Barbara Boxer

Mrs. BOXER

Mrs. BOXER. I yield an additional 1 minute.

Mrs. BOXER. Madam President, how much time do I have remaining?

Mrs. BOXER. Madam President, this is a country of laws, not men. This is a country that treasures its God-given gifts--from the mountains, to the prairies, to the oceans white with foam. God bless America, my home sweet home. This isn't about us being here for 2 years, or 6 years, or 10 years, or 20, or even 50. We will be gone. But we need to think about the future. We can do more for our troops were we just to increase fuel economy. We will save far more doing that than by drilling in a pristine area that has wildlife that looks like this picture.

Mrs. BOXER. Madam President, I hope we will stand with the environment and vote for the Boxer amendment. I yield the floor.

Mrs. BOXER. I move to reconsider the vote.

Mrs. BOXER. Mr. President, I would first like to thank Senator Murray for this critical amendment to deliver on the promise we made to the Nation's children by fully funding the No Child Left Behind Act. It has been over 1 year since the approval of the No Child Left Behind Act. But we are not fulfilling the promise made in that law and are, in fact, leaving millions of kids behind. The Nation has made little progress toward improving the quality of our children's education. In fact, we have taken a huge step backward by actually cutting funding for the education reform law that was enacted. The Murray amendment will not only alleviate the fiscal crisis in our schools so that they can provide a high-quality education for our children, but it will provide funding to keep our children safe in afterschool programs. As the author with Senator Ensign of the bipartisan afterschool program that President Bush signed into law as part of the No Child Left Behind Act, I want to emphasize how important the Federal afterschool program is to children and families across America. Dozens of respected, independent studies tell us that afterschool programs keep children safe, reduce crime and drug use, and improve academic performance. However, despite strong evidence that keeping children safe after school can reduce juvenile crime and prevent children from engaging in risky behaviors, the administration's budget for fiscal year 2004 slashes Federal funding for afterschool programs by 40 percent. This unprecedented cut would result in over 81,000 children in California and almost 600,000 children nationally being pushed out onto the streets after school. Furthermore, by not fully funding afterschool programs at the level that we promised in the No Child Left Behind Act, we will be leaving over a million more children not just behind, but home alone. We cannot afford to neglect our commitment to our Nation's children. The time for rhetoric has passed and now it is time to act. It is time to fully fund afterschool programs and the entire No Child Left Behind Act.

Mrs. BOXER. I would like to be told when I have a minute left. We are reaching the end of a tough debate. It is a very close vote, no doubt about it. The Vice President, I understand, is on his way over in case it is a tie vote. I want to pick up on something Senator Nickles said when he kind of cast aspersions on those who live outside of the State of Alaska and are speaking up in favor of this Arctic Wildlife Refuge. Let me be clear. I come from a State that has millions of acres of wilderness, thousands and thousands of acres of beautiful Federal land. We are very proud of it. We have forests, desert, wetlands, and the rest, including Yosemite National Park. Let me be clear. I welcome the support of my colleagues. I don't shun it. I welcome them to help me preserve those acres for the people of California and the people of the country and, indeed, the people of the world. In our State, we consider these treasures not only to be God-given resources, but we look at them as God-given resources that we, the people of this planet, have to protect. I am interested in Senator Domenici's presentation. It was well done. He has a big chart and he has a dot on the chart. He says: Look at this, it is a dot on this chart. Well, if you go up into space and you look at the Earth, it looks like a little marble. Does that mean we should not care about what happens on God's Earth? So I think we are getting to the point at which we have to make a choice. Do we want to change the policy and go into this beautiful refuge or do we want to look at other ways to get more energy--I underscore, much more energy? Look, if we just close the loopholes on SUVs--by the way, I represent a lot of soccer moms and let me tell you, they want their SUVs, and they want to get better fuel economy from them. I live in a community where almost every other car is big because I live in suburbia. They want to have the option to drive those cars and not have to spend $100 every time they fill up the tank. If we were just to close that SUV loophole, we would save, by 2030, 10 billion barrels of oil. This is what we are talking about. That is far more than you would get out of the Arctic. If you moved up the fuel economy just to 35 miles a gallon--listen to this--we would be 43 percent less dependent upon foreign oil. With ANWR, it is 2 percent. Vote for the Boxer amendment. I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mrs. BOXER. Mr. President, at this point, I will yield to four people in sequence: Senator Bingaman, 10 minutes; Senator Durbin, 5 minutes; Senator Murray, 5 minutes; Senator Stabenow 5 minutes. That will be the total of our speakers and then we will be happy to yield an equivalent amount of time to the other side, if that will be acceptable. These Senators would like to give their short statements and then go back to their committees.

Mrs. BOXER. Twenty-five minutes.

Mrs. BOXER. As I understand it, I control 41 minutes of time. Is that correct? Instead of just standing here and speaking myself about this amendment, I have suggested we allow it to go in this sequence and then back to my colleagues on the other side, just for the sake of my colleagues' schedule.

Mrs. BOXER. Mr. President, I yield 10 minutes to a real leader on this issue, Senator Bingaman, the top Democrat on the Energy Committee.

Mrs. BOXER. Will the Senator yield his remaining time for a question?

Mrs. BOXER. I wonder if the Senator had seen this chart which shows by the year 2030 how much energy is yielded by these various factors. This would be how much energy we would get from the Arctic Refuge production, 2.38 billion barrels of oil. If we just put better tires on our cars, it would result in better fuel economy, we would save more energy. If we just closed the SUV loophole, meaning we got those SUVs up to the same mileage as cars, we would save 10 billion barrels. And, by the way, if we did fuel economy, as my friend suggested, up to 35 miles per gallon, which is very modest, look at what it would save: 18 billion barrels. Here is what the Arctic gets us, and we destroy a region that looks like this, instead of going this way.

Mrs. BOXER. Mr. President, I am going to take 1 extra minute off the bill, if I might, to simply send to the desk a letter from Jimmy Carter, former President Jimmy Carter. Last night it was implied by several colleagues--I have their words actually--I will not go through them now--that President Carter supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Just to quote from a little bit of his letter, he says: We can have the untouched sublime wilderness. Or we can have oil field development. But we cannot have both. Opening the coastal plain for oil exploration and development would be, despite all the much-vaunted technological promises, severely damaging to wildlife and the ecosystem. And it is inherently fatal to the wilderness qualities of this matchless example of America's natural heritage. I ask unanimous consent that the letter be printed in the Record.

Mrs. BOXER. I now yield 5 minutes to Senator Patty Murray who has also been a tremendous voice for the environment here in the Senate.

Mrs. BOXER. Will the Senator yield her remaining time?

Mrs. BOXER. I say to my friend, I appreciate her raising the issue of the safety here because in the Prudhoe Bay oil field and the Trans- Alaska we have seen an average 423 spills annually on the North Slope since 1996, and that is according to the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation. Over 1.7 million gallons of 40 different substances, from acid to waste oil, have been spilled during routine operations from 1996 to 2002. There were 2,958 spills, commonly diesel, crude oil, and hydraulic oil. My friend is right. Maybe years ago they would have been worse spills, but the fact is there are terrible spills now. I see that my colleague's time is up. I thank the Senator for participating. Mr. President, I yield 5 minutes to Senator Stabenow from Michigan.

Mrs. BOXER. Mr. President, I ask we take 10 minutes off our side of the resolution.

Mrs. BOXER. Mr. President I will speak a couple of minutes about the general budget, and then turn to the ANWR Alaska refuge amendment that is pending that I hope will prevail in a vote in a few years. I ask unanimous consent Senators Corzine and Clinton be added as cosponsors to my ANWR amendment.

Mrs. BOXER. Mr. President, I will talk about this budget overall because I listened to my colleague talk about it in a way that, frankly, is stunning because I remember when Republicans wanted a constitutional amendment to balance the budget. Now they are embracing a budget that has deficits as far as the eye can see. If you like deficits as far as the eye can see, you will love this budget and you should vote for it because that is what you are getting.

Mrs. BOXER. I will after I am finished, as I listened to my friend talk for quite a few moments. If you embrace the idea that deficits are a good thing for the country, red ink is a good thing for this country, you will love this budget; go ahead and vote for it and that is fine and we will talk about it when we go home. If you like the idea that we should ignore an enormous cost that is staring us in the face as our beautiful men and women are standing on the brink of war, if you think this budget should ignore those costs, then you should vote for this budget because this is an Alice-in- Wonderland-type of budget. The whole country is focused on what is about to happen--but not in this budget. I have seen comments made by friends of mine from the other body on the other side of the aisle that said hurry up and get this through before we have to deal with the costs of the war. When I hear Senator Frist say let's push this through fast, that, in my opinion, ties the knot here. The other side wants to get this done very quickly even though it has no costs for the war. The first person who said the war will cost between $100 billion and $200 billion was Larry Lindsey, and as we know, he was shown the door. Vote for this budget if you think we should ignore the costs of the war. Vote for this budget if you love deficits. If you like breaking promises to our children on No Child Left Behind, cutting afterschool programs and the like, vote for this budget because that is what you are doing. The President posed for pictures with Senator Kennedy and Congressman Miller--No Child Left Behind--and then he fails to fund it. He is going to kick 50,000 California kids out of afterschool programs, unless we fix it. All through the country, he is going to kick 500,000 to 700,000 kids out of afterschool programs, including kids in New Hampshire and all over our great Nation. Our kids deserve more than that. If you like the fact that No Child Left Behind is not funded fully, vote for the budget. If you want to cut environmental enforcement, vote for the budget. If you want to fund the highways and transit at a lower level than what we need, vote for the budget. Especially vote for the budget if you want to give tax breaks to people who earn more than $1 million a year because they will get back $87,000 a year. Definitely vote for this budget if your heart bleeds for those folks who make more than $1 million a year because that is the centerpiece of this budget. I hope we can change it. We are going to try to change it. We have a few brave souls on the other side of the aisle who agree with us. I don't know how it will turn out. But when I hear people talk about why our country is in so much economic trouble, it started 2 years ago. We lost 2 million jobs because we abandoned fiscal responsibility, we abandoned investment in job-producing investments, we abandoned the principles that led us to the greatest economic recovery in generations. But if you don't want to go back to those good days and stick with these bad days, vote for this budget. On my time that is remaining, I want to say how excited I am that we actually may pass the Alaska wildlife amendment. What we have here on this chart is a very simple visual of what we will save from various scenarios on imported oil. I had, yesterday, the percentages. We see that while ANWR would reduce our reliance on imported oil by 2 percent, if we just did better tires on our cars, which would lead to better fuel economy, we could save 4.3 percent of imported oil. If we closed the SUV loophole and just had the SUVs get the same mileage as cars, we would save 16 percent on the amount of oil we have to import. If we increased our fuel economy by 13--to 35 miles per gallon--which the automobile people say is absolutely possible; we would reduce our dependence on foreign oil by 43 percent. The alternative is this reduction of dependence on foreign oil by 2 percent. By the way, this wouldn't happen for 8 or 10 years. For everybody who says it is going to happen sooner, that is not what the proof is. The science tells us it will take 8 to 10 years to get it up and running. This is the alternative, drilling in this God-given area. I will give the remainder of my time to Senator Conrad. We are talking about a place that looks like this. Yes, in the winter it is icy. Yes, in the winter there is not much--it doesn't look as beautiful as this, but I don't look as good as I looked when I was young, so that happens sometimes. But the bottom line is, it is a beautiful place. Here are some other beautiful pictures. We will show you some of the wildlife that we have, this beautiful bird which is the whimbrel--quite beautiful. It is my chart bird, I call it. That is a beautiful example of what we are trying to save. I will yield the remainder of my time on the resolution to Senator Conrad and hope my colleagues on both sides will support the amendment.

Mrs. BOXER. I have been to Alaska and I am going back. I haven't been to the 1002 area, but my chief environmental legislative aide took my place on a trip that, unfortunately, I had to cancel 6 months ago, and just said it was absolutely exquisite. As my friend knows, we have hundreds of wildlife refuges. I have been to a few. I haven't been to them all. But this is God's gift and whether--

Mrs. BOXER. Yes, I stated that clearly in the debate. The last time I was asked this question, people said these photos were----

Mrs. BOXER. Mr. President, I ask to take 5 minutes off the resolution to respond to the Senator from New Mexico. I believe I might pause here for a unanimous consent request. Mr. President, I ask Senator Nickles, is that correct? Does the Senator wish that I wait while he propounds a unanimous consent request?

Mrs. BOXER. As long as it does not come off my time. I would like to reserve the 5 minutes off the resolution.