Robert Bennett

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the consent agreement with respect to the consideration of S. Res. 7 be modified to allow one technical amendment to the resolution, to be offered by myself and Senator Dodd.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that for the duration of this debate, the following members of the staff detailed to the Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problems be granted the privilege of the floor: Frank Reilly, John Stephenson, Paul Hunter, J. Paul Nicholas, Ron Spear and Tom Bello.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I am prepared to yield back all time, both for myself and Senator Dodd, and call for the yeas and nays on the underlying question.

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

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

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I join my friend from Connecticut in thanking the Senator from Oregon for his diligence on this committee. He comes to the hearings and he contributes. He pays attention. He has blazed a way with the meetings he held in his home State. As I say, I would encourage all other Senators to follow his example. I am happy to yield to him such time as he may require.

Mr. BENNETT. Yes, I am through with my formal statement.

Mr. BENNETT. Thank you. In the list of questions I laid out at the beginning of my presentation, we are now at the point where we are asking the two questions: What should we be doing next and what can we expect? The Senator from Connecticut talked about the liability bill. I agree with him absolutely that we cannot take this particular emergency and turn it into a stealth operation to slip through other legislation, even though I would be for it. The Senator from Connecticut would be opposed to it. I would love to do that. But I think that would be an inappropriate thing to try to do. It has just come to my attention a demonstration of why we need some kind of limited liability relief tied to this. I had an interview with an individual who is following Y2K matters, and she said, ``What are you going to do about insurance companies that are canceling policies over Y2K?'' And quite frankly, I was skeptical. I said, ``I don't know of any insurance companies that are canceling policies.'' Well, she sent me one. And here it is; it arrived today. I think that is appropriate since this is the day we are talking about Y2K. Here--in an area that the Senator from Connecticut has pioneered, health care-- is an insurance company that has sent out an endorsement on one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight different health care policies that they write. They say: The following exclusion is added to Section III [of these policies]: This Policy does not apply to, and the Company will not pay any DAMAGES or CLAIM EXPENSES . . . arising out of, or in any way involving any actual or alleged failure of any . . . ``equipment'' . . . [relating to]: (A) any date or time after September 8, 1999; The reason for that, Mr. President, is because the 9th day of the 9th month of the 99th year could trigger four 9's in a computer program and cause it to fail. (B) any date, time, or data representing or referring to different centuries or more than one century; (C) the change of the Year 1999 to the Year 2000; Or, (D) the Year 2000 as a leap year. The reason for that, Mr. President, is that the algorithm used in computers to compute dates--for reasons I won't take the time to explain--will not recognize the 29th of February, a leap year, in the year 2000; it recognizes it in every other leap year but it does not recognize it in the year 2000. Here is an insurance company that says, ``We will not pay any claims arising from these predictable Y2K kinds of problems.'' So you have that added burden to a company that is doing its very best to get the Y2K thing under control and suddenly finds that their insurance policy is being unilaterally canceled. Now, as I have said on this floor before, I am unburdened with a legal education, so I don't know quite how to deal with this one, but I am sure this is something that ought to go in the mix of what we might do with respect to some kind of legislation this year. Another thing we should be doing next--should be doing now--has to do with more disclosure. Here we are working very closely with the SEC. Chairman Arthur Levitt of the SEC has been in close touch with the committee, with Senator Dodd and me, as we have gone through this. The SEC is working very hard to get more disclosure. Unfortunately, we haven't had the kind of disclosure that I think shareholders are entitled to in this area. This is one thing we ought to keep pushing for. We ought to have more hearings. The Senator from New York talked about that. The authorizing committees, committees of jurisdiction, should take up the burden of conducting oversight hearings of the Departments that they have responsibility for. This has already happened. The Armed Services Committee of the Senate held a very useful hearing last week with the level of preparedness of the Secretary of Defense. I won't repeat all the information that was developed there because it is already in the Record, but there ought to be more of that going on as we get closer to this. The burden of paying attention to what is going on in the executive branch should not fall exclusively on John Koskinen and the President's Council on the Year 2000. It should be shared by the Congress. We should have more activity rather than less, as the Congress stays involved in this. Finally, we have suggested to Senators that they should meet with their own constituents. Senator Dodd has done this in Connecticut, as I have in Utah. Senator Smith has done it regularly in Oregon and as part of his own education as a member of this committee. But other Senators who are not members of the committee have been working in this way. We on the committee are prepared to help them in this effort. We are going to put together, in addition to the report that has been released today, talking points and guidance information for Senators who decide they want to hold town meetings or other meetings while they are back in their own home States. That is very worthwhile. It helps accomplish the twin goals of the committee: No. 1, to calm down the panic so that people are not Chicken Little; and, at the same time, raise the awareness in a responsible way. Individual Senators speaking in their individual States have a higher profile than speeches on the floor of the Senate. That is something we ought to be doing and something that our committee will do its very best to facilitate. Now, this is a moving target, as we have both said. One of the areas that has just come to light that we are going to need more information on is the chemical industry. We were assured that everything was all right in the chemical industry, and now we are discovering that maybe that is not the case. The chemical industry might replace the health care industry as an industry that we look at. This is going to require us to pay attention through the remainder of this year, which is why the resolution funding the committee for the coming year is the subject of this debate. There have been some questions, by the way, raised as to: Where is this money coming from, and how is Senator Bennett going to pay for it? Where is the offset? I can assure all Senators, this is part of the overall allocation of Senate business. This is not new money; this is money that is already in the budget. It is just being allocated to this committee as opposed to some other use. We do not have to come up with an offset for it under the Budget Act. For those who are concerned about that, I assure you that is not of concern. It is a little heartening and indicates that Senators are indeed watching this on their television sets in their own offices. They are making these phone calls. If they weren't calling the cloakroom asking this, then we would know they were not paying attention. The final question which we get all the time with respect to Y2K-- Senator Dodd gets it, I am sure; I get it almost everywhere I go--What can we expect? Are we going to be all right? We addressed this in our opening remarks in saying yes, we are probably going to be all right, generally. The United States is going to have some problems, but it is not going to be the end of the world as we know it. I want to now focus on what I think we can expect outside of the United States, because that is the area of greatest concern as we have gone through this situation. There are far too many countries in the world where Y2K has not been given the kind of attention it deserves. Recently, to his credit, John Koskinen, the President's Y2K czar, working with officials at the United Nations, helped put together a Y2K Day at the United Nations and invited the Y2K coordinators from all of the countries around the world to come to New York and participate in this discussion at the United Nations. I went to New York, along with Congressman Horn, to represent the legislative branch there and demonstrate that it was not just the executive branch of the Government that was concerned about this. There was a very heartening turnout. A large number of countries sent Y2K coordinators. It was a very useful day. That is the good news. The bad news is that many of these Y2K coordinators didn't know anything about Y2K up to about 2 weeks before they were appointed coordinator and given a ticket to New York. They had no idea what this was about. The fact that the United Nations was holding a day and they were invited to come, their government said, ``Maybe we need a Y2K coordinator to go; you go; name somebody''--he or she got on the airplane, flew to New York, and didn't have the slightest idea what we were talking about. That is the bad news. The other bad news is that some of them simply could not afford a ticket. The World Bank funded the airline tickets for some of these Y2K coordinators, which raises the demonstration of the problem we have in many countries around the world. As our consultants have spanned out and talked to these people, many of them say, ``We recognize we have a problem; we recognize it is very serious. We are completely broke. What do you suggest we do about it? We simply can't afford the kind of remediation that you are going through in the United States.'' We just had a team of consultants that came back from Russia and they did a very valid job of assessing where things are in that country. But they said every official that they spoke to began the conversation by asking for money. Every single one said, ``We have a problem. Now, can you help us solve it, because we can't afford to do anything about it.'' Senator Moynihan was talking about the Russian military not having been paid for months and months, and they say, ``If we haven't got any money to pay to our military, we don't have any money to deal with the Y2K problem.'' What will be the impact? There will be economic dislocation in many countries as a result of this. In some countries it will be more serious than others. The unknowable question is, What will be the impact on the United States? I cannot quantify that for you, but I will give you this overall assessment. I think Y2K will trigger what the economists call a ``flight to quality.'' That is, I think investors around the world, as they decide that infrastructure problems are going to arise in certain countries, will decide as a matter of prudence on their part, to withdraw their financial support for economic activity in that country, which will cripple the country further. The speed with which money moves around the world is now very different than it used to be as recently as 10 or 15 years ago. It used to be when there was foreign investment in a country, getting that investment out meant couriers going through airports with attache cases filled with crinkly pieces of paper handcuffed to their wrists. Senator Dole assigned me to work on the Mexican peso problem in early 1995 when the Mexicans devalued the peso. The flight of foreign investment from Mexico took place in a matter of hours, and it was all done electronically--a few keystrokes at a keyboard and the money was gone. The speed with which foreign investment fled Mexico stunned a number of economists who had no idea that the foreign money would disappear virtually overnight. I think you are going to see that kind of thing repeated as foreign investors say: Our Y2K assessment says Country X's infrastructure is going to fail, their power system is going to go down, their telecommunications system will fail and they won't be able to function. Even though we are confident in the management of the company we are backing in that country, we can't run the risk of having them shut down because of an infrastructure failure. We are going to call the loan, sell the stock, and do whatever is necessary to get our money out before it really hits. This ``flight to quality'' may very well mean that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer as a result of Y2K, which raises the other two unknowables, but that we need to be concerned about: One, civil unrest in some of these countries and what that might mean to their economies and their place in the world markets; second, humanitarian requirements. I say, somewhat facetiously, that we have foreign policy by CNN in this country. That is, when the CNN cameras go into a particular area of the world and send images back to the United States, we then respond. CNN cameras showed starving children in Somalia and George Bush sent in troops. I am not criticizing that decision to send in troops, but I wonder if there might not have been starving children in other parts of Africa that CNN didn't get into and that was the reason we didn't intervene in those countries as well. I have a nightmare of CNN cameras in villages or cities where there is no power, no telecommunications, the banking system is broken down, widespread rioting, and then the request is: What is the United States going to do about it? The United States has its Y2K problem under control--the richest country in the world--and we will be faced with the humanitarian challenge of some real hardship in some real areas. So, again, Mr. President, that is one of the reasons why the special committee on year 2000 should be funded and continued, so that we can monitor these things in the way we have in the past and provide information and guidance to policymakers who have come to depend upon us as a repository of information in this whole situation.

Mr. BENNETT. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. BENNETT. I thank the Senator from New York for his generous remarks. He is always generous and gracious. I never deserve all the nice things he says about me, but I am always glad to have him say them nonetheless. I am grateful on this occasion as well. Privilege Of The Floor I ask unanimous consent that Tania Calhoun, a detailee to the committee, be granted floor privileges for the balance of the debate.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senator from Alaska be recognized for the purpose of introducing a bill.

Mr. BENNETT. Thank you, Mr. President. As I have said somewhat facetiously, today is ``Y2K Day in the neighborhood.'' We have had a series of events with respect to Y2K legislation, starting with the debate this morning on the Small Business Administration bill offered by Senator Bond of Missouri. We then went into a closed session where it was my privilege, along with Senator Dodd, to make a presentation to Members of the Senate with respect to the impact of Y2K on our national defense and our intelligence capabilities. And now this afternoon, we have 3 hours to discuss the funding request for the Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problems and, in that process, take the opportunity of the debate to lay out for the Senate and for the television public exactly what we are dealing with. To summarize ``Y2K in the neighborhood,'' I have a single chart that we used in the press conference earlier that outlines what it is we are talking about. Specifically, as you see, Mr. President, it says, ``Y2K--What is it?'' There are some who think it is a rock band and we will make that clear. And then, Why are we vulnerable? Where are the greatest risks? What is being done? What should we be doing next? And what can we expect? It is in the framework of those questions that I will be making my presentation today. In the closed session, we talked about national defense issues, international assessments country by country and the preparedness of the U.S. intelligence community. I report to the Senate as a whole, for those Senators who were not able to be there, that we announced these conclusions to the Senators who were there and, I might say, Mr. President, we were very gratified by the number of Senators who did appear. The room was full, and the Senators were very attentive, which I think is appropriate given the significance of this issue. We believe that there is a low-to-medium probability of exploitation of Y2K by any terrorist groups. People in the press conference asked me, ``Well, can you be specific?'' And the answer is no. We know of no intention on the part of terrorist groups to exploit Y2K uncertainty, but these groups are there, they are up to mischief, and so we say there is a probability, but it is at the low end of things. There is a low probability of a nuclear launch coming by accident as a result of Y2K. Again, we cannot rule it out absolutely, but we think the probability of it is very low. There is a medium probability of economic disruptions that could lead to civil unrest in various parts of the world, and we will discuss that here in the open session as we outline for you how vulnerable some parts of the world may be to Y2K interruptions. There is a high probability of an economic impact with consequences unknown. Here we can only guess, but I think there is a high probability that Y2K will, in fact, produce some kind of economic dislocation that we will feel. As far as U.S. preparedness is concerned, the U.S. Armed Forces will not lose their mission-critical capability, their war-fighting capacity. The United States will remain the world's superpower, and the U.S. intelligence community will not lose its capability to carry out its duties. To go to, first, the question--What is Y2K?--in case there is anyone who really doesn't understand what we are talking about here, it goes to the inability of a computer to recognize the difference between 1900 and 2000 as a date if that computer is programmed for only two digits for the date field for years. This goes back to the 1960s, maybe even the 1950s when memory space was very, very expensive, very, very crucial and, in order to save space, programmers said, ``Well, we can just drop the ``19'' off the year and go to ``69'' for 1969, ``70'' for 1970, and so on. And when someone said, ``Well, what happens when you get to the year 2000 and you get two zeros and the computer will think it is 1900?'' The answer on the part of those programmers was, ``This program will be obsolete and abandoned long before we get to the year 2000.'' They didn't realize the ingenuity of programmers. They figured out a way to preserve those ancient programs and to lay other layers of programming on top of them in such a fashion that the old programs look like the new ones, but deep down in the bowels of all of that programming, you have programs that are scheduled to fail when they get to the crucial time when they go over from 99 to 00. There are many other manifestations of it, going down to embedded chips, computers no bigger than my little fingernail that nonetheless have in them the capacity to fail over this issue. But basically that is the issue. That is what Y2K is. The failure of computers, when they have to transition from 1999 to 2000, those computers that are programmed with two digits for the annual date may fail--some of them certainly will fail--and that is what Y2K is all about. By the way, people ask, What does ``Y2K'' stand for? ``Y'' stands for year, ``2'' stands for 2--that is fairly easy to follow--and ``K,'' from the Greek, standing for kilo, meaning 1,000. It is computer speech for the year 2000. My wife says to me, ``Why do you use that acronym? You just confuse people. Why don't you say `year 2000' instead of `Y2K.' '' And I say, ``Well, it's quicker.'' She says, `` `Y2K,' `year 2000,' you only save one syllable. What is the point? You just do it to confuse people.'' But I guess I have been in Government long enough now that confusing people is part of the program. So what is Y2K? I think that is the answer to the question. Why are we vulnerable? We are vulnerable because at virtually every point of importance in the modern economy and modern activity there stands the computer--whether it is on a chip or in a huge mainframe-- with the capacity to fail. Let's take an event that we hope never happens to any of us, but that is a demonstration of a true emergency--a fire in a building--and see what happens. Here is a picture of a burning building. In order to muster the firefighting capability to deal with this emergency, you have a number of people and a number of systems that are involved. There is the computer-aided dispatching system to send the firefighter to where the challenge is. There is the telecommunications system where the telephone calls go back and forth to send the message from the dispatching system; the building security and fire detection systems that make the phone call back to the dispatching system. The firefighters jump in their cars or their trucks. The trucks have to be filled with fuel. And the pumps that control the fuel supply that goes into the firetrucks all have computers in them--embedded chips. The traffic control system that controls the ability of the fire engine to get through town all has computers in it. The water supply, when they get to the hydrant, is regulated by computers. And, of course, the personnel management systems that get the firefighters into the fire station in the first place now are all managed by computers. A single event we take for granted, all of the things that are done to bring to bear on this event--some firefighting capability, but there are computers at virtually every step of the way. Now, just another example of how interconnected we are in this world. Let's take a single transaction that takes place this time across international lines. This will be, perhaps, a little hard to follow because the chart is relatively smaller and less dramatic than a burning building, but just let me walk you through this as to what happens when there is a commercial transaction that goes across national lines. An import-export kind of transaction. Every red arrow that you see there on the chart, Mr. President, is a transmission of information by computer. Every single time something takes place with the purchase and delivery of an item across national lines --you start the contracts, the negotiations by the Internet, a checking of credit, the contract by the Internet--all the way through. The white arrows on the chart are where something physically moves, when you are moving a piece of merchandise out of a factory onto a ship or out of the truck into a retail store or whatever. Without going through all of the steps, I just point out that there are more red arrows than there are white ones. There are more opportunities for computer failure to ruin the ability of this transaction to go forward than there are physical opportunities for it to fail. We are so heavily interconnected in this world now that we are completely vulnerable to a computer failure. And at every red arrow on that chart right now there is a computer with a potential Y2K problem. Someone once said to me, This problem is really very simple. You just get into the computer and find out where the date is and fix it; change it from two digits to four digits. And I say, yes, that is very simple, very simple problem, very simply solved. The only problem is, you do not know where that date field is, particularly in those old programs that I talked about. It has been likened to this kind of a challenge: Suppose someone said to you, Mr. President, the Golden Gate Bridge has some bad rivets in it, and if you do not replace those faulty rivets, the Golden Gate Bridge will fall down. All you have to do is very simple: Knock out the bad rivet, put in a good rivet, and the bridge is made secure. Now, one out of seven of those rivets in the Golden Gate Bridge is bad, and we cannot tell you which ones they are. You have to go through the Golden Gate Bridge and check every rivet to see which seventh rivet has to be fixed. And by the way, if you do not get every single one, the bridge will collapse, and you do this remediation work at rush hour while the bridge is being used. That is roughly comparable to the challenge that we face here. And that is why we are vulnerable. OK. The next question is, Where are the greatest risks? Well, we can answer that two ways. On our committee, we have decided to rate the greatest risks in terms of which sectors of the economy have the greatest importance to us. And when you rank risk by importance, No. 1 immediately leaps to the top of the list; and that is power. If the power goes off, it does not matter if your computer works otherwise. The only computers that will work in the world, if the power goes off, will be those that have batteries, and that is about 2 or 3 hours, and they are all gone. So we have put our first focus on power. Second, telecommunications. If the telephone goes off, the power grid fails, because many of the signals that keep the power grid functioning go over telephone lines. So once again, everything stops. Third, transportation. If transportation fails, you cannot get coal, for example, from coal mines into power-generating plants. If the switches on all of the railroad lines fail--and they are controlled by computers--there is no coal in the powerplants. The power grid fails, everything fails. You begin to see, again, how interconnected everything is. Fourth, finance. If the banks cannot clear checks, if there can be no transfer of funds, if the financial system collapses, then business collapses. Once again, the chain starts, and you end up ultimately with no power, all the rest of it. Then, general government. We are so dependent on government services to keep the economy running that if the general government services were to fail--in the Federal Government, for example, if the Health Care Financing Administration were to fail and be unable to make any Medicare reimbursements, it would ultimately destroy the health care industry, because 40 percent of the health care reimbursements are Medicare reimbursements. And you simply could not keep a health care facility going if you cut their cash by 40 percent and left it that way for a while. Finally, general business. Those are the ranks of importance that we have looked at in our committee. Let me take this opportunity to make this statement about what we found. The committee has been operating for roughly a year now, and in that process people who have looked at the list I have just recited have gotten very excited. Indeed, they have begun to create a cottage industry of panic. You can get on the Internet and you can look up any kind of web site, and they will take the possibility of computer failure in any of the areas I have just outlined and translate that into what has come to be known in the world of Y2K hyperbole as TEOTWAWKI. Now, TEOTWAWKI is the acronym that stands for ``The End Of The World As We Know It.'' They use that phrase so often, they created an acronym. Now you can get on the Internet and they will talk about TEOTWAWKI. Mr. President, I am here to announce that TEOTWAWKI is not going to come to pass. We are satisfied, as a result of the hearings we held, and the interviews we held, and the investigations we have undertaken on the Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem, that the world is not, in fact, going to come to an end over this problem--certainly not in the United States. We will have problems. There is no question, given the ubiquitous nature of the problem, that it will cause interruptions and difficulties in the United States, but it will not bring everything to a halt. It will not cause the shutdown of vital services. In our opinion, it will be a bump in the road for the United States. Now, people say: What does that mean? How serious a bump and how long will it last, Senator Bennett? I don't know, and I don't know anybody who does, because this is a moving target, there are so many potentials for challenge, that we cannot quantify it with the kind of accuracy that the press always searches for when they ask you these questions. It will have an impact. It will be felt. But how long it will last and how deep it will go I don't know. That is why the committee is going to continue, so that we can continue to study it, and as we get closer to it, we will be in a better position to make that kind of assessment. Now, if we ask the question, Where are the greatest risks? --not in the pattern of the impact on the economy that I have talked about, but on our current state of readiness--we find that the greatest impact, based on what we now know in the committee, is probably going to be in the health care field. This is the field that we think is the least prepared to deal with the year 2000 problem in the United States. One of the reasons for that is it so fragmented. There are so many hospitals. There are so many separate doctors' offices. Some of them have done nothing to prepare for the year 2000. Frankly, some of them can solve their problem in an afternoon. Some of them that are operating off of a single PC can get a patch downloaded from the Internet that can solve their problem. Some of them are going to require substantially more than that. And some of them, frankly, are far enough behind the curve, if they are not on top of it by now, it is too late and they ought to start thinking about contingency plans. We simply do not know. What we do know causes us to believe that health care is vulnerable. Senator Dodd, I am sure, will be addressing this in greater detail because he is the one who has focused on this to a greater extent than any other member of the committee. Another area of readiness that we are concerned about is local government. I gave this Y2K speech at a Rotary Club meeting in a small town in Utah and people asked me, ``What should we do to get ready for Y2K?'' I gave them the same answer I always give them, which is, you should take charge of your own life; you should check with your own bank to make sure they are going to be Y2K compliant; you should check with your own employer to be sure he or she is getting things under control; and, among other things, I said, call your mayor to make sure your water system is going to be all right in your local community. I have done that in Salt Lake City. I have had some long discussions with the mayor of Salt Lake, and she assures me it will be safe for me to be in Salt Lake on New Year's Eve because the water system will work. After I gave the speech, a man came up, shook my hand, and said, ``You have caused me some problems.'' I asked why, and he said, ``I am the mayor.'' I said, ``Mr. Mayor, is your water system going to be all right?'' He said, ``I don't have the slightest idea but I am sure going to find out.'' He said, ``It never occurred to me that we had computer problems in our water purification plant.'' We have held hearings on this issue. I have been in a water purification plant. While I think most local governments are responsible enough and will be on top of it, I am concerned that there will be local governments where there will be critical emergency response systems that will fail--fire departments, ambulances, and so on, water systems, federally funded services. Many of the federally funded services are administered at the local level. Welfare checks are mailed out by county governments, not by the Federal Government, in many instances. And in these communities, there can be serious disruption even while the Nation as a whole is doing fine. In the economy as a whole, the area that is at the greatest risk is where we find medium-sized businesses. The big businesses are probably just fine. Citigroup announced when we first got into this they were going to spend $500 million fixing their year 2000 problem. That went up to $650 million by the time we got around to drafting the report. Now, the day the report is issued, we are told they are spending closer to $800 million to get this solved. But Citigroup will get it solved. They have the money and the muscle and the will to get it taken care of. The very small businesses will probably get it solved because, again, for them, they are dealing with a single computer that runs their payroll and maybe does their taxes, and they do everything else by hand. They can solve that problem in a short-term period of time. The middle-sized businesses that don't have the money of a Citigroup and that have a much bigger problem than a mom-and-pop store are running into difficulty. The surveys we are conducting tell us that these companies are where the problems are going to be. Now you may say, so what? We should really care if an individual business here or an individual business there should fail or should have serious problems. In today's economy, we live in a world of outsourcing and just-in-time inventory. That means that General Motors has literally tens of thousands of suppliers. General Motors does not make everything themselves; they outsource. That is a fancy name for buying it from somebody else. They are dependent on these medium-sized businesses for their parts. One of the scary things is that many of these medium-sized businesses on which General Motors and other big manufacturers are dependent are overseas. I used to run a very small business, so small that it wouldn't really attract anybody's attention, but the key component of our business, without which we had no product, was manufactured in Taiwan, and if we were unable to get that from Taiwan because of Y2K problems in Taiwan, we were out of business. We sold our product to a much bigger company. They were dependent upon us. They could have all of their computers Y2K compliant and be unable to get product from us and therefore have to drop a major product line for them. We couldn't supply it because we couldn't get this product from Taiwan. You see the chain of suppliers that runs throughout the economy in this just-in-time inventory world. When I say I am concerned about medium-sized firms as an area of high risk, it could affect big firms and could affect the economy as a whole. Now, the next question after where is the greatest risk: What are we doing about it? What is being done? Here, I think, it is time for the Senate and the Congress, if I might, to be a little bit self- congratulatory. When this problem first came to the attention of the Congress, Senator Burns of Montana has said he held hearings on this issue, or had been involved in hearings on this issue back in the early 1990s. He said we couldn't get anybody interested; nobody paid any attention. He was on the Commerce Committee. He said the thing just kind of dropped without a trace. We first became aware of this on the Senate Banking Committee in 1996. That is where Senator Dodd and I became zealots on this issue, and we began to work on this with respect to the financial services area. The more we got into that, the more we realized that it encompassed all of the things that I have described here this afternoon. One example demonstrates what I am talking about when I say that Congress can be a little bit self-congratulatory about the question of what is being done. My son-in-law works for one of the major banks in this country. He said at a family gathering, ``You know, I don't know what's happened, but the bank examiners from the Federal Reserve who come into our bank now have only one thing on their minds, and that is Y2K, and they have made it the top priority in the bank.'' I thought, you know, we have finally done something in Congress that has produced a result because, at Senator Dodd's suggestion, we got the bank regulators before our subcommittee of the Banking Committee and we raised this issue with them; we discovered several things. No. 1, they were not raising it as part of the safety and soundness examination they were doing in banks. No. 2, their own computers weren't going to work in the year 2000. They would not be able to conduct their regulatory activities if we didn't get it fixed. The mere act of holding a hearing and bringing these people forward produced a salutary result that actually got out into the economy and changed the way things are being done. Well, now, I think we can take some credit for having raised that alarm. Senator Moynihan wrote to the President and urged him to appoint a Y2K czar or coordinator. The President did not respond. I wrote to the President after we had our hearings in the Banking Committee and recommended it. He did not respond to me, either. But in February of 1998, he did, in fact, appoint a Y2K coordinator. I think the track record says it is the Congress that possibly spurred that. And we now have a President's Council on the Year 2000 Conversion, headed by John Koskinen, working very diligently to make sure the Federal Government and the economy as a whole is ready for this. We are doing everything we can to create awareness of the challenge. At the same time, we want to be sure, in words that we have used before, that while we are ``Paul Revere,'' we are not ``Chicken Little.'' We have to get everybody aroused to the fact that the British really are coming. They have to get out of their warm beds and pick up their muskets and get ready for this; but the sky is not falling and it will not be TEOTWAWKI; it will not be the end of the world as we know it. Well, I see that the vice chairman of our committee, Senator Dodd, has come on to the floor. Soon I will reserve the remainder of my time and give him an opportunity for a statement about this. Other members of the committee have expressed an interest to come to the floor and talk about this issue. I want to acknowledge the tremendous support we have had on this committee. This is a unique kind of committee in that we have had tremendous bipartisan support. My staff and Senator Dodd's staff function almost as one on this committee. We have made every effort to keep any kind of partisanship out of it. We go out on field visits together. Senator Dodd has been indefatigable in his effort to keep this thing going, and he prods me in areas where I need it and keeps the committee focused in areas where sometimes I stray in other places. It has been one of the most satisfying legislative experiences that I have ever had. Other members of the committee, the same way. Senator Moynihan was into this issue before we even discovered it and came onto the committee with great enthusiasm. Senator Smith of Oregon, who came to the Senate as a businessman, took charge of dealing with business and Y2K's impact on business and has been tremendously helpful. We have had Senator Bingaman, who we have asked to focus on the national defense issues. Senator Collins, as a representative of the Governmental Affairs Committee, has held hearings in that committee based on what she has come up with out of our committee. Senator Kyl did all of the heavy lifting on the committee for last year's bill on disclosure and has been enormously valuable. And then we have, unlike any other committee in the Senate, two ex officio members, Ted Stevens of Alaska and Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia; and the fact that the Federal Government received literally billions of dollars in emergency funds in the last supplemental, which, I think, have dealt with the true emergency. I think we are responsible for our being where we are in many of the government agencies. I don't think that would have happened if the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee were not involved directly and particularly in the work of this particular special committee. So, with that tribute to my fellow Senators on this committee and the work that has been done, I will reserve the remainder of my time, Mr. President, to allow the vice chairman of the committee and the ranking Democrat, Senator Dodd, to make his statement. Mr. MURKOWSKI addressed the Chair.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the amendment be agreed to and that the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table.

Mr. BENNETT. The technical amendment is now at the desk, and I ask for its consideration.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now stand in recess until the hour of 2:15 today in order for Members to attend a confidential briefing in room S. 407 of the Capitol, and this briefing is in respect to the Y2K event.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere, Peace Corps, Narcotics and Terrorism of the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, March 2, 1999, at 3:00 pm to hold a hearing.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Subcommittee on Surface Transportation/Merchant Marine be allowed to meet on Tuesday, March 2, 1999, at 9:30 am on reauthorization of the Surface Transportation Board.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem be permitted to meet on March 2, 1999 at 8:30 a.m. for the purpose of conducting a hearing.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, the Committee on Veterans' Affairs would like to request unanimous consent to hold a joint hearing with the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs to receive the legislative presentations of the Veterans of World War I of the USA, Non- Commissioned Officers Association, Paralyzed Veterans of America, Jewish War Veterans, and the Blinded Veterans Association. The hearing will be held on Tuesday, March 2, 1999, at 9:30 a.m., in room 345 of the Cannon House Office Building.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions be authorized to meet for a hearing on ``Medical Necessity: From Theory to Practice'' during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, March 2, 1999, at 9:30 a.m.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources be granted permission to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, March 2, for purposes of conducting a full committee hearing which is scheduled to begin at 10:00 a.m. The purpose of this oversight hearing is to consider the President's budget for FY2000 for the Department of the Interior.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Armed Services be authorized to meet on Tuesday, March 2, 1999, at 9:30 a.m. in open session, to receive testimony on the defense authorization request for fiscal year 2000 and the future years defense plan.

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry be allowed to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, March 2, 1999. The purpose of this meeting will be to review Federal child nutrition programs.

Mr. BENNETT

Mr. BENNETT. Mr. Chief Justice, as I have sat through this trial, I have not spent much time on questions of reasonable doubt or where the preponderance of evidence lies. Whatever the importance of those concepts in a typical court, the constitutional implications of what we are considering are much more serious than the issues decided in a normal trial. I will not vote to remove a sitting President on the turning of a legal issue. Accordingly, early in the trial I decided that I would not vote to convict under the First Article of Impeachment. It struck me as overly legalistic. I listened to the lawyers argue about the proper form of the article, and I heard about questions of materiality--not a term I use in everyday conversation--and I decided that while the case was there, it was shaky. In order to be sure I would render impartial justice, I asked myself if I would remove Ronald Reagan in a similar circumstance. When I realized I would not, I decided that I could not vote to remove Bill Clinton. Once I had made that decision, I more or less tuned out further discussions on Article One, from either side, and concentrated on Article Two. Here the issues seemed more disturbing. The Constitution guarantees that the most ordinary of citizens has the right to her day in court, regardless of her hair or her nose or her choice of attorneys. The man she sues, even if he is the most powerful man in the country, does not have the right to lie while testifying under oath in her case, to deny her truthful discovery just because it would embarrass him. He does not have the right to encourage others who are beholden to him, either for their jobs or for favors he has done for them, to do the same, even by interference. He does not have the right to coach and mislead potential witnesses. He does not have the right to use the awesome power of the White House public relations apparatus to spread false and malicious rumors about people--calling them ``stalkers,'' ``trailer park trash'' and ``liars''--just because he thinks they might embarrass him if they tell the truth. It has been said that it was understandable for President Clinton to do all these things because he was just trying to cover up a sexual affair, and, after all, everyone lies about sex. Well, not everyone. We have had other Presidents whose sexual improprieties have been made public at awkward times --Grover Cleveland, while a candidate for President, was exposed as having fathered a child out of wedlock. Asked by his panicked political allies what to do he said, ``Tell the truth, of course,'' and won the election. Bill Clinton should take such notes. What finally convinced me to vote for Article Two was the statement of my good friend, Dale Bumpers. I thought he was magnificent. He told us that the fundamental purpose of the Constitution was to ``keep bullies from running over weak people.'' I was struck by that. I wrote it down. Then I asked myself, ``In this case, who is the bully, and who are the weak people?'' While publicly posing as a helpless victim of a relentless prosecutor, it was President Clinton and the people in his famous ``war room'' who were the bullies, using presidential powers and presidential lies to run over the rights of Paula Jones and, if necessary, Monica Lewinsky. Any President who is willing to lie and smear and stonewall, whether under oath in a courtroom or before a TV camera, speaking confidentially to his aides or privately to his family--any President who is so ruthless, disdainful of the truth and callous of the rights of others that he is willing to do anything to ``just win, then''; any President who readily uses the power of his office for his personal ends regardless of who is hurt--that President is a bully and, as such, a threat to the constitutional liberties of us all. Dale Bumpers said that the Constitution was written to keep bullies from running over weak people. That's called justice. William Jefferson Clinton tried to obstruct that justice. And I decided to vote to remove him from office. So there I was--ready to vote not guilty on Article One, guilty on Article Two. I sat down and wrote a fancy speech outlining these conclusions, showed it to a few friends, notified my staff and sat back to let things play out. As the trial proceeded, however, something was gnawing at me. The perjury charge kept creeping back into my mind. That something, as I confronted it, was my experience with the Clinton political apparatus and its modus operandi. At the heart of everything that apparatus and its operatives do, whatever the situation, is the process of lying. Some of their lies have been whoppers, some trivial. Most have been dismissed as mere ``spin,'' relatively few have been under oath, but the continuing pattern of distorting, avoiding and, when necessary, simply denying the truth goes back to the 1992 campaign. It has carried through the three Senate investigations in which I have participated. On a parochial note, it defined the process of creating a stealth National Monument in my state. It has permeated the entire PR campaign connected with the Lewinsky affair. The New York Times calls it ``habitual mendacity.'' If this were a standard trial, as juror I would not know any of that. I would have to make up my mind solely on the basis of the evidence presented here. Some would say I still should. I believe that the Framers of the Constitution dictated otherwise. They chose the Senate as the trial court of impeachment deliberately, giving us extensive powers as both judge and jury, and they were not naive enough to think that we would check our understanding of the history of the accused President at the door as we took up this burden. They intended for this to be different than a typical trial court. When I realized that, I began to rethink my earlier decision. With such a pattern of ``habitual mendacity'' running through his entire public career, could I really say that Bill Clinton's perjurious testimony before the Grand Jury didn't warrant removal? I made my decision to change my vote to ``guilty'' on Article One during the closing arguments when Charles Ruff, the President's attorney, asked us a question with respect to an alleged high crime or misdemeanor. He asked, ``would it put at risk the liberties of the people?'' As I watched a replay of the President's testimony repeating obvious lies while under oath, I realized that the answer is yes. A President who has demonstrated a capacity to lie about anything, great or small, whether or not under oath, does threaten our liberties. We cannot be sure of anything he says, we cannot trust his word, whatever the issue. We will always be fearful of where that trait of his could take us, and we should be. So now I will vote guilty on both Articles, with a clear conscience that I have done my duty. And I would vote the same if the President's name were Ronald Wilson Reagan.