Sam Brownback

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. I thank the Presiding Officer. I appreciate that greatly. I always need to watch my junior Senator and make sure he is in his place. Mr. President, I note, properly, my junior Senator is the dean of the Kansas delegation, even if he is the junior Senator. I rise in support of the Craig amendment. I wish to make comments that I think are pertinent and germane to the farm bill because I believe this admendment is pertinent and germane to the farm bill. I know colleagues are looking at this amendment saying it is a private property rights issue, it belongs in the Judiciary Committee and this is an issue we should track through that committee. This is an issue involving agricultural lands, which I think is wholly appropriate for the farm bill. Also, private property issues are so key and central to farming in the United States. It is in many places dominantly private property issues. In the West, there are a lot of public lands and agricultural use in public lands areas. But private rights dominates throughout the agricultural system of our country. There was a shock sent out with the Kelo case when the Court said you now don't have to have this justification of a public use for private property to be taken and can condemn it. Many were shocked on all sides of the aisle--right, left, middle, people in urban areas, people in rural areas. I wish to say specifically people from rural areas were particularly struck by this decision because they all feel an attack frequently from people in governmental entities to take lands for power lines, parks, land that should go back to them in some cases, if it is a railroad line that has been abandoned and the deed said the land will revert to the farmland owner and then it is taken for a trail. People are saying wait a minute, I thought we had private property rights, basic in our constitution, basic in our philosophy, basic to agriculture. This is a narrow issue to get at the Kelo decision. It is well crafted by the Senator from Idaho to support those private property rights. The amendment will deter States and local governments from taking working agricultural land against the will of the landowner only to designate that same land as open space. Here I think you can look at that and say, well, obviously, that is something we should protect, that private property right. If there is to be eminent domain, it has to be listed on a public purpose, like we have had eminent domain laws for some period of time now, and not just taking it to keep an open space. If that is to take place, there needs to be a different set and a different system rather than what is being allowed or expanded after Kelo by local or State units of government. This narrows the decision of Kelo back to what it was prior to Kelo-- a protection of private property rights. I think that is important. I think it is a key issue and one that is a top priority to agriculture and landowners. Indeed, the President of the American Farm Bureau Federation said after Kelo: No one's home or farm and ranch land is safe from government seizure because of this ruling. Well, let's make sure their land is safe. We can do that, and this is an amendment that helps to do that. I think it is an important amendment to help to do that. If you voted in support of private property rights, I would hope you would support the Craig amendment, whichever side of the aisle you are on, and say there is an appropriate way and there is an inappropriate way and the appropriate way to make sure you have eminent domain is for a public purpose and not just taking agricultural lands to maintain open spaces and reducing the value of that land or its workability as agriculture. This is an important, good amendment, and I urge my colleagues to support it. I yield back to the sponsor of the bill.

Mr. BROWNBACK. I was called the junior Senator from Kansas.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, may I inquire of the Senator from Iowa, if this is voted on, will this require a 60-vote threshold?

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I wish today to applaud my alma mater, Kansas State University, and three of its students. Recently, three Kansas State University students and a student from the University of Delaware teamed up to win first place in a student case study competition at the ninth annual International Leadership Association conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. Members of the winning team from Kansas State were Chance Lee, senior in sociology and political science with a minor in leadership studies, Manhattan, KS; Lauren Luhrs, senior in human ecology and mass communications-public relations with minors in leadership studies and business, Overland Park, KS; and Anthony Carter, senior in sociology with a minor in nonprofit leadership, Colorado Springs, CO. The Leadership Studies Minor at Kansas State University has been a tremendous success. The mission of the Leadership Studies at Kansas State University is to develop knowledgeable, ethical, caring, inclusive leaders for a diverse and changing world. Mr. President, this program is doing just that. I am proud of this program, my alma matter, and the three students who represented Kansas State University so well. In the competition participating teams were given a 23-page document from the Harvard Business School which detailed specifics for leadership development at Goldman Sachs. The document provided key details for the case study, including the purpose of the leadership development program to be created. It also gave six factors that were essential in the design of the program: form and location, faculty, content and format, method, target audience, and governance and sponsorship. I again congratulate these three students for their success.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, it is my hope that we can move together in finding cures and developing research that cures humans that is ethical and sound and doesn't destroy young human life. We have been able to do quite a bit of this already. We recently found there was scientific work done by a Northwestern University professor in developing cures and treatments for type I diabetes using stem cells. Again, this is adult stem cells, which is ethical and moral, no problem with it. The only problem I found with it is that the Northwestern professor was having to do this in Brazil rather than in the United States to get support and funding. He is saying this: Though too early to call it a cure, the procedure has enabled the young people, who have type I diabetes, to live insulin-free so far, some as long as 3 years. The treatment involves stem cell transplants from the patient's own blood. For parents who are dealing with juvenile diabetes and those difficulties, this is fabulous news in humans. We need more of it, and we need it to take place in the United States and not Brazil. Nothing against Brazil. I am glad for it to take place there, but I want it here for our children. We now have--as I have said previously on the floor--73 different human applications for adult stem cells. We have not been able to come up with any in the embryonic field yet. I think a bigger number--and we will verify this for my colleagues, as it is not verified yet--is somewhere north of 400,000 people who are now being treated with adult or cord blood stem cells in the United States and different places around the world, the majority being U.S. citizens. Of course, we don't have any in the embryonic field because it continues to struggle with tumor formation as an issue. These are wonderful numbers of treatments that we are getting in different human maladies and, hopefully, we can verify that number of 400,000 people being treated with stem cells, getting heart tissue and spinal cord tissue to regenerate, and Parkinson's treatment is coming forward. This is a beautiful set of treatments--all ethical. I want to look at the budgetary numbers briefly to remind my colleagues where we have invested taxpayer funding in this field. It is my hope that as we look at the numbers--we have an ethical issue on human embryonic stem cell research, and I believe we have crossed over the line. I hope we can continue to look at our funding issues, where we are putting a lot of money, and have put a lot of money, into embryonic stem cell research. We are looking at $140 million in fiscal year 2006 and over half a billion since 2002 in embryonic stem cell research of both human and nonhuman types. We have not cured a single patient yet with that money. May I submit to my colleagues that with over half a billion dollars, we could be treating and developing these cures in the United States and not in Brazil. In trying to set aside all of the sharp edges that have now been associated with this debate, and focusing just on patients and treating people, I hope we will say we are all in this for cures, for treating people. So if I could take portions of these funds and put it into treating people and getting more people treated for Parkinson's, congestive heart failure, or diabetes--all the things that we are actually doing in humans today but that need more research in funding-- that we would say: OK, you are right. We don't have to go the embryonic stem cell route now. Let's go to where people are getting treated and treat people. This is about curing people. That is what we have debated and talked about for some period of time, curing people. We have one that is working and one that doesn't. Yet we have invested pretty heavily in this. I ask my colleagues if there is some way that we could put the swords down and talk about this rationally, stop the fighting and say how do we treat people. I believe that is our objective. With that, I thank my colleagues for their indulgence in this debate. It will continue to come up. The next issue will be human animal crosses. I advise my colleagues on this, you will see people pushing to cross genetic materials from animals into humans. They are going to say it is going to cure a lot of people. I think it is an enormous ethical boundary that we should not cross at this point in time, with our understanding of life and what it is to be human. I hope before we go that route, we will all get together and say we are going to pause for a while on this one. This is too big for all of us, and we want to think about this for a while--left, right, middle. We have a ways to go to get some cures. We are getting them. We don't need to cross over to that. We can think about that. I yield the floor. Exhibit 1 Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Lines Derived from Human Somatic Cells Somatic cell nuclear transfer allows trans-acting factors present in the mammalian oocyte to reprogram somatic cell nuclei to an undifferentiated state. Here we show that four factors (OCT4, SOX2, NANOG, and LIN28) are sufficient to reprogram human somatic cells to pluripotent stem cells that exhibit the essential characteristics of embryonic stem cells. These human induced pluripotent stem cells have normal karyotypes, express telomerase activity, express cell surface markers and genes that characterize human ES cells, and maintain the developmental potential to differentiate into advanced derivatives of all three primary germ layers. Such human induced pluripotent cell lines should be useful in the production of new disease models and in drug development as well as application in transplantation medicine once technical limitations (for example, mutation through viral integration) are eliminated. Mammalian embryogenesis elaborates distinct developmental stages in a strict temporal order. Nonetheless, because development is dictated by epigenetic rather than genetic events, differentiation is, in principle, reversible. The cloning of Dolly demonstrated that nuclei from mammalian differentiated cells can be reprogrammed to an undifferentiated state by trans-acting factors present in the oocyte (1), and this discovery led to a search for factors that could mediate similar reprogramming without somatic cell nuclear transfer. Recently. four transcription factors (Oct4, Sox2, c-myc, and Klf4) were shown to be sufficient to reprogram mouse fibroblasts to undifferentiated, pluripotent stem cells (termed induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells) (2- 5). Reprogramming human cells by defined factors would allow the generation of patient-specific pluripotent cell lines without somatic cell nuclear transfer, but the observation that the expression of c-Myc causes death and differentiation of human ES cells suggests that combinations of factors lacking this gene are required to reprogram human cells (6). Here we demonstrate that OCT4, S0X2, NANOG, and LIN28 are sufficient to reprogram human somatic cells. Human ES cells can reprogram myeloid precursors through cell fusion (7). To identify candidate reprogramming factors, we compiled a list of genes with enriched expression in human ES cells relative to myeloid precursors, and prioritized the list based on known involvement in the establishment or maintenance of pluripotency (table S1). We then cloned these genes into a lentiviral vector (fig. S1) to screen for combinations of genes that could reprogram the differentiated derivatives of an OCT4 knock-in human ES cell line generated through homologous recombination (8). In this cell line, the expression of neomycin phosphotransferase, which make cells resistant to geneticin, is driven by an endogenous OCT4 promoter, a gene that is highly expressed in pluripotent cells but not in differentiated cells. Thus reprogramming events reactivating the OCT4 promoter can be recovered by geneticin selection. The first combination of 14 genes we selected (table S2) directed reprogramming of adherent cells derived from human ES cell-derived CD45+ hematopoietic cells (7, 9), to geneticin-resistant (OCT4 positive) colonies with an ES cell-morphology (fig. S2A) (10). These geneticin- resistant colonies expressed typical human ES cell-specific cell surface markers (fig. S2B) and formed teratomas when injected into immunocompromised SCID-beige mice (fig. S2C). By testing subsets of the 14 initial genes. we identified a core set of 4 genes, OCT4, SOX2, NANOG, and LIN28, that were capable of reprogramming human ES cell-derived somatic cells with a mesenchymal phenotype (Fig. 1A and fig. S3). Removal of either OCT4 or SOX2 from the reprogramming mixture eliminated the appearance of geneticin resistant (OCT4 positive) reprogrammed mesenchymal clones (Fig. 1A). NANOG showed a beneficial effect in clone recovery from human ES cell-derived mesenchymal cells but was not required for the initial appearance of such clones (Fig. 1A). These results are consistent with cell fusion-mediated reprogramming experiments, where overexpression of Nanog in mouse ES cells resulted in over a 200-fold increase in reprogramming efficiency (11). The expression of NANOG also improves the cloning efficiency of human ES cells (12). and thus could increase the survival rate of early reprogrammed cells. LIN28 had a consistent but more modest effect on reprogrammed mesenchymal cell clone recovery (Fig. 1A). We next tested whether OCT4, SOX2, NANOG, and LIN28 are sufficient to reprogram primary, genetically unmodified, diploid human fibroblasts. We initially chose IMR90 fetal fibroblasts because these diploid human cells are being extensively characterized by the ENCODE Consortium (13), are readily available through the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC, Catalog No. CCL-186) and have published DNA fingerprints that allow confirmation of the origin of reprogrammed clones. IMR90 cells also proliferate robustly for more than 20 passages before undergoing senescence but grow slowly in human ES cell culture conditions, a difference that provides a proliferative advantage to reprogrammed clones and aids in their selection by morphological criteria (compact colonies, high nucleus to cytoplasm ratios, and prominent nucleoli) alone (14, 15). IMR90 cells were transduced with a combination of OCT4, SOX2, NANOG, and LIN28. Colonies with a human ES cell morphology (iPS colonies) first became visible after 12 days posttransduction. On day 20, a total of 198 iPS colonies were visible from 0.9 million starting IMR90 cells whereas no iPS colonies were observed in non- transduced controls. Forty-one iPS colonies were picked, 35 of which were successfully expanded for an additional three weeks. Four clones (iPS(IMR90)1-4) with minimal differentiation were selected for continued expansion and detailed analysis. Each of the four iPS(IMR90) clones had a typical human ES cell morphology (Fig. 1B) and a normal karyotype at both 6 and 17 weeks of culture (Fig. 2A). Each iPS(IMR90) clone expressed telomerase activity (Fig. 2B) and the human ES cell-specific cell surface antigens SSEA-3, SSEA-4, Tra-1-60 and Tra-1-81 (Fig. 2C) whereas the parental IMR90 cells did not. Microarray analyses of gene expression of the four iPS(IMR90) clones confirmed a similarity to five human ES cell lines (H1, H7, H9, H13 and H14) and a dissimilarity to IMR90 cells (Fig. 3, table S3, and fig. S4). Although there was some variation in gene expression between different iPS(IMR90) clones (fig. S5), the variation was actually less than that between different human ES cell lines (Fig. 3A and table S3). For each of the iPS(IMR90) clones, the expression of the endogenous OCT4 and NANOG was at levels similar to that of human ES cells, but the exogenous expression of these genes varied between clones and between genes (Fig. 3B). For OCT4, some expression from the transgene was detectable in all of the clones, but for NANOG, most of the clones demonstrated minimal exogenous expression, suggesting silencing of the transgene during reprogramming. Analyses of the methylation status of the OCT4 promoter showed differential methylation between human ES cells and IMR90 cells (fig. S6). All four iPS(IMR90) clones exhibited a demethylation pattern similar to that of human ES cells and distinct from the parental IMR90 cells. Both embryoid body (fig. S7) and teratoma formation (Fig. 4) demonstrated that all four of the reprogrammed iPS(IMR90) clones had the developmental potential to give rise to differentiated derivatives of all three primary germ layers. DNA fingerprinting analyses (short tandem repeat- STR) confirmed that these iPS clones were derived from IMR90 cells and confirmed that they were not from the human ES cell lines we have in the laboratory (table S4). The STR analysis published on the ATCC website for IMR90 cells employed the same primer sets and confirms the identity of the IMR90 cells used for these experiments. The iPS(IMR90) clones were passaged at the same ratio (1:6) and frequency (every 5 days) as human ES cells, had doubling times similar to that of the human H1 ES cell line assessed under the same conditions (table S5), and as of this writing, have been in continuous culture for 22 weeks with no observed period of replicative crisis. Starting with an initial 4 wells of a 6-well plate of iPS cells (one clone/well, approximately 1 million cells), after 4 weeks of additional culture, 40 total 10-cm dishes (representing approximately 350 million cells) of the 4 iPS(IMR90) clones were cryopreserved and confirmed to have normal karyotypes. Since IMR90 cells are of fetal origin, we next examined reprogramming of postnatal fibroblasts. Human newborn foreskin fibroblasts (ATCC, Catalog No. CRL-2097) were transduced with OCT4, SOX2, NANOG, and LIN28. From 0.6 million foreskin fibroblasts, we obtained 57 iPS colonies. No iPS colonies were observed in non-transduced controls. Twenty-seven out of 29 picked colonies were successfully expanded for three passages, four of which (iPS(foreskin)-l to 4) were selected for continued expansion and analyses. DNA fingerprinting of the iPS(foreskin) clones matched the fingerprints for the parental fibroblast cell line published on the ATCC website (table S4). Each of the four iPS(foreskin) clones had a human ES cell morphology (fig. S8A), had a normal karyotype (fig. S8B), and expressed telomerase, cell surface markers, and genes characteristic of human ES cells (Figs. 2 and 3 and fig. S5). Each of the four iPS(foreskin) clones proliferated robustly, and as of this writing, have been in continuous culture for 14 weeks. Each clone demonstrated multilineage differentiation both in embryoid bodies and teratomas (figs. S9 and S10); however, unlike the iPS(IMR90) clones, there was variation between the clones in the lineages apparent in teratomas examined at 5 weeks. In particular, neural differentiation was common in teratomas from iPS(foreskin) clones 1 and 2 (fig. S9A), but was largely absent in teratomas from iPS(foreskin) clones 3 and 4. Instead, there were multiple foci of columnar epithelial cells reminiscent of primitive ectoderm (fig. S9D). This is consistent with the embryoid body data (fig. Sl0), where the increase in PAX6 (a neural marker) in iPS(foreskin) clones 3 and 4 was minimal compared to the other clones, a difference that correlated with a failure to downregulate NANOG and OCT4. A possible explanation for these differences is that specific integration sites in these clones allowed continued high expression of the lentiviral transgenes, partially blocking differentiation. PCR for the four transgenes revealed that OCT4, SOX2, and NANOG were integrated into all four of the iPS(IMR90) clones and all four of the iPS(foreskin) clones, but that LIN28 was absent from one iPS(IMR90) clone (#4) and from one iPS(foreskin) clone (#1) (Fig. 2D). Thus, although LIN28 can influence the frequency of reprogramming (Fig. 1A), these results confirm that it is not absolutely required for the initial reprogramming, nor is it subsequently required for the stable expansion of reprogrammed cells. The human iPS cells described here meet the defining criteria we originally proposed for human ES cells (14), with the significant exception that the iPS cells are not derived from embryos. Similar to human ES cells, human iPS cells should prove useful for studying the development and function of human tissues, for discovering and testing new drugs, and for transplantation medicine. For transplantation therapies based on these cells, with the exception of autoimmune diseases, patient-specific iPS cell lines should largely eliminate the concern of immune rejection. It is important to understand, however, that before the cells can be used in the clinic, additional work is required to avoid vectors that integrate into the genome, potentially introducing mutations at the insertion site. For drug development, human iPS cells should make it easier to generate panels of cell lines that more closely reflect the genetic diversity of a population, and should make it possible to generate cell lines from individuals predisposed to specific diseases. Human ES cells remain controversial because their derivation involves the destruction of human preimplantation embryos and iPS cells remove this concern. However, further work is needed to determine if human iPS cells differ in clinically significant ways from ES cells.

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I rise to discuss a recent enormous scientific breakthrough on a topic that has engaged this body for much of the past 8 years. I think this is a day that many of us--I think perhaps all of us--have hoped would take place. I ask unanimous consent to include in the Record at the end of my remarks an article that broke lose right around Thanksgiving.

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, this article is by Dr. James Thomson, University of Wisconsin. Some may recognize that name. His name has been used on this floor many times during the past 8 years on the issue of embryonic stem cell research. He is the man who discovered human embryonic stem cells about 10 years ago and described them as being what is called pluripotent, which means that an embryonic stem cell could form any other type of cell tissue in the body, whether it is for the eye, brain, bone, or skin. Any type of cell tissue could regenerate on a fast basis, and it was thought that these sorts of pluripotent embryonic stem cells were going to solve a number of our human health problems. Many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle embraced the news and said this is a fabulous thing and we are going to be able to now cure a number of people from diseases who have had great problems and difficulties, and we want cures for them. There was an ethical glitch with it in that it took the destruction of a human embryo to get these human embryonic stem cells, and therein ensued a fight that engaged the country and engaged the world about the tension between cures and an ethical recognition of human life and the sacredness of human life. It has been a long debate. I am hopeful that the article I submitted into the Record is the bookend on the other end of this debate that was started by Professor Thomson and that, in many respects, I hope is ended by Professor Thompson and his colleagues. In this article they describe a new type of pluripotent stem cell that is manipulated by man. They call it an induced pluripotent stem cell. This is an elegant and simple process where they take a skin cell from an individual and they reprogram it to be able to act like an embryonic stem cell, or what they call an induced pluripotent stem cell. They then are able to get it to generate more embryonic-like stem cells that are pluripotent and which then can be used to treat diseases or to study diseases, thus removing the need to develop and have a human embryo destroyed, or the origination of the embryonic stem cells, thus removing the problem of not being able to get a genetic match so that we have to go to a cloned embryonic stem cell, or a cloned human to create an embryonic stem cell that matches genetically. You don't have to do that. Get a person's skin cells, reprogram them, back in, pluripotent, to form any type of cell--elegant, simple. There are still many barriers to go on embryonic-like stem cells anyway because they have had a problem with tumor formation. But on the ethical issue, I am hopeful we are on the other bookend, and it is now over; that we don't need to destroy young human life for cures; that we don't need to destroy them for pluripotent cells; that we can do it much simpler and ethically and that good ethics is good science. I put a description up here of what Dr. Thomson said on this subject. There was a University of Tokyo professor who came out with an article the same day, using a slightly different or modified technique, to be able to do this in humans. The University of Tokyo professor had done this earlier in mice and now has perfected it in human cells. He came out saying the same thing: These induced pluripotent cells described here meet the defining criteria we originally proposed for human ES cells, with the significant exception that the induced pluripotent cells are not derived from embryos. That was Dr. James Thomson. I want to speak about this to my colleagues because we have had so many debates on the Senate floor about this topic. I hope my colleagues will research this. A number of people in the scientific field are saying: Great, but let's not stop embryonic stem cell work and destroying embryos for research purposes. Or let's not stop human cloning because it appears now that the only reason to clone a human would be to bring a human to live birth at this point in time, which still has everybody in this body opposed to that type of human cloning. It is noteworthy that the ``father'' of Dolly the sheep has said he has given up on human cloning to go to this type of technique rather than human cloning to provide these sorts of cures and research. Mr. President, I also ask unanimous consent to be printed in the Record at the end of my comments a Telegraph article from the United Kingdom in which Ian Wilmut announced he is shunning human cloning.

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

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I will try to be brief and to the point, if I cannot be eloquent. I want to talk about the Iraq situation. A number of Senators have spoken about that this morning. They are looking at the progress that is taking place with the surge. I had great question about the surge at the outset. I questioned whether this was the right route to go. Yet I have to say my concerns were proven wrong. Look at the numbers: U.S. deaths are down more than 50 percent since June. Iraqi deaths are down more than 50 percent since August. Sectarian violence is down dramatically. Areas of Baghdad are opening. October saw the fewest roadside bomb instances since September of 2005. Mortar rocket attacks are at their lowest level since February 2006. Nobody would say it is over, we have won, but they would say these are very positive events that have taken place. The area we have to emphasize now is the political solution to capture the moment of getting more stability on the ground in Iraq. For some time Senator Biden and I have pushed a federalism approach that this body endorsed by 70 votes. Now is the time for us to push much more aggressively on this political solution. We are seeing this already taking hold in the Kurdish region which has had a head start. Under Saddam Hussein, the Kurds were protected by our air power in the north. They have stabilized a government and have been operating basically that region. We now have Anbar stabilizing, the Anbar awakening. But they are not particularly interested in the federalism solution because they don't have oil. So what we have to have take place at the national level in Iraq is an oil law that distributes oil on a per capita basis around the country, not in regions, so federalism roots can take hold--not one Iraq but several regions and not necessarily on a sectarian basis. Several Iraqis I have met with are saying they believe in federalism. They think it is the route to go. But they say: Don't say we are a Sunni region here or a Shia region there. These are going to be multisect regions so we can get together on a regional basis and not on a division basis around the country. This is a very promising route to go, but we need a political surge to take place in Iraq. We need to put emphasis on a political surge to capitalize on the stabilizing situation that is taking place on the ground. We need a diplomatic surge. We need to push the Iraqis to get oil laws and debaathification taking place on a national level. We should prioritize local and provincial elections and encourage Iraq to devolve power from Baghdad. We should provide additional humanitarian assistance for those Iraqis who fled sectarian violence and relocated to other areas, or they are coming back. Some people are not coming back to areas because there is no housing left; it got blown up in all the violence that took place. Instead of pretending that nothing has changed, our debate needs to reflect the reality on the ground, that the security situation is much better, that we have a real moment here. The reality is that security has improved. The reality is that centralizing power in Baghdad is not the route to go. Creating federal regions provides a chance for that success to be captured and moved forward. I question what came out of the Joint Economic Committee on the funding of the war. I am ranking Republican on that committee. That was not a committee report. I believe there are significant problems with how that funding level was arrived at. I don't think that was accurate. I don't think it was a positive way to move forward. Instead, now is the time to say: OK, let's capitalize on the surge. Let's go on a bipartisan basis with Senator Biden and myself on federalism. Let's push that to capture this, and then we as America can declare victory-- not a Republican victory, not a Bush victory, but we as Americans can say it is now stabilized and we can start to pull our troops back. That is the talk that is penetrating now, and it is the talk we need to have a lot more of. Iraqi President Talibani endorses federalism as a political solution. The Kurds have announced they will convene a federalism conference. Some Iraqi Shia groups are openly discussing the creation of a region that would be a federalism model. The Sunnis do not particularly want to because they do not have oil, so we have to get that oil devolved. I think there is a real route forward for us to all be able to say, soon, we are making progress, it is sustainable, and we are handing it off to the Iraqis. Mr. President, I thank you for your indulgence. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. I ask unanimous consent to speak for a total of 8 minutes.

Mr. BROWNBACK. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I believe we have 4 minutes remaining, if I may inquire of the Chair.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, every so often a defining moment arrives, capable of dramatically altering the future of a Nation and its people. The country of Lebanon, which will hold its Presidential elections as soon as November 21, is on the brink of one of these moments. Lebanon is a country whose vision for a socially rich, prosperous, and democratic future could serve as a model for what we hope to see in the Middle East region. Yet in spite of the courageous and unwavering will of the Lebanese people, extremist forces led by Syria, Iran, and terrorist groups--primarily Hezbollah--conspire to undermine the democratic majority in Lebanon and remake the country in their own oppressive image. Ever since Lebanon's Cedar Revolution in 2005, when a third of the Lebanese people flooded the streets in peaceful protest against Syria's foreign domination, Lebanon has struggled to remain on the path to peace and democracy. The cultural and media capital of the Arab world, Lebanon is comprised of a uniquely rich social and religious fabric where Christians, Sunnis, and Shias live in relative harmony. Polling data from Lebanon indicates that the majority of the Lebanese people desire an independent and stable country, free from Syrian and Iranian influence. They want the militias, including Hezbollah, disarmed, and they want an international tribunal to investigate the assassinations of Rafiq Hariri and other members of their Parliament. On November 21, the Lebanese Parliament is scheduled to meet to elect the country's next President, an event which will serve as a harbinger for the future of independence and democracy in the Middle East. The stakes could not be higher--a fact that has not been lost on Syria and Iran and that certainly must not be lost on us. Desperate to regain its lost foothold in Lebanon, Syria has adopted the macabre strategy of systematically assassinating members of the March 14th parliamentary majority, the embodiment of the Cedar Revolution's ideals. This tactic is designed to ensure the election of a President sympathetic to Syrian hegemony. As the election date approaches, Lebanon's prodemocracy members of Parliament have been forced to enter complete seclusion in Beirut's Phoenicia Hotel. They cannot go outside, or even look out of windows, for fear of a sniper's bullet. If we are committed to ensuring a free and democratic future for the Middle East, safe from terror and extremism, we must not remain silent or passive about the need to ensure that the constitutional Presidential election process in Lebanon remains untainted by foreign meddling and coercion by terrorist groups like Hezbollah. We must be unequivocally clear in our support for our March 14 allies in Lebanon. I commend Secretary of State Rice for her recent statement that ``any candidate for president or any president [of Lebanon] needs to be committed to Lebanon's sovereignty and independence, needs to be committed to resolutions that Lebanon has signed on to . . . and needs to be committed to carrying on the tribunal.'' I also strongly agree when she says that ``the March 14 majority should not be put in a position of having to accept either extra-constitutional measures or measures that would undermine the program that they stand for.'' In light of the precarious situation in Lebanon, we must ensure that the United States will not support anything less than the untainted election of a constitutionally legitimate President in Lebanon. We must make clear to the regimes in Syria and Iran, in no uncertain terms, that the United States will not support a puppet President that seeks to thwart the will of the Lebanese people, nor will the United States remain silent in the face of the spread of militant Islamic extremism. We must not allow Lebanon to be dragged back into chaos and war. Lebanon's enemies should understand that we are fully dedicated to Lebanon's future as a model for independent and sovereign democracy in the Middle East. We cannot abandon the Lebanese people and our shared ideals at this critical moment. The stakes are simply too high--for Lebanon, for the Middle East, and for us.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the Human- Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act, joined by Senator Landrieu and 15 other cosponsors. A healthy imagination is a good thing in a young child. Children may dream of becoming a firefighter or an astronaut. In the case of really young children--especially when they love animals--they may even imagine being a horse or a dog. I don't see any harm in this . . . as long as there is a general attachment to reality as the child matures. However, today, we are starting to see such wildly imaginative dreams being transformed into reality in a few rogue science labs in this country and abroad. Efforts are being marshaled to push us in the direction of experiments to create human-animal hybrids. Amazingly, here at the dawn of the 21st century, the Island of Dr. Moreau is becoming more than a fiction. The legislation that we introduce today is very modest in scope. Though a few researchers may argue that it goes too far, there are many more who argue that it does not go far enough. I believe that the legislation that we offer today, hits just the right chord to be in tune with our society's needs. We do not want to stifle legitimate science. We only want to stop the efforts of mad scientists. In short, this bill only bans the creation of organisms that truly blur the line between humans and animals. For instance, the legislation is so modest that it does not view all human-animal mixes as ``hybrids.'' This is because we recognize that some procedures--which currently use such techniques--do not blur the line between species. For example, a human with a replacement pig heart valve--such as our former colleague, Senator Jesse Helms is not considered a hybrid under this bill. Additionally, mixes that do not blur the line between human and animal--such as a mouse created with a human immune system, on which drugs could be tested for AIDS patients would not be banned. Again, this is because there is no blurring of the identity of the creatures involved. What is banned is the creation of hybrid creatures that blur the line between species. For instance, creating an animal with human reproductive organs or a primarily human brain would be prohibited because such a creature blurs the lines between the species. Additionally banned are the creation of hybrids through experimental cloning techniques and/or the fusion of human and animal gametes. With this common sense bipartisan legislation, we are basically going with the most modest of bans in order to ensure that we do not infringe upon legitimate scientific research. This ban would only hinder the efforts of mad scientists and rogue researchers. Legitimate scientists should have nothing to fear from the enactment of this legislative proposal. There are many different reasons to support this legislation. This is reflected in the diverse groups that support this bill. On the right are groups such as the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America; on the left are groups like Friends of the Earth and the International Center for Technology Assessment. Both sides have different but equally valid reasons for supporting the Human-Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act. For now though, I would like to focus my attention on what I believe is the central ethical question: Why should we be opposed to human- animal hybrids? I would submit that it is much more than what some have termed, ``the Yuck Factor.'' Rather, the reason to oppose human-animal hybrids is embedded in our very fabric as human beings. The reason to oppose the creation of human-animal hybrids is that the creation of such entities is a grave violation of human dignity and a defilement of the human person. Human beings have a fundamental right to be born fully human. To create a human-animal hybrid whose identity as a member of the species Homo sapiens is in doubt is a violation of that human dignity and a grave injustice. Think about this for a minute. What if--beyond your control--some mad scientist were to have created you as only 80-percent or 50-percent human. That would not be fair to you, but it would be something that you could not change and it would be something that you would have to live with for the whole of your existence on earth. The fundamental issue is the dignity of the human person, but it does quickly move into other issues, such as the creation of a sub-human servant class, or maybe even a super-human class that comes to dominate humanity. In the year 2000, one of the first attempts at human-animal hybrids was made. It was a vanguard attempt, which was shamed back into the silence of the mad scientist laboratory from which it came; but now as some scientists are trying to bring human-animal hybrids more into the mainstream, an essay on the year 2000 attempt is worth considering again. The essay, entitled, ``The Pig-Man Cometh'' appeared in the October 23, 2000, Weekly Standard, and from this piece I will quote extensively. In the piece, J. Bottum wrote: On Thursday, October 5, it was revealed that biotechnology researchers had successfully created a hybrid of a human being and a pig. A man-pig. A pig-man. The reality is so unspeakable, the words themselves don't want to go together. Extracting the nuclei of cells from a human fetus and inserting them into a pig's egg cells, scientists from an Australian company called Stem Cell Sciences and an American company called Biotransplant grew two of the pig-men to 32- cell embryos before destroying them. The embryos would have grown further, the scientists admitted, if they had been implanted in the womb of either a sow or a woman. Either a sow or a woman. A woman or a sow. There has been some suggestion from the creators that their purpose in designing this human pig is to build a new race of subhuman creatures for scientific and medical use. . . . But what difference does it make whether the researchers' intention is to create subhumans or superhumans? Either they want to make a race of slaves, or they want to make a race of masters. And either way, it means the end of our humanity. You can't say we weren't warned. This is the island of Dr. Moreau. This is the brave new world. This is Dr. Frankenstein's chamber. This is Dr. Jekyll's room. This is Satan's Pandemonium, the city of self-destruction the rebel angels wrought in their all-consuming pride. But now that it has actually come--manifest, inescapable, real--there don't seem to be words that can describe its horror sufficiently to halt it. May God have mercy on us, for our modern Dr. Moreaus--our proud biotechnicians, our most advanced genetic scientists--have already announced that they will have no mercy. It's true that Stem Cell Sciences and Biotransplant have now, under the weight of adverse publicity, decided to withdraw their European patent application and modify their American application. But they made no promise to stop their investigations into the procedure. We simply have to rely upon their sense of what is, as Mountford put it, ``ethically immoral''--a sense sufficiently attenuated that they could undertake the design of the pig-man in the first place. The elimination of the human race has loomed into clear sight at last. It used to be that even the imagination of this sort of thing existed only to underscore a moral in a story. . . . But we live at a moment in which British newspapers can report on 19 families who have created test-tube babies solely for the purpose of serving as tissue donors for their relatives--some brought to birth, some merely harvested as embryos and fetuses. A moment in which Harper's Bazaar can advise women to keep their faces unwrinkled by having themselves injected with fat culled from human cadavers. A moment in which the Australian philosopher Peter Singer can receive a chair at Princeton University for advocating the destruction of infants after birth if their lives are likely to be a burden. A moment in which the brains of late-term aborted babies can be vacuumed out and gleaned for stem cells. In the midst of all this, the creation of a human-pig arrives like a thing expected. We have reached the logical end, at last. We have become the people that, once upon a time, our ancestors used fairy tales to warn their children against--and we will reap exactly the consequences those tales foretold. This was a grim philosophical essay, but the questions that it poses are worth reflecting upon--even if those questions make us cringe. Will society exercise some responsibility, or will it be led, mindlessly going wherever the mad scientists want to go? Every week, it seems that there are new developments. Yesterday, the science journal Nature published an article on advances in cloning technology using monkeys. This is a slightly different issue than human-animal hybrids, but it further illustrates the rapid changes, developments, and surprises occurring in science. Such developments must be harnessed by society and directed toward good and ethical ends; and if the developments cannot be directed to good ends, then they should be abandoned to the scrap heap of morally bankrupt ideas. If we neglect to direct our course, we will be led to the brink of destruction. I am more optimistic than the tone embodied in the Weekly Standard essay. I believe in the goodness of the American people and their elected representatives. I think that we can rise to the challenge to ensure that the marvels of science are properly channeled to serve humanity and human dignity. Consideration and passage of the ``Human-Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act,'' which we introduce today, would be a wonderful step in the right direction.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the Human- Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act, joined by Senator Landrieu and 15 other cosponsors. A healthy imagination is a good thing in a young child. Children may dream of becoming a firefighter or an astronaut. In the case of really young children--especially when they love animals--they may even imagine being a horse or a dog. I don't see any harm in this . . . as long as there is a general attachment to reality as the child matures. However, today, we are starting to see such wildly imaginative dreams being transformed into reality in a few rogue science labs in this country and abroad. Efforts are being marshaled to push us in the direction of experiments to create human-animal hybrids. Amazingly, here at the dawn of the 21st century, the Island of Dr. Moreau is becoming more than a fiction. The legislation that we introduce today is very modest in scope. Though a few researchers may argue that it goes too far, there are many more who argue that it does not go far enough. I believe that the legislation that we offer today, hits just the right chord to be in tune with our society's needs. We do not want to stifle legitimate science. We only want to stop the efforts of mad scientists. In short, this bill only bans the creation of organisms that truly blur the line between humans and animals. For instance, the legislation is so modest that it does not view all human-animal mixes as ``hybrids.'' This is because we recognize that some procedures--which currently use such techniques--do not blur the line between species. For example, a human with a replacement pig heart valve--such as our former colleague, Senator Jesse Helms is not considered a hybrid under this bill. Additionally, mixes that do not blur the line between human and animal--such as a mouse created with a human immune system, on which drugs could be tested for AIDS patients would not be banned. Again, this is because there is no blurring of the identity of the creatures involved. What is banned is the creation of hybrid creatures that blur the line between species. For instance, creating an animal with human reproductive organs or a primarily human brain would be prohibited because such a creature blurs the lines between the species. Additionally banned are the creation of hybrids through experimental cloning techniques and/or the fusion of human and animal gametes. With this common sense bipartisan legislation, we are basically going with the most modest of bans in order to ensure that we do not infringe upon legitimate scientific research. This ban would only hinder the efforts of mad scientists and rogue researchers. Legitimate scientists should have nothing to fear from the enactment of this legislative proposal. There are many different reasons to support this legislation. This is reflected in the diverse groups that support this bill. On the right are groups such as the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America; on the left are groups like Friends of the Earth and the International Center for Technology Assessment. Both sides have different but equally valid reasons for supporting the Human-Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act. For now though, I would like to focus my attention on what I believe is the central ethical question: Why should we be opposed to human- animal hybrids? I would submit that it is much more than what some have termed, ``the Yuck Factor.'' Rather, the reason to oppose human-animal hybrids is embedded in our very fabric as human beings. The reason to oppose the creation of human-animal hybrids is that the creation of such entities is a grave violation of human dignity and a defilement of the human person. Human beings have a fundamental right to be born fully human. To create a human-animal hybrid whose identity as a member of the species Homo sapiens is in doubt is a violation of that human dignity and a grave injustice. Think about this for a minute. What if--beyond your control--some mad scientist were to have created you as only 80-percent or 50-percent human. That would not be fair to you, but it would be something that you could not change and it would be something that you would have to live with for the whole of your existence on earth. The fundamental issue is the dignity of the human person, but it does quickly move into other issues, such as the creation of a sub-human servant class, or maybe even a super-human class that comes to dominate humanity. In the year 2000, one of the first attempts at human-animal hybrids was made. It was a vanguard attempt, which was shamed back into the silence of the mad scientist laboratory from which it came; but now as some scientists are trying to bring human-animal hybrids more into the mainstream, an essay on the year 2000 attempt is worth considering again. The essay, entitled, ``The Pig-Man Cometh'' appeared in the October 23, 2000, Weekly Standard, and from this piece I will quote extensively. In the piece, J. Bottum wrote: On Thursday, October 5, it was revealed that biotechnology researchers had successfully created a hybrid of a human being and a pig. A man-pig. A pig-man. The reality is so unspeakable, the words themselves don't want to go together. Extracting the nuclei of cells from a human fetus and inserting them into a pig's egg cells, scientists from an Australian company called Stem Cell Sciences and an American company called Biotransplant grew two of the pig-men to 32- cell embryos before destroying them. The embryos would have grown further, the scientists admitted, if they had been implanted in the womb of either a sow or a woman. Either a sow or a woman. A woman or a sow. There has been some suggestion from the creators that their purpose in designing this human pig is to build a new race of subhuman creatures for scientific and medical use. . . . But what difference does it make whether the researchers' intention is to create subhumans or superhumans? Either they want to make a race of slaves, or they want to make a race of masters. And either way, it means the end of our humanity. You can't say we weren't warned. This is the island of Dr. Moreau. This is the brave new world. This is Dr. Frankenstein's chamber. This is Dr. Jekyll's room. This is Satan's Pandemonium, the city of self-destruction the rebel angels wrought in their all-consuming pride. But now that it has actually come--manifest, inescapable, real--there don't seem to be words that can describe its horror sufficiently to halt it. May God have mercy on us, for our modern Dr. Moreaus--our proud biotechnicians, our most advanced genetic scientists--have already announced that they will have no mercy. It's true that Stem Cell Sciences and Biotransplant have now, under the weight of adverse publicity, decided to withdraw their European patent application and modify their American application. But they made no promise to stop their investigations into the procedure. We simply have to rely upon their sense of what is, as Mountford put it, ``ethically immoral''--a sense sufficiently attenuated that they could undertake the design of the pig-man in the first place. The elimination of the human race has loomed into clear sight at last. It used to be that even the imagination of this sort of thing existed only to underscore a moral in a story. . . . But we live at a moment in which British newspapers can report on 19 families who have created test-tube babies solely for the purpose of serving as tissue donors for their relatives--some brought to birth, some merely harvested as embryos and fetuses. A moment in which Harper's Bazaar can advise women to keep their faces unwrinkled by having themselves injected with fat culled from human cadavers. A moment in which the Australian philosopher Peter Singer can receive a chair at Princeton University for advocating the destruction of infants after birth if their lives are likely to be a burden. A moment in which the brains of late-term aborted babies can be vacuumed out and gleaned for stem cells. In the midst of all this, the creation of a human-pig arrives like a thing expected. We have reached the logical end, at last. We have become the people that, once upon a time, our ancestors used fairy tales to warn their children against--and we will reap exactly the consequences those tales foretold. This was a grim philosophical essay, but the questions that it poses are worth reflecting upon--even if those questions make us cringe. Will society exercise some responsibility, or will it be led, mindlessly going wherever the mad scientists want to go? Every week, it seems that there are new developments. Yesterday, the science journal Nature published an article on advances in cloning technology using monkeys. This is a slightly different issue than human-animal hybrids, but it further illustrates the rapid changes, developments, and surprises occurring in science. Such developments must be harnessed by society and directed toward good and ethical ends; and if the developments cannot be directed to good ends, then they should be abandoned to the scrap heap of morally bankrupt ideas. If we neglect to direct our course, we will be led to the brink of destruction. I am more optimistic than the tone embodied in the Weekly Standard essay. I believe in the goodness of the American people and their elected representatives. I think that we can rise to the challenge to ensure that the marvels of science are properly channeled to serve humanity and human dignity. Consideration and passage of the ``Human-Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act,'' which we introduce today, would be a wonderful step in the right direction.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I wanted to speak on the farm bill. I am glad to see we are taking baby steps forward. If the leaders have their things worked out, I want to go ahead and speak. The farm bill obviously for my State is a very important issue. I appreciate that we are making some steps forward. I do think it would be wiser if we could start amending and start working as a legislative body and see how far we get. We have been on the bill now for 10 days. We have not had a vote. It seems it would be prudent to go ahead and try it. I realize the leaders are trying to work something out, and I hope they can. But each day we do not get something moving, we are not moving forward on the farm bill. I think we can trust each other in the process. I do want to recognize the work that has been done by the committee on the farm bill, the Agriculture Committee and their work. I think they have done a number of very nice things in the bill. I say that as someone from an agricultural State, from an agricultural family, who has been Secretary of Agriculture for the State of Kansas and has a degree in agriculture. I can see some very positive things. I like the overall trend in certain areas of the bill and some of it not. I wish to comment on both of those and make one particular policy provision notice to my colleagues and friends in the Senate. The Senate farm bill creates the Average Crop Revenue Program, a new safety net for farmers to utilize if they choose to do so. That is key for me, giving farmers the choice in how they manage their risk and not requiring that they take and use this program. Farmers may choose to stay in the current system or may opt into the new ACR Program. I think that flexibility is a good way to go forward. Despite several threats throughout the year, the farm bill leaves direct payments at their current level. I think that is a victory and that is good for farmers in farm country. Direct payments are the only commodity title program that provides direct assistance to producers when they have no crop to harvest. Unfortunately, that happens all too often in my State. It has happened in places of my State this year. In fact, 2 weeks ago, I was in a field of soybeans tilling them up. There was not enough there to harvest. It happens. There is nothing a farmer can do about it if the weather breaks that poorly against him. So I am pleased to see those direct payments continue to exist, because when you have no crop, it does not matter how much the price is, it doesn't work, you have nothing to sell. I also particularly appreciate the expanded research for energy coming from agriculture. To me, this has been one of the Holy Grails in agriculture for years and years, to expand the definition of the business from food and fiber, to food, fiber, and fuels. This effort recognizes our need to grow more of our own fuel to help in the environment in doing that, to help in the economy, the rural economy in doing that. It recognizes this fabulous chance we have in a world today to do things along that line. If I could take a moment to set a root off to the side or shoot it off to the side, on this particular energy provision, I think there is another way we can also go that the managers have put in the base bill; that is, replacing oil-based products with starch-based products. This is again something the agricultural industry has worked at for a long time, is doing a much better job of, but we still do not have many of the products on the marketplace. For instance, I had a company from my State, Midwest Grain Products, in my office 2 weeks ago with now 100 percent starch-based plastic utensils. He gave me some spoons and chopsticks that were made 100 percent out of wheat starch. They had been going 50 percent out of starch and 50 percent out of oil-based products. But he is now at 100 percent. Yet they have not been able to crack through the marketplace yet on this, a totally biodegradable product made out of agricultural commodities, better for the environment, certainly better for our economy. One of the things we have put in this farm bill is a New Uses Expo, where we would showcase on an annual basis, almost like you do at an auto show, the computer shows, on an annual basis, the new widgets coming out of agriculture, replacing, in many times and places, oil- based products with agricultural-based products, but showcasing that, having the Secretary of Agriculture and indeed even the Secretary of Energy cohosting that event. I think that is something that can help us expand the marketplace and expand value added coming out of agriculture, which is key for rural communities in my State and many others. There are problems in the bill. That is why I hoped we could get some amendments moving. First, the bill contains a ban on packers owning livestock. This is a very contentious issue in my State and many places around the country. Under this packer ban provision, processers would be prohibited from owning, feeding or controlling livestock more than 14 days before slaughter. You can look at this, and as someone raised in a farm family, I look at this and say: Well, that sounds like a pretty good thing. I do not want packers owning livestock. I want the family farm, I want my dad and my brother to be owning that livestock rather than the packers. But then you start looking at the marketplace and the changes taking place in the marketplace and say: Wait. This is going to disrupt some good things happening. Ten days ago, I was on a ranch, a feed yard in Lyons, KS. They are raising certified Angus beef, natural, no artificial hormones, no antibiotics in the livestock, and then direct marketing that to consumers on the east coast, a great innovative product they have got coming out. They are getting a premium then for farmers when they can market this product that way. But to do it, they had to enter into a contractual agreement with the packers that are set to process the animal and to deliver it to the end consumer, to the stores that they are going to directly to the consumers with. So with this packer prohibition ban, this innovative market technique that is getting more in the pocketbooks of my farmers, because they are working with the packers, going straight to the consumer with a product they want, certified Angus beef, that is all natural, you are going to break that supply chain. They are not going to be able to work with the packer on a contractual arrangement to do this. They are saying: Look, this is going to hurt us. We are not going to be able to do this. Now your ban that you are doing to try to save family farmers is going to hurt family farmers. So this is kind of the law of unintended consequences, that something people are trying to do on a positive basis to help family farmers is, in the end, going to hurt many of them in being able to increase the income they get from their livestock. That is what they need. They need to be able to get more income from their livestock, and here is a key marketing tool and a way to be able to do that. I would hope that would be something we could deal with and something we can get passed. Overall, I do not want to take a lot of time of my colleagues, other than to recognize the importance of getting this bill through. I would urge them on the Democratic side to let us start doing some amendments and working this bill through. I think we have a good base bill to work from. I think we can make some sensible decisions around here and get a farm bill through that is important to my State, important to the country, important to the future of the industry, and important to security in the United States on energy security. But to do that, we need to get the process going. I would urge my colleagues to allow that to move on forward.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I will not take that much time, but I do want to draw my colleagues' attention to an issue that is going to be in front of the Judiciary Committee and my colleague, the Presiding Officer, this next week, and that is the nomination of Judge Michael Mukasey to be Attorney General of the United States. Judge Mukasey is an outstanding nominee, highly qualified by anybody's definition, a consensus nominee who has now drawn fire. It strikes me as a situation of ignoring the forest for a tree. I want to talk about the specific tree that is here in the way, but I want to also point out the forest we have. Judge Mukasey is an outstanding, qualified nominee, strongly supported, warmly put forward by Republicans and Democrats alike. He is not an ideologue by any means. Senator Schumer said, at the outset: [H]e could get a unanimous vote out of this committee. Senator Schumer had previously discussed Judge Mukasey as a possible appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court--a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Here again, Senator Schumer's words: Let me say, if the president were to nominate somebody, albeit a conservative, but somebody who put the rule of law first, someone like a . . . Mike Mukasey, my guess is that they would get through the Senate very, very quickly. Well, it has now been 41 days that the nomination has been pending. That is longer than any other nominee for Attorney General in over 20 years. He is a consensus nominee. I have my problems with Judge Mukasey on narrow issues. But if we look at the central issue of our day, which is the war on terrorism, the war we are having with militant Islamists that we are likely to be in for a generation, you could not ask for a more qualified Attorney General nominee than Judge Mukasey. He is a gentleman who, as a judge, has handled some of the most difficult terrorism cases we have had in the country. He is an outstanding jurist. He is highly qualified. He handled the blind sheik case that came in front of his court. He has handled others. This is a nominee who is going to be in position for, well, the rest of this year and next year, and that is it, as Attorney General. I think he is so highly qualified he could well proceed into a next administration if he could get in in this administration. Yet he is not being put forward. I want to quote--and this is an extraordinary quote. This is the Second Circuit Court of Appeals praising his work as a trial court judge in some of these difficult cases. I have not read before where a circuit court has praised the work of a trial court judge to such an extraordinary degree as they did of Judge Mukasey where they noted this. This is the Second Circuit saying this about him: ``extraordinary skill and patience.'' Further continuing to quote: ``outstanding achievement in the face of challenges far beyond those normally endured by a trial judge.'' That is the Second Circuit Court of Appeals about Judge Mukasey. This is an outstanding individual. Now, he was sailing along, doing well as a nominee, going through a tough confirmation process, handling the hearings well, dealing with the issues, and then an issue came up about torture, and waterboarding in particular. Then there seemed to be some confusion being declared about this, so he has cleared up the record on that issue. I want to read what he has stated on the record about this particular issue. And I want to say at the outset, it cannot be clearer that Judge Mukasey does not approve of waterboarding. He does not approve of it. He has called the procedure ``repugnant to me.'' He wrote to the Judiciary Committee Democrats that ``nothing . . . in my testimony should be read as an approval of the interrogation techniques presented to me at the hearing or in your letter, or any comparable technique.'' ``[N]othing . . . in my testimony should be read as an approval of [this] interrogation technique. . . .'' He has pledged, if confirmed, he will examine interrogation programs thoroughly, and he has promised that ``if, after such a review, [he] determine[s] that any technique is unlawful, [he] will not hesitate to so advise the President and . . . rescind or correct any legal opinion of the Department of Justice that supports use of the technique.'' Now, do my colleagues doubt Judge Mukasey, whom they roundly praised just weeks ago, is a man of his word? Do they believe he would permit an illegal program to go forward? I do not think so. He will not. This is a straight-shooter. He is not a yes-man. He is not a yes-man to anybody. He has been on the bench for years. He has handled tough terrorism cases. He recognizes the threat terrorism is to this country. He also recognizes that the United States must stand for what is right. If we don't, that will be used against us in other places around the world, and it doesn't flow to the best image and it doesn't flow to the heart of what America is: a rule-of-law nation that stands up for what is right. He is going to do that. He has done that. He will do that. He is not a yes-man to anybody. He is not a yes-man to people who would oppose him in this body. He is not a yes-man to the President. He has far too distinguished a career to be a yes-man, with less than 14 months left in an administration, for him to say: OK, I am just going to roll over and approve something I disagree with, in the final 14 months of an administration. We need an Attorney General. We need an Attorney General in this country. This one has been pending far too long. I ask my colleagues who are seeking to oppose him--I think primarily on the grounds that they just want to oppose the Attorney General nominee of the United States or oppose the President--to back up and to take a second look at this gentleman and his great qualifications, his integrity he has conducted his entire life with, what he has specifically said about waterboarding, and find it in themselves to do the right thing and support him. This is an outstanding nominee who doesn't deserve this sort of treatment. We need to get this vote up and approved. I believe the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, whom I have worked with a great deal and whom I have a great deal of respect and admiration for, is going to hold hearings on Judge Mukasey on Tuesday, and a vote. I am hopeful we can vote him out of committee and vote him through the Senate, clearly before the Thanksgiving Day break. We need to. We need an Attorney General. This is the right man at the right time for this job. I thank you very much, and I note the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business for up to 10 minutes.

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, thank you very much.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, how much time remains on our side of the aisle on morning business?

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

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I wish to talk about the situation in Sudan. The situation in Darfur has been widely noted and known. It is deteriorating. It is deteriorating slowly. We want to get the factions back together to try to talk about what it is we can do to bring some stability. Something that is not widely followed right now is the deteriorating situation between the north and south. We have had a long-term peace agreement in place now for a couple of years between the north and south that ended the longest running civil war in Africa. It had been going on for 20 years. Two million people were killed. Now the south has backed away somewhat from the government. The north government is not complying with the peace agreement. I will be bringing out a more full statement to my colleagues. This is very dangerous, as far as the situation that now we could get back into a problem between the north and the south again, and have two fronts going. In the south, long term, there was a genocide going on there before it took place in Darfur. We have to be vigilant toward the Sudanese Government, which is the problem. This is a genocidal government in Khartoum. We have to get on top of that situation and make sure it doesn't deteriorate between the north along with what is taking place in the west and Darfur. It could well be that Sudan in the future is a country that breaks up into three or four different countries because of the way the Khartoum government is trying to force people into their ideological box. It is a militant Islamist government started by Osama bin Laden, this iteration. It is the problem, but we have to deal with it, where it is in this situation. I don't want us to take our eyes off the ball. In the south, where there has been a lot of work over a long period of time to get that peace, I hope that we not lose that peace in the overall situation. Finally, the President of Congo is in Washington now. I met with him yesterday, along with a number of my colleagues. One of the issues I want to bring up here, and I will be developing some legislation, is that a number of radical militant groups are raiding in the eastern part of the Congo. They are dislocating nearly 450,000 people now. In these guerrilla movements, what they do is get control of an area and then they get mineral rights for individuals or to groups to come in and mine things, such as coaltan. It is a particular metal used in making cell phones. That is how they finance their rebel movement. We saw this in the blood diamond issue in western Africa. What we did then was put a certification process together, that you had to certify that the diamonds came from legitimate means, and that shut the financing down. My hope is we can do something similar in the Congo, where we can have a certification on minerals like the coaltan and then shut the financing down for these groups that run civilian populations out of an area. I think that is something we can do credibly. Our markets and our economy are our key foreign policy tools. Here is a place where we can use the U.S. market to try to help bring stability to a region that is key for stability throughout Africa. If we get stability in the Congo it might bring stability throughout the region. I hope we can do those things. I appreciate my colleagues' time and yield the floor.

Mr. BROWNBACK

Mr. BROWNBACK. Mr. President, I want to speak from the heart on two matters: one on my good friend, Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash 5 years ago. Several speakers have spoken already, very eloquently, about Paul Wellstone, a wonderful man. He and I disagreed on many issues in this body, and yet we had a wonderful relationship because of the nature of the person he was. He practiced the art of disagreeing without being disagreeable. It is a tough art to do, particularly in legislative bodies it can be very difficult. But he did it, and he did it very well. And he had a number of friends on both sides of the aisle from wide across the political spectrum. Because of that attitude--and here is something I really want to say to my colleagues--Paul and I could get together on what I deemed to be the most important piece of legislation that I have been a part of here, as far as a primary sponsor, and that is the human trafficking work that he and I started--actually, his wife got him focused on it, and she was killed in the same plane crash--where we started seeing people trafficked into the United States and different places around the world, and we wondered what is going on with this dark underside of the globalization that is taking place. The way they saw it was his wife first started to see Ukrainian women trafficked into Minnesota and showing up at battered women shelters. They had been trafficked into prostitution in the United States and then had shown up at battered women shelters. And they said, how did you get here? Then they started backtracking the trail through gang activities, criminal activities, organized crime activities, that moved them from the Ukraine into the United States, into brothels, and then they were battered. As they started to piece this together, they were seeing organized crime which now we know is in many cases involved in human trafficking around the world and is the third leading source of income for organized crime now--trafficking. Much of it is women or young girls, in many cases if not most, that they are trafficking and trafficking into prostitution. Paul's wife first observed this. Paul got involved in it. I got involved in it, seeing it from another angle, and we were able to put together a coalition around that issue of human trafficking at an early phase, before we noticed that much. That included people from across the political spectrum. Paul and myself--he a dedicated liberal, myself a conservative--we had Gloria Steinem and Chuck Colson in this coalition, pushing for a bill against human trafficking, the first legislation we did here on that topic. Because we were able to work together and reach out across the aisle and disagree about a lot of things but not be disagreeable and find common cause, we were able to deal with something that is a scourge on this planet. As we globalize, walls come down, people are moved, many times illicitly, in many cases brutally, and in a lot of cases are killed in the process, or seen as disposable people--which is a term of art used by one of the authors, experts on this topic, who has written a book called ``Disposable People.'' These are people who have been trafficked. Then after they get diseased or run down, they are thrown out on the street as a disposable person. It is a very ugly thing. Paul, with his heart of gold, saw this. I remember him complaining to me one day as I was coming out on the Senate floor. He came charging up to me and he said: You do this to me. I said: What? He was showing me the rankings and he was only the second most liberal in the Senate. In the prior years he was the most liberal. He said: You did that to me. If I hadn't been working with you, I would be the most liberal still. He had that kind of sense of humor about him that he would blame me. He came up to me one day, where I was talking about life being sacred and precious, and I was saying I believe all life is sacred, it is precious, a child of a loving God, and that includes Paul Wellstone and Ted Kennedy too. He came out and said I like your line on this, even if I don't agree with your position on life. He enjoyed life. He lived it well. I think he has also taught a good lesson for the rest of us about core convictions. There is no problem with having core convictions. It is a good thing to have core convictions and to stand by those. It is also a good thing to recognize when it is that the topics you are talking about are not your core convictions, so you can reach out across the aisle. I think maybe 30 percent of the topics around Washington, maybe more, could be less, are divisive ones, where there are divisions on both sides. But there is 70 percent we can work on. The country is desperate to see us make Washington work, to see us reach across the aisle, to see us make it work on core topics. Joe Biden and I held a press conference in Iowa about a political solution in Iraq, and people were stunned, saying this is what we want to see; we want to see our country work on tough topics. We can do that on issues such as cancer, the war on cancer--there is no division between the parties on that--and reaching across the aisle we can show the American people a government that works. That is something we need to do. That is something I think would be in Paul Wellstone and his wife's legacy. I remember them today and I hope all of us will remember them in our prayers, about what they gave to us. I often say you can't measure a tree very well until it is on the ground. Unfortunately, that is the case with Paul, a wonderful guy with a wonderful heart. I disagreed with him on a number of political issues, but I loved his style and loved the way he lived life.