Dale Bumpers

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I have the utmost respect for the sponsor of this bill, but I have utterly nothing but contempt for the amendment. Medicare has done more to provide a good night's sleep to the elderly of this country than any other single program, with the possible exception of Social Security. We made a solemn contract with the elderly of this country to provide them with medical care. When I was first elected Governor of my State, I found that 50 percent of the people didn't even know what to do in case they got sick. But when you polled the people over 65, they knew what to do and they knew where to go and they knew their bill was going to be paid. The underlying assumption of the Kyl amendment is that somehow or other people are having a difficult time getting a doctor to take them. Now, the General Accounting Office has answered a number of questions propounded to them by the distinguished senior Senator from New York, Mr. Moynihan, and in answer to one of the questions: How much difficulty are they having? here is the answer. According to the GAO, 96 percent of the Medicare-eligible people in this country stated that they had some difficulty getting medical care. But listen to this. The Kyl amendment goes to this figure: Only two-tenths of 1 percent said they had difficulty getting satisfactory assistance because of Medicare. Here we are tinkering with a system that has been so successful and so rewarding to our elderly, because two-tenths of 1 percent of the people in this country said they had difficulty getting the kind of care they wanted under Medicare. No. 1, doctors right now, under the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, are eligible to charge 15 percent more than the Medicare allowance. For example, you have a procedure--say, laser surgery for your eyes. Assume that the Medicare limit on laser surgery for your eye, or eyes, is $1,000, but the doctor can charge 15 percent more than that, or $1,150. Medicare may only pay 80 percent of the allowable charge, or $800, but the doctor can charge 15 percent more than the Medicare allowance. The balanced budget amendment also provided that if a doctor wants to privately contract, he or she may privately contract, but they have to drop out of the program for 2 years. Now, we feel strongly--many of us--that this is an elitist amendment. Obviously, there are a lot of people in this country--perhaps 2 percent to 5 percent--who will pay a doctor of their choice whatever he charges. They want him; they are used to him. Say I worked from the time I was 30 years old until I was 65 and went to the same doctor, and when I became 65 I said, ``Doctor, I am switching from my Blue Cross policy over to Medicare.'' The doctor says, ``I'm sorry, I'm not going to be able to take care of you anymore because Medicare is simply not meeting my expenses.'' You think about that. The patient may be a person of very modest means but who, above all, wants to go to the doctor he or she has been going to for years, and the doctor says, ``Well, now, if you are willing to pay, that is a different matter, I will let you keep coming to see me.'' Let me tell you another thing the doctor can do. Assume you are in a fairly big-sized clinic, and the doctor says, ``We will take you for your heart conditions under Medicare, but we can't take your liver,'' or, ``we can't take your kidneys.'' Think of all the different kinds of contracts people would enter into. If this amendment ever became law-- God forbid--you would start hearing some of the most fraudulent contracts and some of the most exorbitant charges for medical services that would choke a mule. Mr. President, if there is a problem with Medicare, if we are not paying enough to entice a majority of the doctors in this country to provide services under Medicare, let's raise the rates. But for Pete's sake, let's not allow people to enter into these private contracts. I have the utmost respect for the medical profession. But I am telling you, you are giving them unbelievable leverage over millions of Medicare patients if you allow them to say, ``I can't take you because Medicare is not enough.'' If only two-tenths of 1 percent of the people in this country are having difficulty getting medical care because of Medicare rates, I suggest to you that that is not a sufficient number to warrant tinkering with one of the finest programs this country has ever produced. I yield the floor and yield the remainder of my time. Mr. WELLSTONE addressed the Chair.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Fine. As I was saying, Madam President, the Senator from Alaska will be presiding as chairman on the Senate side in the conference committee. He and I have a deep reverence for the law as we understand it. And, as I say, I think I would rather have his word on this than to have my amendment adopted. So with that, I withdraw the amendment.

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

Mr. BUMPERS. Yes.

Mr. BUMPERS. Madam President, I just want to thank the chairman for his remarks. And with that understanding, my amendment was a sense-of- the-Senate resolution, and, quite frankly, I would rather have the chairman's word.

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

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

Mr. BUMPERS. Madam President, I have an amendment at the desk, but I think the chairman of the Appropriations Committee and I have a pretty good understanding about the amendment and its intent. And I am not saying that he agrees with every jot and tittle of it, but I think that he feels pretty much the way I do about it. Let me just say for the Record that here is what I am trying to accomplish with the amendment. As you know, an emergency appropriation does not require an offset. An appropriation in this bill which is not an emergency does require an offset. And under the Budget Act, spending that is not an emergency and nondefense discretionary spending must be offset with nondefense discretionary spending and defense spending that is not an emergency must be offset by defense spending cuts--offsets. And the House has done something--the thing that really sort of got me interested in this--the House has done something which is really very strange and, frankly, I consider to be a violation of the Budget Act. What they have said is, we are declaring these items--for example, assistance to Bosnia and the Iraqi operation--as emergencies. And, as I said, under the law they do not require offsets if they are emergencies, but the House has chosen to offset them anyway. And they have offset them totally from nondefense discretionary spending, such as housing, AmeriCorps, and other things that may not be popular to some people but they are fairly popular with me. So what I want to do is emphasize that the Senate is proceeding exactly the way we should and in accordance with the Budget Act. We have declared these things emergencies. The ones that have not been declared emergencies we have offsets for. And when we go to conference with the House, we are going to be in a strange position. They are going to be saying this is an emergency, but we are going to offset it anyway. I think that the chairman agrees with me that if the conference does, in fact, have any offsets--and particularly offsets of emergency matters--that we will comply with the requirement of the Budget Act; and that is, defense spending increases for emergency purposes will be offset by defense funds, and the same way with nondefense discretionary spending. And I would like, if I could, to get the chairman of the committee to comment on what I have just said.

Mr. BUMPERS. What is the parliamentary situation? Let me rephrase that. Is an amendment pending?

Mr. BUMPERS. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to speak for 2 minutes as if in morning business.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Madam President, I simply want to call to the body's attention--indeed, to the American people's attention--an editorial in the Washington Post this morning called ``Trigger Happy.'' As you know, my home State is Arkansas, and we have just experienced one of the gravest tragedies in the history of our State. People all over the State--not just those in Jonesboro --are grieving over the loss of four children 11 years old, and one 32-year-old pregnant schoolteacher, a catastrophic happening that no one can even begin to explain. But the Post this morning certainly points out one of the serious problems facing this country, and one with which we have never even come close to coming to grips with, and I don't in the foreseeable future see us coming to grips with it. But here it is: In 1992, handguns killed 33 people in Great Britain; 36 in Sweden; 97 in Switzerland; 60 in Japan; 13 in Australia; 128 in Canada; and, 13,200 in the United States. There was a study completed by the Violence Policy Center. And as the Post points out--they can't put it all in here. But listen to this: For every case in which an individual used a firearm kept in the home in a self-defense homicide, there were 1.3 unintentional deaths, 4.6 criminal homicides, and 26 suicides involving firearms. The overall firearm-related death rate among U.S. children aged less than 15 was nearly 12 times higher than among children in the other 25 industrialized countries combined. From 1968 to 1991, moter-vehicle-related deaths declined by 21 percent, while firearm-related deaths increased by 60 percent. It is estimated that by the year 2003, firearm- related deaths will surpass deaths from motor-vehicle-related injuries. In 1991 this was already the case in seven States. Madam President, those figures are so shocking to me. I have studied this issue for some time and have lamented the increasing violence from the Postal Service. And now it seems that it is becoming endemic in the schoolyards in America. When in the name of God is this country going to wake up to what is going on in the country and the easy accessibility to guns? I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, will the Senator yield? Senator Moseley- Braun was speaking about the shooting in Jonesboro, and I have not said anything on the floor about that. I would like 2 minutes to follow up on that.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. I thank the Senator.

Mr. BUMPERS. My colleague from Georgia is correct. The reports from officials at the Department of Agriculture would suggest that with an additional $50 million, which would bring the total supplemental appropriation for the Emergency Watershed and Flood Prevention account to $100 million along with the $60 million allocated for the Emergency Conservation Program, the needs of Georgia as well as the numerous other Americans around the country who are in need of natural disaster relief will be met.

Mr. BUMPERS. The Senator from Montana is correct. The suggested figure of $195,000 is not a binding cap on the funds potentially available to FARAD in fiscal year 1998. I understand that grants under the Smith Lever 3(d) Food Safety program will be awarded in the near future and that proponents of the FARAD program should be advised that additional competitive funds may be available and they may wish to craft their applications to reflect this opportunity. disaster assistance

Mr. BUMPERS. I will discuss that with you in just a moment.

Mr. BUMPERS. I will send the amendment to the desk to be set aside to be brought up at your discretion.

Mr. BUMPERS. I ask unanimous consent I be permitted to send an amendment to the desk, the same be immediately laid aside, and later brought for consideration.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, let me just, first of all, express my profound thanks to the distinguished Senator from Illinois for her sensitivity and sincere compassion over what is the most traumatic event, perhaps ever, in my State. We have tornadoes and we lose a lot of lives in tornadoes, and we have a lot of property damage. But for just sheer trauma, this event is really unique to us, as it would be to any State in the Nation. The grief is indescribable. The circumstances are indescribable. Nobody could speculate with any degree of accuracy as to what possesses an 11- or 13-year-old child to do this. You can wonder how did they lay their hands on such an arsenal of weapons in order to perpetrate the crime? But at this point, I share the comments of the Senator from Illinois that it is premature to speculate on that because that will all come out as the investigation goes forward and is unwound. I simply want to say that it is a terrible plight in this country when such an event can even be thinkable, let alone happen. It is becoming all too frequent that you pick up the paper and find that this is happening in the school yards of America. This is not a high school, this is a middle school of 11-, 12-, and 13-year-old youngsters. Nineteen were injured and five are dead. It is an unspeakable horror. I know I speak for all the Members of the Senate in expressing our sincere grief, our condolences and sincere sympathies to all the people who have been affected in this, the parents and relatives of the children who have been injured and killed, and to those others who were not but will be traumatized and scarred by this for the rest of their lives. I yield the floor, Mr. President.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I am pleased to join my colleague Senator Cochran, Chairman of the Agriculture, Rural Development, and Related Agencies Subcommittee, in offering an amendment to S. 1768 relating to the boll weevil eradication loan program. Our amendment will provide an additional $222,000 in budget authority to support an increased program level of nearly $19,000,000. This amendment will return the program to the fiscal year 1997 level of approximately $40,000,000 which is consistent with the program's identified need. This loan program is an important component of USDA's overall boll weevil eradication strategy. Already, regions of this country are benefitting from complete boll weevil eradication. The benefits of this program include reduced chemical applications, higher net farm income, increased land values, and other attributes important to the vitality of rural America. This program benefits not only farmers, but everyone interested in a clean environment and economic prosperity. There are still large regions of the country where the boll weevil eradication program is either in the very early stages or has not yet begun. In my state of Arkansas, referendums have been recently concluded in which farmers are agreeing to assessments to pay their share of the boll weevil grant program that is administered through the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. The loan program that we seek to increase, administered by the Farm Service Agency, helps farmers accelerate the timetable for complete eradication of this pest. It is very important that we move these areas forward as quickly as possible to help protect the environment and to help sustain rural economies. The program level made possible by this amendment will return the program to last year's level which is the very least we should do at this time. Again, I want to thank Senator Cochran for his leadership on this issue and to Senators Stevens and Byrd for seeing it included in the text of S. 1768. amendment no. 2075 (Purpose: Waive the requirements of 23 U.S.C. 125(b)(1) with respect to emergency disaster highway assistance necessitated by the 1997/1998 storms from El Nino) On page 45, line 13, after the words, ``highway program made available by this Act'', insert the following: ``: Provided further, That 23 U.S.C. 125(b)(1) shall not apply to projects resulting from the Fall 1997 and Winter 1998 flooding in the western States''.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Madam President, let me thank first the Senator from North Dakota for his very kind remarks and for yielding to me immediately, because I do have a committee that I need to get back to. I have come to the floor every time I have had an opportunity for the past 23 years to express my moral and vocal support for legislation that has any potential for curbing drunken driving. I grew up in a devout Methodist household where, in a small town, drinking was absolutely forbidden. Everybody in town knew who drank. We didn't have anything but Presbyterians, Catholics, Methodists, and Baptists. The Catholics drank wine. We could not have wine at communion in the Methodist Church because the Methodist Church was adamantly opposed to any alcoholic beverage. So we drank grape juice at communion. But my mother, considering the fact, as I have said many times on this floor, that I grew up in a household where we were taught that when we died we were going to Franklin Roosevelt. My mother and my father thought he was the greatest man who ever lived. But my mother could not abide Eleanor Roosevelt because she had been accused--I am not sure, according to Doris Kearns' book, ``No Ordinary Time,'' what the real circumstances were. But, anyway, it was a widely held belief in this country that Eleanor Roosevelt had told young women how not to drink too much, which was, if you drink, you only have one drink, or drink in moderation. That was more than my mother could abide. She detested Eleanor Roosevelt until her dying day. The interesting thing about growing up poor in the South in those days was, as I say, most people couldn't afford to drink, even if they wanted to. But my mother and father, until the day they died, never-- either one--tasted alcohol in any form. So it was on March 22nd. I was a freshman law student at Northwestern University in Chicago. One Sunday evening somebody came in--there was a telephone booth down the hall in the dormitory--and said, ``Dale, somebody wants to talk to you. It is long distance.'' I went down. My sister's brother-in-law was on the phone saying my mother and father had been in an accident and he thought I should come home. He described it for me, and still it didn't really sink in. But, in any event, that was about 7 or 8 o'clock in the evening. I made arrangements to fly home the next morning. That was back when air traffic was almost nonexistent. But the sum and substance of the story, Madam President, was my mother and father and another couple had been out on a Sunday evening jaunt and had gone over to Oklahoma to look at the spinach crop on some land that my father owned. They were returning about dusk on a narrow, two-lane highway where I-40 runs today. So this drunk comes roaring over, sliding into my father's side of the road. And that is the end of the story. The woman, who was a friend, was killed instantly. My mother and father were taken to the hospital in Fort Smith, where my mother died 2 days later and my father died 6 days later. The interesting thing about that whole thing is--you can think of all kinds of interesting sidelights to a story like that--that the man who hit them had been run out of town in a small town. I believe it was Danville, AR. The sheriff told him to get out of town. He was drunk. So I don't know where he was heading. Some people said he was heading for California. And the State Police picked him up on the way. They didn't pick him up. They saw that he was drunk. The State trooper started chasing him, had a flat, and had to give up the chase. So here was a family as close as any family could be. Interestingly, my brother was himself in law school at Harvard. I believe he was a classmate of Senator Chafee. He was a sophomore at Harvard Law School. They didn't have semesters like they did at Northwestern. This was in March. Of course, he had to drop out of school. We both dropped out of school because we were so devastated. He lost the whole year and had to go back and take the whole year over because he was not there for final exams. I am taking up too much time, I see. I just want to say that ever since that tragedy happened in my household, I have done everything I could do, both here and as Governor of my State, to make sure other families were not devastated in such a way. I had always been opposed to the death penalty before that happened, and I had a tough time after that reconciling my position. I came down on the side of the death penalty later on because I couldn't make much of a distinction between a drunk driver killing my father and mother than I could if he had done it with a gun. When I have a chance to vote for an amendment like Senator Dorgan's, it is a pleasure. I compliment him for doing something that may--just may; no, it will--keep a lot of families from enduring the agonies that this close family, as close knit as any family ever, endured being totally destroyed in the blinking of an eye because of a roaring drunk. I am pleased that the Senator from North Dakota has asked me to come over and speak on it. It is my honor. I yield the floor. Mr. LOTT addressed the Chair.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I yield to no Senator, with the possible exception of Robert C. Byrd from the great State of West Virginia, in my contempt for and disdain for the line-item veto bill that we passed in the 104th Congress and which two district courts have held to be unconstitutional. But I intend to vote to sustain the President's veto. I stood on this floor day after day, year after year, saying that the line-item veto was a lousy idea, an unconstitutional idea. When I think of the abuse that I and Senator Byrd and the people who stood fast on the floor of the Senate against the line-item veto--when I think of the abuse we took, the political abuse we took for resisting what was a palpable political idea, that still rankles me. Like so many ideas that have been floated through this body in the past 23 years that I have been here, they have immense popularity but they are lousy ideas, and the line-item veto stands out about as high as any next to the constitutional amendments related to prayer in school, flag burning and term limits and all those others things that people love to bring up here so they can run on them because they are popular. A little history. When Ronald Reagan ran for President in 1980 he ran on the single proposition that he would balance the budget, and the people of this country were becoming, at a time when the national debt was $1 trillion--the people were not only becoming apprehensive about the ability of Congress to control its habits, they were becoming downright frightened. So the soothing voice and the soothing promise of Ronald Reagan played very well with them and he was elected in a landslide. He carried 44 States. He promised that he would balance the budget in 4 years and maybe in 3. I believed him. I thought he really was committed to a balanced budget. Frankly, not to denigrate the President, I think he really was committed to a balanced budget. I just think, somehow or other, his advisers gave him bad advice and convinced him that, somehow or other, the budget would take care of itself just because he was President. So he came with one of the strangest economic programs in the history of this country. The Nobel laureate at MIT, whose name I forget, who won a Nobel prize for economics, said it was the most profligate, irresponsible economic policy, not in the history of America, but in the history of the world. And what was it? We would balance the budget by cutting taxes. That is a new one, isn't it? You balance the budget by cutting taxes. And, to his credit, he offered a lot of spending cuts. Some of them were foolish. I remember making ketchup a vegetable in the school lunchrooms. I didn't think that was a very appropriate way to balance the budget. I didn't think considering Hamburger Helper to be an entree was a very good way to balance the budget. But I voted against his tax cuts. There were 11 Senators, 11 Senators who voted against the tax cuts which were, as usual, mostly for the rich. But on the spending cuts I voted ``Aye.'' Eleven Senators voted against the tax cuts, and I said--if you want to read a beautiful speech, write my office and I'll send you a copy of it--I said, ``If you pass this bill, you are going to create deficits big enough to choke a mule.'' I was wrong. They were big enough to choke an elephant. But then when it came time to vote for the spending cuts, and there were a lot of programs that I liked that President Reagan was proposing to cut, some to eliminate, and I voted with him. And you know something? There were only three U.S. Senators who voted against the tax cuts and for the spending cuts. The budget would have been balanced in 3 years if a majority of the Members of Congress had voted that way. Three Senators--Bill Bradley from New Jersey, Fritz Hollings from South Carolina and yours truly. I want that put on my epitaph. As the deficits began to soar, first to $100 billion and then later to $200 billion, that was scary. That was scary, Mr. President, when we doubled the national debt of $1 trillion, which has taken us 200 years to accumulate, and all of a sudden the first 4 years of Ronald Reagan's administration we doubled it. We did not balance the budget, we doubled the national debt, and people were scared. That is when President Reagan said, ``What we need is a line-item veto. If you will just give me a line-item veto, I can balance the budget.'' Every thinking person knew at that time that you weren't going to balance the budget with a line-item veto. I can remember when entitlements represented almost as much as the entire income to the Federal Government. I used to do a study every year on seven programs: defense, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the debt, Civil Service pensions and one other thing which eludes me. Seven things. When you added those seven things up, not counting any other discretionary spending, you used up virtually all of the income the Federal Government had. To suggest that a line-item veto could be used to bring this budget into balance in light of those kinds of statistics was absolutely inane, if not insane. I can remember when I ran for reelection in 1986, the question was always--of course, first of all, I had to face prayer in school. But you know something, Mr. President, with my constituents, I was the only southern Senator who voted against a constitutional amendment for prayer in school. When I explained to my constituents why I voted against it, I got 62 percent of the vote. That sounds like a boast. I don't mean that. All I am saying is, when people hear common sense, they respond in a commonsensical way. Not only was I having to defend myself against prayer in school, I was having to defend myself against the so-called line-item veto. Why do you not want the President to have the right to stop all those pork projects? It was like Gerald Ford said when he was first elected President. He learned early on the difference between those very meritorious projects out in his district in Michigan and all those poor projects in the rest of the country. The point is, every analysis that was done of the Federal budget showed that if a line-item veto were used to the very maximum, it would have a minuscule effect on the deficit. It was nothing but a distraction, but a very politically popular one. A lot of us who stood up for the Constitution paid dearly. We were abused politically by admittedly unsophisticated people, well-meaning people, but people who really did not understand the Constitution, which says Congress shall pass a bill and present it to the President. It did not say for the President to pick and choose what he wants. It said he shall sign it or not sign it. If he does not sign it, he can veto it. Approve or not approve, those were his options. The President has the right and the power--he has the bully pulpit. Anytime the appropriations committees are meeting in the U.S. Senate, the President can call over here and say, ``If you put this, this, this and this in that bill, I am going to veto it.'' I have seen Presidents do it a lot of times. Bill Clinton does it all the time. Do you know what we do? We normally take it out because we do not want the bill vetoed. That is a Presidential prerogative. But John Adams, James Madison, people who drafted the Constitution, would be whirling in their graves if they knew this body passed such a piece of legislation as the line-item-veto bill. Mr. President, I feel badly sometimes when I talk the way I am talking right now, because a lot of well-meaning Senators really believed in the line-item veto, I think. I don't mean to denigrate anybody who disagrees with me on this. It is just that I feel so strongly about the Constitution. I have to say, the Congress is the worst place in the world for trivializing the Constitution. It is incredible the things that people come up with. There was even a resolution in 1976 in the House of Representatives saying it shall be unconstitutional for any President to run who hasn't got enough sense to get out of a hail of bullets. Not out of the rain, out of a hail of bullets. Mr. President, 11,000 resolutions have been submitted in the Congress since this great Nation was founded--11,000--to change the Constitution. If you take the Bill of Rights out, to the eternal credit of both Congress and the American people, we have only tinkered with it 17 times. No thanks to Congress, in one way, because there have been plenty of efforts, 11,000 efforts, to amend the Constitution, the greatest organic law in the world. So every time we get a chance to do something politically popular, it is always the Constitution that suffers, that magnificent document crafted by the greatest assemblage of minds under one roof in the history of the world. People around here treat it as though it is a rough draft. I do not want to wait for the Supreme Court to declare the line-item veto unconstitutional, which they will surely do. I want the people who passed the line-item veto bill in the first place to repeal it. It is our solemn duty to undo one of the most miserable mistakes we have ever made. I spoke to some of my good friends who supported that thing, and now they tell me they supported it because they believed there would be a new President in 1996--I must say a lot of people voted for the line- item veto because they thought Ronald Reagan would have been elected forever for life. Nobody ever thought about William Jefferson Clinton being in the White House when the line-item veto took effect, and he likes it. He had it when he was Governor. I was Governor of Arkansas before he was and I liked it. I used it. I used to call those legislators up and say, ``You know that vo-tech school down there in your hometown. There is $250,000 in this budget. If you don't get down there and behave, there isn't going to be any vo- tech school in your hometown.'' If you want to straighten up a legislator's conduct, that is the way to do it. As I say, I am not being cute about this, I am just simply saying I am going to vote to sustain the President's veto, because I want the line-item veto to be painful enough that a majority of the people in this body will be willing to undo a miserable mistake we made. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I rise this afternoon not just in support of but in strong support of the nomination of Dr. David Satcher to be Surgeon General of the United States. I also want to state that I have a personal prejudice because I have worked closely with Dr. Satcher over the last 5 years since he became head of the Centers for Disease Control. There is a current cute saying making the rounds in Washington, and unhappily it is true. This is the only nation on Earth where a person is presumed innocent until they receive a Presidential nomination. We have had a lot of contentious debate on this floor about various nominations. I have not participated in many of those debates. But I am participating and I will continue to participate in the nomination of Dr. Satcher because I think he is one of the finest medical people in the United States. I also happen to think that he is one of the finest men, one of the finest people in the United States. I believe that the President could not have chosen better for this position. Mr. President, it is a real travesty to me that people who want to serve their Government in a position such as this are subjected to such a contentious process. Admittedly, the position of surgeon general doesn't have a lot of clout, but it does have a lot of public relations value. There are a lot of public appearances made by the Surgeon General. They take a lot of different positions on medical techniques and medical practices in this country. In some respects, I can sympathize with the Senator from Missouri who is opposed to this nomination, apparently based on Dr. Satcher's presumed feelings about the issue of partial-birth abortion. I happen to agree with Dr. Satcher on partial-birth abortions, but I recognize it is a very, very difficult moral question for everyone. I also have to confess to the Senate that I voted against Dr. Koop's confirmation to be Surgeon General because of his position on that issue, and have lived until this day to regret my vote because he turned out to be one of the greatest surgeon generals this country has ever had. I didn't know Dr. Koop. If I had known him maybe I would have voted differently. I do know Dr. Satcher in a very personal, intimate way because I have worked closely with him for 4 years. But aside from that, I ask my colleagues to look at his credentials. Look at the life of this African American who has risen from a poor rural community to become prominent, to become a role model. He went to Morehouse College, the same school Dr. Martin Luther King graduated from. Do you know what he did there? He was Phi Beta Kappa, which means that intellectually he was superior; a good student. From there he went on to get his MD and Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve in Cleveland. He did that in 1970, and then went into a career of academic and public health medicine. So far that is pretty impressive, is it not? A man who has spent his entire life since 1970 in public health and was a Phi Beta Kappa with the highest degrees you can get in medicine. After he graduated he served on the faculty at the UCLA Medical School, and as Dean of Family Medicine at King-Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was then appointed president of Meharry Medical College in 1982. He was President of Meharry Medical College until 1993 until President Clinton chose him to head up the Centers for Disease Control, an agency to which we turn time and time again every year. Whether there is an EColi breakout, or a virus breakout in Africa, or whether it is mad cow disease in England, or whether it is an avian flu virus in the chickens of Hong Kong, it is the Centers for Disease Control who the world calls on, and they respond. They respond always in a very professional and effective way. I don't know what else may be involved in this, other than partial- birth abortions. I have heard that some people take exception to the role of the Centers for Disease Control in conducting research in developing countries aimed at reducing transmission of HIV from pregnant mothers to newborns through AZT therapy. Let me say, first of all, that tests to measure the effectiveness of long-term AZT therapy on pregnant women were started long before Dr. Satcher came to the Centers for Disease Control. Let me also say those tests were expanded upon to measure the effectiveness of short-term drug therapy, because the public health infrastructure in Africa could not support the longer-term regimen. Getting AZT to pregnant African women during their entire pregnancy was almost impossible because of logistics. It was just not practical. The short-term regimen provides massive doses to pregnant women just before they deliver. And it is this short-term approach that holds out hope for the thousands of HIV-infected children who are born in Africa each week. In every experiment, the health ministers of each African country in which the trials were conducted approved the study design. But whether you like that or whether you do not like that, or whether you don't think the tests should have been conducted, or if they were not conducted correctly, the entire process started long before Dr. Satcher came to CDC. And the process was a joint effort of NIH, CDC and the World Health Organization. And what difference should it make when we consider the nomination of this outstanding candidate for the post of surgeon general? Mr. President, there is also controversy on the question of preventing AIDS transmission through needle exchange and on the issue of making condoms available in public schools. Regarding the former, Dr. Satcher has said that science rather than politics should determine our policy. On the issue of condoms, Dr. Satcher has stated that such decisions should be made in local communities by parents, teachers and community leaders. Who here can disagree with those positions? Mr. President, on the issue of partial-birth abortion, the American Medical Association came out and said they are opposed to it but here is what they say about Dr. Satcher. The American Medical Association continues to enthusiastically support Dr. David Satcher . . .'' [The surgon general's office] ``has been vacant far too long,'' [and] ``the American public needs a credible voice they can turn to in times of a public health crisis. . . . We urge Congress to look at the totality of Dr. Satcher's expertise and experience. He is a physician, administrator, educator, and outstanding public health leader. Why is it we turn to the agencies like the AMA when we agree with them and want to ignore them when we don't agree with them? Mr. President, I want to go back to say that Betty Bumpers, my wife, and I have devoted a large part of our public life, which now spans 27 years, to improving the immunization of children. It was Betty's idea. It was not mine. And until this day she is extremely active. She and Roslyn Carter have their own program, and have had it for 7 years, called ``Every Child by Two.'' They go around the country and work with governors and community groups to educate parents and providers on the importance of immunizing our young children by age two. I have paid close attention to CDC's immunization program ever since I came to the Senate, and over the past five years under Dr. Satcher's leadership, our nation has achieved the highest immunization levels and the lowest rates of childhood disease in our country's recorded history. What parent in the United States wouldn't take great pride in that achievement? What Senator would not applaud Dr. Satcher for the role he has played in eradicating polio from the Western Hemisphere? Who would not applaud Dr. Satcher's efforts to eliminate polio in Africa? The elimination of polio in the United States alone saves the taxpayers of this country $250 million a year. He had whooping cough when he was a child. It made an indelible impression on him, and it was the reason he went into medicine. So when I think of the many conversations and meetings I have had with Dr. Satcher in my office, he is always at the highest professional level. I have never heard him utter a statement that didn't reflect credit on him personally and didn't reflect credit on his total commitment to the health of the people of the United States. What in the name of God else do you want--would we reject a man who came up from nothing to become one of the preeminent medical people in this country simply because we disagree with him on one or two things? I notice people who do not want Washington telling them what to do often want Washington to tell the rest of the country what to do. If an atheist invented a cure for cancer, would you refuse to take it because he was an atheist? Of course you wouldn't. That is the kind of logic we are confronted with here because you may disagree on a policy that really is not a policy. You want to deprive this man of the post that the President nominated him for. And what did he say in answer to a letter from Senator Frist from Tennessee? What did he say to Senator Frist about the issue of partial-birth abortion? I see Senator Frist on the floor. He knows exactly what he said and it is this: Let me say unequivocally that I have no intention of using the position of Assistant Secretary for Health and Surgeon General to promote issues related to abortion. I share no one's political agenda, and I want to use the power of these positions to focus on issues that unite Americans--not divide them. If confirmed by the Senate, I will strongly promote a message of abstinence and responsibility to our youth, which I believe can help reduce the number of abortions in our country. Where can you find a more noble or professional statement than that? I say to my colleagues: Let us not divide ourselves over an appointment of this importance and destroy a man who has devoted his entire life to the well-being of the children of this country as well as its adults. I yield the floor, Mr. President. Mr. ALLARD addressed the Chair.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, prior to introducing my bill, let me just lend my support to the remarks just made by the Senator from South Carolina. He and the Senator from North Dakota, Senator Dorgan, have made speech after speech after speech on the floor of this body about how we do not have truth in budgeting. We do not have a balanced budget. We are not even close to a balanced budget and are not going to be for some time to come. And the idea of people talking about tax cuts or using the budget surplus, which does not exist, to using that surplus to cut taxes or to increase spending is an absolute absurdity. I think this year, 1998, we are anticipating a $100 billion surplus in Social Security. So I lend my support to what the President said the other night. And I lend my support to what the Senator from South Carolina just said. (The remarks of Mr. Bumpers pertaining to the introduction of S. 1586 are located in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, what is the parliamentary situation?