a little technical. But understand when the legislation was passed, anything that had more than 8,000 MTOPS in it could not be exported, and therefore could not be sold in the green part of that bar. Let's look at what is happening as Moore's law becomes obsolete as the power of computers increases more rapidly. Here is a blowup of this device as it existed in 1999, less than 6 months ago. A Pentium III chip carries with it 1,283 MTOPS. So if you had one of these with one Pentium III chip in it, you could export it. If you put two Pentium chips in it, you could export it because it doubles to 2,383. If you put four Pentium chips in it, doubling it again, you went to 4,584. But when you doubled that by putting eight chips in it, it cannot be exported now because it is over 8,000 MTOPS. In 1999, this was a product that could be purchased in the United States by anybody, carried out the door, or installed, if you are buying it for your business, by the people who are providing for you. But it cannot be sold overseas without a review of the export license. Because we were so anxious to make sure that these computers didn't get into the wrong hands, the export license time for review of this was 180 days, or 6 months. That meant that an American manufacturer who took one of these processors from Intel, put eight chips in it, and put it in his computer, could sell it anywhere he wanted to in America but could not export it for 180 days. What happened in that 180 days while he was waiting for export approval? Let's look at where we are now in the year 2000. In that 180-day period where you are waiting for export approval, the Itamium chip has been developed and come on the market. It has 6,131 MTOPS in one chip. If you are going to export this product, you can only have one chip in it. If you put two in it, you are immediately close to 12,000 MTOPS. If you put in four, you are at 23,000 MTOPS. And, if you put in the standard eight that this carries, you are at 47,000 MTOPS. The administration has proposed raising the 8,000 MTOPS level to 25,000, which clearly doesn't do you any good. The technology is moving so rapidly that you can buy 25,000 just as quickly as you can buy 8,000. This is where we are today. If you had applied for an export license with Pentium chips last year and waited 67 months, by the time you got your 6-month approval, you would be facing this kind of competition, and no one would want your Pentium chip. They would want one with the Itamium chip. You say, all right. I will put up with the 6 months, and I will apply for this computer with eight Itamium 2000 chips. What is ahead of you if you do that? Looking ahead to 2001 with the Itamium 2001 chip, this is what you are facing. That chip will do 9,198 MTOPS all by itself. Even one chip in this one makes it illegal to export without waiting 180 days for approval. Go to the normal eight chips, and you are at 70,000 MTOPS. To those who say: Good heavens, we are exporting or allowing people to buy supercomputers that can do all of the command and control decisions for an entire defense system, we are in terrible trouble, we are giving away our secrets; I say in the Defense Department we still have supercomputers that are currently running at the rate of 2 million MTOPS. For those supercomputers, these things are child's play. By the time we get to 70,000 MTOPS in a computer of the kind in my hand, the supercomputers will have gone up from 2 million to as high as 30 million. That is the speed with which all of this is happening. What are we proposing in this legislation? Simply this: We are saying approval can be granted within 30 days. We are taking it from 6 months down to 1. Why do I pick 30 days, along with Senator Reid? We look at the export controls--which, again, are there to protect America's secrets--and we find that 30 days is currently the timeframe for an F-16. If a foreign government wants to buy our most sophisticated aircraft, we take 30 days to determine whether or not that particular aircraft in the hands of that particular government produces some kind of threat to national security. Yet we will take 6 months to decide whether that government can buy a computer that is available in virtually every technology center anywhere in the United States. They can buy it in the United States, throw it on the airplane, and take it abroad themselves. Somebody could say: Gee, that is illegal to take abroad. What kind of secrecy and control is it when one can buy it on the street in the United States, any citizen can buy it as easily as they could buy one of these, but for some reason we can't allow them to export it? There is another factor to recognize. We are not operating in a vacuum. There are Japanese companies that can do this. There are French companies that can do this. There are German companies that can can do this. If we say American companies can't do this, we just guarantee the rest of the world will get this market. Remember those lines on that bar chart showing the foreign market is bigger than the American market? We are guaranteeing the rest of the world will take this market away from the United States as we sit here with our 180-day review period, saying in effect no American company can get into this business at all, because in that 180-day period everyone overseas will have bought foreign and not bought American. It is vitally important that we recognize the reality of what is happening in the computer world, we bring the date necessary for review down to a reasonable period of time, and we say, if you want to buy one of these from Intel with eight Itanium 2001 chips in it, it will not take any more time for you to do that than it will take you to buy an F-16. That is the reasonable, intelligent thing to do. That is what the legislation of Senator Reid and myself seeks to establish. I hope it is not necessary for our bill ever to be considered or passed. I hope the export administration bill comes back on the floor and Senator Reid and I can offer our bill as an amendment to that bill and see it adopted by the Senate and sent to the President as rapidly as possible. Just in case that does not happen, by introducing this bill on behalf of Senator Reid and myself today, I am making clear we have a backup somewhere in the legislative channel to which we can turn to try to make it logical and possible for American computer manufacturers and American chip manufacturers to continue America's leadership in this market. Make no mistake, we are talking hundreds of billions of dollars where America currently has the technological leadership in the world. That leadership is now threatened by Government regulations. It is imperative we change those regulations on the floor of the Senate, if possible, working with the administration.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, today Senator Harry Reid of Nevada and I are introducing bipartisan legislation with respect to the review period for the sale of high-performance computers. Both Senator Reid and I were hoping this legislation would not be necessary. We had planned it as an amendment to the Export Administration Act, but that act, for a variety of reasons, has been stalled here on the floor, and the issue is so important that we don't want to let it die. We are introducing this legislation in order to keep the issue alive and, if necessary, to provide a vehicle for producing the review that we think is necessary. Let me display a chart that demonstrates what is happening in the high-tech world of business computers. These are not the computers that we carry back and forth on the planes. You and I, as we fly back to our homes, have laptops and those laptops have amazing capabilities in them and represent the changes that are occurring in the computer world. If I can be personal for just a moment, at one point in my career, I was the head of a company that was grandly called the American Computer Corporation. We produced, among other products, a computer that was about the size of a washing machine. We were very proud of it. It had 10 megabytes of hard disc memory in it, and it sold for about $35,000. It was literally built in a garage, and we sold every single one we could make. Today, I have in my hand a computer that costs less than $500, which has far more power and capacity than that old machine we were so proud of, with its 10 megabytes of hard disc. The laptop I carry with me back and forth between here and Utah has more computing power in it today than the computers that controlled the space shuttle. I have been down to Cape Canaveral to the Kennedy Space Center. I have seen the space shuttle. The space shuttle computers that control the flight of that at this time are very highly technical instruments and are built throughout the entire airplane. They take up so much room that they are part of the superstructure of the airplane itself. Today, there is more computing power in the laptop that I carry than there is in that whole airplane. This is a manifestation of what the people in the computer world call Moore's law. Mr. Moore was one of the first CEOs of Intel. He propounded over 20 years ago Moore's law which says that every 18 months, the power of computers doubles for the same price; so that every 18 months, the computer that you had 18 months ago is now obsolete and the new one is twice as fast. Then, 18 months later the new one will be twice as fast as that one was. And 18 months later, the next new one will be twice as fast, and so on. Moore's law has held for over 20 years. Every 18 months the power of the computer doubles. Moore's law doesn't hold anymore--not because the power of the computer is not doubling but because the power of the computer is doubling in less than 18 months. It is doubling faster than Moore projected in Moore's law. This chart demonstrates what is happening in the world with what we call ``business computers.'' These are computers that are roughly the size of that old computer we produced that was the size of a washing machine, or a college refrigerator. Only now, these computers have the power and capacity that we used to think of in terms of the giant supercomputers that would fill this room. Thereby hangs the issue that has caused me and Senator Reid to join together and introduce this piece of legislation. When supercomputers, the huge machines that could do an enormous amount of computation work, were first invented, it was a matter of national security that they be kept out of the hands of America's enemies. So it was established by legislation that there would be a limit on the size of computers that could be exported because we wanted to make sure the supercomputers stayed in American hands. The limit that was placed on supercomputers was at the level of 8,000 MTOPS. I don't mean to be overly technical here, but we need to understand what we are talking about. MTOPS is an acronym for millions of theoretical operations per second. How many theoretical operations or calculations can the computer perform in a second? How many millions can it perform in a second? At the time this legislation was put in place, it said anything over 8 trillion theoretical operations per second constituted a supercomputer, and therefore it had to be protected from export. It had to be held in the United States, for national security purposes. We were the only country in the world that had a computer that could approach 8 trillion MTOPS, or millions of theoretical operations per second. That was then. This is now. I hold in my hand a device that is produced here in America by Intel that contains eight chips. And therein lies the tale that I want to talk about today. Just think of this. This, by the way, retails for about $900. It is part of the mother board of a traditional business computer today. The mother board is about 2 feet square. This fits on the mother board with all of the other chips that are in it. But this is the controller of all of that. And it has in it eight tiny chips. Here is the marketplace for this kind of computer worldwide. We have the figures. In 1997, worldwide, it is a little over 2 million. You see in the blue down below is the market in the United States, and the green is overseas. You can see that the market overseas is bigger than the market in the United States. The chart marches on with projections made by the Gartner Group out of Connecticut to the year 2002. We see, roughly speaking, that in that 5-year period--from 1997 to 2002--this market will quadruple. We are talking hundreds of billions of dollars per year of market. I want that understood as the matrix of what we are talking about here. This is the size of the market for a product of which this is the heart. Now let's talk about it in terms of export control on MTOPS. I hope we can tie all of these together. I realize this is a little technical. But understand when the legislation was passed, anything that had more than 8,000 MTOPS in it could not be exported, and therefore could not be sold in the green part of that bar. Let's look at what is happening as Moore's law becomes obsolete as the power of computers increases more rapidly. Here is a blowup of this device as it existed in 1999, less than 6 months ago. A Pentium III chip carries with it 1,283 MTOPS. So if you had one of these with one Pentium III chip in it, you could export it. If you put two Pentium chips in it, you could export it because it doubles to 2,383. If you put four Pentium chips in it, doubling it again, you went to 4,584. But when you doubled that by putting eight chips in it, it cannot be exported now because it is over 8,000 MTOPS. In 1999, this was a product that could be purchased in the United States by anybody, carried out the door, or installed, if you are buying it for your business, by the people who are providing for you. But it cannot be sold overseas without a review of the export license. Because we were so anxious to make sure that these computers didn't get into the wrong hands, the export license time for review of this was 180 days, or 6 months. That meant that an American manufacturer who took one of these processors from Intel, put eight chips in it, and put it in his computer, could sell it anywhere he wanted to in America but could not export it for 180 days. What happened in that 180 days while he was waiting for export approval? Let's look at where we are now in the year 2000. In that 180-day period where you are waiting for export approval, the Itamium chip has been developed and come on the market. It has 6,131 MTOPS in one chip. If you are going to export this product, you can only have one chip in it. If you put two in it, you are immediately close to 12,000 MTOPS. If you put in four, you are at 23,000 MTOPS. And, if you put in the standard eight that this carries, you are at 47,000 MTOPS. The administration has proposed raising the 8,000 MTOPS level to 25,000, which clearly doesn't do you any good. The technology is moving so rapidly that you can buy 25,000 just as quickly as you can buy 8,000. This is where we are today. If you had applied for an export license with Pentium chips last year and waited 67 months, by the time you got your 6-month approval, you would be facing this kind of competition, and no one would want your Pentium chip. They would want one with the Itamium chip. You say, all right. I will put up with the 6 months, and I will apply for this computer with eight Itamium 2000 chips. What is ahead of you if you do that? Looking ahead to 2001 with the Itamium 2001 chip, this is what you are facing. That chip will do 9,198 MTOPS all by itself. Even one chip in this one makes it illegal to export without waiting 180 days for approval. Go to the normal eight chips, and you are at 70,000 MTOPS. To those who say: Good heavens, we are exporting or allowing people to buy supercomputers that can do all of the command and control decisions for an entire defense system, we are in terrible trouble, we are giving away our secrets; I say in the Defense Department we still have supercomputers that are currently running at the rate of 2 million MTOPS. For those supercomputers, these things are child's play. By the time we get to 70,000 MTOPS in a computer of the kind in my hand, the supercomputers will have gone up from 2 million to as high as 30 million. That is the speed with which all of this is happening. What are we proposing in this legislation? Simply this: We are saying approval can be granted within 30 days. We are taking it from 6 months down to 1. Why do I pick 30 days, along with Senator Reid? We look at the export controls--which, again, are there to protect America's secrets--and we find that 30 days is currently the timeframe for an F-16. If a foreign government wants to buy our most sophisticated aircraft, we take 30 days to determine whether or not that particular aircraft in the hands of that particular government produces some kind of threat to national security. Yet we will take 6 months to decide whether that government can buy a computer that is available in virtually every technology center anywhere in the United States. They can buy it in the United States, throw it on the airplane, and take it abroad themselves. Somebody could say: Gee, that is illegal to take abroad. What kind of secrecy and control is it when one can buy it on the street in the United States, any citizen can buy it as easily as they could buy one of these, but for some reason we can't allow them to export it? There is another factor to recognize. We are not operating in a vacuum. There are Japanese companies that can do this. There are French companies that can do this. There are German companies that can can do this. If we say American companies can't do this, we just guarantee the rest of the world will get this market. Remember those lines on that bar chart showing the foreign market is bigger than the American market? We are guaranteeing the rest of the world will take this market away from the United States as we sit here with our 180-day review period, saying in effect no American company can get into this business at all, because in that 180-day period everyone overseas will have bought foreign and not bought American. It is vitally important that we recognize the reality of what is happening in the computer world, we bring the date necessary for review down to a reasonable period of time, and we say, if you want to buy one of these from Intel with eight Itanium 2001 chips in it, it will not take any more time for you to do that than it will take you to buy an F-16. That is the reasonable, intelligent thing to do. That is what the legislation of Senator Reid and myself seeks to establish. I hope it is not necessary for our bill ever to be considered or passed. I hope the export administration bill comes back on the floor and Senator Reid and I can offer our bill as an amendment to that bill and see it adopted by the Senate and sent to the President as rapidly as possible. Just in case that does not happen, by introducing this bill on behalf of Senator Reid and myself today, I am making clear we have a backup somewhere in the legislative channel to which we can turn to try to make it logical and possible for American computer manufacturers and American chip manufacturers to continue America's leadership in this market. Make no mistake, we are talking hundreds of billions of dollars where America currently has the technological leadership in the world. That leadership is now threatened by Government regulations. It is imperative we change those regulations on the floor of the Senate, if possible, working with the administration.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I might be allowed to proceed as in morning business.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. He is talking about the Vice President's recent talk on education, and he quotes the Vice President as saying: Today, I am proposing a new national commitment to bring revolutionary improvements to our schools--built on three basis principles. First, I am proposing a major national investment to bring revolutionary improvements to our schools. Second, I am proposing a national revolution-- And so on. According to Mr. Will, the Vice President used ``revolution,'' ``revolutionary,'' or ``revolutionize'' 8 times in his speech and ``invest,'' a word we know means spending, 14 times. As Mr. Will concludes in his article: The basic Gore position is that the public schools are splendid, and at the same time desperately in need of revolutionary investments. I find a disconnect between the Vice President's rhetoric out on the campaign trail and what we are hearing on the floor today because any attempt on the part of the Republicans to produce something that is different is attacked. Anything we say let's experiment with is attacked. The overwhelming defense of the status quo is underlying everything our friends on the other side of the aisle are saying. From the prospect of the position I had as chairman of that strategic planning commission, I want to look at this fearsome, frightening, Republican proposal that would go into such new ground as to somehow threaten the status quo. It is the most timid, it is the most small, tiny, incremental kind of revolution I have ever seen. The bill the Republicans are putting forward is, to put a number on it, something like 98-percent status quo. It funds the programs we have now, and it funds them generously. It supports the programs we have now, and it supports them solidly. But it says, putting the smallest toe at the very edge of the smallest possible body of water: Couldn't we just try a couple of things? Couldn't we give 10 States the chance, if they want to--no mandates, no requirements--just 10 States the chance, if they might want to, to try something out? In another area, couldn't we just try 15 States? Boy, that is bold and revolutionary and going to upset the whole world--15 States, if they decide they want to, might be able to try a few things a little differently. These are the threatening kinds of Republican proposals that are coming along that are causing our friends to be so excited about anything that might in any way upset the status quo. If a State finds the Republican proposal is so revolutionary and threatening that it will destroy the State's ability to deliver education to its children, the State does not have to accept it. There is no mandate in this bill at all that says any State has to do any of the things we are giving them the opportunity to do. This is just the first tiny step. From my position as chairman of that strategic planning commission, I would look at the Republican proposal and say: This is timid. This is not nearly what is needed. But I come here and discover it is denounced as somehow so threatening that it is going to bring down the entire educational edifice of the United States. But I repeat, at the same time, there is that kind of attack on Republican willingness to innovate and to even allow States to try a few things. At the same time that kind of attack is going on, the Vice President is going up and down the country demanding revolutionary improvement with major investments. I would like to know what those revolutionary improvements are. I would like to know, in the context of this bill, what changes in the status quo in revolutionary fashion the Vice President has in mind. If you get to the details, the only revolution he is calling for is spending more money on programs that already exist. Let's take a look for just a minute at some past history. I want to read an excerpt from the Washington Post, talking about schools in the District of Columbia. It says: Alarmed by the crises confronting Washington youth, a group of community leaders is urging sweeping changes in D.C. public schools. That does not sound like the status quo is so wonderful. And another: A new consumer guide to the nation's public school system ranks only two urban school systems lower than the D.C. schools. Again, the status quo is not so wonderful. The interesting thing about these quotes from the Washington Post is that they appeared there in 1988, 12 years ago. For 12 years, Republicans have been trying to bring about some changes in the D.C. public schools. I have stood on this floor and debated this issue in the context of the D.C. appropriations bill. Every time we try to try something different in D.C., we are told no, we cannot upset the status quo. Here is another quote from the Washington Post: The malaise that infects the District of Columbia public schools runs deep. . . . There are problems in every phase of the educational process. There are school system employees who display no interest in the advancement of students, while excellent teachers and administrators are smothered by confusing and contradictory directives. . . . Instruction is inconsistent. At many schools, the audit said, test results have not been shared with parents and teachers. . . . The teacher appraisal process has been a joke. In the 1988-1989 school year, not one teacher received a conditional or unsatisfactory rating. On average, 22 percent of the teachers received no evaluation at all. While some excellent teaching was observed, the audit said, the predominant classroom activity involved students copying exercises and directions from books while teachers graded papers at their desks. This appeared in the Washington Post in 1992, some 4 years after the first articles appeared in the Washington Post. What revolutionary changes are we talking about? Every time the Republicans come to the floor and ask for an incremental change, we are told, no, you are undermining the confidence in public schools. For over a dozen years now, in at least the Nation's school district where we have some degree of influence, the public school system has failed the children of the public schools. As I listen to this debate and relive my experiences from memory as being chairman of the Strategic Planning Commission for the Utah State board of education, I realize how timid public policymakers really are, how anxious they are to talk about revolutionary improvements when they are running for office, and how anxious they are to stifle any attempt to bring to pass any sort of revolution when they have the opportunity to make a policy decision. We must recognize, as I said before, this bill as what it is. The underlying bill is not a revolutionary bold attack on the status quo. I wish it were. There are many things that can and should be done. This is just the most timid kind of probing into possibilities, and yet even that is too much, even that is too fearful for those defenders of the status quo. I go back to my original analogy. When it was first suggested to General Motors that they might produce some smaller cars, that they might try to go after the market that Toyota was beginning to discover, there was a mantra that ran through General Motors and Ford and the big three generally, and it was: Small cars mean small profits. It was repeated over and over. By repeating that mantra to themselves, these auto executives convinced themselves that the status quo was just fine, and they watched the Japanese come into this country and take market share away from them to a degree that, to some extent, threatened their existence. It was only after the marketplace told them they should be focusing on the driver and what the driver wanted rather than on their own systems and what they were comfortable producing that they finally began to compete in the world marketplace for automobiles and began to produce the kinds of cars Americans wanted to drive. Now American manufacturers are competitive, and we drive American cars with the understanding that they are well built, they have good fuel economy, and they give us the value for the money, an understanding that, frankly, 15 or 20 years ago, Americans did not have. Why can't we have that same understanding with respect to education instead of being so overwhelmingly concerned with the system and how do we tweak the system and how do we defend the system and this is the way we teach and, by George, the students have to sit there and take it. Why can't we say: What do the students need to function effectively in society? Why can't we assess the student needs, the student challenges in the future, and the student responsibilities and then say, OK, if that is what the student needs, we will provide it? If the student needs skill in the English language, to a degree that he or she does not have it now, we better figure out a way to get it to them. The main problem with our school system is this: Our school system is built on the industrial model. Indeed, it was created as we went through the Industrial Revolution. Stop and think about it for a moment. Our schools are factories. That is, the model on which they are built is the factory model, with the student as product and the teacher as worker. Indeed, we organize the workers into unions, which is just the same thing that happens in a factory. Here is the product. The product is wheeled into the English room where the English worker pours English into the product for 45 minutes. The factory whistle blows, and the product is wheeled into the math room, where the math worker pours math into the product for 45 minutes. The factory whistle blows, and the product is wheeled into the social sciences room where the social science worker pours social science into the product for 45 minutes, and so on. It is organized along the industrial model, student as product, teacher as worker. After the product has gone through enough class time exposures, we stamp a certificate on it, which we call a diploma, and send the product out into the world saying: You are now educated, and the certificate we have put upon you proves it. We spend more attention to seat time than we do to the ability of the student to perform. If I may digress for a moment and give you an example of how pervasive this whole mentality is from my own State, I want to talk about one of the members of our commission. We had a professor in educational psychology at Brigham Young University who was a member of the Strategic Planning Commission, which I chaired. I will not give you all of this history, except to tell you he made a commitment early in his life that he would return some day to the tiny rural community in Utah where he grew up and give something back to that community. It was an emotional kind of commitment made as a teenager when the people in that community raised enough money to send him to the University of Utah to get a college education, something he never could have afforded on his own. As I say, he is a professor, graduated Ph.D. from Stanford, one of the Nation's leading authorities on small school problems. The position of superintendent of the school district in which his old hometown was located became vacant. He said to his wife: I am going to apply for that position. She said: Come on, that's so far below what you do and what you are qualified for professionally. He said: No, I made a commitment years ago that I would someday return to my hometown and give back to that community, and here is a way I can do it. I can go there, be the superintendent of schools, try a whole bunch of innovative things, and make a major difference. I can fulfill that age-old commitment I made as a teenager to go back to my community. He applied for the position. He was told that he was not qualified for the position because there were certain gaps in his academic record that were required for that particular assignment. All right, he said, I will fill those gaps. He went around to his colleagues in the School of Education at Brigham Young University and said: Give me the test. I have to have this particular class on my transcript. Even though I am a Ph.D. from Stanford, I have to have this particular class. Give me the test. I will take the test and demonstrate proficiency. They said: No, no, no, no, no, no. You have to take the class. We can't give you an examination to find out whether you are proficient. You have to take the class. He said: Some of these classes I teach. They said: It doesn't matter. You have to sit in the classroom for the prescribed number of hours or we will not certify you as being educated. He did not become the superintendent of schools in that particular rural district. This demonstrates the commitment that runs through the entire educational community, to seat time as the ultimate measure of educational ability. What we are saying in this bill is, let's take a tiny, incremental, very tentative step towards looking at the needs of the student instead of focusing on the structure of the system, toward saying if somebody teaches a class, let's just assume that he knows what is in that curriculum and does not have to sit through it in order to acquire the requirements of the system. Let's move from the industrial model paradigm that has the student as product and teacher as worker to a system with the student as worker-- student, you are responsible for your own education--and teacher as coach. Teacher, help the worker understand where to go to get this information, to look for that skill, and so on. In the process that means, ultimately, we will have a system that funds the student rather than the system. We will have a funding system where the money follows the student wherever the student, as worker, decides he or she needs to go, with the teacher, as coach, saying: You may have made a wrong decision. Look at the options. Look what you could do over there. Let me help you. Let me coach you. Let me support you. But understand, the ultimate responsibility for your education is yours, not mine. That kind of a paradigm shift in thinking throughout the entire educational system would be truly a revolutionary improvement rather than the kind of changes or improvements that the Vice President has in mind when he uses those phrases. I thank the Chair and the other Members of the Senate for your indulgence. As I have gone on this trip down memory lane of my own involvement with schools, I close with this one last anecdote. When we were laying out, for an employee of the Utah board of education, some of the things we wanted to do and wanted to see happen in Utah's schools, he looked at me with great horror and said: We can't do that overnight. He said: Understand, we are trying to make these sorts of improvements. We are trying to make this a better situation for kids. But we can't do it overnight. You are too impatient. You come out of the business world where you can make a decision and then have it implemented. We can't do that. He said: But give us credit for moving. We will move in this direction, but we won't get there for 15 years. I said to him: Now, wait a minute. Fifteen years? Think of that in terms of the life of the student. That means the students who are entering this system as kindergartners, this year, will not see any improvement in their entire career because they will graduate before 15 years as seniors from high school. If you think it is salutary that we can get changes moving slowly, and they will be effective in 15 years, you are just saying that a kindergartner entering school today is doomed to stay in the status quo his or her entire career through elementary and secondary education. As the quotes I have read indicate, I was right. Students who entered as kindergartners, at least in the District of Columbia, are now graduating as seniors with no improvements, no changes. That is tragic. To condemn a youngster as a kindergartner to no changes, no improvements, no experimentation at all, just to defend the status quo, and say, we are moving towards these changes, and they will come 15 or 20 years from now, is not something with which I want to be associated. The Republican bill is not threatening. The Republican bill is not revolutionary. The Republican bill is the tiniest kind of incremental opportunity for States to experiment. We ought to pass it. I yield the floor. Exhibit 1 A Lesson Plan for Gore (George F. Will) If Al Gore keeps talking incessantly about education, someday he may slip and say something interesting. But he avoided that pitfall--anything novel would offend his leash- holders, the teachers' unions--in his Dallas speech last Friday, unless you find interesting this unintended lesson, drawn from his speech, about how schools are failing to teach future speech-writers how to write: ``Today, I am proposing a new national commitment to bring revolutionary improvements to our schools--built on three basic principles. First, I am proposing a major national investment to bring revolutionary improvements to our schools. Second, I am proposing a national revolution in . . . '' By November the salient issue may be not education but: Can Americans bear a president who talks to them as though they are dim fourth-graders? Whoever writes Gore's stuff knows his style, the bludgeoning repetition of cant, as in his almost comic incantations about Republicans' ``risky tax schemes.'' In Dallas, Gore used ``revolution,'' ``revolutionary'' or ``revolutionize'' eight times and ``invest'' (a weasel word to avoid ``spending'') or some permutation of it 14 times. And--it is as reflexive as a sneeze--he used ``tax scheme'' three times, ``risky tax cut'' once and threw in another ``scheme,'' referring to vouchers, for good measure. Gore's grating style in Dallas suited his banal substance, which was Lyndon Johnson redux. The crux of Gore's plan is more spending of the kinds that are pleasing to teachers' unions. Such as: ``My education plan invests in smaller schools and smaller classes--because we know that is one of the most effective ways to improve student performance.'' Actually, we know no such thing. Pupil-teacher ratios have been shrinking for a century. In 1955 pupil-teacher ratios in public elementary and secondary schools were 30.2-to-one and 20.9-to-one respectively. In 1998 they were 18.9-to-one and 14.7-to-one. We now know it is possible to have, simultaneously, declining pupil-teacher ratios and declining scores on tests measuring schools' cognitive results. If making classes smaller is such an effective route to educational improvement, why, after 45 years of declining pupil-teacher ratios, are schools so unsatisfactory they need to be ``revolutionized'' by Gore's ``investments''? Gore's Dallas speech proves the need for remedial classes not only in prose composition but in elementary arithmetic, too. He says that George W. Bush's ``tax scheme, if enacted, would guarantee big cuts in spending for public schools.'' Well. Bush's proposed tax cut over 10 years would involve just 5 percent of projected federal revenues. And federal money amounts to just 7 percent of all spending on public elementary and secondary education. Tonight's homework assignment, boys and girls, is to calculate how trimming 5 percent of federal revenues could necessitate ``big cuts'' in education, 93 percent of which is paid for with nonfederal funds. Gore's vow that every new teacher hired under his program would be ``fully qualified'' probably is an encoded promise that all new teachers would be herded through the often petty, irrelevant and ideologically poisoning education schools that issue credentials to teachers. Education schools feed their graduates into, and feed off, the teachers' unions. Those unions sometimes push for state legislation that keeps the education schools in business by requiring teachers to pass through them. ``There are,'' says Gore, ``too many school districts in America where less than half the students graduate, and where those who do graduate aren't ready for college or good jobs.'' Washington has lots of public schools that fit that description, which is why none of Gore's children attended one. Most failing schools serve (if that is the word) poor and minority children, whose parents increasingly favor meaningful school choice programs--programs that give parents resources to choose between public and private schools, thereby making the public school system compete. Gore is vehemently opposed to that. The ``dramatic expansion of public school choice'' he promises would enable students to choose only among public schools, thereby keeping students from low-income families confined to the public education plantation. What would be ``revolutionary'' would be a Gore education proposal that seriously offended the teachers' unions. But he is utterly orthodox in his belief that public schools are splendid--and desperately in need of revolutionizing investments. ``Fundamental decisions about education have to be made at the local level,'' said Gore at the beginning of last week's litany of proposals for using federal money, and the threat of withdrawing it, to turn the federal government into the nation's school board. To the classes Gore needs in remedial composition and arithmetic, add one on elementary logic.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I rise to commend my friend from Michigan for his amendment. I endorse the amendment. I think it is only common sense that we deal with this issue. I will make some comments about the underlying bill and what I have heard in this debate and try to put it in some kind of context. First let me outline what credentials I have to comment on this. About a dozen years ago, I was approached by the chair of the Utah State School Board and asked to chair the Strategic Planning Commission that was being followed by that school board to create a strategic plan for Utah schools. Frankly, that was the experience that got me back into public life. I was very comfortably ensconced as CEO of a profitable company and thinking that would be my career for the rest of my life. Getting involved in educational issues, becoming chairman of that planning commission, and laying out a strategic vision for Utah schools got me immersed in the whole education issue. What I discovered 12 years ago--a depressing thing, by the way, and nothing has changed in the intervening 12 years--was that the school system was focusing on the wrong issue. Indeed, we named our report ``A shift in focus'' because we said that was what was going to be necessary to solve the educational problem in this country. All of the focus of the professional educators and people involved in education was on the system: How can we tweak, fine-tune, fund, change, somehow manipulate the system? As we got into it, we said no, the shift should be from focusing on the system and how it works, to focusing on the student and what he needs. I offered this analogy going back again to my business roots. In the automobile world, at one time General Motors focused entirely on the way they made automobiles. They said: These are the automobiles we make. Now, sales department, you go out and sell the automobiles to the public. Toyota came along, a very small company, and said: We are going to ask the drivers what they want in a car, and we are going to focus on drivers rather than cars. As a result, Toyota came up with an entirely different kind of car from those General Motors was producing. The focus was on the driver and not the car. The focus was on the customer and not the company. The company that focused on the customer and on the driver did exceedingly well. Toyota grew from a tiny company to the second largest in the world making automobiles and became, for a time, more profitable than General Motors, until General Motors discovered they had to shift their focus. Instead of saying, this is what we produce, you go buy it; like Toyota, they started asking the question: What do you want? We will go make it. Saturn, a General Motors venture, came out entirely of that activity. That is the analogy I used when I wrote that strategic plan for Utah schools: Instead of focusing on the school system and how it works, focus on the students and what they need. We were asked to come up with a mission statement for education as we did that commission. The mission statement we came up with terrified the superintendent of schools in the State of Utah. He said: You can't say that because if you say that, we will get sued. We went ahead and said it anyway. What we said was: The mission of public education is to empower students to function effectively in society. That is what we are here for, to empower students to function effectively in society. No, no, no, say the professionals; the mission of education is to construct a system that does the following things. We do not measure the system. We measure the ability of the students to function in society. If they cannot function effectively in society, they are not getting a decent education. That was a radical notion 12 years ago. As I say, 12 years have passed and very little has changed. Those are my credentials. That is the background I had coming in and listening to this debate. As I listen to this debate, I have some very, for me, interesting reactions. First, from our friends on the Democratic side of the aisle, we have had an eloquent, continuing, and unrelenting defense of the status quo. Any suggestion that we try to do anything different is met with a stonewall of criticism and fear that somehow something will change. There is an unrelenting defense of the status quo that has been the underlying theme of this entire debate, as far as my friends on the other side of the aisle are concerned. Interestingly enough, an overwhelming defense of the status quo is not what the American people want to hear. So if we go out on the campaign trail for just a moment, we find the Vice President saying we need revolutionary changes in education. There is an article that ran in this morning's Washington Post, which I ask unanimous consent to have printed at the end of my remarks, written by George Will.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I rise today to support Senator McConnell's stock options legislation, S. 2323, and commend him for his hard work on this issue. This legislation allows companies who currently offer non-salaried employees a stock options program to continue to incentivize their work force without the threat of sanctions of the U.S. Department of Labor. This is an easy one to support. The United States is unique in the world with regard to how our stock options and the wealth generated in our companies are shared with those who significantly participate in their creation. As in most of the rest of the world, it used to be that only our top executives received stock options from their companies. Today, many high tech companies offer stock options to all of their employees, from the clerk to the CEO. Particularly with regard to an individual's retirement needs, stock options are a tremendous financial opportunity for all workers and their families. We must do everything in our power to preserve these positive wealth- and risk-sharing developments in our economy. Employees at every level should be allowed to reap the rewards of the success of their company. All throughout the United States, it has become common place for employees to quit their job and go to work for progressive companies who allow them to share in the wealth that their corporations generate. I hear repeatedly from industrial companies whose compensation structure is often very different, that they are losing their most talented and valuable employees to these new, often high-tech, corporations. And Mr. President, that kind of competition for employees benefits all Americans and it's a positive development. The Department of Labor's ill-considered advisory opinion, threatened this development, and would have resulted in the cessation of often generous stock option plans for non-managerial and non-professional employees in many of America's most progressive corporations. It is critical that we recognize the importance of these wealth- and risk- sharing developments to the health of the American economy and carefully weigh each new regulation, interpretation, and law before we rashly risk the financial health and well-being of the hard-working families who have everything to do with the level of productivity our economy enjoys.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I am pleased to take a step in addressing the long-term water needs of Summit County, Utah. The bill I am introducing today, to make a necessary technical correction, authorizes the Secretary of the Interior to enter into contracts with the Weber Basin Water Conservancy District. This legislation would permit non- federal water intended for domestic, municipal, industrial, and other uses to utilize federal facilities of the original Weber Basin Project for various purposes such as storage and transportation. In this case, the Smith Morehouse Dam and Reservoir was constructed by the Weber Basin Water Conservancy District in the early 1980's using local funding resources in order to create a supply of non-federal project water. However, it has been determined that there is currently a need to deliver approximately 5,000 acre feet of this non-federal Smith Morehouse water in conjunction with approximately 5,000 acre feet of federal Weber Basin project water to the Snyderville Basin area of Summit County, Utah and to Park City, Utah. In 1996, the Weber Basin Water Conservancy District entered into aMemorandum of Understanding and Agreement to deliver this water approximately 14 miles from Weber Basin Weber River sources within a certain time frame and dependent upon the execution of an Interlocal Agreement with Park City and Summit County. The Warren Act requires that legislation be enacted to enable the District to move ahead with this agreement with Summit County and Park City to deliver the water utilizing Weber Basin Project facilities built by the Bureau of Reclamation. There is an immediate need for the delivery of water to this area. The Utah State Engineer halted the approval of new groundwater developments in the area last year. At the same time, Summit County is experiencing tremendous growth; in fact it is one of the highest growth areas in the state. Within the areas to be served, taxed by the Weber Basin District, there is a definite public need for an adequate, reliable, and cost effective water delivery project in order to meet the future demands of this area. Since there is precedent allowing the wheeling of non-federal water through federal facilities, my colleagues should realize that this is a non-controversial piece of legislation. Therefore, I hope that Congress will move quickly to pass this legislation next session and I look forward to working closely with my colleagues on the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources to move it quickly.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I am pleased to take a step in addressing the long-term water needs of Summit County, Utah. The bill I am introducing today, to make a necessary technical correction, authorizes the Secretary of the Interior to enter into contracts with the Weber Basin Water Conservancy District. This legislation would permit non- federal water intended for domestic, municipal, industrial, and other uses to utilize federal facilities of the original Weber Basin Project for various purposes such as storage and transportation. In this case, the Smith Morehouse Dam and Reservoir was constructed by the Weber Basin Water Conservancy District in the early 1980's using local funding resources in order to create a supply of non-federal project water. However, it has been determined that there is currently a need to deliver approximately 5,000 acre feet of this non-federal Smith Morehouse water in conjunction with approximately 5,000 acre feet of federal Weber Basin project water to the Snyderville Basin area of Summit County, Utah and to Park City, Utah. In 1996, the Weber Basin Water Conservancy District entered into aMemorandum of Understanding and Agreement to deliver this water approximately 14 miles from Weber Basin Weber River sources within a certain time frame and dependent upon the execution of an Interlocal Agreement with Park City and Summit County. The Warren Act requires that legislation be enacted to enable the District to move ahead with this agreement with Summit County and Park City to deliver the water utilizing Weber Basin Project facilities built by the Bureau of Reclamation. There is an immediate need for the delivery of water to this area. The Utah State Engineer halted the approval of new groundwater developments in the area last year. At the same time, Summit County is experiencing tremendous growth; in fact it is one of the highest growth areas in the state. Within the areas to be served, taxed by the Weber Basin District, there is a definite public need for an adequate, reliable, and cost effective water delivery project in order to meet the future demands of this area. Since there is precedent allowing the wheeling of non-federal water through federal facilities, my colleagues should realize that this is a non-controversial piece of legislation. Therefore, I hope that Congress will move quickly to pass this legislation next session and I look forward to working closely with my colleagues on the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources to move it quickly.