Joe Biden

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I am pleased to join Chairman Lugar in presenting the Foreign Relations Authorization Act for fiscal year 2004. As the chairman has described, we will soon submit a substitute amendment consisting of the text of three bills: S. 925, the Foreign Relations Authorization Act as reported out of committee in April; S. 1161, the Foreign Assistance Authorization Act, as reported out of committee in late May; and thirdly, a bill authorizing a new program, the Millennium Challenge Account which was initiated by the Bush administration in March of 2002. This program was authorized by the committee in legislation also reported in May. Since then, further discussions have occurred between myself, Senator Hagel, and the chairman which the chairman has already described. I will return to that subject in a few moments. All three bills received unanimous support from the Committee on Foreign Relations. The markups of these bills were not at all contentious and, quite frankly, didn't last very long. Their easy passage in committee is a testament to the bipartisan approach the chairman is developing on this legislation and the committee as a whole. The chairman has already summarized the provisions of the substitute amendment. Let me join him in highlighting a few of the key points. First, the bill provides the President's budget request for the Department of State, and it does more. We increase the authorization for several programs where we believe the budget request is inadequate, such as embassy security, international exchanges, public diplomacy, and in certain foreign aid accounts, including programs devoted to nonproliferation activities. If we are going to send people overseas to advance American interests, we have to protect them. We have to give them the tools to do the job. That is what we attempt to do here. Second, the bill authorizes establishment of a Middle East television network. In recent years, the Broadcasting Board of Governors has done an incredible job in reviving our radio broadcasting in the region. Radio Sawa now is, if not the most popular, one of the most popular and oft-listened-to programs in the region. I would note parenthetically that as we struggle to make our case known in the Middle East, we have to understand who our target is. You have the vast majority of the people, for example, in Iran under the age of 18. You have the vast majority, 60 percent of the folks in the Arab world, under the age of 18. We have a very young audience, an audience that if we don't begin to get the U.S. message across, in light of what they are being fed now, these young pages sitting here who make the Senate run, they are going to, when they get to be my age, inherit the whirlwind. They will have a gigantic problem. The television network is a new undertaking that I and others have been pushing for some time. It is a new undertaking for the U.S. Government in broadcasting but one that I believe is clearly worth trying. Most people in the Middle East get their news from television. Three of us, the Presiding Officer, the chairman and I, returned a week or so ago from Baghdad. One of the things we found out was our case has not even been made there. We control the television de facto right now, and we are on, unless something changed in the last week, at least 4 hours a day with the most bland broadcasts. It is not but it seems that it is straight out of the public information department of one of the agencies in the Federal Government. We have to figure out a way to get Iraqis on television 12, 14, 18 hours a day explaining straightforwardly what is going on over there. The Iraqi people right now are in 123 degree weather. They have no electricity and they are wondering why Uncle Sam, who could defeat their great Satan Saddam Hussein in such a short time, rout his vaunted army and Republican Guard and fedayeen, can't get everything up and running immediately for them. They think like most folks in that difficult region of the world that there must be some plot. What they don't know is--and we are not broadcasting it--that all our efforts--not all--are being sabotaged, literally blown up, blowing up the grids, blowing up the powerplants. They are blowing up the oil pipelines. So one of the larger points about the television network is we have to be in the game. We have to be in the game to be able to try to get our points across in a region where we don't get a very fair shake. Third, the bill authorizes expanded international exchanges with the Muslim world, including high school exchange programs, modeled on a successful effort that has been in place with Russia and the newly independent states for some time now, and it is successful. There are a lot of avenues for reaching out to the Muslim world, and face-to-face exchanges are one of the best ways to be able to have impact on opening people's minds. In the foreign assistance portion of the bill, let me call attention to two provisions--the Radiological Terrorism Threat Reduction Act and the Global Pathogen Surveillance Act. My friend from Indiana, the chairman, may be quietly smiling at me for taking these two and focusing on them because they are two proposals that I put forward. But I thank him for concluding they had merit and seeing to it they are in the bill. I developed these bills over the past year to address the threat of possible radiological terrorism and bioterrorism. The bill on radiological terrorism would address the threat posed by radiological dispersion devices, colloquially known as dirty bombs. Most people listening to this do not understand when we talk about dirty bombs. A lot of people think it is a nuclear device, a homemade nuclear device. That is of consequence, but the dirty bomb can cause incredible economic dislocation, although it is not likely to kill a lot of people. It is taking radioactive material and packing it around conventional explosives and blowing it up and ending up making the area in which it is dispersed have a level of radiation that exceeds what is safe in the minds of the EPA and scientists for people to be engaged in. But it is not going to kill a lot of people if one went off, God forbid, in the Mall, which is not far from here. But it is a clear and present danger and a concern. The Global Pathogen Surveillance Act is the second piece of legislation which authorizes $35 million in assistance for fiscal 2004 for developing nations to improve their efforts to detect, track, and contain disease outbreaks. As the SARS epidemic has demonstrated, viruses and pathogens do not respect national borders. Without a quick diagnosis of a biological attack or a rapid recognition of suspicious patterns of diseases, and fast transmission of that information, we can see that an epidemic can spread very rapidly by getting people heading out of an airport not knowing they were exposed. In dealing with dirty bombs and dangerous pathogens, it is in our national interest to help other nations contain these threats before they get to our shores--threats that do not respect national borders. This legislation does that. It helps them set up infrastructures to be able to have their public health systems go out and identify the existence of these pathogens. One of the things we know about SARS--and the criticism of the Chinese is they didn't acknowledge what was happening quickly enough. They didn't put in place quickly enough a national system to contain it. You have to know the problem before you can warn people of its existence. Many of these countries--a vast portion of them--do not have a public health infrastructure to be able to do this. This helps them; it is a small start of $35 million for that effort. Finally, let me say a few words about the millennium challenge account. The President deserves, in my view, credit for proposing a significant increase in foreign aid, and requiring that such assistance be targeted to selected countries which meet certain performance criteria. I will acknowledge on the floor what both of my colleagues here know. I was skeptical of whether or not the performance criteria were really a way to avoid delivering foreign aid or a way to identify what we know is important. When we give foreign assistance to a country that, for example, is a democracy, as opposed to a dictatorship, we know that aid is more likely to meet its desired end and be used in a way that is efficacious than when we give it to a country that has no standards, so that we can determine how the money is being dispersed. I have become convinced for some time now that--and this is a President who, historically, I am told has been opposed to foreign aid per se, and some of his predecessors share his view--this is actually a way to increase not only our contribution in foreign assistance but also its efficacy. When we spend a dollar, we will get a dollar's worth of benefit--not us, but the people who get it for the expenditure. We have learned over the last several decades that providing foreign assistance is important. We have learned a lot. One thing we know is that assistance works best in countries that get the basics right, countries that invest in the health and welfare of their people, have a relatively democratic system and an economic system that is open and transparent. That is what this millennium account is about--making sure that more money goes to places that will be able to use it well. Where the administration has taken the wrong turn, in my view, is with this proposal to establish a new governmental agency to administer this program. Five years ago, under the leadership of our friend and former colleague, Senator Helms, Congress abolished two foreign policy agencies, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the U.S. Information Agency, and merged them into the State Department. The legislation enacted in 1998 also gave the Secretary of State more authority to supervise operations of agencies; in particular, the Agency for International Development, so-called AID. I supported that initiative as did I think both of my colleagues here. The President's proposal, the Millennium Challenge Account, in my view, is directly contrary to the decision Congress made 5 years ago about how we should organize. It would create a new agency to be located outside the State Department and outside the Agency for International Development. In my view, it would weaken the authority of the Secretary of State to coordinate all foreign assistance. I find it ironic that a Republican President would seek to expand the Government's foreign policy bureaucracy, just a few years after Congress voted to reduce the size of that same bureaucracy. During the committee markup on this bill, the Presiding Officer, Senator Hagel, and I offered an amendment with the very powerful case he made, which the committee adopted by an 11-8 vote, to prevent the establishment of such an agency. Instead, the Hagel-Biden amendment gave the Secretary of State the authority to coordinate this new program consistent with the 1998 Helms reorganization legislation that passed. The administration responded by threatening a veto if the Hagel-Biden amendment were to survive in conference. I must say I don't find that veto threat very credible. It is easy for me to say, since I am not the chairman. There is a degree of sensitivity that increases when you are the ranking member and it is a President of your own party. I have been there. So I am sure my friend believes that veto threat is much more credible than I think it is. But that is pure conjecture. The reason I am doubtful is the President has yet to veto a bill--I would be shocked if he would veto this whole bill over that one issue. But that is a matter of subjective interpretation. Subsequent to our markup and this veto threat, the chairman developed a compromise text that meets Senator Hagel and me part of the way. It retained the provision establishing a new agency, but it does do some good, in my view. It gives the Secretary of State greater authority over the agency by having its chief executive officer report to the Secretary of State, just as the AID administrator reports to the Secretary. That is an improvement, but it still contains a fatal flaw, and that fatal flaw is the new agency, in my view. Moreover, it adds to the confusion by having the head of the agency report to the Secretary of State, but then assigns several of its critical functions to a five- member board on which the Secretary of State is only one of those five members and dispersing this aid through the millennium account. Reluctantly, I will go along with this compromise proposed by the chairman. I still believe it is a mistake to create a new agency, and if things were to change, and if by the grace of God and the good will of the neighbors my party took over the Senate again, and if I were chairman of this committee, I must put everyone on notice that I will try to eliminate that agency and try to put it back in the State Department because I think it is a mistake. But I want to deal in full disclosure here. I am going along with it because, quite frankly, the option is not particularly acceptable. The option is not have the agency, not have the money, not have the increased foreign aid, which I think is not a rational option. If this legislation is enacted, as I said, I reserve my right to fight another day to attempt to reverse the decision. But based on the way things are going, I do not think anybody should get too worried if you think having a separate agency is a good idea. I have acceded to the desire of the chairman in order, as I said, not to let the bill get bogged down on this organizational issue. I agree Congress should move forward and improve this important initiative, but in the coming months, the President's proposal will be put to the test relatively quickly. In announcing this initiative, the President pledged to increase foreign assistance above and beyond current aid budgets; in other words, not to sacrifice current programs. This is not we take away from here to give to foreign aid. It is to increase foreign aid and maintain our commitment on other programs as well. I must tell my colleagues, I am starting to doubt the President will be able to deliver on that commitment. The allocations of the foreign operations appropriations account for fiscal year 2004 in the other body, the House, is abysmally low, in my view, just $17.1 billion, a reduction of $1.7 billion below the President's request. The allocations in this body, in the Senate, are better, $18.1 billion, but still three-quarters of a billion dollars below the President's request. Even the bill before us falls short. It authorizes $1 billion in fiscal year 2004 and increases to the $5 billion level by 2006. But for this fiscal year, it is $300 million below the President's request. Again, this is not a criticism of the chairman. He made a very valid point. We have not passed an authorization bill in a long time, and we did pass a budget with which I did not agree. I voted against the budget resolution, but the majority of the U.S. Senate voted for it. The chairman's argument is we must stay within that budget to have credibility in order to get the requisite number of votes to do something we have not done in a long time: pass an authorization bill. The fact is, we are below the President's request because of being constrained by the budget guidelines we passed, and the House is way below it, $1.7 billion. According to press reports, the Vice President of the United States was involved in negotiations with the House leadership over House allocations. If that is true, it does not look to me as if the administration is working very hard to support this millennium challenge account. Again, as the old saying goes, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. We are going to know very soon, God willing. It is beyond my comprehension how the Congress will adequately fund the millennium account, keep our commitment to $3 billion a year to HIV/AIDS assistance, and not reduce any current programs. I seriously doubt it can be done, but I sincerely hope I am proven wrong on that score. The burden, in my view, is on the President and the majority in Congress in both Houses to deliver on the President's promise. Just as the United States will demand accountability for countries that become eligible, the rest of the world is waiting to see if we will fulfill the President's commitment that has been widely circulated at the G-8, widely circulated in every international forum, and I think we will be making a gigantic mistake if we do not meet the President's commitment. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I thank the chairman, and I believe we are ready to consider amendments. I see Senator Brownback is in the Chamber. It is my understanding Senator Brownback may start, but we are going to, at 2 o'clock, have a vote and then go back to Senator Brownback. I thank the chairman for his diligence, for his courtesy, and for his leadership in getting us to this point.

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I thank my colleague. It was a great honor for me to participate. Amendment No. 1138 to Amendment No. 1136

Mr. BIDEN. Parliamentary inquiry: Is it appropriate to ask unanimous consent that is how we proceed; that is, a voice vote will follow if, in fact, the amendment is not tabled?

Mr. BIDEN. That is what I thought. That is why I asked the question. The amendment can be agreed to; is that possible?

Mr. BIDEN. At the time? I can't ask that now?

Mr. BIDEN. Parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. BIDEN. The Senator from Indiana is about to make a motion to table the Boxer amendment. It has been stated verbally that if that tabling motion fails, then we would move to a voice vote to accept the Boxer amendment. Is there any way in which to get a unanimous consent agreement that is how we would proceed?

Mr. BIDEN. I thank the Chair. Words make a difference. I ask unanimous consent that if, in fact, the Boxer amendment is not tabled, the amendment be agreed to.

Mr. BIDEN. Madam President, I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. BIDEN. Madam President, I share the view of my friend from Indiana. I think of the 20-some amendments out there, 99 percent of them are able to be worked out. Many of them will be accepted with a few small changes. I encourage if not the Senators, the staffs who are authorized to come to the floor and work them out. Further, it is my understanding, regarding the distinguished Senator from New Jersey, we should proceed on an amendment he may withdraw. However, he is prepared to speak to that amendment. He wants to do that. I promised him I would try to get him up next. I am not asking unanimous consent but I am talking long enough so his staff can hear this and get him back over here. He is ready to go.

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I will be happy to accede to that in light of the fact that Senator Brownback is here to go and Senator Lautenberg is not.

Mr. BIDEN. I thank the Chair and apologize for the clumsy way in which I phrased the question. I commend Senator Boxer for her leadership on this legislation. I co- sponsored this bill in the last Congress and I am proud to support it again. The Mexico City policy, also known as the ``global gag rule,'' is bad policy and a bad idea. Let us be clear what this issue is not about. The issue is not about abortion--although it is often portrayed as such by the proponents of Mexico City. Rather, the provision is about free speech and democratic values. Longstanding law--a law authored by former Senator Jesse Helms-- already prohibits the use of U.S. funds to perform or promote abortions. Let me repeat that. Current law, on the books for nearly three decades and authored by our former colleague Jesse Helms, already bans the use of U.S. taxpayer dollars to perform or promote abortions. Any assertion to the contrary is false. The ``Mexico City'' policy goes much further: it demands that foreign, nongovernmental organizations which receive U.S. population assistance funds agree that they will stop using their own funds to discuss with their own governments how abortion will be regulated. No such restrictions would be imposed on U.S.-based organizations, for a simple reason: they would be unconstitutional under the First Amendment. Nor are such restrictions imposed on foreign governments. If they were, then U.S. assistance to countries such as Israel might be in danger, because the Israeli government uses its own funds to pay for abortions. In my view, the Mexico City policy is anti-democratic, because it attempts to silence foreign recipients of U.S. funds. It is the policy of the United States to advance the cause of democracy by promoting the values which we hold dear--such as freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom of the press. The Mexico City policy flies in the face of these fundamental values by attempting to restrict the speech of recipients of U.S. funds. This is a gag rule, pure and simple. It restricts speech. And for the life of me I cannot understand why anyone--Republican or Democrat-- would support a provision that would violate the First Amendment if applied to U.S.-based organizations. Of course, foreign citizens and organizations do not have constitutional rights. But just because we can legally apply this restriction does not mean that it is good policy. And I do not believe that it is. I urge my colleagues to adopt the amendment.

Mr. BIDEN. I want to make clear what I am saying. We already know there are 20-some amendments out there. I believe we can settle almost all of those amendments by negotiation without long discussions on the floor tonight or tomorrow or any time. I have no illusions, having been here a long time--even longer than the assistant leader--that we are going to get this thing done quickly, nor that we may not have nongermane amendments that may be meritorious and may take a long time. I understand that. All I am saying is what we do know is this: Let's get it done because most of it is not nearly as controversial as it appears to be. That is the point I am trying to make. Not that I am making any predictions. There are two things I never predict. One is the weather and the second is what the Senate is going to do. So I am not predicting. I am saying we know what we have before us; let's get it done and we can move on tomorrow or the next day or next week or next year to do whatever comes up. I yield the floor.

Mr. BIDEN. Yes. We are prepared to accept the Brownback amendment.

Mr. BIDEN. Will the Senator yield for a unanimous consent request?

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be added as a cosponsor to the amendment.

Mr. BIDEN. I am prepared to accept the amendment.

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Perry Cammack, a Javits fellow working on the staff of the Foreign Relations Committee, be granted the privilege of the floor during consideration of S. 925.

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I would like to proceed in morning business to briefly discuss two totally different subjects, if I may. I rise initially to acknowledge the passing of a good friend of mine. People may find it strange to hear the Senator from Delaware say that, because they are used to so much hyperbole from all of us in the Senate, in Congress, and many in public office. They find it difficult to believe that people with disparately different views, as Strom Thurmond and I had, were good friends. I received a call not too many weeks ago from Nancy, Strom Thurmond's wife, telling me she had just spoken to the Senator. To use Nancy's phrase, she said that Strom ``was now on God's time, Joe.'' I wondered for a moment about exactly what she meant. She went on to say that he doesn't have much time left, his body is shutting down. She said he made a request which both flattered me greatly and saddened me significantly. She said he asked her to ask me whether or not I would deliver a eulogy for him at his burial, which is going to take place on Tuesday next--this coming Tuesday. It might come as a surprise to a lot of people that on Tuesday, somewhere approaching 4 or 5 o'clock, people--including representatives from Strom's family--will stand up to speak of him and that I will be among them. I am a guy who as a kid was energized, angered, emboldened, and outraged all at the same time by the treatment of African Americans in my State--a border State--and throughout the South. When I was not much older than the young pages who are now sitting down there I literally ran for public office and got involved in public office and politics because I thought I would have the ability to play a little tiny part in ending the awful treatment of African Americans. I will stand up to speak about Strom Thurmond. In the 1950s I was a child in grade school, and in the late 1950s and into the 1960s I was in high school. As hard as it is to believe now, that was an era where, when you turned on your television, you were as likely to see ``Bull'' Conner and his German Shepherd dogs attacking black women marching after church on Sunday to protest their circumstance, or George Wallace standing in a doorway of a university, or Orville Faubus. This all started to seep into my consciousness when I was in grade school, as it did, I suspect, for everyone in my generation. It animated my interest, as I said, and my anger. I was not merely intellectually repelled by what was going on in the South particularly at the time, I was, as is probably a legitimate criticism of me, angry about it and outraged about it. The idea that I would come to the Senate at age 29--to be precise, I got elected at age 29; by the time I got sworn in, I turned 30--and 2 years later to be serving on a committee with J. Strom Thurmond, him the most senior Republican and me the most junior not only Democrat but junior member of the committee. Over the next 28 years he and I would become friends. He and I would, in some instances, have an intimate relationship. The idea that my daughter, who is now a 22-year-old grown woman, would, to this day, in her bedroom, have one picture sitting on her dresser of all the pictures she has since she was a child. From the moment she was born--her father was a Senator and her entire life I have been a Senator--she has had the privilege of being able to meet Senators and Presidents and kings and queens. She has one picture sitting on her bureau. It startled me when I realized it the other night. She does not live at home. She, like all young people, is on her own. It is a picture of her and Strom Thurmond, taken when she was 9 years old, sitting on her desk. If you had told me--first off, if you had told me when I was 20 years old I was going to have a child, that would have been hard to believe. But if you told me when I was 29 years old--when I did have two children--that one of my children, as I approached the Senate roughly 30 years later, would have a childhood picture of her or him in Strom Thurmond's office, standing next to his desk with his arm around her, and it was kept on her bureau, I would have said: You have insulted me. Don't do that. The only point I want to make today, as I do not intend at this moment to attempt to eulogize Strom, is that I think one of the incredible aspects of our democracy--even more precisely, our Government, our governmental system--that is lost today on so many is it has built into it the mechanisms that allow you not only to see the worst in what you abhor and fight it but see the best in people with whom you have very profound philosophic disagreement. There is an old expression: Politics makes strange bedfellows. That is read today by most young people, or anyone who hears it, as meaning what it maybe initially meant: that they are strange bedfellows because people need things from each other, and they compromise. So you end up being aligned with someone with whom you disagree, out of self- interest. But the majesty of this place in which I stand--this Senate, the floor of this place, the floor of the Senate at this moment--is it has another impact on people I do not think many historians have written very well about, and I think it is almost hard to understand, even harder to articulate; and that is, it produces relationships that are a consequence of you looking at the best in your opponent, the best in the people with whom you serve, the best about their nature. I remember, as a young Senator--I guess I was 31--wandering on the floor one day. New Senators will not like what I am about to say, but when you are a newer Senator, you have less hectic Senate responsibilities than you do when you are a more senior Senator. You are no less important. But being chairman of a committee gives you the honor of turning your lights on and turning them off, meaning you are the first and last there. When you are not a senior Member, you are not required to do that as much. So I was wandering literally onto the floor, like my friend from Montana just has, and there was a debate going on. (Mr. BURNS assumed the chair.)

Mr. BIDEN. One of my colleagues, who also became a friend, was railing against something I felt very strongly about. And at the time, because of the circumstance in which I got here, I was meeting regularly, once a week, with one of the finest men I ever knew, the then-majority leader Senator Mike Mansfield. When I got here, between the date I got elected and the date I arrived, my wife and daughter were killed in an automobile accident and I was not crazy about being here. Senator Mansfield, being the great man he was, took on the role of sort of a Dutch uncle. He would tell me what my responsibility was and why I should stay in the Senate. And then, without my knowing it, really, at the time--looking back, it is crystal clear--he would ask me to come and meet with him in his office once a week and talk about what I was doing. But he acted sort of like he was the principal and I was the young teacher, and I was coming to tell him how my classes were going. But, really, it was just to take my pulse and see how I was doing. Anyway, I walked on the floor one day, and a particular friend of mine, Jesse Helms--he has become a close friend, God love him. He is in North Carolina now in retirement--he was going on about something I had a very serious disagreement with. I walked into Senator Mansfield's office--which was out that door-- and I sat down with him. He said: How is it going? And I began to rail about how could this Senator say such and such a thing? It had to do with the Americans with Disabilities Act or what was being discussed then. And Senator Mansfield, in his way, just let me go on, and then he said: Joe--I will not bore you with the whole story. This relates to Strom--he said: Joe, you should understand one thing. And he told me the story about Harry Truman. When Harry Truman first got to the Senate--I will paraphrase this--he wrote back to his wife Bess and said: I can't believe I am here. I can't believe how I got here with all these great men. Apparently, not long thereafter, he wrote back to Bess and said he couldn't understand how all these other guys got here. Well, he told me that story. And he said: Let me tell you, every single solitary man and woman with whom you will serve in the Senate has something very special that their constituency sees in them. And your job is to look for that. I can't imagine anybody saying that today, can you? I can't imagine, in this raw political environment we are in, somebody having the insight Mike Mansfield had and telling a novitiate, if you will, a new, young Senator, that part of my job was to look for that thing in my colleague, a colleague with whom I have a bitter disagreement, to look for that thing in him that his constituency recognized which was special and sent him here. Maybe subconsciously, because of that, I became one of Strom Thurmond's close friends and, as his AA will tell you, one of his protectors, especially as he got older. Mike Mansfield was right. I never called Mike Mansfield ``Mike.'' I am standing here as a senior Senator saying Mike Mansfield. I never called him Mike until the day he died. I called him Mr. Leader. And Strom Thurmond had a very special piece of him that his constituents saw that had nothing to do with the most celebrated aspects of his career. The most celebrated aspects of his career were the ones I abhor the most: The filibuster to fight civil rights and to keep black Americans in the shadow of white Americans or signing the Southern Manifesto. It is funny--I say to my friend from Montana--I actually got tied up with a lot of Southerners. Senator John Stennis became my friend. I had his office. I have the table he presented to me in the conference room that had been Richard Russell's, upon which--I am told--the Southern Manifesto was signed. I might note parenthetically, if you all know John Stennis, he talked at you like this all the time. He would hold his hand like this. When I was looking through his office, when he was leaving, to see whether I could take his office because of my seniority, he reminded me of the first time I came by his office as a young Senator to pay my respects, which was a tradition then. And I sat down at that conference table which he used as his office desk. He patted the leather chair next to me. He said: Sit down. He said: What made you run for the Senate? After congratulating me. And like a darn fool I told him the exact truth. I said: Civil rights, sir. As soon as I said it, I could feel the beads of sweat pop out on my head, my underarms get damp. Why am I telling this old segregationist that the reason was civil rights? That is not a very auspicious way to start off a relationship. He looked at me and said: Good. Good. Good. That was the end of the conversation. Over the intervening years, we served 18 years. We shared a hospital room in Walter Reed for 3 months. He was in there, and I was. He became supportive of me in my effort to run for President back in the 1980s. We became good friends. But 18 years later, when I came back to look at his office to see whether or not I would take his office because it was a more commodious space, I walked into the office. It was during that interregnum period after the Presidential election. President Bush was about to take office. There had been this transition. Anyway, I said to his secretary of many years--I am embarrassed, I can't remember her first name. I think it may have been Mildred. He was in the Senate 42 years, maybe 43--is the chairman in? She said: Senator, you can go right into his office. I walked in. He was sitting in the same spot he was 18 years earlier. Only this time in a wheelchair with an amputated leg was John Stennis. I said: Mr. Chairman, I apologize. He said: Come in, sit down. Sit down. He patted the chair. I sat down. He startled me. He said: You all remember the first time you came to see me, Joe? I had not. And he reminded me. I looked at him and he recited the story. And I said: I was a pretty smart fellow, wasn't I, Mr. Chairman? And he said: I wanted to tell you something then and I am going to tell you now. He said: You are going to take my office, aren't you? I said: Yes, sir, Mr. Chairman. He caressed that table--it was a big mahogany table about half the size of the table in the cabinet room--as if it was an animate object. He said: Do you see this table, Joe? I said: Yes, Mr. Chairman. He said: This table was the flagship of the Confederacy from 1954 to 1968. He said: Senator Russell would have us every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday--I forget what day--and we would have lunch here. He said: Everybody had a drawer. And he opened one of the drawers. He said: We planned the demise of the civil rights movement at this table. He said: It is time now that this table go from the table of a man against civil rights to the table owned by a man for civil rights. I give you my word on that. I was moved by that. I looked at him, and he said: One more thing, Joe, before you leave. He said: The civil rights movement did more to free the white man than it did the black man. And I said: How is that, Mr. Chairman? None of you here are old enough to remember him, but again the way he talked, he went like this, he said: It freed my soul. It freed my soul. The point I want to make that I am grappling with here is the men and women who serve here, and Strom Thurmond in particular, actually change. They actually grow. They actually, because of the diverse views that are here and the different geography represented, if you are here long enough, it rubs against you. It sort of polishes you. Not in the way of polish meaning smooth, but polishes you in the sense of taking off the edges and understanding the other man's perspective. I believe Strom Thurmond was a captive of his era, his age, and his geography. I do not believe Strom Thurmond at his core was racist. But even if he had been, I believe that he changed, and the news media says he changed, they think, out of pure opportunism. I believe he changed because the times changed, life changed. He worked with, he saw, he had relationships with people who educated him, as well as I have been educated. Hubert Humphrey wrote a book--and I had the great honor of serving with him--called ``The Education of a Public Man.'' I watched Strom Thurmond as the percentage of his staff increased in terms of black representation. He and I were chairmen, or cochairmen, of the Judiciary Committee for almost two decades--16 years I believe. I watched him. He would lean over to me in the middle of a hearing because we had a genuine trust and say: Joe, what did they mean by that? I will never forget we were holding a hearing on a Supreme Court Justice, and at the end the last group of witnesses we had--we had six witnesses--included a young man representing the gay and lesbian task force. He was chairing and I was the only one with him because the hearing was already finished and these were people coming to register opposition or support. They ranged from all kinds of groups that were before us--extremely conservative ones and liberal ones--to give everybody their say. Everybody on the committee knew it was basically over. Because of being the ranking Democrat or ranking Republican or the chairman, you have to be there. I will never forget sitting next to him and he leaned over and said: What is he saying? This young man was explaining the point of view of why, in fact, to be gay was not to be in any way maladjusted. But Strom came from an era and a time that was different, so he looked at the young man and he said: Have you received psychiatric help, son? Now, everybody in that room who was under the age of 40 laughed and thought he was being a wise guy. He was serious. He leaned over to me and he said: Joe, why do they call it ``gay''? He wasn't being snide. He literally, at 91 years old, didn't understand that. I guess it must not have been Rehnquist. It must have been someone later. He did not understand. Remember, this man was over 100 years old. He came from the Deep South. People from the far North don't understand either. But he came from an environment that was so different. But in this place, over time, he had the ability, without even knowing it, to apply Mike Mansfield's standard, which was to look at the other guy or woman and try to figure out what is the good thing about them that caused their people to send them here, with all their warts, foibles and faults. I deem it a privilege to have become his friend. We were equals in the sense that our vote counted the same. Our influence on some issues was the same. But I am 60 and he was 100. There was always a 40-year chasm between us. I could say things to Strom and be irreverent with him. I could grab him by the arm and say: Strom, don't--which I would not have been able to do if there had been a 10-year difference. I was like the kid. It is strange--I find it strange even talking about it-- how this relationship that started in stark adversarial confrontation ended up being as close as it was, causing Strom Thurmond to ask his wife whether I would deliver a eulogy for him. I don't fully understand it, but I do know it is something about this place, these walls, this Chamber, and something good about America, something good about our system, and it is something that is sorely needed--to look in the eyes of your adversary within our system and look for the good in him, and not just the part that you find disagreeable or, in some cases, abhorrent. I will end on a more humorous note. I had the privilege of being asked to be one of the four people to speak at his 90th birthday party. The other people were George Mitchell, then majority leader, a fine man; Bob Dole; and Richard Milhouse Nixon. It was before a crowd of a thousand or more people, black tie, here in Washington. It was quite an event. It kind of shocked everybody that I was asked to be one of the speakers. It shocked me to be seen with Richard Milhouse Nixon, even though he was President when I arrived here. I did some research about Strom to find out about his background before I did this tribute on his 90th birthday--a combination tribute and roast. You know what I found? I found a lead editorial--I don't have it now--from the year 1947 or 1948 from the New York Times, and the title, if memory serves me correct, is something like ``The Hope of the South.'' It was about Strom Thurmond. The New York Times, the liberal New York Times, in the late forties--it must have been 1947-- wrote about this guy, Strom Thurmond, a public official in South Carolina, who got himself in trouble and lost a primary because he was too empathetic to African-Americans because when he was a presiding judge, he started an effort statewide in South Carolina that tried to get better textbooks and materials into black schools, and he tutored young blacks and set up an organization to tutor and teach young blacks how to read. Strom Thurmond. Strom Thurmond. I think it was in 1946 or 1947. The essence of the editorial was that this is ``the hope of the South.'' In the meantime, he got beat by a sitting Senator for being ``weak on race.'' I think Strom Thurmond learned the wrong political lesson from that and decided no one would ever get to the right of him on this issue again. But I also was sitting next to him when he voted for the extension of the Voting Rights Act. The only point I want to make is, people change, people grow, and people react to crises in different ways. I choose to remember Strom Thurmond in his last 15 years as Senator rather than choose to remember him when he started his career. I do not choose that just as a matter of convenience. I choose that because I believe men and women can grow. I believe John Stennis meant it when he said the civil rights movement saved his soul. I believe Strom Thurmond meant it when he hired so many African Americans, signed on to the extension of the Voting Rights Act, and voted for the Martin Luther King holiday. I choose to believe that he meant it because I find it hard to believe that in the so many decent, generous, and personal acts that he did for me that it did not come from a man who is basically a decent, good man, and the latter part of his career reflects that. I choose it not just because I am an optimist. I choose it not just because I want to believe it. I choose it not just because I believe there is a chemistry that happens in this body. I choose it because I believe basically in the goodness of human nature and it will win out, and I think it did in Strom. I will have more to say--or less to say but hopefully more succinctly and in a more articulate way--at his funeral. I close by saying to Nancy, Strom, Jr., and all of his children, how much I cared about their father, how much, in a strange way, he taught me, and how much I hope he learned from those of us who disagreed so much with his policy on race. The human side of this can never be lost. They lost the blood of their blood, bone of their bone. It was a tough time. But I am flattered that he asked me, and I just hope that I and others are worthy of his memory when we speak of him on Tuesday.

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I planned yesterday to be here today to speak about a totally different subject, and then we learned last evening what happened to Strom Thurmond. With the permission of my colleagues, I wish to move for a few minutes to a totally different subject, and that is the war in Iraq. I say ``the war in Iraq'' because there is still a war in Iraq. I returned from Baghdad on Tuesday with two of my distinguished Republican colleagues--Senators Lugar and Hagel. I came away with several impressions that I want to pass on to my colleagues in the hope that it will give some additional information or insight. My impressions, although not stated in the same way by my two colleagues, Senators Hagel and Lugar, I am confident are the same ones they had because we did a number of press conferences and we talked at length. It was a 14-hour flight back. We are good friends, and we all agree on the essence of what I am about to say, although we have different emphasis on different points. Let me say what those primary impressions are and why I think there is such an urgency. First, there is still a war going on. It is more like a guerrilla war but there is a war. Meeting with our military troops, meeting with our generals, one told us: Every time I send a young man out on patrol on the streets of Baghdad in a humvee, I tell them: Treat it as if you are in battle. He told us how they know now that our young men and women are being targeted not by some random group of Islamists who are angry but by professionals, the leftover fedayeen, the Republican Guard. Where did all these folks go? They went back into their communities. One colonel told us they know that people who are engaged in going after Americans are instructed in the following way: All our young men and women wear helmets and flack jackets. They are instructed when there is a disturbance to come out of the crowd. If they are going to try to kill one of our young men and women, there is a 4-inch opening to do it; that is, space between the back of the helmet and the top of the bulletproof vest is where they aim to kill our soldiers. That is not the work of just random and irrational people who are angry we are in their country. How well coordinated and how well organized it is they do not know, and I do not know, but there is still a war going on. The second impression I came back with is, what a remarkable group of people we have working in the toughest of conditions against the longest of odds to put Iraq back on its feet and back into the hands of the Iraqi people. I am not merely talking about our military, which has been celebrated with good reason and everybody knows; I am talking about our civilians. I am talking about Ambassador Bremer. I am talking about Ambassador Crocker. I am talking about Secretary Slocum. I am talking about the most talented group of people we have assembled, the people who have had incredible experience in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and in Afghanistan in trying to stand up a police department. We spent an hour or more at the police training academy with men I know are the best in the world. I know because I spent so much time in the Balkans and so much time dealing with the subject. I know they are the single best in the world. In fact, coincidentally, one of them happens to be a former chief of police of the Newark Police Department in the town in which I attended college, the University of Delaware. These are incredibly talented people working under incredibly difficult conditions, made more difficult, I am sad to say, by the incredible miscalculations this administration is making about how to proceed in Iraq. Many of us on this floor--I am not unique--have pointed out that winning the war is only half the problem, the smaller half. Winning the peace is an astronomically difficult subject. As I say to my colleagues and anyone who asks, if the Lord Almighty came down and sat in this chair and agreed to give the President and those on the ground in Iraq the right answers to the next 20 decisions they had to make, the next 50 decisions they had to make, consequential decisions, we still only have, in my view, a 65-percent chance of getting it right. That is how complicated Iraq is. That is how difficult this problem is. But it has been made much more difficult, frankly, by the wrong assumptions that were made by the administration. This is not second- guessing. These are things that, for a year before, many of us argued with them about. I supported us taking out that tyrant, but there seems to be a tone deafness right now, and that is that the administration thought building the peace would be built upon three assumptions they had, for which, in the hearings we held I never found any basis. One is, they expected to find a fully functioning bureaucracy when they got to Iraq, a literate country that would have in place for each of their departments--think of it in terms of the United States--their department of education, their department of public works, their department of highways, their department of security. We were told, with absolute certainty by the administration, that all we had to do was go in and decapitate the Baathists, that is the neo-Nazis who ran that country, and we would have this infrastructure ready to take over the running of their country. But it melted away. It is not there. The second assumption was we were told they expected to find an army intact. Again, we decapitate the bad guys but there would be a standing army we could work with. That melted away. It does not exist, and to the extent it exists, it is engaged in guerrilla activity. The third assumption was we were going to find a police force in the country that once we took the bad apples out of--like we did, by the way, in Colombia, helping them vet their national police--that we would have tens of thousands of police officers we could work with who were trained. There are none, and there never were any. The result has been massive problems in terms of getting basic services back and restoring security. We have seen looting and political sabotage against power, oil, and water plants, some organized resistance, which seems to be getting more organized. All of this is compounded by years of neglect by Saddam Hussein's regime. Neither this administration nor any of us could have reasonably anticipated how badly he treated the infrastructure of his own country. It is not merely that he did not repair the infrastructure during the period when the embargo was on them, when they were operating under sanctions, but for 30 years. In fairness to the administration, no one knew how badly he had raped and pillaged his own country and infrastructure. We knew what he did to his people but we did not know this. Ultimately, Iraqis need to do all these jobs: Administrate, be the army, be the police force, restore security, maintain security, but it is going to take a long time to do that. Meanwhile, we the international community should be filling the gaps, not we the United States alone. What is worse is we should have known better. We had extensive experience in the Balkans. We had considerable experience in Afghanistan, which is a failure, in my view. We had considerable bipartisan testimony from experts on the left, right, and center, going back to July, that these problems would be protracted and they would be deep. I will never forget two leading generals, the former head of CENTCOM and former NATO director, testifying before our committee, and I remember the parallel they used. They said we have this incredible military juggernaut which we have planned incredibly well and executed it incredibly well, but we should in tandem be planning for the occupation of Iraq. There was virtually no planning, but that is water over the dam. That is not just me. Ask my Republican colleagues who deal with this. There was no planning. The question now, and my purpose today, is not to say, aha, look at the mistake you made, you did not listen. It is to say, let's get over this. Now that we realize and the whole world understands these infrastructures do not exist, it is time to internationalize the effort. First, we need a significant infusion of military and civilian police to fill the gap of the Iraqi police. On another date, I will spend more time on this, but there are 79,000 Iraqi police spots we have to fill. Our experts on the ground in Iraq say there is a need immediately for 5,800 European crack police, the gens de guerre, to be brought in to maintain the peace and security of the citizens, stop the looting, make the traffic lights work, investigate the murders and the rapes, while we are training 80,000 new police officers. There is a gigantic vacuum, and our own people on the ground say we need help now. So I implore the President to get over his feelings about the Europeans, the French and the Germans in particular, and seek their assistance because I believe they are ready to assist. They need to be asked. As I said, we are starting from scratch to build an Iraqi police force of 73,000 people with 18,000 cars. Now we have about 30,000 Iraqi police, all ill trained, with about 200 cars. How long will it take to get to 73,000, which is a very thin blue line? The estimate of many is about 5 years. So what do we do in the meantime if we do not seek to internationalize this? Second, we need to sustain and probably increase our military forces in Iraq, and it need not be more Americans. We should be reaching out to NATO. When I have spoken to Lord Robertson, when I have spoken to the head of NATO, and spoken to the country specific, I am told they are prepared to send hard, tough, fighting troops into Iraq, but they want to be asked. To the best of my knowledge, the President and Secretary of Defense and the Vice President have decided not to ask. If that is true, that is foolhardy. We need between 30,000 and 60,000 forces there, and they should be NATO forces. Meanwhile, the notion that has been floated out of the Pentagon by Mr. Rumsfeld, as he suggested 6 weeks ago that we could get down to 30,000 troops by the end of the year, is pure fantasy. Who are we kidding? Get down to 30,000 troops within 6 months? Unless he has a plan no one has ever heard of internationalizing this to the extent that they are backfilled with European and other forces. We need to get more troops in. They need to be effective, and the best place to look is NATO. As I said, I met with Secretary General Robertson last weekend. NATO is willing to help, but the administration has to ask. So please ask, Mr. President. Third, we are going to need significant resources to get all of this done. Just a couple of weeks ago my committee, headed by Senator Lugar, had testimony from leading members of the administration saying do not worry; basically, the oil revenues are going to take care of all of this. What a joke. We have a leading oil man appointed by the administration in Baghdad with whom we sat and met, my two colleagues and I. He said we will get to 1 million barrels a day maybe by the end of the summer; maybe by the end of 2004, an average of 2.4 million a day. Let me explain that. It means there may be the ability to generate $5 billion worth of revenue this year and $14 billion next year; and it costs us $3 billion a month just to maintain our troops there. It is time we start leveling with the American people. Maybe the most important impression was our folks on the ground are doing an incredible job. I am not being solicitous. I am not just saying we are doing a great job. They are doing an incredible job. The most positive thing I came away with: I went over despondent about a lack of a political game plan of transferring government to the Iraqis. I am truly impressed with Ambassador Bremer and his team. They have that process underway, after we finally discarded what I assume was the Cheney-Rumsfeld idea of putting Mr. Garner in there and finding Mr. Chalabi--I may be wrong about that; if I am, I apologize for sounding harsh. But the President was wise enough to recognize the model they originally came up with on the political transition--General Garner is a fine man, and the expatriates being the basis upon which the government would be stood up quickly--was not realistic, and he made a swift change. I implore the President to make a similar change in thinking about police and the military. Nobody back home understands. The American people have not been given the facts, in my view, to be able to fully understand how monumental the task is we are undertaking, how long it will take and how much it will cost, how many troops. The President needs to go to the American people and tell them. I will end where I began 10 months ago in this Chamber after my hearings in July--almost a year ago, when I chaired the Foreign Relations Committee. I said then and I repeat it: The one thing all who come out of the Vietnam era generation can agree on is, regardless of what our view was on the war at the time, no foreign policy, no matter how well fashioned, can be sustained without the informed consent of the American people. As I have said repeatedly, folks in my State and around the country thought when we went in that Johnny and Jane would come marching home as they did after gulf I, immediately after the war. There is a bit of shock and dismay on the part of the families of the National Guard and the reservists when they find out their dads and moms are not coming home; they are being extended. We knew ahead of time they would have to be extended. You knew it, I knew it. We did not tell. We told them, the President didn't. Mr. President, please go on television, tell the American people what is expected of them now. They will respond. We are a mature people. They don't like the fact that 161,000 Americans have to stay there for an extended period of time. But we have to tell them, and tell them why it is so important it be done. It is in the naked self-interests of the United States that we get this right--that we stand up with a government at the end of the day that is at least more democratic, is not a breeding ground for terror, and is a stabilizing influence in the region because it will save the lives of our children and our grandchildren if we do it right. We have an opportunity to do it right. This is doable. But not on the cheap, and not without leveling with the American people. Nearly 2 months ago, on May 1, President Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln to address our troops and the Nation. Behind them was a large banner that read ``Mission accomplished.'' Our troops did accomplish their first mission, a remarkable mission in Iraq, of ridding its people of the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein. But the larger and more difficult mission is building the peace in Iraq and is far from accomplished. In fact, it has only just begun. I respectfully suggest it is time for the President to explain that to the American people, to talk to us straight about the hundreds of thousands of troops who will be needed immediately and the tens of thousands of troops who will be needed for a long time, and the tens of billions of dollars that will be needed, and how we will have to energize the international community as donor nations to come up with that money so we do not hold the bag for it all. It will take many years. When Senator Lugar and I held our hearings, everybody kept saying, the day after the war, and we said, no, it is not the day after, it is the decade after Saddam Hussein is down--the decade after. I have not found one reasonable person who suggests that the United States will not be heavily involved, even after there is a transition to an Iraqi Government, for at least the next 3 to 5 years. If anybody thinks it is less than that, they are kidding themselves. If it is less than that, it will mean we will lose the peace. I know it is dangerous, and I can see my colleague looking at me; it is dangerous to prognosticate in this business because everybody remembers exactly what you said. But I am saying the same thing I said last July. It was a worthy goal to take down Saddam Hussein. He was a danger to his people. The one thing the whole world has seen is what a madman he was. He has killed 300,000 of his own people at least. Mass graves abound. We did a worthy and noble thing. But we must internationalize this effort now. Now. Now. We must level with the American people. I conclude by saying what the troops told us. You have been on these missions. These young men and women we have dinner with, these young troops we go out and ride around with, the people we spend our time with in the country, they want to know in Baghdad, are we going to support them? They know how tough this is. They know how many more of them are going to die. They know their life is at risk. They know this is an incredibly difficult undertaking, and they are wondering why, when they pick up the papers back home, it is not being stated that way. It is being treated as if this is over. The American people deserve to be leveled with. Everyone here knows, whether we say another year or 10, whether it is 75,000 troops or 160,000, whether it is $1 billion or $20 billion or $40 billion, we all know it is a lot more than any of us are telling the American people. It is time, as one of my Republican colleagues said, to tell the truth. I am not suggesting the President is lying. He is not. I am suggesting the American people do not have any idea what we have signed them on to. We had better tell them. I yield the floor.

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, after many years of preparation and deliberation, and following weeks of debate and discussion on the floor this year and last, we in the Senate are about to vote on a bill providing some prescription drug benefits for Medicare beneficiaries that is widely expected to pass. Seniors have been demanding prescription drug coverage for many years now. They need it and they deserve it, and I believe what we should be passing here today is a bill that will bring the American people the type of prescription drug benefit they have been seeking--one that is easy to understand and use, one that covers a substantial portion of all their costs, and one that is affordable. But to the many Medicare beneficiaries who will read the details of this bill and say, ``there isn't much in here for me and it will cost me more than I am now paying for drugs,'' I would say: I hear you. This bill is not enough, not nearly enough. I have a lot of concerns about this bill. There is no uniformity from region to region in the benefit package or beneficiary payments. Seniors in the East could be paying far higher premiums than their relatives in the Midwest. The drug plan relies on private insurance companies to provide a type of insurance policy that they have already said they are unwilling to sell. I am skeptical that these private plans will stay, and that could mean seniors will have no stability in their coverage. The bill does allow traditional Medicare to step in and fill the gap but seniors might have to move back to a private drug plan if new ones come to the region. There is also a gap in coverage which I think is unfair and will surprise a lot of people. Finally, the bill falls short in its efforts to induce employers not to abandon their retiree prescription drug coverage, a situation that too many retirees have already faced in recent years. In summary, I view this bill not as a situation where we would say that the glass is half full and half empty; to my thinking, the glass is only about one-quarter full. In 2003, prescription drugs are as important in medical care as surgery; consequently, it seems logical to me that if Medicare pays for the bulk of the cost of a heart bypass operation for all beneficiaries, it should similarly pay the bulk of the cost of the drugs used to lower the cholesterol, and which would prevent the need for the bypass operation, for all beneficiaries. This bill does not achieve that commonsense goal. Not even close. But we need to start somewhere. This is the first step in gradually moving the health plan that covers nearly 40 million seniors and disabled individuals into the 21st century. And it is, very frankly, the best that we can expect to pass this Congress and that the President will sign. There are some good provisions in this bill. All Medicare beneficiaries will have access to a prescription drug plan. Individuals with low incomes, below 160 percent of Federal poverty level, will have access to prescription drug coverage at very little cost. Those with very high prescription drug expenses, in the many thousands of dollars, will have stop-loss protection to help protect them against catastrophic drug costs. And no one is forced to abandon the traditional Medicare Program for their basic health care, with which they are so familiar, in order to obtain prescription drug coverage. During the Senate deliberation on this bill, I have voted for amendments that would improve the prescription drug coverage and decrease the cost to beneficiaries. Almost all of these amendments were not adopted, mostly with the rationale that there was not enough money. I do not feel constrained by some arbitrary $400 billion cost limit on this bill. I never agreed to such a limit. In fact, my sense of values tells me that prescription drug benefits are a high priority, and I would be willing to spend more than $400 billion for a good prescription drug plan, while cutting budget items of lower priority, such as tax cuts for the very wealthy. In the end, I decided to vote for this bill, despite its severe limitations. Given the many past years of fruitless discussions on this matter, I feel it is critical to put something into law now that can serve as a starting point for development of a true prescription drug plan. But that is not to say that I will accept any lesser of a bill, and my colleagues should not count on my continued support, if the final version of this bill that comes out of negotiations with the House of Representatives undercuts the Medicare Program or moves toward reducing protections for beneficiaries. We also need to remember, this bill comes with a warning to all of us: the public is a lot smarter than they are sometimes given credit for, and if we do not work diligently to improve what we have begun, they will rightly take out their anger on us. We need to ensure that this bill is the first step, not the last step.

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I rise to speak today to mark several important developments in our Nation's fight to end domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking. First, I recently had the honor of addressing domestic violence advocates from across the country who have convened in Washington, DC, to attend the annual meeting of the National Network to End Domestic Violence. These are the women and men on the front lines, transforming the Violence Against Women Act from words on a piece of paper into real solutions for battered women and children. These advocates witness the terrible toll of family violence. They, in essence, know the statistics by heart. Statistics like 20 percent of all nonfatal violence against females over 12 years of age were committed by intimate partners, according to government statistics released in February 2003. Or the statistics that tell us that in 2000 alone, 1,247 women were killed by an intimate partner. These advocates experience what the studies confirm; that is, in almost half of the households with domestic violence, there are children under the age of 12. In the face of such daunting numbers, I was pleased to tell these advocates that our fight for an independent and separate Violence Against Women Office is over. I have been assured by Attorney General Ashcroft that his department will comply with the directive for an independent office that was in the law passed by the Congress last session. I want to make clear that my Violence Against Women Office Act and subsequent push to ensure compliance was not a fight about office space or bureaucratic in-fighting. I introduced this legislation because I know that a separate office means that the office's leadership and agenda cannot be marginalized or pushed to a back office. A separate office means that violence against women issues stay at the forefront and that its director appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate will have an office with the stature and status to use it as the bully pulpit on domestic violence issues that I intended when I authored the Violence Against Women Act. Nor is the independent office simply a Joe Biden issue. The Violence Against Women Office Act was voted on favorably--with no objections--in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The act passed unanimously in the Senate and passed overwhelmingly in the House. The mandate for freestanding Violence Against Women Office is Congress' law, not a whim. Despite the law's clear language and intent, the Department of Justice formally announced in February 2003 that it ``interpreted'' the new law to permit the office to remain as a part of the Office of Justice Program, the arm of the Justice Department which handles grant making, rather than implementing significant policy decisions. I vigorously protested this ``interpretation,'' informing the Justice Department that it was inconsistent with both the plain letter of the law, as well as congressional intent. In fact, I personally called Attorney General Ashcroft on February 13 to discuss this issue and to urge him to reconsider the Department's position. On March 24, the Attorney General called to inform me that he had personally reviewed this issue and that he was reversing the Department's February decision. More specifically, he pledged to me that the Office would be moved outside of the Office of Justice Programs to become an independent and distinct office, as called for by the law. He also pledged that the Director of the Office would have a direct line of report to him, and not be required to report through the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Justice Programs, as the Department had previously required. I am grateful that Attorney General Ashcroft took the time to turn his full attention to this matter, to examine the law and legislative history, and to ensure that his Department correctly implemented the act. I commend the Attorney General for doing ``the right thing'' with respect to the office. The strength and stature of the Violence Against Women Office will be matched by the strength and stature of its director, Diane Stuart. Pursuant to the new law that requires Senate confirmation, Ms. Stuart testified before the Judiciary Committee earlier this month, and the committee will vote on her nomination on Thursday. Ms. Stuart has been acting director of the office for almost 2 years, and during that time has done terrific work. I am particularly impressed with the extraordinary outreach Ms. Stuart has done thus far, meeting with law enforcement, prosecutors, and service providers from Montgomery County, MD, to Portland, OR. She is truly an expert in the areas of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking, and I look forward to working with her as we fight to end family violence in our communities.

Mr. BIDEN

Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I rise to introduce the Law Enforcement Discipline, Accountability, and Due Process Act of 2003, along with the Chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Corrections and Victims' Rights Senator Graham, Senator McConnell and Senator Bunning. These are trying times for the men and women on our front lines providing domestic security, our Nation's law enforcement personnel. State and local fiscal problems are forcing many communities to cut their police budgets. Each change in the Nation's homeland security alert level results in increased overtime and other costs for local law enforcement. Just yesterday, the FBI reported that the number of murders and rapes was up across the country in 2002. And this Administration is determined to dramatically scale back Federal crime- fighting initiatives like the COPS program, a proven initiative that has been hailed as one of the keys to the crime-drop of the nineties. At the same time, the men and women of law enforcement work in extremely dangerous environments. An average of 165 police officers are killed in the line of duty every year. And at times, internal police investigations and administrative hearings do not provide officers with basic protections. According to the National Association of Police Organizations, ``[i]n roughly half of the states in this country, officers enjoy some legal protections against false accusations and abusive conduct, but hundreds of thousands of officers have very limited due process rights and confront limitations on their exercise of other rights, such as the right to engage in political activities.'' The Fraternal Order of Police notes that, ``[i]n a startling number of jurisdictions throughout this country, law enforcement officers have no procedural or administrative protections whatsoever; in fact, they can be, and frequently are, summarily dismissed from their jobs without explanation. Officers who lose their careers due to administrative or political expediency almost always find it impossible to find new employment in public safety. An officer's reputation, once tarnished by accusation, is almost impossible to restore.'' This legislation we introduce today seeks to provide officers with certain basic protections in those jurisdictions where such workplace protections are not currently provided. This bill allows law enforcement officials to engage in political activities. It provides standards and procedures to guide State and local law enforcement agencies during internal investigations, interrogations, and administrative disciplinary hearings of law enforcement officers, and it calls upon States to develop and enforce these disciplinary procedures. The bill would preempt State laws which confer fewer rights than those provided for in the legislation, but it would not preempt any State or local laws that confer rights or protections that are equal to or exceed the rights and protections afforded in the bill. My own State of Delaware has its own law enforcement officers' bill of rights, and as such Delaware would not be impacted by the provisions of this bill. I am pleased that the bill has earned the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police and of the National Association of Police Organizations. Beyond benefiting those on the front lines of local law enforcement, this bill would enhance the ability of our citizens to hold their local police accountable if they do transgress while on the job. The legislation includes provisions that will ensure citizen complaints against police officers are investigated, and that citizens are informed of the outcome of these investigations. The bill balances the rights of police officers with the rights of citizens to raise valid concerns about the conduct of some of these officers. In addition, I have consulted with constitutional experts who have opined that the bill is consistent with Congress' powers under the Commerce Clause and that it does not run afoul of the Supreme Court's Tenth Amendment jurisprudence. While I believe that the bill we introduce today takes the right approach, I want to note the International Association of Chiefs of Police's opposition to this measure. In April of this year I met with Richmond, California Chief of Police Joseph Samuels, the president of the IACP. Chief Samuels and I acknowledged that we disagreed on this bill, but I pledged to him that their concerns would be heard and taken into consideration as the bill we introduce today is debated in Congress. It is my view that without a meeting of the minds between police management and union officials on this issue, enactment of a meaningful law enforcement officers' bill of rights will be difficult. It is my hope that the newly-constituted Subcommittee on Crime, Corrections and Victims' Rights, on which I serve as ranking member, will hold a hearing on this measure. That subcommittee is the proper forum in which to debate the merits of our approach to guaranteeing basic procedural safeguards to the men and women of law enforcement. I urge my colleagues to join Senators Graham, McConnell, Bunning and me in providing all of the Nation's law enforcement officers with the basic rights they deserve. I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.