Joe Biden

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the Anticounterfeiting Act of 2004, along with Senators Murray, Hollings, Smith, and Allen. Two years ago, I held a hearing entitled, ``Theft of American Intellectual Property: Fighting Crime Abroad and At Home,'' and I issued a report on the status of our fight against this crime. Today, I attended a hearing chaired by Senator Specter on a similar topic, again driving home for me the serious problems encountered in today's world by American intellectual property. What I have learned is that every day, thieves steal millions of dollars of American intellectual property from its rightful owners. Over a hundred thousand American jobs are lost as a result. American innovation and creativity need to be protected by our government no less than our personal property, our homes and our streets. The Founding Fathers had the foresight to provide for protection of intellectual property, giving Congress the power to ``promote the progress of science and useful arts'' by providing copyrights and patents. American intellectual property represents the largest single sector of the American economy, employing 4.7 million Americans. It has been estimated that software piracy alone cost the U.S. economy over 118,000 jobs and $5.7 billion in wage losses in the year 2000. Even more, the International Planning and Research Corporation estimates that the government loses more than a billion dollars worth of revenue every year from intellectual property theft. To put that in perspective, with a billion dollars in additional revenue, the American government could pay for child care services for more than 100,000 children annually. Alternatively, $1 billion could be used to fund a Senate proposal to assist schools nationally with emergency school renovations and repairs. There is another problem. Counterfeiters of software, music CDs and motion pictures are now tampering with authentication features. Holograms, certificates of authenticity, watermarks and other security features allow the copyright owners to distinguish genuine works from counterfeits. But now, highly sophisticated counterfeiters have found ways to tamper with these features to make counterfeit products appear genuine and to increase the selling price of genuine products and licenses. Put another way, not only do crooks illegally copy American intellectual property, they also now illegally fake or steal the very features property owners use to prevent that theft. Copyrights mean nothing if government authorities fail to enforce the protections they provide intellectual property owners. The criminal code has not kept up with the counterfeiting operations of today's high-tech pirates, and it's time to make sure that it does. The Anticounterfeiting Act of 2004 updates and strengthens the Federal criminal code, which currently makes it a crime to traffic in counterfeit labels or copies of certain forms of intellectual property, but not authentication features. For example, we can currently prosecute someone for trafficking in fake labels for a computer program, but we cannot go after them for faking the hologram that the software maker uses to ensure that copies of the software are genuine. In addition, many actions that violate current law go unprosecuted in this day and age when priorities, such as the fight against terrorism and life-threatening crimes, necessarily take priority over crimes of property, be they intellectual or physical. Moreover, the victims of this theft often do not have a way to recover their losses from this crime. For this reason, the Anticounterfeiting Act of 2004 also provides a private cause of action, to permit the victims of these crimes to pursue the criminals themselves and recover damages in federal court. Current law criminalizes trafficking in counterfeit documentation and packaging, but only for software programs. The Anticounterfeiting Act of 2003 updates and expands these provisions to include documentation and packaging for phonorecords, motion pictures, other audiovisual works, and copies of other copyrighted works. The existing provision with regard to counterfeiting addresses certain items of intellectual property, including motion pictures, software, and phonorecords. The Anticounterfeiting Act of 2004 updates the coverage of this statute to include other copyrighted works, such as books. As published books and ebooks begin to be subject to the piracy already witnessed by motion picture, softward and recording industries, they need the same protection. This issue is not going way; to the contrary, it is growing, and Congress continues to focus on potential solutions, as evidenced by today's hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee, and an upcoming hearing in the Foreign Relations Committee. The 2002 version of this bill did not manage to secure passage and enactment into law, but there is reason for optimism that this year its fate will be different. America's content providers, and the many jobs that depend on them, could certainly use the help. America is a place where we must encourage diverse ideas, and with that encouragement we must protect those ideas. They are the source of our music, our art, our novels, our movies, our software, our products, all that is American culture and American know-how. The Anticounterfeiting Act of 2004 gives our ideas the protection they deserve. I ask unanimous consent that the text of this bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the Anticounterfeiting Act of 2004, along with Senators Murray, Hollings, Smith, and Allen. Two years ago, I held a hearing entitled, ``Theft of American Intellectual Property: Fighting Crime Abroad and At Home,'' and I issued a report on the status of our fight against this crime. Today, I attended a hearing chaired by Senator Specter on a similar topic, again driving home for me the serious problems encountered in today's world by American intellectual property. What I have learned is that every day, thieves steal millions of dollars of American intellectual property from its rightful owners. Over a hundred thousand American jobs are lost as a result. American innovation and creativity need to be protected by our government no less than our personal property, our homes and our streets. The Founding Fathers had the foresight to provide for protection of intellectual property, giving Congress the power to ``promote the progress of science and useful arts'' by providing copyrights and patents. American intellectual property represents the largest single sector of the American economy, employing 4.7 million Americans. It has been estimated that software piracy alone cost the U.S. economy over 118,000 jobs and $5.7 billion in wage losses in the year 2000. Even more, the International Planning and Research Corporation estimates that the government loses more than a billion dollars worth of revenue every year from intellectual property theft. To put that in perspective, with a billion dollars in additional revenue, the American government could pay for child care services for more than 100,000 children annually. Alternatively, $1 billion could be used to fund a Senate proposal to assist schools nationally with emergency school renovations and repairs. There is another problem. Counterfeiters of software, music CDs and motion pictures are now tampering with authentication features. Holograms, certificates of authenticity, watermarks and other security features allow the copyright owners to distinguish genuine works from counterfeits. But now, highly sophisticated counterfeiters have found ways to tamper with these features to make counterfeit products appear genuine and to increase the selling price of genuine products and licenses. Put another way, not only do crooks illegally copy American intellectual property, they also now illegally fake or steal the very features property owners use to prevent that theft. Copyrights mean nothing if government authorities fail to enforce the protections they provide intellectual property owners. The criminal code has not kept up with the counterfeiting operations of today's high-tech pirates, and it's time to make sure that it does. The Anticounterfeiting Act of 2004 updates and strengthens the Federal criminal code, which currently makes it a crime to traffic in counterfeit labels or copies of certain forms of intellectual property, but not authentication features. For example, we can currently prosecute someone for trafficking in fake labels for a computer program, but we cannot go after them for faking the hologram that the software maker uses to ensure that copies of the software are genuine. In addition, many actions that violate current law go unprosecuted in this day and age when priorities, such as the fight against terrorism and life-threatening crimes, necessarily take priority over crimes of property, be they intellectual or physical. Moreover, the victims of this theft often do not have a way to recover their losses from this crime. For this reason, the Anticounterfeiting Act of 2004 also provides a private cause of action, to permit the victims of these crimes to pursue the criminals themselves and recover damages in federal court. Current law criminalizes trafficking in counterfeit documentation and packaging, but only for software programs. The Anticounterfeiting Act of 2003 updates and expands these provisions to include documentation and packaging for phonorecords, motion pictures, other audiovisual works, and copies of other copyrighted works. The existing provision with regard to counterfeiting addresses certain items of intellectual property, including motion pictures, software, and phonorecords. The Anticounterfeiting Act of 2004 updates the coverage of this statute to include other copyrighted works, such as books. As published books and ebooks begin to be subject to the piracy already witnessed by motion picture, softward and recording industries, they need the same protection. This issue is not going way; to the contrary, it is growing, and Congress continues to focus on potential solutions, as evidenced by today's hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee, and an upcoming hearing in the Foreign Relations Committee. The 2002 version of this bill did not manage to secure passage and enactment into law, but there is reason for optimism that this year its fate will be different. America's content providers, and the many jobs that depend on them, could certainly use the help. America is a place where we must encourage diverse ideas, and with that encouragement we must protect those ideas. They are the source of our music, our art, our novels, our movies, our software, our products, all that is American culture and American know-how. The Anticounterfeiting Act of 2004 gives our ideas the protection they deserve. I ask unanimous consent that the text of this bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, like a lot of my colleagues this week, I have been visited here in Washington by a number of my constituents. We get to hear, first hand, about the lives of the people we represent, about how we can help them or hurt them. As we debated the budget this week, a couple of those meetings really stood out in my mind. When I met with Delaware's League of Local Governments, their top priority was increased funding for public safety and homeland security. These are the mayors and county executives from my State, the public officials closest to the needs of our communities. They came to tell us that they need more cops on the beat, they need more resources and more attention from us here in Washington to deal with the security of the chemical plants in their towns, to name just one important example. As they brought this message to us here in Washington, not just to me but to all of us in the Congress, we were presented with this budget resolution, that cuts 30 percent from the support for first responders, the very fire fighters and police officers that we so often pay lip service to. Lip service is all they get from this budget. I joined with my colleagues in offering an amendment to restore and increase funding for homeland security, in keeping with the message we heard this week from our State and local officials. But that amendment was rejected, because it would have taken a small amount from the tax cuts--just a small amount--from the tax cuts going to those with the top 1 percent of incomes in this country. I offered an amendment during the budget debate to restore funds cut from the COPS Program, that has put more policemen and women on the streets of towns and cities in Delaware and across the country. This budget, in a false economy, had reduced funding for law enforcement grants by over 60 percent. My amendment would have restored a billion dollars to the COPS program, the Local Law Enforcement Block Grant, and the Byrne program. And it would have taken an additional 1 billion dollars off of the deficit. Those amendments were rejected to protect the tax cuts that go to the top 1 percent of income earners in this country. Those are not the priorities of the local government officials who came here this week looking for help to strengthen public safety in their communities. But that is the top priority of this budget resolution: sacrificing every other priority to avoid shaving barely 1 percent off of a tax cut that will total $690 billion dollars for people in the top 1 percent income level in this country over the next 10 years. I also had the pleasure of meeting with the American Legion of Delaware this week. It is always moving, and a little humbling, to meet with the men and women who have given so much to this country. But these days, with so many of our troops still in the field, these meetings have even more meaning. I know that a lot of my colleagues met with their veterans this week, too, and that they heard the same thing I did: health care is their top priority. This budget makes it harder for veterans to get health care, and makes it more expensive. We offered amendments this week to add $2.7 billion to this budget for veterans' health care, and to pay for it by shaving less than 1 half of 1 percent off of the tax cuts for those in the top 1 percent of income earners in this country. That amendment was rejected, too. To prevent a tiny reduction in the tax breaks for those who have the most we refused to add funds for veterans' health care. In the debate this week on the budget resolution we made fundamental choices, and those choices revealed the principles, the values, that will guide us for the rest of this legislative session, and for years to come. The values in this budget are not those of the local officials who came to see me this week. They are not the values of the veterans who came to town, either. And they are not my values. When you write a budget, you have to put your money where your mouth is. At the end of the day, you have to be willing to make the choices-- you have to set the priorities. And at the end of the day, those priorities, those values, will be written in black and white--and in the gallons of red ink in this budget resolution. The statement made by this budget is one that I categorically reject, and that I urge my colleagues to reject. I have to say that the budget resolution that is before us this week is perhaps the most irresponsible, disingenuous, and I have to add, the most callous that I have seen in my time here in the Senate. This budget resolution, puts us on a track toward historical levels of debt, to be left to our children and grandchildren. This budget resolution slights the most basic responsibilities of our Government, with cuts in homeland security, in education, health care, transportation, clean water, and scientific research, despite growing needs in all of those areas. This budget resolution will cripple our ability to meet the looming crisis in the Social Security System because it borrows virtually all of the reserves that Social Security is now building up in anticipation of the retirement in just over 10 years of the baby boom generation. Even borrowing all of those Social Security reserves does not balance this budget. Even cutbacks in heath care, in medical research, in law enforcement, in education won't bring this budget back into balance. These false economies that will cost us more in the future will not bring the budget into balance. In fact, under this budget, deficits continue to grow and grow, into the future. On paper, this budget claims to reduce the deficit over the next 5 years. There are 2 problems with that claim. First, the claim that this resolution will reduce the deficit ignores the cost of the continuing war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, and the continuing war on terrorism. Whatever those costs may be, there is one number that we know for a fact is false, is dead wrong, and that number is zero. By the estimate of the Congressional Budget Office, those costs could run to $280 billion over the next 10 years. There is supposedly an allowance in this budget for $30 billion, but that is only a small fraction of what we can expect, and it is not even counted as part of the deficit. If we spend it, it will add to the deficit, but in this resolution, it is not counted, nor is the $250 billion more the CBO expects us to spend. Millions of Americans are finding out now, and tens of millions will soon find out, that the Alternative Minimum Tax, designed to make sure millionaires did not manage to escape paying tax altogether, is set to fall on middle-class families. It will cost tens of billions of dollars to prevent that from happening. The administration agrees that it needs fixing, too. But this resolution assumes only 1 year of AMT relief, leaving out of the deficit count tens of billions in certain costs over the coming years. The claim that this resolution reduces the deficit over the next 5 years is based on taking all of the reserves of the Social Security system, reserves that will be needed in the next decade for the largest wave of retirements in our country's history. If you leave that out, the deficit 5 years out will be closer to $550 billion, not the $237 billion they claim. The other problem with the claim that this resolution will reduce the deficit in the next 5 years, is that the next 5 years, as bad as they are, are not real problem. The real problem our Nation will face lies in the years after that, when the deficits explode, on a collision course with the coming crisis in the Social Security system. It matters little what happens in the next 5 years if we careen into budget collapse in the years that follow. That is just what this resolution would do. It leaves us on a path to add more than $2 trillion to our debt over the next 10 years. It demands sacrifice from the middle class, who face rising health care costs and high college tuition payments at a time when job security is shaky, when the search for a new job takes longer and longer, and when we are losing the bedrock manufacturing jobs that have been the foundation of our middle class. This budget demands sacrifice from everyone, except those Americans who have already been most blessed by the opportunities and advantages offered by this great country. For those Americans, who have received and will receive the lion's share of the recent tax cuts, not a dime of sacrifice will be asked. Out of a total, 10-year tax cut of over $1.8 trillion, the top one percent will get $690 billion. The average taxpayer in the top 1 percent will get a 10-year tax cut of over half a million dollars. That is what this budget resolution, and the votes we have taken here on the Senate floor, will go to any length to protect. The reason that the rest of us must sacrifice, we are told, is that we face massive deficits. We just don't have enough money. Like the child who killed his parents, and then begged for mercy because he was an orphan, the majority, who has insisted in the face of exploding deficits on tax cut after tax cut after tax cut, now claims we do not have the money to fund the most basic promises to American citizens. To make up for those deficits, to pay for those tax cuts, this budget goes after those who are least able to help themselves. Unfortunately, their sacrifices will be in vain because this budget will still leave us with a massive burden of increasing debt. But this budget does not ask for a dime of sacrifice from those who have enjoyed the greatest economic success in this country, and who--on top of their growing wealth and incomes--have been the major beneficiaries of the recent rounds of tax cuts. Over and over in this debate we have debated amendments to restore cuts in public safety and homeland security, in veterans' health care, in education funding--to keep the many promises to Americans that we have made. To support those priorities that help average Americans, those amendments called for small reductions in the tax cuts going to the top 1 percent of Americans. We are not talking about cancelling tax cuts for average Americans. And we are not talking about cancelling tax cuts for the wealthiest among us. We are just talking about reducing the already huge tax cuts that they are going to receive. If this budget resolution is adopted, we will break promises to governors, mayors, school boards, teachers, parents, and children. The No Child Left Behind program will be funded at a level $8.6 billion below what we promised when that law was passed. If this resolution is adopted, we will leave veterans' health care $2.7 billion below what it is needed to keep our commitment to those who have already given so much--who continue to give so much--to our country. If this resolution is adopted, we will shortchange the working poor in this country who are doing just what we hoped they would do when we reformed welfare. But the earned income tax credit, that President Reagan himself called the best anti-poverty program we have, will be cut by $3 billion. That program will be cut by $3 billion, because this Senate refused to take a tiny nick out of the tax cuts going to those with an average income of a million dollars a year. This Senate would rather take $3 billion from the working poor than take a tiny fraction from the those who already have so much. The list goes on. It includes Senator Lieberman's amendment, to provide an additional $7 billion for homeland security. These funds would have helped to secure our ports and our borders and our transportation system, guard against bioterror, and support first responders. That amendment, that would take a little more than 1 percent of the total tax cut going to the wealthiest 1 percent--leaving them with more than nine-tenths of their tax cut, more than $680 billion--that amendment was rejected. This budget resolution has one principle and one principle only: protect those tax cuts at any cost, including trillions of dollars in additional deficits and debt. We know what those cuts will cost us in the future, and how much sacrifice they demand from those who can least afford it, but what have they done for us so far? I ask my colleagues to remember the first time that President Bush called for tax cuts. That was back in the last presidential campaign, when the economy was booming and the budget was in surplus. He promised us that we could afford huge tax cuts, that were designed to shrink federal revenues, and to prevent the build-up of budget surpluses. Hard is as it to recall, the threat he was most concerned with was that we would balance the budget and then keep on building up surpluses. Then, as the economy slowed down, he claimed that those same tax cuts would stimulate growth--the tax cuts he designed in the midst of the strongest economic boom our country had ever seen. When those tax cuts failed to stimulate growth, and as deficits began to expand, virtually wiping out the $5.6 trillion ten-year surplus projected when he came into office, we were told that we needed even more tax cuts. Not only have the deficits continued to grow, but those deficits and the tax cuts that brought them on have done nothing to create jobs. You have to go all the way back to the Hoover administration to find a record of job losses to rival this one. We have come out of recession, and have restored a respectable level of economic growth, and the stock market has come back to around the levels it reached in 1998. We are 37 months past the last peak in the business cycle, and on those measures things are looking up. But this recovery is unique in our history. When it comes to jobs-- the one real measure of economic health--we are, compared to our experience, 5.4 million jobs behind where we should be. While we have lost 2.4 million jobs over this period, we have also failed to produce new jobs at normal rates. As the population grows, that means that more and more people are out of work, more than just the 2.4 million who had a job when this administration came into office, and who don't have one now. In addition, there are millions who should be in the labor force, who have either dropped out and stopped looking, or never entered the labor force--over two and a half million. So while the unemployment rate is officially 5.6 percent, counting those who have despaired of finding work in this economy the rate is actually 7.4 percent. The reason so many are discouraged from looking for work is clear-- the duration of unemployment is the longest in 20 years. The number of people who have exhausted their long-term unemployment benefits is growing. Despite repeated efforts, this Congress has refused to extend long-term unemployment benefits. Last month, no new private sector jobs were created. None. The small amount of hiring that happened was done by governments, not by the private sector, the only engine for real, sustained economic growth. We have enacted tax cuts that will cost us $2.3 trillion dollars, counting the extra interest needed because all of that money is borrowed. We have turned balanced budgets, and historically high surpluses, into historically high deficits. We are still 2.4 million jobs in the hole, by official numbers and millions more jobs short of where we should be this far into an economic recovery. This resolution shrugs off these sorry facts. It does nothing to change course in the face of these failures. As a matter of fact, this budget resolution will result in higher deficits than no change in current policy. No budget resolution at all would be better than the one before us today. I will vote against it and hope my colleagues will join me.

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. Earlier the distinguished Senator from Washington yielded to Senator Carper and me to allow us to both acknowledge support for her amendment and then a total of 10 minutes of morning business to speak to another issue.

Mr. BIDEN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that my colleagues would permit an additional total of 10 minutes, divided between the junior Senator from Delaware and myself.

Mr. BIDEN. Madam President, I am told we used up a lot of the time, necessarily. I ask unanimous consent to have an additional 5 minutes.

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I want to relay a telephone number, a number that may not sound familiar but you can be sure is memorized by thousands of women across the country. 1-800-799-SAFE--the number for the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Each month, over 16,000 women and men call the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with a bilingual staff and a TTY-line for the hearing impaired, the National Domestic Violence Hotline provides immediate, informed and confidential assistance to those caught in family violence. Oftentimes, it is the first call a battered woman makes, even before calling the police or a friend. The Hotline is located in Austin, TX, but answers telephone calls placed anywhere in the United States and the U.S. territories. A distressed caller is connected to a trained advocate who is able to provide crisis intervention counseling, help create a safety plan, directly connect the caller with a local shelter or provide a range of local referral information. Using a massive database listing more than 5,000 services nationally, one of 30 full or part-time advocates puts a caller in touch immediately with local programs offering shelter and direct care. I want to share with my colleagues two real-life stories from women who have called the Hotline. One caller dialed the Hotline after her boyfriend pulled a gun and threatened to kill her if she left him. Fearing for her life, she fled with her two young children. They ran to a nearby strip mall where she called the Hotline. As she told a Hotline advocate her story, she watched her abuser search for her in every store in the mall. Once a local shelter was contacted, arrangements were made to rescue the woman and her children from their hiding spot in a back alley behind the restaurant. An immigrant woman who spoke no English called from a community clinic. She had learned that for the past year her abusive husband had been raping their 15-year-old daughter. Her husband had no idea she was calling the Hotline. He had kept her so isolated on the ranch where they lived that she didn't even know her address. While the woman stayed on the line, an advocate contacted the sheriff's office and together they pieced together enough information to figure out her address. The sheriff made plans to confirm the child abuse at the daughter's school, after which the husband would be arrested immediately. After completing the exchange with the sheriff's office, the advocate contacted the nearest shelter and arranged to pick up the woman and her daughter at the clinic. These are real women who we see every day at work, at the grocery store and at the school parking lot whose lives have been dramatically changed, in part, by that first call to the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Created by the Violence Against Women Act, the Hotline answered its first call on February 21, 1996, and its one millionth call on August 4, 2003. In the past decade we've witnessed a sea of change in how Americans view domestic violence. It is no longer treated as a private, family matter, but as a public crime. As public awareness has grown--as the Hotline's telephone number is posted on bus billboards and websites, in school offices and doctor's waiting rooms-- there has been a dramatic increase in calls. Between 2000 and 2001 alone, call volume increased by 18.5 percent. In 2002, the Hotline answered almost 180,000 calls, an increase of 7.5 percent from the previous year. The Department of Defense recently requested that the Hotline accept calls from military personnel--a move that will certainly increase the call volume substantially. While the majority of the Hotline's day-to-day operating costs are paid with Federal dollars designated in annual spending bills, funding has not kept pace with the growing call volume and the Hotline's technology and telecommunication needs. This year, the spending bill appropriated only three million dollars to the Hotline. Older equipment, coupled with increased usage, has set the Hotline up to experience frequent problems with the network, data corruption and the lurking threat of a crash in the entire system. The Hotline tries to answer almost 500 calls a day with old computers and servers. Because the system is outdated and the staff is stretched thin, over 26,000 calls last year went unanswered due to long hold times or busy signals. We need to answer each and every one of the calls to the Hotline. Today I am launching an innovative and far-reaching solution to the Hotline's problems, the Connections Campaign. The Connections Campaign is a public/private partnership that teams up private telecommunication and technology companies with the Federal Government to solve the Hotline's crisis. Under the Connections Campaign, the same companies-- Microsoft, Sony, BellSouth, Verizon Wireless, IBM, Nortel Networks, Dell and others--that supply Americans with home computers, cell phones and telephone service are donating hardware and software to the Hotline. Items like mapping software, networked computers, servers, flat-screened monitors and telephone airtime are being pledged to the Hotline. This is just the beginning of a multi-year, multi-million dollar initiative to place the Hotline squarely in the twenty-first century. On the public side of the partnership, I am proud to introduce the Domestic Violence Connections Campaign Act of 2004 which will provide a million dollars to train and assist the Hotline's advocates so that they may effectively use the improved equipment provided by the Connections Campaign. In addition, the Act creates a new research grant program to be administered by the Attorney General that will review and analyze data generated by the Hotline. Taking into consideration needs for caller confidentiality and security, researchers will study Hotline data to determine the trends, potential gaps in service and geographical areas of need. Within three years of enactment, researchers will release a comprehensive Hotline study to Congress and the Attorney General. Finally, my bill provides an $800,000 grant program for the Hotline to increase public awareness about domestic violence and the Hotline's services. One hand clapping simply does not make enough noise. Federal, State and local government cannot always supply all the answers and resources to resolve our communities' pressing problems. Today's Connections Campaign recognizes that big problems warrant grand, collaborative solutions. Cooperation between the Federal Government and the private sector is critical to enhance the National Domestic Violence Hotline. A cornerstone of the Violence Against Women Act was my conviction that ending domestic violence and sexual assault required a coordinated, community response. We worked hard to ensure that emergency room personnel, police officers, victim advocates, shelter directors and court clerks worked together to implement the many mandates of the Violence Against Women Act. The Connections Campaign is Act Two. We are now asking that the corporate community get actively involved to strengthen a key safety net for women and their families, the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Today's legislation and the kick-off is just the beginning of what I envision to be a lasting connection between the Hotline and the technology and telecommunications community. I look forward to coming back to the Senate floor to inform my colleagues about the new computers, wireless headsets, upgraded software and other technology that could be provided to the Hotline through the Connections Campaign. In the meantime, let me close by commending and expressing my gratitude to Sheryl Cates, the director of the Hotline and her dedicated staff who are providing the first step to safe, new lives for millions of battered women. They are truly doing God's work. I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I want to relay a telephone number, a number that may not sound familiar but you can be sure is memorized by thousands of women across the country. 1-800-799-SAFE--the number for the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Each month, over 16,000 women and men call the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with a bilingual staff and a TTY-line for the hearing impaired, the National Domestic Violence Hotline provides immediate, informed and confidential assistance to those caught in family violence. Oftentimes, it is the first call a battered woman makes, even before calling the police or a friend. The Hotline is located in Austin, TX, but answers telephone calls placed anywhere in the United States and the U.S. territories. A distressed caller is connected to a trained advocate who is able to provide crisis intervention counseling, help create a safety plan, directly connect the caller with a local shelter or provide a range of local referral information. Using a massive database listing more than 5,000 services nationally, one of 30 full or part-time advocates puts a caller in touch immediately with local programs offering shelter and direct care. I want to share with my colleagues two real-life stories from women who have called the Hotline. One caller dialed the Hotline after her boyfriend pulled a gun and threatened to kill her if she left him. Fearing for her life, she fled with her two young children. They ran to a nearby strip mall where she called the Hotline. As she told a Hotline advocate her story, she watched her abuser search for her in every store in the mall. Once a local shelter was contacted, arrangements were made to rescue the woman and her children from their hiding spot in a back alley behind the restaurant. An immigrant woman who spoke no English called from a community clinic. She had learned that for the past year her abusive husband had been raping their 15-year-old daughter. Her husband had no idea she was calling the Hotline. He had kept her so isolated on the ranch where they lived that she didn't even know her address. While the woman stayed on the line, an advocate contacted the sheriff's office and together they pieced together enough information to figure out her address. The sheriff made plans to confirm the child abuse at the daughter's school, after which the husband would be arrested immediately. After completing the exchange with the sheriff's office, the advocate contacted the nearest shelter and arranged to pick up the woman and her daughter at the clinic. These are real women who we see every day at work, at the grocery store and at the school parking lot whose lives have been dramatically changed, in part, by that first call to the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Created by the Violence Against Women Act, the Hotline answered its first call on February 21, 1996, and its one millionth call on August 4, 2003. In the past decade we've witnessed a sea of change in how Americans view domestic violence. It is no longer treated as a private, family matter, but as a public crime. As public awareness has grown--as the Hotline's telephone number is posted on bus billboards and websites, in school offices and doctor's waiting rooms-- there has been a dramatic increase in calls. Between 2000 and 2001 alone, call volume increased by 18.5 percent. In 2002, the Hotline answered almost 180,000 calls, an increase of 7.5 percent from the previous year. The Department of Defense recently requested that the Hotline accept calls from military personnel--a move that will certainly increase the call volume substantially. While the majority of the Hotline's day-to-day operating costs are paid with Federal dollars designated in annual spending bills, funding has not kept pace with the growing call volume and the Hotline's technology and telecommunication needs. This year, the spending bill appropriated only three million dollars to the Hotline. Older equipment, coupled with increased usage, has set the Hotline up to experience frequent problems with the network, data corruption and the lurking threat of a crash in the entire system. The Hotline tries to answer almost 500 calls a day with old computers and servers. Because the system is outdated and the staff is stretched thin, over 26,000 calls last year went unanswered due to long hold times or busy signals. We need to answer each and every one of the calls to the Hotline. Today I am launching an innovative and far-reaching solution to the Hotline's problems, the Connections Campaign. The Connections Campaign is a public/private partnership that teams up private telecommunication and technology companies with the Federal Government to solve the Hotline's crisis. Under the Connections Campaign, the same companies-- Microsoft, Sony, BellSouth, Verizon Wireless, IBM, Nortel Networks, Dell and others--that supply Americans with home computers, cell phones and telephone service are donating hardware and software to the Hotline. Items like mapping software, networked computers, servers, flat-screened monitors and telephone airtime are being pledged to the Hotline. This is just the beginning of a multi-year, multi-million dollar initiative to place the Hotline squarely in the twenty-first century. On the public side of the partnership, I am proud to introduce the Domestic Violence Connections Campaign Act of 2004 which will provide a million dollars to train and assist the Hotline's advocates so that they may effectively use the improved equipment provided by the Connections Campaign. In addition, the Act creates a new research grant program to be administered by the Attorney General that will review and analyze data generated by the Hotline. Taking into consideration needs for caller confidentiality and security, researchers will study Hotline data to determine the trends, potential gaps in service and geographical areas of need. Within three years of enactment, researchers will release a comprehensive Hotline study to Congress and the Attorney General. Finally, my bill provides an $800,000 grant program for the Hotline to increase public awareness about domestic violence and the Hotline's services. One hand clapping simply does not make enough noise. Federal, State and local government cannot always supply all the answers and resources to resolve our communities' pressing problems. Today's Connections Campaign recognizes that big problems warrant grand, collaborative solutions. Cooperation between the Federal Government and the private sector is critical to enhance the National Domestic Violence Hotline. A cornerstone of the Violence Against Women Act was my conviction that ending domestic violence and sexual assault required a coordinated, community response. We worked hard to ensure that emergency room personnel, police officers, victim advocates, shelter directors and court clerks worked together to implement the many mandates of the Violence Against Women Act. The Connections Campaign is Act Two. We are now asking that the corporate community get actively involved to strengthen a key safety net for women and their families, the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Today's legislation and the kick-off is just the beginning of what I envision to be a lasting connection between the Hotline and the technology and telecommunications community. I look forward to coming back to the Senate floor to inform my colleagues about the new computers, wireless headsets, upgraded software and other technology that could be provided to the Hotline through the Connections Campaign. In the meantime, let me close by commending and expressing my gratitude to Sheryl Cates, the director of the Hotline and her dedicated staff who are providing the first step to safe, new lives for millions of battered women. They are truly doing God's work. I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Judiciary Committee be discharged from further consideration of H. Con. Res 355, and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration. It is honoring the University of Delaware football team.

Mr. BIDEN. Madam President, having been here over 30 years, I understand the Senate rules and that you are not allowed to refer to anybody sitting in the gallery. So I will not refer to the fact that anybody is sitting in the gallery. I stand here with great pride that my alma mater, the University of Delaware, has won the national football championship for Division I-AA. In my 32 years serving in the Senate for Delaware, I have had the opportunity to give hundreds of speeches on the Senate floor. We have much more, though, than a national championship to celebrate. With our nickname, the Fighting Blue Hens, when we were recruited by the University of Delaware, we probably wished they had some other name like the Fighting Tigers or something; but we are Blue Hens. But we are the Blue Hens, and we are proud of the fact that year in and year out we have this long tradition of having a first-rate football team. But none like this team. This team played one of the most outstanding seasons in college football history with a record of 15 to 1 and setting a school record for victories in any single season. After clinching their seventh Atlantic 10 Football Conference Championship, the 2003 squad sailed through the division I-AA playoffs outscoring our opponents with a combined score of 149 points to 23. In fact, they won the championship game by shutting down--and since our Parliamentarian is a graduate, I almost feel badly mentioning that great college--Colgate University 40 to 0. My only concern was if we had another game, I would have felt very badly for whomever we played because they just kept getting better and better. You can imagine Senator Carper and I and Congressman Castle attended the majority of these games as devoted fans. As I earlier said, this marks the university's first division I-AA title crown, but we earned six other football titles as a division II school, including when I was there playing. The last division II title was in 1979. The reason I mention that is it is significant because our current coach, K. C. Keeler, was a linebacker on that national championship team. In his second year at the helm at the university, K. C. Keeler took this team to a national championship. K. C. is the first to give his predecessor, my old coach, Tubby Raymond, credit for having recruited pretty good guys to play on that team. Let me conclude by saying I am often asked why I ever thought I should run for President of the United States, as I did, and attempt to get the nomination back in the eighties. There was a simple reason. I learned early on, after being a county councilman and then getting elected as a Senator, I was given the honor of presenting the Washington Touchdown Club's Timmie Award. We used to honor the best ``small college team in America.'' I had the opportunity of giving that to Tubby Raymond. There were people at an old hotel, including Supreme Court Justices and others. I never saw my old coach flustered, but as I stood up, introduced by Howard Cosell, to present him with this award, I gave him the award, handed him the trophy, and he turned and said: You know, I just want to tell you, Joe Biden was one of the best ball players I ever had play for me. And that was just being a Senator. So I figured if I had gotten elected President, I would have been able by another means to be named what I always wanted to be, an All- American. And that is the only reason I ever ran for President. I wanted to set that record straight. I am one of the best ball players Delaware ever had, which is simply not true. But I can tell you it is the only time my former coach was ever flustered. But this guy, Keeler, knows about my lack of talent and about how to recognize talent, and he produced the best football team probably in the history of the State of Delaware. We are here to congratulate them. I thank my colleagues for allowing us this time. I yield now to my colleague who is an equally avid football fan and a graduate of the University of Delaware.

Mr. BIDEN. Madam President, I ask for 1 additional minute.

Mr. BIDEN. Madam President, when the Senator was standing with Congressman Castle in the end zone looking at what was going on, I was in the other end zone begging Andy Hall to throw me the ball. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the concurrent resolution and the preamble be agreed to en bloc; that the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table en bloc; and that any statements relating to the resolution be printed in the Record, without intervening action or debate.

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I support this resolution commemorating an extraordinary holiday, International Women's Day; a day that is celebrated around the globe to mark women's achievements and to recognize pressing gender inequities still to be erased. There is no doubt that women have made tremendous strides toward equality and justice in the last century. International Women's Day provides an important chance to acknowledge women who have pioneered change and paved the way for millions of women and girls to access equal education, employment and opportunity. On the other side of the coin, International Women's Day provides an opportunity for us to make a new ``to-do'' list and highlight what remains to be done, both at home and abroad. Women's rights, or lack thereof, in the Middle East and South Asia assumed special prominence in the days and weeks after the tragic events of September 11. Americans became familiar with the Taliban's horrendous repression of Afghan women and girls. Two years after the United States removed the Taliban from power, Americans watched as the Afghan loya jirga, or grand council, met to adopt a new constitution-- an opportunity to debate and create enforceable women's rights. Yet it remains to be seen whether the country's constitution establishes tangible improvements to the plight of Afghan women. In a similar vein, the fall of Saddam Hussein has given Iraqi women an opportunity to engage in public life and seek equal rights. Indeed, the interim Iraqi constitution sets aside 25 percent female participation in the interim government. But the challenges to women's rights in that region of the world abound, ranging from engrained religious and cultural norms to poverty from years of strife. I am convinced, however, that lasting stability and representational government depends upon the emancipation and full participation of women in the Middle East and South Asia. International Women's Day is a chance for us to reiterate that message, in those regions and around the world, that empowering women is the key to lasting peace and prosperity. And to that end, the United States should provide critical resources to help support and empower women and girls around the globe--an articulated priority to this administration, but as of yet an unmet goal. A fitting tribute to International Women's Day would be ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, also known as the International Women's Rights treaty. It sets out basic women's rights--such as the right to an equal education and the right to own and inherit property. These rights are well settled in the United States, but unfortunately, they are not the norm in too many places around the globe. The treaty is stalled because of the administration's interminable treaty ``review.'' After first telling the Committee on Foreign Relations that it supported the treaty, it has commenced a review of the treaty that has now lasted nearly 2 years. To date, 174 countries have become party to the treaty. The United States stands with the likes of Iran, Afghanistan, Syria and Sudan as those few countries that have yet to become a party. This is not the company that our country--the place where the women's movement began--should keep. An administration that cares about the promotion of women's human rights should declare its unwavering support for the International Women's Rights treaty. International Women's Day is also a perfect time for my Senate colleagues to recognize and address the plight of refugee women. I urge them to show their support for the Women and Children in Armed Conflict Protection Act of 2003, the ``Protection Act'', S. 1001. There are nearly 20 million people homeless today because of war and internal conflict--and the majority of them are women and children. A tragic irony is that women and kids who find their way into refugee camps sometimes face abuse and exploitation in the very place that is supposed to provide security and safety. The Protection Act of 2003 requires the United States government to develop a comprehensive strategy to protect women and children in all stages of conflicts, and sets out specific codes of conduct for agencies running refugee camps. In addition, the bill supports a variety of programs that are providing help to women in war-torn countries, programs that range from tracing lost relatives to providing legal aid for rape survivors. Most importantly, the bill backs up all of its directives with money--$45 million per year--money that can make a real difference to women in such extreme crisis. According to Government reports, some 800,000 to 900,000 people are trafficked across international borders worldwide to be enslaved as sweatshop workers, prostitutes, agricultural workers, or domestic servants--up to 20,000 of them are trafficked into the United States. A recent New York Times Magazine article profiled the gory details of sex trafficking in America's towns and suburbs. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act is the first Federal legislation that attacked head-on the very serious crime and aftermath of human trafficking. The legislation is wide in scope, tackling among other items, Federal penalties for trafficking, international ramifications for trafficking and the immigration needs of trafficking victims. But there remains much to be done. I want to make sure that we have provided law enforcement all of the legal tools and financial resources they need to go after criminals who engage in trafficking. I want to find out if criminal penalties--both here and abroad--are sufficient to deter traffickers. I want to explore if there are innovative things which can be done with extradition and witness protection to encourage fearful victims and witnesses to come forward to help make these cases. Women and girls are overwhelmingly the victims of trafficking. Stepping up our attention to this crime means speaking up for international women's rights--a perfect endeavor on International Women's day. I will close my remarks on International Women's Day with a topic that my fellow Senators know animates me--ending violence against women. One in three--that is how many women worldwide are raped, beaten or sexually abused in their lifetime. Violence against women is the quintessential global issue. It strikes in wealthy and poor countries, ravages war-torn countries and peaceful ones alike, and plagues disparate cultures. In a nationwide poll, women in the United States recently named domestic violence as their number one concern--number one. Guaranteeing women safety and immediate accountability for violence is the first step towards creating equal opportunities in the public realm--it is the sock that must go on before the shoes. Our attention and efforts to eradicate violence against women must not wane, and indeed, we need to redouble our efforts. Our International Women's Day and every other day, women all over the world deserve nothing less.

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I rise today to make plain my strong opposition to the bill under consideration today, S. 1805, the ``Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.'' Let me state at the outset, I support the rights of law-abiding citizens to own and appropriately use firearms. But this bill has nothing to do with protecting those citizens' rights. Instead, this bill is about protecting rogue gun manufacturers that sell defective products and rogue gun dealers who turn a blind eye to suspicious sales and thefts. The shorthand title for the bill is accurate, the Gun Industry Immunity Act. I won't mince words, this bill gives an entire industry a free pass. In exchange for that free pass, hundreds of thousands of victims across the county will confront closed doors at the courthouse. While I recognize that the bill carves out a set of exceptions of permissible law suits, this is cold comfort. The exceptions are extremely narrow and do not provide reasonable opportunities for legitimate lawsuits to proceed. I am deeply troubled by the fact that this bill will stop pending and future civil lawsuits against the gun industry, including those filed in the wake of the DC Sniper shootings. As the American public well knows, prior to their killing spree, John Muhammad and Lee Malvo allegedly obtained a Bushmaster rifle from a store in Tacoma, Washington, the infamous Bull's Eye Shooter Supply Shop. This rifle was one of 238 weapons that disappeared from the store's inventory over a three year period. More than fifty of those same ``missing'' firearms turned up in crime traces. Civil suits have been filed against Bull's Eye alleging that the store was negligent by failing to keep track of its weapons, and against the gun manufacturer alleging that continuing to supply such dangerous weapons to a store that cannot maintain accurate track is also negligent conduct. But under today's bill, these allegations do not fit the narrow exceptions of permissible suits. Legal experts David Boies and Lloyd N. Cutler, as well as the Congressional Research Service, opine that these sniper suits will be dismissed immediately if the President signs the gun industry immunity act. In real terms this means that the snipers' victims, including Denise Johnson, widow of the Montgomery County bus driver Conrad Johnson, and the family of James ``Sonny'' Buchanan, who was gunned down while mowing the lawn, will have no remedies. Another lawsuit that will be derailed if the gun industry immunity bill passes is a 1999 case against a gun dealer who repeatedly supplied a so-called ``straw purchaser'' with handguns, one of which killed 9- year old Nafis Jefferson in Philadelphia, PA. I was struck by what Nafis' mother said when advised that her lawsuit may be dismissed. She stated, ``Before this happened, I believed in the American dream. You work hard, you have a family, you have a good life. This--this has devastated me. I understand commerce, but there also has to be common sense.'' Under the gun industry immunity bill it is quite likely that a pending suit filed by the families of two New Jersey police officers will be dismissed. The officers' families have sued the gun dealer who sold the gun used to shoot them, one of twelve guns the dealer sold in one transaction, in cash, in circumstances so suspicious that the dealer subsequently called to alert the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Yet rather than having the careful consideration of the facts by judge and jury, today, Congress will decide that Mr. McGuire's and Mr. Lemongello's families cannot pursue any remedies in civil court. A family in Massachusetts will also be denied a right to sue should the Gun Industry Immunity Bill pass. Twenty-six year old Danny Guzman was killed with a 9 mm Kahr Arms gun. The gun was one of a dozen taken from Kahr's unsecured factory, some by the manufacturer's own employee with a criminal record and history of drug abuse. The guns were taken before serial numbers had been stamped on them, making them very difficult to trace. Eventually, a young child found the gun used in Mr. Guzman's death behind an apartment building close to the scene of the shooting. A Massachusetts court found that the suit alleges valid negligence and public nuisance claims against the gun manufacturer and it is set for trial. Yet today's bill would deny Mr. Guzman's family their day in court. Some have characterized the lawsuits against the gun manufacturers and dealers as ``junk'' suits that are cluttering our court houses and bankrupting the industry and thus, justifying this extraordinary solution of blanket civil immunity. But our local, State and Federal judges and court personnel are no where to be found in this debate. No letters or reports document an inundation of firearm lawsuits plugging up the halls of justice. Furthermore, there is no evidence that our State and Federal courts cannot efficiently and effectively manage the pending forearm lawsuits. Indeed, the opposite is true. Look no further than a recently issued opinion by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in which the court addressed the certified question on whether state law created a duty to protect victims of handgun violence from injury caused by illegal gun trafficking. This Court wrote a careful and balanced opinion that fully addressed the issue. As a former Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, I am well aware of the complicated and deliberate process courts follow to develop tort law. I am not persuaded that Congress should tread into these waters so adeptly managed by our nation's judges and juries. Gun manufacturers and dealers are not above the law. The gun industry Immunity bill is a radical and unprecedented attempt to undercut common tort law, usurp the responsibilities of judges and juries and most importantly, deny worthy victims of their day in court. I urge my colleagues to vote against S. 1805, and thank the distinguished Senator from Rhode Island for his hard work fighting this bill.

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, parliamentary inquiry: Is there a unanimous consent agreement on time?

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, ask the indulgence of my colleague from Ohio, who I guess has the floor now, would he yield me 30 seconds?

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I associate myself with the remarks of my friend from Connecticut. This is about the raw exercise of political power. I do not know how many times in my 31 years I have ever heard a Senator stand up on the floor when he represents the greatest number of constituents affected by a bill, who are major players in his State, and say he disagrees with their position. We are missing an awful lot of that. I acknowledge that this man has some political courage. We all would do a lot better if there were a lot more of it to go around. I yield the floor.

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I rise today in support of the Stabilization and Reconstruction Civilian Management Act of 2004, a bill that will increase the ability of our civilian agencies to effectively respond to complex emergencies and stabilize countries in the wake of war or crisis. I commend and express my gratitude to Chairman Lugar for his leadership on this issue. Since December of last year, the chairman and I have been engaged in discussions with experts from in and outside government on whether the United States is adequately organized and equipped, and its personnel trained, to deal with post- conflict reconstruction. Our premise was this: in the last decade, the United States has taken on post-conflict stabilization missions in countries such as Bosnia, East Timor, Haiti, Somalia, and now Afghanistan and Iraq. In the decade to come, whether we like it or not, nation building will remain vital to our national security. We have learned a lot from our efforts. And we have made a lot of mistakes in the process. One lesson that I think is clear is that we have not done a very good job of turning our experience into tools for the future. So the chairman and I put together a group of outside advisers who had held senior positions in the last two administrations; we also invited officials from this administration to give their ideas. The bill we are introducing today is the product of those consultations. I wish to thank all of the participants of the group for their invaluable input to this bipartisan initiative. Addressing the needs present in post-conflict reconstruction--and in particular, in countries that are on the verge of becoming failed states--is one of the greatest challenges we face today. It matters to the people living in those nations, and it matters to the American people. A bipartisan commission organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Association of the U.S. Army found, to no one's surprise, that ``failed states matter--for national security as well as for humanitarian reasons. If left to their own devices, such states can become sanctuaries for terrorist networks, organized crime and drug traffickers, as well as pose grave humanitarian challenges and threats to regional stability.'' We should not have to reinvent the wheel every time we are faced with a stabilization crisis--it's inefficient and ineffective. Rather than address crises on an ad hoc basis--cobbling together plans, procedures, and personnel--as we have been doing, we need to be forward-thinking, comprehensive, and strategic. The thrust of this legislation is to do precisely that. The bill authorizes the creation of an office within the State Department that will be the focal point for creating plans and procedures to respond to crises, and it establishes a corps of active duty and reserve personnel who will be able to deploy rapidly when and where critical needs arise. Mr. President, this bill is not a cure-all. But I believe it is a good start to addressing a critical need: that of strengthening our civilian capacity to handle complex emergencies overseas. Again, I thank Chairman Lugar and the members of our policy advisory group for their work on this issue. I yield the floor.

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I rise today in support of the Stabilization and Reconstruction Civilian Management Act of 2004, a bill that will increase the ability of our civilian agencies to effectively respond to complex emergencies and stabilize countries in the wake of war or crisis. I commend and express my gratitude to Chairman Lugar for his leadership on this issue. Since December of last year, the chairman and I have been engaged in discussions with experts from in and outside government on whether the United States is adequately organized and equipped, and its personnel trained, to deal with post- conflict reconstruction. Our premise was this: in the last decade, the United States has taken on post-conflict stabilization missions in countries such as Bosnia, East Timor, Haiti, Somalia, and now Afghanistan and Iraq. In the decade to come, whether we like it or not, nation building will remain vital to our national security. We have learned a lot from our efforts. And we have made a lot of mistakes in the process. One lesson that I think is clear is that we have not done a very good job of turning our experience into tools for the future. So the chairman and I put together a group of outside advisers who had held senior positions in the last two administrations; we also invited officials from this administration to give their ideas. The bill we are introducing today is the product of those consultations. I wish to thank all of the participants of the group for their invaluable input to this bipartisan initiative. Addressing the needs present in post-conflict reconstruction--and in particular, in countries that are on the verge of becoming failed states--is one of the greatest challenges we face today. It matters to the people living in those nations, and it matters to the American people. A bipartisan commission organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Association of the U.S. Army found, to no one's surprise, that ``failed states matter--for national security as well as for humanitarian reasons. If left to their own devices, such states can become sanctuaries for terrorist networks, organized crime and drug traffickers, as well as pose grave humanitarian challenges and threats to regional stability.'' We should not have to reinvent the wheel every time we are faced with a stabilization crisis--it's inefficient and ineffective. Rather than address crises on an ad hoc basis--cobbling together plans, procedures, and personnel--as we have been doing, we need to be forward-thinking, comprehensive, and strategic. The thrust of this legislation is to do precisely that. The bill authorizes the creation of an office within the State Department that will be the focal point for creating plans and procedures to respond to crises, and it establishes a corps of active duty and reserve personnel who will be able to deploy rapidly when and where critical needs arise. Mr. President, this bill is not a cure-all. But I believe it is a good start to addressing a critical need: that of strengthening our civilian capacity to handle complex emergencies overseas. Again, I thank Chairman Lugar and the members of our policy advisory group for their work on this issue. I yield the floor.

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, in my 33 years as a U.S. Senator from Delaware, I have had the opportunity to give hundreds of speeches on the Senate floor, but today is a first. It gives me tremendous pride today to officially congratulate my alma mater, the University of Delaware, on winning its first-ever NCAA Division I-AA National Football Championship. Players, fans, and students will celebrate this milestone in the University of Delaware's history at a rally on Tuesday, February 10, 2004, at the Bob Carpenter Center. And we have much more than the national championship to celebrate. The Fightin' Blue Hens played one of the most outstanding seasons in college football history, with a record of 15 and 1 and setting a school record for victories in a season. After clinching their seventh Atlantic 10 Football Conference championship, the 2003 squad sailed through the Division I-AA playoff, outscoring opponents by a combined score of 149 to 23. In fact, they won the championship game by shutting down Colgate 42 to 0. You can be sure I attended every playoff game, along with tens of thousands of other devoted Blue Hen fans. As I said earlier, this marks the University of Delaware's first Division I-AA title crown, but we earned six other football titles as a Division II school. The last Division II title in 1979 was significant because our current coach, K.C. Keeler, played on that 1979 championship team as a linebacker. In just his second year at the helm of UD football, K.C. Keeler took his team to the national championship; but, K.C. is the first to give his predecessor, legendary Hall of Fame coach Tubby Raymond, all the credit for recruiting and building this team. Tubby, this championship is yours, too. To be sure, UD football has come a long way since the 1960s when I was at the University. But at a time when we all need some good news, the 2003 University of Delaware football team has given our State plenty to cheer about. My warmest congratulations to the coaches, players, parents, school officials, cheerleaders, marching band members, students, and, of course, the diehard fans, as we celebrate being national football champions.

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I rise today to honor a true business leader and long-time friend in my State of Delaware, Jim Wolfe. Many of us in public office talk about creating good-paying jobs and fighting for the middle class, Jim Wolfe has lived those goals throughout his professional career. For the past 11 years, Jim Wolfe has led the Chrysler, now the DiamlerChrysler Automobile Assembly Plant in Newark, DE. Tomorrow, he is hanging up his hat as plant manager to take the helm as president and CEO of the 2,800-member Delaware State Chamber of Commerce. As plant manager of Delaware's DiamlerChrysler plant, which is home to the popular, award-winning Dodge Durango, Jim orchestrated a dozen overhauls of the facility to retool it for new car models. More significantly, he oversaw the re-training of thousands of workers to upgrade their skills. The DiamlerChrysler plant in Delaware is one of only a few U.S. auto facilities remaining on the East Coast. It is an economic engine in Delaware, employing more than 2,300 people and contributing $363 million annually to our State's economy. The financial domino effect goes even further: one auto worker creates another 1.6 jobs in other industries, such as transportation, retail services, and labor. Jim Wolfe is no stranger to the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce. For the past year he has served as Chairman of the Chamber's independent Board of Directors. He is a long-time member of the Chamber's Board of Directors and Executive Committee, as well as serving as Chairman of the Delaware Manufacturing Association. On a personal note, Jim has been a great and trusted friend and advisor to me for many years. I have visited with him and his workers at the Newark DiamlerChrysler Plant more times than I can count, and he always gave it to me straight. When the facility was in jeopardy of closing in the early 1990s, he counseled me on how to help save this manufacturing gem for our State, which we accomplished. Jim is a 40-year employee of Chrysler. We stole him from his native Michigan, but he and his wife Laura are now part of the Delaware family. Jim's stature in the business community has been earned and is well- deserved. He will bring a hands-on knowledge of the business world to his new position directing the Chamber's many affiliates, including the Manufacturing Association, the Delaware Retail Council, The Public Policy Institute, and the Small Business Alliance. DiamlerChrysler's loss is truly the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce's gain. But we all win because we'll continue to benefit from Jim's affable personality, skilled business acumen and foresight as a community leader in Delaware.

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, Tom Carper and I have a resolution at the desk, and I ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. BIDEN. I thank the Chair. I thank the clerk for reading the resolution in its entirety. Mr. President, my friend, our colleague, Bill Roth, died while the Senate was out of session. Otherwise, I am certain there would have been a profuse outpouring of sentiment on the floor, as when any person of consequence dies. Bill Roth was a man of the Senate and a man of consequence. He was also, even though we were on opposite sides of the aisle, one of my closest friends in the Senate. We had the honor, as my friend and colleague, Senator Carper, and I do, of riding Amtrak together. In Bill's case and my case, we rode the train together almost every day for 28 years. Literally, for the first 24 years probably every day the Senate was in session. You can't have that kind of proximity with a man or a woman without getting to know them pretty darn well. I got to know Bill very well. I got to know his family. I got to know his hopes, his dreams, his fears, and his concerns, as he did mine, my family, my hopes, dreams, and concerns. An unusual thing developed: a bond of trust. I can and will say for the record that there is no person in public life I came to trust more than Bill Roth. I trusted him with my concerns. I trusted him with family issues. I trusted him with personal issues. And I trusted his judgment on political issues, even when he and I disagreed. We would ask each other questions: What do you think would happen if I do the following? What do you think the consequence would be? Even though we were in opposing parties, neither hesitated to give our friend the best advice we could. I once said that running against Bill Roth was like running against a wheat thrasher: big, gobbles up everything in his way, and he was very silent. Before it was all over, everything was harvested. Bill Roth, I think, was the most underestimated man with whom I have served going into my sixth term as a Senator. I might note for the record that Bill Roth's family is incredibly talented. His wife, Jane Roth, is one step away from the Supreme Court as a Third Circuit Court of Appeals judge. None of us who know her ever hesitated to support her. We pushed her. She is highly regarded and, as my friend from Pennsylvania, Senator Specter, knows--and no one knows the Third Circuit better than he does; literally no one knows it better than he does--is one of the most respected jurists on that venerable circuit. His son, Bud, is a lawyer who is an extremely talented young man, and his daughter, Katie, is a doctor. I might note that Bill finally had a namesake. Just shortly before he died, he got to see his daughter's son who they named William. Bill actually died here in Washington visiting Katie. This is a man who lived a full life, raised a great family, and will be missed not just by his family, but by our entire State and all those who knew Bill. I can say without equivocation that I would have been honored, quite frankly, to have any one of his senior staff members work on my staff. One of the ways I think you measure the mark of a national leader is to look at the people with whom he or she surrounds himself or herself. Look at the people who they pick to represent them. Look at the people who they choose to be their alter ego. Without exception, Bill Roth chose administrative assistants and senior staff members out of the same mold as himself: always totally honorable, balanced, straightforward, not at all ideological. I have close friendships, personal friendships, with Bill's former staff directors, people who still live in Delaware and, I might add--I don't want to ruin their reputations--support me politically, support me in my races. It is hard, as I said, in a State as small as ours--I see my friend from Utah, which has grown to be a very large State relative to us, but when I first arrived here, when his dad was here, with whom I served, I think we were a little bit bigger than Utah at the time. In small States, everyone knows everyone. Everyone has a sense of who everyone else is. It is hard in a State as small as ours, when you are in close proximity to people you respect, not to let it show, and that is exactly what happened in Delaware. We went through 28 years of serving together, and I cannot think of one single solitary time--not one single occasion--where Bill Roth had or I ever had even a negative inference asserted about the other guy. We have a tradition in Delaware of not being very negative and partisan. I can tell you with the single exception of one highly contested political race, you never heard Tom Carper, you never heard our sole Congressman and former Governor, Mike Castle, you never heard in my State any of us criticizing the other. It has been a wonderful State to represent. Bill Roth set the pattern. He surrounded himself with people of character such as himself, and that is something that should be strived for. Bill, as I said, was known on the Senate floor, known in the country like few of us will be for the Fulbright scholarships, for the Roth IRAs. Everybody knows that Bill Roth was a man who promoted savings. He was a man who was tight with the taxpayers' money, which is a great asset. We used to kid. Every once in a while we would go to a function here in Washington and we would take a cab together. I remember once Bill leaning in to talk to the cab driver. I said: What are you doing? He said: I gave him a dime tip and told him to vote Democrat. He also had a sense of humor, which most people on the floor never got a chance to see. I don't know anybody who worked with Bill Roth who ever suggested that you could not work with Bill Roth; that he would not weigh in. One of the things I want to mention about Senator Roth, though--and I am trying to move through this in the interests of time because I know we have the State of the Union and I know matters are going to be brought up today--is that one of the hallmarks of his career is he had a real sense of proportion, a sense of proportion that is missing today in much of public life. He fully understood that the Federal Government was both dangerous and necessary, that it is of value and sometimes part of the problem. He never had any trouble distinguishing between when it should be proactive and when it should not be active at all. He was not driven by ideology that blinded him to the needs of the people of my State, the Nation, or blinded him to civil liberties and civil rights. He used to always surprise many of my Democratic colleagues because Bill was always so conservative on tax policy. I hope I don't get my friend from Utah in trouble, but one of the things about him is he is a man of independence. I think it surprised some of my colleagues when he voted against the constitutional amendment on the flag. They said: Wait a minute, this guy is a conservative. It is because he is a conservative, I might add, that he did vote against it. But it would always surprise my colleagues on the Democratic caucus. They would say: Wait a minute, Bill Roth is a strong proponent of Title IX. That is the title that says you have to spread a proportionate amount of money on women in sports and colleges and universities. Bill Roth was very strong on women's rights. To the chagrin of his colleagues and some of mine, he is in large part a reason there is no drilling in ANWR. Bill Roth is a Republican leader of the effort to see there was no drilling in ANWR. We have the Tongass Forest in Alaska, which is multiple times the size of my State, because of Bill Roth. Bill Roth had an environmental record that could easily have been associated with a liberal Democrat. Bill Roth's views on women's rights, civil rights, was moderate to liberal. It always used to surprise people on this side of the aisle when they would say, whoa, was that Bill Roth who just voted on this, that, or the other thing? Bill Roth was a complex man, a man who could not be pigeonholed or characterized by a single label. But he was ultimately a practical guy, a man who knew what he thought, what he believed, and very quietly and unhesitatingly never, never ceased or backed off from what he thought was a right thing to do. On a personal note, like all of you in these cynical times--I would like you all to know that Bill Roth was anything but cynical. Bill Roth was not only an honorable man, Bill Roth was a noble man. The word ``nobility'' comes to mind, to me. When I learned of his death--and I was caught off guard as I was asked by the press about it--the first thing that came to mind was: He's a noble man. He's a noble man. Let me explain what I mean by that. It is the way he dealt with people. It is the way he acted. Name someone for me in contemporary politics who was a winner of the Bronze Star and never once mentioned it. You cannot find a single piece of campaign literature that I am aware of. I never heard him speak of it. I never heard his campaign use it. Who, today, would not be out there talking about having been the recipient of a Bronze Star--to prove their patriotism, to prove their bravery? Bill Roth never, never mentioned it. This is a politician who was not afraid to use gimmicks. This is a guy who rode an elephant to make a point, out here in front of the Capitol. This is a guy who talked about the $3,000 toilet seats and would hoist up toilet seats. He was a bit of a showman in that regard. But when it came to talking about himself, Bill Roth never did. He had this sense of nobility about him. The other thing I loved about Bill Roth, in an environment where--I guess it has always been this case in politics--where money is king, campaigns cost so much money--Bill Roth was the chairman of the Finance Committee. Bill Roth could have raised more money than the Lord Almighty. But he always used to drive his chiefs of staff crazy when he wouldn't do what other people legally would do. He wouldn't call in the heads of the corporation and the business community and others who had great interest in what went on before the Finance Committee. He wouldn't do it. Bill Roth had trouble raising money. He was uncomfortable. I loved him for it. I loved the fact that he was uncomfortable doing it. The other thing that used to drive me crazy sometimes, to show you how he was, I remember we had a little fight on the floor here about a thing most people don't know much about but in Delaware it is a big ticket item financially for the State--escheatment. Escheatment means when somebody dies and leaves no heir and owns a security, under the rules that exist now, that money reverts to the State of incorporation. So let's say you owned 1,000 shares of stock of General Motors and you passed away, you had no heirs, the estate was left--the State gets the estate. But which State gets it? Historically it has been the State where you are incorporated. So if General Motors is incorporated in Delaware, even though its business is in Michigan, the money goes to Delaware. That is a big amount in their budget. There was a suit filed in the Supreme Court but the Supreme Court said, no, it is OK to do it that way, but it is up to the Congress to change it if they wanted to. Mr. President, 78 Senators said let's change that, and 370-some Congressmen said let's change that. I didn't think it was a good idea to change it. I have a simple rule. I say it straightforward. I think I never take personally the competition for highway funds or bridges or programs. We all compete, each of our States, for that. I take it very personally when my colleague or a colleague in the Senate decides to take an action that would benefit his State only marginally, but would do great damage to my State. I take that very personally. Changing law on escheatment would have been marginally beneficial to 47 other States but a gigantic detriment to my State. So I went to Daniel Patrick Moynihan; New York was affected by this. I went to my friend, my friend who is no longer here, Al D'Amato--affectionately referred to as pothole Al. And I went to my friend Senator Kennedy from Massachusetts, and we said we are going to do what we can to see this doesn't change. I will tell you the end of the story. We ended up winning. Even though over three-quarters of the Senate cosponsored the change and more than that in the House, we ended up winning in the end of the day. That was because our colleagues realized we took it personally, it didn't affect their States very positively, and they in fact saw the better part of valor here and were willing to help us. I remember standing in the well of the Senate saying to Bill: Bill, you are chairman of the Finance Committee. Let your colleagues know this is important to you. He said: I don't know. You tell them. You tell them. He was even uncomfortable saying that. He was one of the most powerful men in the Senate and he wouldn't say: Hey, look, Bennett, this is important to me. Please help me. He wouldn't even do that. Although he had all this power, the thing that was so beautiful about him, he was uncomfortable with power. I think it is always healthy when people are uncomfortable with wielding power. But he never hesitated to wield it when he thought it was absolutely clear cut. So this was a guy who was a noble man. I just watched him. I watched him operate for over 28 years. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to proceed for 3 more minutes.

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, there is a quotation engraved on the wall at Union Station. It goes like this: Be noble, and the nobleness that lies in other men sleeping but never dead will rise in majesty to meet thine own. Bill Roth also brought out the humility in those who worked with him and those who were around him. There is much more to say about him. I have said too much. I apologize. I did not realize that time was controlled. My colleague from Delaware, a cosponsor of this resolution, Senator Carper, would like to speak. I ask whether my colleagues would object if Senator Carper is able to proceed.

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, Americans believe in fair play: the right for everyone to have his say, the opportunity to get a job and make your own way in the world, a fair wage for a day's work. This is not just idealism--we figure we are all better off if the system we live in is open and fair. That belief in fair play is the foundation of this Senate and indeed of our constitutional system itself. My father worked hard and he taught me that fairness is our most fundamental value. He taught me that we always have to stand up against the abuse of power at every level. Whenever someone uses their advantage, be it wealth, education, size, strength, whatever it may be, against someone else, it is wrong, and it goes against everything we stand for, everything we are as a nation and a people. Not just the process is flawed. The product of that process, the Omnibus appropriations bill before us today, is flawed, too. It is unfair. That back-room, unrepresentative process has produced legislation that deserves to be defeated, not just because of the way it was cobbled together, but because of what will happen if it becomes law. Here is one result of that process: millions of men and women who will lose their right to time and a half overtime pay, a cornerstone of our workers' rights for over half a century. Both the House and the Senate, with bipartisan majorities, voted last year to block new Labor Department rules that weaken overtime protections. But this bill cancels out that decision, allowing those rules to go forward. The latest news from the jobs front--that hundreds of thousands of Americans have given up looking for work after we have gone through 3 years of job losses--sent a shock through financial markets. It should worry us all. Now is not the time to be cutting the pay of those Americans who have jobs. But that is just what weakening overtime pay will do. While recent economic news has been positive, there is little hope for sustained, healthy economic growth without solid, good-paying jobs. Consumer confidence and consumer spending--the keys to our economy-- ultimately depend on Americans' confidence that they have a secure job, a job that pays a fair wage for a fair day's work. For over half a century, American workers have known what that meant--a 40-hour workweek, and time and a half if you worked overtime. You could count on that extra pay in exchange for the extra burden of working more than 40 hours a week. Many workers often have no choice about working overtime--it is up to their boss. But if they have to work those extra hours, their employer is required to pay them time and a half. This has been a cornerstone of the social contract between labor and management, between workers and employers. But despite the key role of the 40-hour workweek, despite the wide- spread reliance on time and a half pay for work past those 40 hours, this administration has proposed radical changes in the regulations governing overtime pay. When I spoke here as a cosponsor of Senator Harkin's amendment here on the floor of the Senate back in September, we heard from some supporters of the rule changes that they would not decrease the number of workers eligible for overtime pay. But if there was any doubt about the real motivation behind these regulations, just look at the regulations themselves. They provide explicit instructions to employers on methods they could use to avoid increasing the pay of employees who, we are told, will become eligible for overtime pay. So all of those workers we were told would benefit, who would ``automatically'' qualify for time-and-a-half overtime pay, if their pay is under $425 a week, could easily see not one dime of new pay. Employers are coached on ways to avoid any new costs and still comply with the regulations. So don't tell me this is going to add to workers wages--that claim is refuted in the regulations themselves. And for other workers, with pay over that threshold, the regulations clearly threaten to take away overtime protections. They want to make it easier for employers to reclassify as many as eight million hourly workers who now get overtime pay, to make them ineligible for overtime pay. Right now, if you are not ``white collar''--working in management, essentially--your boss has to pay you time and a half for all the work you do over 40 hours a week. The idea is that more highly educated workers, who participate in management, who have significant authority over the workplace, are more properly classified as salaried, not hourly workers. They get a fixed amount of pay, no matter how many hours they may put in a week. Hourly workers, on the other hand, who do not manage the conditions under which they work, who have less to say about how the workweek is organized, must be compensated if they work more than the basic 40 hours. That has been the definition of a fair day's work for a fair day's pay for more than half a century, and its basic fairness still makes sense today. But the administration's new regulations would make it easier--would actually create an incentive--for employers to classify workers who have little advanced education and little or no authority, to classify those workers as white collar workers. Overnight, under these new regulations, millions of workers could lose the right to overtime pay. These rules are designed not only to make it easier to reclassify workers, but to make it pay for employers who do so. They will save money, since they will no longer be required to pay workers the time and a half rate that they are now guaranteed. No change in the number of hours they could be required to do, no change in their education, no change in their responsibilities--just a change in the regulations in Washington, and they are out overtime pay. That is one of the many reasons this legislation should be defeated, but it is not the only one. Right now we have a law on the books that makes sure everyone who buys a gun is checked to see if they have a criminal record--or if they are on our terrorist watch list. Those records are kept for 90 days--long enough to find out if a gun was sold to a criminal or terrorist, someone who initially may have appeared to have no criminal record or other ``red flag'' that would signal he is a bad guy. Ninety-seven percent of the times that the reporting system discovered that a bad guy--a terrorist, a wife-beater, whatever--had mistakenly been sold--a weapon, it took more than 24 hours to figure it out. Destroying those records in 24 hours will destroy our chances of catching bad guys. The change in this legislation will mean that 97 percent of the criminals or others who are mistakenly sold a weapon will go undetected by a system that was supposed to make us safer. Does the public know about this? I don't think so. That is because of the closed-door, backroom deal making that cobbled this massive bill together. This provision has never previously been considered by the House or the Senate. Bad process, bad product. And that is true for what the leadership did with the issue of media ownership. Last year, the FCC decided to abandon its long-standing limitation that said no company or person could own television stations reaching more than 35 percent of the Nation's viewing audience. The FCC raised that limit to 45 percent, threatening harmful consolidation among media outlets that could undermine competition and diversity among broadcast voices. The FCC's actions were met with consternation from all sides of the political spectrum, and both the House and Senate voted with bipartisan majorities to forestall this change. But the will of the Congress was cast aside. The leadership of the Congress--mind you, not the Members of the House and Senate--under pressure from an administration eager to take care of large corporate interests, removed the 1-year restriction on the FCC's changes and replaced it with a new permanent 39 percent cap. The list of bad provisions goes on. When we wrote the farm bill in the last Congress, with the support of both parties, we included a requirement that when we shop at the grocery store, we know what country our produce and meats come from. That rule--requiring labeling that indicates the country of origin-- was to go into effect this year. But this legislation delays that rule for 2 years. It rewrites the farm bill to delay that rule--something neither the House nor the Senate voted to do. Since that change was put into this bill, we have now found out that mad cow disease made its way into our country from Canada. Not a major cause for alarm, but certainly a lot of folks would now want to know where their beef comes from. But it will be 2 years before they get that information, if this bill passes. There is one other thing that has to be mentioned here today. We have come through the last 3 years, including several months of strong economic growth, but we are still not creating new jobs. For the first time since the Great Depression, we have gone 3 straight years without creating a single new job. Not one. The unemployment rate has come down recently, but that is because the job picture is so bleak that over 300,000 people just stopped looking. Long-term unemployment is a much bigger problem these days, especially in our hard-hit manufacturing sector. The kinds of changes we have gone through in recent years means that many of those jobs just won't be coming back. Those that will come back will return slowly. That leaves hundreds of thousands of Americans running out of their long-term unemployment benefits. But we went out of session last fall and let the extended unemployment compensation program just expire, at the worst possible time. And we come back today with this appropriations bill, leaving that program expired and those Americans without benefits. There are now 2.4 million fewer jobs overall than there were when the last recession began. Every month, about 100,000 more workers exhaust their existing benefits. The most recent report of people dropping out of the job hunt altogether is all the proof we need that long-term unemployment is a key feature of this economy right now. This is not the time to let the program expire, but this bill, which covers so many programs and so many policies in so many parts of our Government, fails to address this problem. That is unacceptable. For the bad policies that are in it, and for the good policies that have been dropped from it or simply ignored, I urge my colleagues to join me in voting against cloture on this bill. This conference report continues the administration's attempt to undo the equation we put in place when I wrote the 1994 Crime Bill: more police equals less crime. The conference report cuts COPS by 24 percent, and cuts the Local Law Enforcement Block Grant program almost in half. These are proven programs that help local police departments beef up their staffs and modernize their equipment, and the cuts couldn't be coming at a worse time. There is only $756 million for COPS in the conference report, a drastic cut from the fiscal year 2003 level of $978 million. COPS' core program--the initiative that helps local police departments hire new community police officers--is funded at just $120 million, a 30-percent cut from last year and a far cry from the late nineties when the hiring program regularly received over a billion dollars per year. These cuts are shortsighted, ill-conceived, and I fear they will significantly hurt local law enforcement's ability to fight crime. In a time of color-coded alerts, a rising murder rate, and an FBI increasingly focused on counterterrorism and away from violent crime, we are inexplicably asking the men and women of law enforcement to do much more with much less. When asked to justify this approach, the administration responds that Federal resources for ``first responders'' are way up. Respectfully, that simply is not an adequate answer, and it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the needs of local law enforcement. Defending the homeland against a terrorist attack and preventing a woman from being raped are simply two different problems that require different solutions and different sets of contributions from the Federal Government. I think Massachusetts Public Safety Secretary Edward Flynn is on the right track when he says, ``terrorism is the monster that ate criminal justice''. We need to dedicate sufficient resources to fight international terrorism and local crime at the same time, but this conference report falls far short in this regard. I recently received a letter from the International Association of Chiefs of Police where they express ``grave concern'' over the funding levels for COPS and the Local Law Enforcement Block Grant contained in this conference report. In their letter, the IACP states their ``belief that at this crucial time in our history, we cannot afford to reduce the effectiveness of our nation's state and local law enforcement agencies by cutting vital federal assistance programs.'' The Nation's police chiefs are not alone in their concern. According to the U.S. Conference of Mayors: too many families are still being ravaged by illegal drugs, too many citizens and law enforcement officers are put in danger due to drug and gun related crimes, and property and violent crimes are still a major issue in too many communities. They also strongly oppose the cuts in this conference report. The National Association of Police Organizations wrote me to say that this conference report ``does not sufficiently address the needs of America's police officers in their dual fight against terrorist threats and domestic crime.'' I cannot support the cuts this conference report proposes, and I encourage my colleagues to listen to their mayors and police officers before casting their vote. Mr. McCain. Mr. President, because of time constraints, my comments will be brief. I will, however, make extensive remarks about the omnibus bill at a later time. We are nearly 4 full months into fiscal year 2004 and we are still without 7 of the 13 annual appropriations bills. For the second time in less than a year, we are considering a massive omnibus appropriations bill, with this one totaling a whopping $820 billion. Sadly, this conference report is loaded with over $11 billion in special interest pork-barrel projects and legislative riders that have no business in this or any other spending bill. This omnibus appropriations bill has received considerable and justifiable criticism in the press and it should serve as an alarming wake up call. We are facing a $500 billion deficit. That's half of a trillion dollars--the largest ever. And what do we do when faced with such a problem? We spend even more. An article in Sunday's Washington Post pointed out what really drives the agenda here on Capitol Hill. The article states: Today, the country still faces serious problems--oil dependence, child poverty, new gaps in health care coverage, deteriorating rural communities and failing public schools. One doesn't have to be an advocate of big government to believe Congress has a role in crafting pragmatic solutions to these problems. Yet as Congress returns this week, none of these issues is on the agenda. What is on the agenda? Why, things Congress has always excelled in: dispensing pork barrel projects and using taxpayer's money to reward supportive lobbies. Additionally, an editorial in today's Wall Street Journal states: The bottom line is truly shocking. Passage of the omnibus would raise total discretionary spending to more than $900 billion in 2004. The editorial goes on to note that this increase should not be blamed on the war. It states that, At 18.6 percent, the increase in non-defense discretionary spending under the 107th Congress, 2002-2003, is far and away the biggest in decades. In 2003, total Federal spending topped an inflation-adjusted $20,000 per household for the first time since World War II. Let me point out just a few of the things that are included in this bill: $450,000 for the Johnny Appleseed Heritage Center in Ohio; $200,000 to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, OH for the Rockin' the Schools education program; $175,000 to paint a mural on a flood wall in a city in Missouri; $325,000 for construction of a swimming pool in Salinas, CA. In addition to literally thousands of earmarks, this conference report contains major policy changes. Some of these provisions include legislative language authorizing the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands crab fisheries rationalization plan, which would divide 90 percent of that crab market among just a small group of processors. Fishermen could only sell to those processors and only those processors would sell to consumers. This proposal has not been considered by the authorizing committees of jurisdiction, nor requested by the Administration. Another legislative item included in this bill include media ownership provisions to undo a June 2 FCC regulation. Further, language is included mandating that the background check approval records issued after the purchase of a firearm be destroyed within 24 hours instead of the current policy of 90 days. This omnibus legislation also contains an environmental rider meant to benefit Briggs and Stratton, a major manufacturer of small engines. There is also language that redirects $40 million for construction of a cargo terminal at the Port of Philadelphia that is designed to support high speed cargo vessels for a private venture. Today, not only do the vessels not exit, but their design is based on unproven technology. We have to change the way we do business around here. Through our wasteful spending practices, we have succeeded in tying a millstone of debt around the necks of future generations of Americans. Today, we have on opportunity to make serious and substantial change in the way we treat the American taxpayer. Let's rise to the challenge. Let's not squander this opportunity. I urge my colleagues to vote against cloture on this horrendous piece of legislation. construction of a port of philadelphia marine cargo terminal