Dale Bumpers

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I will engage the distinguished manager of the bill in a short colloquy, but let me start off by saying that there are parts of this bill that are confusing because any bill of this magnitude obviously has some things that are hard to understand without knowing precisely what was intended. These are fairly arcane questions, usually not very entertaining to anybody except those of us who deal with issues affecting the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior. Question No. 1. As I understand it, the U.S. Government will pay $250 million for the Headwaters Forest as provided in the bill; correct?

Mr. BUMPERS. The second question: Do the authorizing committees have the authority under this bill to determine additional conditions under which the money can be spent?

Mr. BUMPERS. There is a provision in the bill that says before the President can spend that money, the $315 million, which includes both the New World Mine and the Headwaters Forest, before the President can spend that money to acquire those two properties, the authorizing committees of the House and the Senate have 180 days from the date of enactment of this bill in which to take action. If they take no action, presumably the President would be authorized to go ahead and make the purchase?

Mr. BUMPERS. That brings me to the point. If the Secretary and the Governor of Montana cannot agree prior to this date on something similar to $10 million, then the Governor of Montana is within his right to demand the so-called Otter Creek tracts, which are tracts of land with a considerable amount of coal underneath them; is that correct?

Mr. BUMPERS. Now, if the President were to veto the bill, because it contained some fairly stringent conditions that he found odious and the Congress did not override it, would the President still have authority to go ahead and make the purchase?

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I have authority from Senator Byrd to yield myself time on this.

Mr. BUMPERS. Right. Now, there is a provision in here that says Headwaters Forest must be appraised, through a normal appraisal, the appraisal submitted to the GAO within 30 days, et cetera. My question is, if the appraisal came out that the Headwaters Forest was worth more than $250 million, would the President have the authority to spend more money out of the Land and Water Conservation Fund to pay the appraised price?

Mr. BUMPERS. So we are only authorizing under this bill, and subject to the 180 days within which the committees have to act, we are only authorizing the expenditure of $250 million for Headwaters Forest?

Mr. BUMPERS. If the appraisal came out more than that and Mr. Hurwitz decided he wanted the appraised value, we could not pay him the appraised value; is that correct?

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. I thank the Chair. (The remarks of Mr. Bumpers pertaining to the introduction of S. 1283 are located in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')

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

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, about 10 days ago the Senate adopted the appropriations bill on defense. I sit on the appropriations committee. I was one of five Senators who voted no. I think the bill passed 95 to 5. I don't enjoy voting against a defense budget. I am not running again, so I am not worried about somebody accusing me of being soft on defense. That has always been the mortal fear of Members of the Senate when you are voting on weapons system, that their opponent in the next election will accuse them of being soft on defense. Sometimes I think we should be accused of being soft in the head. We passed a bill that contained $247.5 billion for defense, and that did not include nuclear weapons and weapons development. That is all handled in the energy and water appropriations bill. And it did not include military construction, which is also in a separate bill. When you add those together, the appropriations for national defense total $268.2 billion. That is right up there with what we spent in the cold war. If, in 1985, you had asked the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, indeed, if you had asked all the chiefs, ``If the Soviet Union were to suddenly be dissolved and disappear, how much do you think we could cut the defense budget,'' I promise you the answer would have been anywhere from $50 billion to $100 billion. Today the Soviet Union has been dissolved. It does not exist anymore. The military forces of Russia are in shambles. And we are appropriating $268 billion--big, big figures. What are we thinking about? There is not a major enemy in sight. How much do we spend? And who are we afraid of? Here is a little chart that I believe my colleagues will find interesting. When we appropriate $268 billion, we are spending twice as much as all of the eight potential enemies we could possibly conjure up. Here is what the United States spent, $268 billion; Russia, $82 billion; China, $32 billion; and the six rogue countries, $15 billion. So we spend twice as much as all of those countries, twice as much as Russia, China, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Syria, Libya, Cuba combined. And when you add the NATO alliance, Japan and South Korea to what we are spending, it comes to four times as much. The United States and its allies are now spending four times as much for defense as virtually everybody else in the world. That is the macro overlook of what I think is terribly wrong with the way we are appropriating money. But within that $268 billion, let me just tell you some of the reasons I could not stomach it. Between 1998 and 2001, under that bill, we are going to retire 11 Los Angeles class submarines that have an average of 13 years left on their lives. What are we doing? When we appropriated the money to build Los Angeles class submarines, we were assured these submarines were the best in the world and that they had a 30-year life. Everybody beat themselves on the chest and said isn't that wonderful, we are building submarines that have a 30-year life. So now we are retiring 11 of them that still have 13 years left on their lives. Why? So we can build one new attack submarine in fiscal 1998 at a cost of $2.3 billion. You talk about penny-wise and pound-foolish; we are going to spend $3.4 billion for four DDG-51 destroyers. That is even one more than the Pentagon requested. How are we going to pay for that? Well listen to how we are going to pay for it. First of all, I am offended because they are retiring a ship that Betty Bumpers is the chief sponsor of. We christened the CGN-41, a guided missile nuclear ship, back in 1979. That ship had a life expectancy of 38 years, and we are about to scrap it. It is as modern as tomorrow. We are going to scrap it so we can build four new DDG-51 class destroyers, to keep the shipyards busy. We are retiring one of the most beautiful ships you will ever see, and it has 18 years left on its life. We are also retiring three Perry-class frigates that have 20 years left on their life. What in the name of all that is good and holy do we care what the life expectancy of a ship is if we are going to retire them in order to make room for some more ships? The first thing you know, we will be building them and retiring them before they go into service so we can keep the shipyards busy. Then, Mr. President, there is the $331 million in this bill for the B-2 bomber. Let me say in all fairness, as long as William Jefferson Clinton is President, we are not going to start building B-2 bombers. I heard him speak on that subject. But what are we doing? We are saying, ``Well, Mr. President, we know you don't like the B-2, so what we're going to do is give you $331 million to start building nine more B-2 bombers, but if you don't want to do that, then spend this money on spare parts on the ones we have.'' The Pentagon and the Air Force didn't ask for an additional $331 million in spare parts, and we are not going to build the B-2. Why in the name of all that is good and holy are we putting $331 million in the budget? I come finally to the two items that really burn me worse than any other part of the budget. First, the F-22 fighter. When you start seeing full-page pictures in the New York Times and the Washington Post and in Roll Call and The Hill newspaper of this magnificent F-22 fighter, you can bet your bottom dollar the full-court press is on. I have no more ability to stop the F-22 fighter than I can keep the Earth from revolving. Once a plane like that develops the kind of momentum the F-22 has, nobody can stop it. Nobody can stop it no matter how foolish it is. Let me wedge the F-22 fighter for you in between two other fighter planes. Right now we are beginning to build a new version of the Navy's F-18 fighter plane called the F-18 E/F. It is the most advanced version of the F-18 to date. Cost? Mr. President, $90 million each. Number? Probably around 600. The Navy says, and the intelligence community confirms, that the F-18 fighter will be superior to any other non-American fighter plane in the world through the year 2015. I repeat: The 500 to 600 F-18 E/F's we are going to build will be superior to any non-American fighter plane known in the world between now and the year 2015. The Navy says it will provide air dominance until the year 2020. I am for it. We are building it. It is a magnificent airplane. So what are we going to do now in the year 1998 to 2000? We are going to start building this F-22. Do you want to know the cost of that? Sixty-two billion dollars for 339 airplanes. That comes to somewhere between $180 million and $190 million each, which makes it precisely twice as expensive as the most expensive fighter plane ever built in the United States. If we needed it, we might justify the cost. But if we don't need it, we couldn't justify it at any cost. An Air Force official has said, ``I promise you, we will build these 339 planes for $61.7 billion.'' We just happened to be debating the authorization bill for defense at that time. I said, ``OK, we'll take you at your word. I can't stop the plane, which I would divinely like to do, but we will hold you to your word. You say you can build it for $61.7 billion. Let's put that in the bill, that you may not spend more than that.'' Do you know what? They are already hollering like a pig under a gate: ``We can't live with it.'' So when you talk about a $190 million airplane, that is what they are saying today. Anybody who has been in the Senate as long as I have knows they are not about to build that plane for that. They already cut the number of planes because they faced a $16 billion cost overrun. To proceed with the sequence, in the year 2005, we are going to start building what we call the Joint Strike Fighter, and we are going to build about 2,800 of those. I happen to support the Joint Strike Fighter because it is going to be used by the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marine Corps. It is supposed to cost much less than $100 million each and be a state of the art fighter plane. So why are we sandwiching this F-22 fighter at a cost of $62 billion between the F-18 and the Joint Strike Fighter? Why? Because the lobbyists have the power to make it happen, not because we need it. It is a cold-war relic. You might ask, ``Well, who dreamed up the F-22?'' I will tell you who dreamed it up. The Russians. Back when the old Soviet Union kept us from sleeping at night, they announced in the early 1980's, back in the heyday of the Soviet Union, ``We're going to build a fifth-generation fighter that's going to be superior to anything ever built in the history of the world.'' That is all you have to do to get the Pentagon's attention. So the Air Force went to the drawing board and started designing the F-22 to meet the threat of the Soviet Union and their fifth generation fighter. What happened? The Soviet Union went bankrupt, and the fifth generation remained on the drawing board where it is today, unless they have lost it. What are we doing? We are getting ready to produce an airplane designed to compete with a plane that is still on the drawing board in Russia and may never come off the drawing board. The F-22 has virtually no ground-attack capability. They put a couple bombs on it just so they could say it has ground-attack capability. It is a good airplane. I am not arguing that. You can build all kinds of airplanes that are good airplanes, but I want to tell you something, while it has a good air superiority capability, in Desert Storm and Iraq, we flew four times more ground-attack flights than we did flights to achieve air dominance and air superiority. Mr. President, this cold war relic should never have been built. Finally, the argument that I thought I was going to finally win--I don't win many arguments on defense. I don't know of anybody who ever tries to kill a weapons system or bring some sanity to defense spending that ever wins. I can only remember two or three weapons systems in my 23 years in the Senate that we have ever stopped. They take on a life of their own, and the minute Congress starts looking at them, the manufacturers start running full-page ads in every newspaper and magazine in the United States, giving the American people the impression that we will be seriously threatened if we don't build that particular weapons system. The one I thought I was going to win was to stop plans to backfit our Pacific fleet submarines with new ballistic missiles. We have 10 Trident submarines in the Atlantic and 8 in the Pacific. The ones in the Atlantic are furnished with what we call the D-5 missile. A fine missile, very accurate. It is the most modern, accurate ballistic missile we have. Our eight Trident submarines in the Pacific are equipped with an older missile called the C-4. The C-4 is not quite as accurate as the D-5. Do you know what the difference is, Mr. President? According to unclassified data from the Congressional Budget Office, the C-4 lacks having the accuracy of the D-5, and the accuracy shortage is about 450 feet, or the distance from where the Presiding Officer is sitting right now to where the Speaker of the House is sitting down the hall. When you consider the smallest warhead that goes on these missiles, the 100 kiloton W-76 warhead, would wipe the District of Columbia completely off the map, why, again, in the name of all that is good and holy are we getting ready to spend $5.6 billion to take the C-4 missiles off our Pacific fleet and replace them with the D-5 missiles? Do you know why? Because the Navy wants it, and the Navy and the industrial complex have the power to get it. We had a serious debate in the appropriations committee on this, and as I started to say earlier, I thought I had won that debate. I thought the committee was agreeing with me. I thought the committee agreed that it would be the height of foolishness to retrofit those submarines in the Pacific when the warheads and the missiles on them will last longer than the submarines. No question about it. So what are we going to do here when the cold war has long since ceased to exist? We are going to scare the life out of the Russians by modernizing our ballistic missile submarine fleet and spend $5.6 billion that we could save doing it. We may also keep the Russians from ratifying START II. Oh, I could go on and on about what an utter waste of money that is. Did you know that those C-4 warheads I just described for you and the missiles on which they sit will last longer than the submarines? We are not even going to backfit four of the submarines because they are going to be retired before the C-4 missile will have lived out its usefulness. So, Mr. President, I do, indeed, get agitated about these things, and I get frustrated. The people sent us here to do a job as best we see fit. When I see the needs of this country, when I see an educational system that needs to be fixed, when I see a planet threatened by environmental concerns, and when I see us fighting over who is going to get highway money to take care of the 200 million vehicles in this country, I get frustrated. Mr. President, do you know, just sort of digressing for a moment, when I was a young marine in World War II, I remember seeing in one of the papers in California that we had 30 million vehicles on the road. You know how many we have today? Two hundred million. By the year 2050, at the rate we are going, we will have 400 million. Mother Teresa was the exemplification of a woman who lived the consummate Judeo- Christian life, God bless her soul, but she was fighting a losing battle from the very beginning. When she was a young novitiate, India had 250 million people. Today, they have almost 800 million. Mother Teresa was fighting a losing battle. The highway commissions in our respective 50 States are fighting a losing battle, too. They are trying to build more highways, wider highways to accommodate 30 percent of all the vehicles in the world. Those 200 million vehicles in this country are 30 percent of all the vehicles in the world. We are going to have to think differently and act differently if we are going to deal with our transportation needs in the future, or every city in America is going to be in gridlock. In that connection, in putting that in the context of another burning issue around here called global warming, those 200 million vehicles contribute 27 percent of all the world's greenhouse gases that the United States throws into the stratosphere. When you think of what it is going to cost to clean up all the Superfund sites in this country. To try to keep our water and air clean, and when I looked at the kind of money we spend on defense, so much of which is wasted, I had to come to the floor to make this speech. I did not want to vote against the defense budget. I just simply say I thought it was too much money. It was a lot more than too much money. It was putting weapons systems in mothballs that have long lives left. It was buying weapons systems we do not need. It was cold war mentality at its worst when the cold war is over. Mr. President, I yield the floor. Mr. KOHL addressed the Chair.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce a bill on behalf of Senator Carol Moseley-Braun and myself authorizing the award of the Congressional Gold Medal to the extraordinary group of Americans known as the Little Rock Nine. We speak often of heroes in this body. Sometimes we worry that there are no heroes in our country today, no one for our children to look up to, no one to inspire us to be our best selves. But a couple of weeks ago, we had a vivid reminder that there are still heroes among us. The Little Rock Nine returned to Little Rock Central High School to stride through the doors again. This time those doors were held open by the Governor of Arkansas and the President of the United States. Jean Brown Trickey, Carlotta Walls LaNier, Melba Patillo Beals, Terrence Roberts, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Thelma Mothershed Wair, Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, and Jefferson Thomas. Their names are not so familiar to the American public, but they ought to be. On a fall day in 1957, these nine Americans were teenagers, children really, and they marched up the steps of Little Rock Central High School, young black teenagers through a huge crowd--actually a mob--of angry white people who despised them just for being there and presuming to attend a public school in their own home town. They marched up the steps with a cool courage that remains awesome today, no matter how many times we see the grainy newsreels. In 1957, Little Rock was not a very big city, but for a few days, it became the center of the world. Arkansas was not the most staunchly segregationist State in the South, but politics, history and fear conspired to make it the crucible for the authority of Brown v. Board of Education. And through that storm of controversy marched these nine young people, frightened but dignified, barely comprehending what was happening but sensing that they were helping to move aside a profound obstacle. Now, even the people who jeered at them will admit that they were impressed and moved by the courage of those nine kids. The images of those days in Little Rock, and the extraordinary lives these nine sons and daughters of Arkansas have led are proud symbols of the progress we have made in America and a solemn reminder of the progress we have yet to make. Any ordinary teenager is sensitive to the tiniest insult, the most innocent slight. It is hard to imagine what these nine felt as they were cursed and spat upon, peppered with every slur and threat the crowd could muster. They were opposed by the Governor, by most every local leader, by their peers and by a fully armed unit of the National Guard. They were able to enter the school when President Eisenhower ordered in units of the airborne division to escort them and enforce the order of the Supreme Court. But it was not the power of the soldiers or the authority of the law that won the day. It was the grace and courage of those nine young people. Their grace and courage prevailed that day and has inspired us for 40 years. They deserve our thanks and admiration. They deserve a medal. We should present those nine heroes of Little Rock with the Congressional Gold Medal as a permanent remembrance of their unforgettable moment of courage. I hope all of my colleagues will cosponsor this bill and see that it quickly becomes law. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce a bill on behalf of Senator Carol Moseley-Braun and myself authorizing the award of the Congressional Gold Medal to the extraordinary group of Americans known as the Little Rock Nine. We speak often of heroes in this body. Sometimes we worry that there are no heroes in our country today, no one for our children to look up to, no one to inspire us to be our best selves. But a couple of weeks ago, we had a vivid reminder that there are still heroes among us. The Little Rock Nine returned to Little Rock Central High School to stride through the doors again. This time those doors were held open by the Governor of Arkansas and the President of the United States. Jean Brown Trickey, Carlotta Walls LaNier, Melba Patillo Beals, Terrence Roberts, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Thelma Mothershed Wair, Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, and Jefferson Thomas. Their names are not so familiar to the American public, but they ought to be. On a fall day in 1957, these nine Americans were teenagers, children really, and they marched up the steps of Little Rock Central High School, young black teenagers through a huge crowd--actually a mob--of angry white people who despised them just for being there and presuming to attend a public school in their own home town. They marched up the steps with a cool courage that remains awesome today, no matter how many times we see the grainy newsreels. In 1957, Little Rock was not a very big city, but for a few days, it became the center of the world. Arkansas was not the most staunchly segregationist State in the South, but politics, history and fear conspired to make it the crucible for the authority of Brown v. Board of Education. And through that storm of controversy marched these nine young people, frightened but dignified, barely comprehending what was happening but sensing that they were helping to move aside a profound obstacle. Now, even the people who jeered at them will admit that they were impressed and moved by the courage of those nine kids. The images of those days in Little Rock, and the extraordinary lives these nine sons and daughters of Arkansas have led are proud symbols of the progress we have made in America and a solemn reminder of the progress we have yet to make. Any ordinary teenager is sensitive to the tiniest insult, the most innocent slight. It is hard to imagine what these nine felt as they were cursed and spat upon, peppered with every slur and threat the crowd could muster. They were opposed by the Governor, by most every local leader, by their peers and by a fully armed unit of the National Guard. They were able to enter the school when President Eisenhower ordered in units of the airborne division to escort them and enforce the order of the Supreme Court. But it was not the power of the soldiers or the authority of the law that won the day. It was the grace and courage of those nine young people. Their grace and courage prevailed that day and has inspired us for 40 years. They deserve our thanks and admiration. They deserve a medal. We should present those nine heroes of Little Rock with the Congressional Gold Medal as a permanent remembrance of their unforgettable moment of courage. I hope all of my colleagues will cosponsor this bill and see that it quickly becomes law. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, let me just say McCain-Feingold may be dead as most people around here seem to believe. I have always believed the American people can have anything they want any time they are unified. The time is fast approaching when the American people are going to demand that we change a system that is rotten to the core. McCain-Feingold goes a long way in that direction. It doesn't go nearly far enough to please me personally, but at least it will be a beginning. The two things you can do to restore people's faith in the American Government and Congress, the two things you can do that will instill more confidence than anything else would be to balance the budget and change the way we finance campaigns. I have heard all the sophistry about the constitutionality of this bill. I just want to tell you, when it comes to free speech, you can hang your hat on free speech if you want to, but the thing that makes this system rotten is that a guy who can afford to belly up for $100,000 gets a lot more free speech than some guy giving $25. The reason he doesn't give $25 is because he knows it gets him nothing--not even good government. So I plead with my colleagues, for God's sake, let's do something that the vast majority of the American people want us to do--that is, to level the playing field for all parties. You don't have a democracy when the people we elect and the laws we pass depend on how much money we raise for it. I yield the floor.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. No, I won't yield, Senator. I have been waiting all afternoon to speak. When I ran for Governor the first time, I found asking for money the most difficult thing I had ever done. I could not believe that I had to go around pleading with people to give me a few dollars. Nobody wanted to give me any money anyway because I had 1 percent name recognition when I started running. Some guy gave me a $100 one day, and he said, ``I bet the horses all my life, but I have never bet on such a long shot as yours.'' But he gave me $100 anyway. I asked Tom Eagleton, the fine Senator from Missouri, when he announced he was going to leave the Senate, ``Tom, why are you leaving?'' He gave me three reasons. First of all, he said, ``I'm tired of laughing at things that ain't funny.'' The second was, ``I'm tired of answering hate mail.'' And third, ``I'm tired of going around with my tin cup out''--three very compelling, perfectly legitimate reasons for wanting to leave the Senate. As good as McCain-Feingold is, it does not remove the problem Senators face of voting on issues in which an awful lot of people who have given them money have a dynamite interest. My son, who lives in Little Rock, and his wife had twins about a year ago, and they had a woman who came to stay with them when the twins were born. They are very fortunate they can afford that. A lot of people have twins and they can't afford to have that kind of help. Be that as it may, she has been a very intelligent woman. I visit with her when I go over to see the twins. Last week she said, ``You know, Dale, I don't know much about what's going on up there, but it seems to me like you all spend all your time investigating each other.'' I said, ``That's right, Nancy.'' That is all we are ever going to do as long as we finance campaigns the way we do now. Every time you vote on an issue, Senators, you are vulnerable to accusations if it benefits anybody who ever helped you. When you take money from somebody and you vote on an issue, you better hope two things: That the issue turns out well, and that the guy who gave you money does not turn out to be a crook because if he does, the press comes running to you: How much money did he give you or why did he give you money? Was there any quid pro quo? I am reluctant to mention this, but I am going to tell you the truth. I never did like the Keating case. A colleague whom I consider to be one of the most honest men I have ever known spent $600,000 of his own personal money defending himself because he was said to have helped somebody who gave him money in a campaign. I can promise you he would never have taken it in a thousand years if he thought it had the least taint to it. And if Keating's S&L had made it, you would never have heard about the Keating case. There would have been no case. But because he was giving money to a lot of people and his S&L went under, and he turned out to be a crook, then we had this big dog and pony show in the Senate that lasted a year or more. You know, I have been a friend of the President's for now 26 years. And as well as I knew the President, as close a friend as we have been through the years, I never heard of Whitewater until he became President, never knew there was such a place, never knew there was such a corporation. And if Bill Clinton hadn't had the temerity to come to Washington as the President of the United States, you would never have heard of Whitewater. It is all how things turn out. But to reemphasize the point I started to make, that is, colleagues, when you take a contribution from anybody, even if your own intentions are pure, you better hope that money is coming from an honorable person. You better hope it is coming from somebody who isn't out defrauding people. And you better be careful how you vote on issues that can help a contributor if they turn sour or turn out to be a crook. It doesn't matter if you cast that vote on the merits. And as long as we have this system of financing campaigns you can lie awake at night worrying about it because it is a real threat. Where a quid pro quo can be inferred, it will be. That is the perception that will remain until we change the campaign finance law. We have reached the point, Mr. President, where every single Member is constantly just one step away from disaster. And guilt or innocence has little to do with the outcome. One woman told me the other day that she had been interviewed and appeared before grand juries in one of these many investigations and was going to have to deed her house--I promise you she is totally innocent of anything--going to deed her house to her lawyer because it is the only asset she has that will come close to covering her legal bills. Well, we have reached the point in this country where simple negligence, bad judgment, just plain policy differences are becoming criminal offenses. How many independent counsels do we have running loose in this town? And how many more will we have? I can answer that partially. As long as we finance campaigns the way we do now, there are going to be independent counsels galore in this city. When you increase funding, spending on congressional elections in 1976 from $99 million to, in 1996, almost $800 million, you have to ask, where is this going to end? That is an 800 percent increase in 20 years, with no letup in sight. Look at the $450 million or almost $500 million in soft money for both parties during the last election cycle. It will be more this year, they are already ahead of the 1995-1996 cycle. Who gives that money? It is not little struggling lawyers as I was 40 years ago in a little town in Arkansas. It is not average folks with five and ten and fifty dollar contributions. I will tell you when it is going to end, Mr. President. It is going to end when the American people rise up in righteous indignation and come to the realization that the system is rotten, come to the realization that they do not count. It will end when enough people in Congress get tired of every contribution that goes sour being microscopically addressed by the press and wondering about when you are going to be on one of the news magazines the next episode. There is no perfect solution to this. I happen to come down on the side of public financing. I have a bill. I wanted to introduce my bill as an amendment. Senator Kerry and Senator Wellstone have a bill. We discussed whether to try to offer our bills as amendments to this bill. We concluded that would probably be counterproductive, would not get many votes, probably would not get a single Republican vote, maybe 25 or 30 Democrat votes. Yet 66 percent of the people, according to a Gallup poll in October of last year, 66 percent of the people in this country said they favor public financing of our campaigns. I heard the distinguished Senator from Colorado say a moment ago that he won even though he was outspent. I was too in my first race. I ran against a Rockefeller. I guess you would call that stupidity. But in any event, I won, and when I ran for the Senate against an incumbent, I was badly outspent. But I tell you, those are rare exceptions. I applaud anybody who spends less money than his opponent and manages to win because 90 percent of the candidates in this country who spend the most money end up winning. Pretty heavy odds. According to statistics to this date, if you have the money, you have a 9-to-1 chance of winning. In the 1995-96 election cycle, 400 corporations, labor unions, and individuals contributed $100,000 or more in soft money; 400 of them gave over $100,000. Were they after good government? Is that what they wanted? I don't mean to demean anybody, because I have a lot of friends who have been faithful to me for 26 years in the contribution area. I can truthfully say I am most grateful to all of them. But when I first started running for Governor in my State, there were no campaign laws and I was absolutely aghast at the amount of cash money, greenbacks, that was floating around in campaigns. One man handed me fifty $100 bills. I knew he had a deep and abiding interest in certain things that were bound to come up when I was elected, if I was elected. So I handed him his fifty $100 bills back. Do you know something? He doesn't like me to this day. You can't give people money back and make them like it, can you, Senator? My campaign finance director came up and said, ``How are we going to run this race? You are giving more money back than we are taking in.'' I have given a lot of money back. All I am saying is, when you think about how much money $100,000 is, and when you think about who gave it, you have to believe that they wanted something more than good government. In 1996--listen to this--in the U.S. Senate, Senate incumbents had a 2 to 1 spending advantage over challengers. You hear people say public financing of campaigns is welfare for the politicians. Do you know what I say to chamber of commerce and Rotary Club members, all conservative businessmen who do not much like this idea of public financing? I remind them, you have been investing in the stock market for several years now and you have been doing well. But I can tell you, if you really want to make some money, if you really want a return on your investment, you opt for public financing. That will give you the biggest return of any investment you ever made in your life, because we won't be spending a lot of money on unworthy projects that contributors supported. It will be a great investment because it will yield a cleaner government and the people will believe it is a cleaner government. The average successful Senate race today costs $4 million. That is average. Some races have cost as much as $28 million. Where will we be 20 years from now if the costs of Senate races continue to go up another 800 percent? You can't count that high. You can't get computers to count that high at the rate we are going. One of the problems that I have with the McCain-Feingold bill, and I am a cosponsor and ardent supporter and I certainly intend to vote for it, but I will tell you one of my fears is, while it will help preserve our democracy for a little longer and it will take some of the problems out of the way we finance campaigns today, nothing will cure the problem like public financing. But the point I want to make, what I worry about is, if we pass McCain-Feingold, there will be a lot of hoopla about it, because I have never known people as tenacious and determined and as hard-working as Senator Feingold and Senator McCain have been on this issue. They have my deep and abiding admiration for their tenacity and their determination to try to do something about what is wrong with the system. But if it passes, we will go home and we will pat ourselves on the back and give ourselves the ``good government'' award, as Senator Hollings is always saying, and the American people will be thinking the system has been fixed. A lot of it will have been fixed, but problems will remain and I fear that they will make the people even more cynical. The issue advocacy ads that are really ads for a candidate--they drive me crazy. This bill would help to bring them under control, require disclosure of the sources of money used to produce them. They are really campaign spending. I can tell you, I have voted for one constitutional amendment since I have been in the Senate. I voted for ERA soon after I arrived in the Senate. Since that time, I have voted about 32 times against every constitutional amendment. Either earlier this year or last year, I voted against Senator Hollings' amendment to the Constitution which would have allowed the Congress to set campaign spending limits. I am going to vote for it. I want to announce now publicly, the next time Senator Hollings brings that amendment up, I intend to support it. Despite my deep reservations about amending our Constitution, I will do almost anything to change the way we finance campaigns in this country, because I am absolutely convinced that this system is totally destructive to our democracy. I yield the floor, Mr. President. Ms. COLLINS addressed the Chair.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, let me say, first of all, that the distinguished Senator from Maine, Senator Collins, has been waiting for a long time. I am most reluctant to take her spot. But I understand she has to leave. So rather than waste the time, and with her indulgence, I hope she will forgive me, I will go ahead and proceed with my statement. First of all, Mr. President, I would like for every Member of Congress to ask himself or herself this very simple question: How much longer do you think our democracy can survive if we continue under the present system of financing our campaigns? The first question ought to be: Can we continue to pass laws and elect people based on how much money they have and expect a participatory democracy to survive? Question No. 2: Can this democracy survive under the present system of financing campaigns if we adopt McCain-Feingold? With the utmost respect for two dear friends in the Senate, Senator Feingold and Senator McCain, I would have to say that this bill will help our democracy last a little longer than it would if we do nothing. We call ourselves a participatory democracy. And yet, most people have long since quit participating. So another question that every Member of the Senate ought to ask before they vote on this bill is: Why do only 50 percent of the people in our country bother to vote? The next question they ought to ask is: Why do only about 4 percent of the people in the country contribute to candidates and parties? We can contribute 3 bucks to the Presidential Election Fund by checking a box on our tax return, without any cost to ourselves, yet the percentage of people who check that box is down now to about 13 percent of the people who file tax returns. Thirteen percent will say, ``Yes. I want $3 of my taxes to go to the Presidential campaigns.'' I think there are an awful lot of people in this country that think they are paying that $3 out of their own pocket. They don't pay the $3. All they do is say I would like for $3 of my existing tax liability to go to the Presidential campaign. That system has attracted much higher percentages than in the past. But it has been declining. So, ask yourself. Why do only 50 percent of the people vote? Why do only 4 percent of the people contribute? Why is the number of people checking the box on their Federal tax return continuing to go down? The answer to that is very simple. They don't think they count. They say to themselves: ``Why should I contribute? Yes. I could give 25 bucks. I could give 50 bucks.'' But when you see $100,000 contributions in soft money, and you see the $2,000 contributions to candidates, really $4,000 if the contributor's spouse also contributes, who will believe that his $15 or $20 is going to make a difference? And they are showing in big numbers they don't believe they count by staying home on election day. And they see legislation passed continually where they know money was the determining factor. I can remember when I was a young attorney just out of law school practicing law in my little hometown. A man came into my office one day. He said, ``I want you to give me $250 for a Member of Congress.'' And I said, ``He's not even up for reelection this year. Why would I give him $250?'' He said, ``Well, they have a lot of expenses,'' and so on. And I said, ``Well, I'm not going to give you $250,'' the primary reason being I don't have $250. The second reason is $250 is two monthly house payments. And the third reason is I don't even like the guy; he doesn't represent my views. And fourth, I thought, if I were going to give $250, why would I give it to you? Why wouldn't I give it to the candidate so he would at least know I had given him $250 and I would also like for him to know that that is a big, big amount of money for a struggling young lawyer in a little town in Arkansas.

Mr. BUMPERS. Will the Senator yield for a parliamentary inquiry?

Mr. BUMPERS. I thank the Chair.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, is there any order of sequence on the speaking?

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, there were five votes against the conference report on Defense appropriations. I was one of those five. I do not presume to speak for any of the others. I speak only for myself, and I will speak at length on my reasons next week. But I just want to say tonight that by adopting that conference report we are embarking on the building of a fighter plane called the F-22, which is going to be twice as expensive as any fighter plane ever built. My guess is that it will cost somewhere between $70 and $100 billion when it is finished, for 339. We are embarking on a $4 billion cost of retrofitting the Pacific fleet with D-5 missiles on ships which are already equipped with C-4's, and the C-4's will outlive the ships they are on. And for a lesser reason, of course, the $331 million in the bill on the B-2 bomber. Mr. President, if you want to spend this for new bombers, be my guest. If you don't, put it in spare parts. If they need spare parts for B-2's, let's appropriate the money to do it. But let's not use that kind of shenanigan to get $331 million in here and hope we can crank up the B-2 program again. We are talking about ringing up new expenditures of close to $100 billion in this. I will elaborate more extensively next week.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the pending amendment be temporarily laid aside in order for me to proceed for 1 minute.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Madam President, I rise today because I believe the Senate set a terrible precedent last Thursday when it voted to uphold a point of order that was made against an amendment that Senator Gregg and I offered to H.R. 2107, the Interior appropriations bill. This amendment proposed to collect the royalty from hardrock mining operations on public land and a reclamation fee from hardrock mining operations on land that was patented pursuant to the 1872 mining law. The receipts collected from the royalty and reclamation fee would have been deposited in a trust fund to be used to reclaim abandoned hardrock mines in the West. Opponents of my amendment, in an attempt to prevent Senators from going on record in support of an effort to make the mining industry help pay for the environmental disasters it has created, raised a point of order arguing that the reclamation fee constituted a tax proposed by the Senate and thus the amendment violated the origination clause of the Constitution; that is, that all revenue measures must originate in the House. Unfortunately, the Senate voted to uphold the point of order even though the amendment was not even close to being unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has held on numerous occasions that while a tax provision may not originate in the Senate, a governmental fee can. ``A statute that creates a particular governmental program and that raises revenue to support that program, as opposed to a statute that raises revenue to support government generally, it is not a `bill for raising revenue' within the meaning of the origination clause.'' That is confirmed in United States versus Munoz-Florez. My amendment would have imposed a royalty and a fee in order to directly fund the reclamation of abandoned hardrock mines. It was not intended to raise revenues for the Treasury. In fact, Madam President, the Parliamentarian has already ruled that the reclamation fee provision does not constitute a tax when the Parliamentarian referred S. 326, which includes the very same reclamation fee proposal that I had, to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee rather than the Finance Committee. The House Parliamentarian made the very same ruling when he referred the House companion to S. 326 to the House Natural Resources Committee rather than the Ways and Means Committee. I find it perplexing that anybody could argue that the amendment that Senator Gregg and I offered to the Interior appropriations bill could possibly constitute a tax. However, even if that were the case, it ought to be noted that the Interior appropriations bill originated in the House of Representatives in accordance with the origination clause of the Constitution. It does not matter that the amendment was offered in the Senate as long as the bill originated in the House. In Flint v. Stone Tracy Company, 220 U.S. 107 (1911), the Supreme Court ruled that legislation which created the tax on corporations complied with the origination clause even though the corporate tax was proposed by the Senate as a substitute to an inheritance tax that was included in the bill as reported by the House. The fact that H.R. 2107 was reported by the Appropriations Committee rather than the Finance Committee is not relevant. The Senate has in the past added an amendment which modified the Tax Code to an appropriations bill. For example, in 1982 the Senate added a provision to the supplemental appropriations bill which limited the availability of certain tax deductions for Members of Congress. Madam President, Senate rules do not permit the Parliamentarian to rule when a point of order is made against an amendment on constitutional grounds. If the Parliamentarian had been able to rule, the point of order would not have even been made and the decision would not have been close. Instead, the point of order was made with the knowledge that Senators would be able to defeat the Bumpers-Gregg amendment without actually going on record in support of allowing mining companies to continue acquiring billions of dollars worth of minerals from the taxpayers of this country without compensation and leaving those same taxpayers with environmental disasters to clean up. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, let me first of all say my opposition to my colleague's amendment is difficult for me. I have the utmost respect for him. We have a fine working relationship. Occasionally we have a disagreement, as on this amendment. I know he feels very strongly about it. My interests in the wilderness areas and the rivers of this country go back to the time when I was Governor of the State of Arkansas. Long before Congress considered wilderness legislation, Arkansas was considering it. I must confess before God and everybody that my wilderness proposal was the only substantive legislation I lost or was unable to pass in my first term as Governor. It was considered a little bit of a radical concept. Now, of course, we have millions and millions of acres in the national forests and State forests set aside for wilderness areas. It was a concept whose time had not come in 1971. I remember one legislator said, ``Who wants a wilderness? If you want one, go grow one.'' That is how shallow the thinking was about wilderness back then. Fortunately, I was able to designate a few rivers as scenic rivers. I am pleased we were able to do that. I am a strong believer in preserving everything that has any aesthetic or cultural value. Now, as I see this proposal, not my colleague's proposal, but as I see what the President is proposing, I just do not understand, frankly, the opposition. We have had some calls in our office suggesting that this is a United Nations plot to take over private property. Well, I wouldn't be standing here saying that the President's idea is a good one if I thought for a minute it was going to take people's property away from them, that there was some kind of cabal or conspiracy to do such a thing as that. I guess that you could compare this to a scenic highway. In Arkansas we designate scenic highways in our State. You know why we do that? To entice tourists to drive on those scenic highways. You drive a few miles west of Washington, DC, and all you can see are signs saying ``Scenic Highways.'' I have never heard any outcry from anybody in my State opposing scenic highways. We love them. They do wonders for the Arkansas tourist industry. If I understand the proposal on the heritage rivers, it is designed so that the President would have to be told or he would have to be requested by the people in the local community that they want to declare their river an American heritage river. If he did it, it would be an honorary designation more than anything else. The only time any Federal resources would be committed to it would be if the local community decided that they wanted to start a new project along the river, as we have done in Little Rock, AR, with a beautiful new park. In 1972, I attended a Southern Governors' Conference in Austin, TX. We always have a big dinner at the close of those things. Lady Bird Johnson was my seatmate at dinner. I had never met her before. She is a very gracious, charming woman. The Lady Bird Johnson Park out here is a real tribute to her. She told me, ``Governor Bumpers, I was in Little Rock about 2 weeks ago and I was staying in a brandnew hotel. I looked out my window toward the river and there was the county jail and a sand and gravel operation.'' She said, ``I believe that Little Rock is the only city in the world on a major river that doesn't have a riverfront park that utilizes the beauty of the river and builds on the beauty of that river.'' I came back and reported that to the city fathers in Little Rock. It was rather embarrassing when she brought it to my attention. To make a long story short, we now have one of the most magnificent riverfront parks in Little Rock, AR, today, of any State in the Nation. We have a week-long Riverfest festival which everybody in Arkansas takes great pride in. There is nothing underhanded or sinister in this proposal. The President is not asking for legislative authority. He is simply saying, if the community of Little Rock came to him and said, ``We want this river in our State declared an American heritage river,'' he could proclaim it, like giving them a plaque. Everybody in this body has 1,000 plaques. What is wrong with that, providing recognition to aesthetic values in this rather meager way? I yield the floor.