Dale Bumpers

Mr. BUMPERS

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

Mr. BUMPERS. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, let me just echo the words of the distinguished Senator from Mississippi. The Senator from Colorado and several communities in Colorado have a very difficult problem in renewing easements and rights-of-way on municipal water supplies which cross Federal lands. Those are up for renewal. I happen to come down very strongly on the human needs side when issues like this arise. It is not that there are not other problems that can and should be addressed in order to accommodate the future of those lines for the benefit of both parties, and that is the reason I personally favor and the administration favors the provision in this amendment that as long as both parties voluntarily agree to changes which are beneficial to both, that is fine. But frankly, the Federal Government and Forest Service should not have the right to be arbitrary or capricious in renewing these rights-of-way which are critical to the very existence of some of these communities. The Senator from Colorado has my gratitude for offering it, and I am happy that we were able to work out this language. We have no objection to the amendment.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote by which the motion was rejected.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, when you consider the mood of the country, which everybody recognizes is pretty hostile and very volatile, most of it directed at the U.S. Congress and the people who occupy this Chamber and the one down the hall, most people do not understand what this Market Promotion Program is. But it is the very epitome of what people are upset about. I cannot fathom our continuing a program such as this. We spent $2 billion a year helping companies export--$2 billion--and here we put $110 million in for not just these corporations listed on this chart but dozens and dozens of other corporations, all of whom are quite capable of fending for themselves--the biggest in America. Can you imagine McDonald's spending $60 million or $80 million a year on advertising and us giving them $3 million to advertise Big Mac in Russia or wherever? What kind of nonsense is this? This is one of those issues that if every single American were required to listen to the debate on this issue, I promise you, this $110 million would be torpedoed in a megasecond. People would be appalled if they knew this sort of thing went on and particularly in light of the people we are cutting. I still believe in helping people. I believe in what de Tocqueville talked about, an enlightened self-interest. I said it on this floor a hundred times. We ought to help people who want to make it and are reaching for the first rung on the ladder. We are passing a lot of legislation here that guarantees a lot of people who would like to have a chance, for example, to go to school on the GI bill like I did. I would not be standing here if it were not for the GI bill. I ask unanimous consent for an additional 2 minutes.

Mr. BUMPERS. My brother made it pretty big in the corporate world. He would never have made it. We came from very poor circumstances. So, yes, I believe in helping people. I do not believe in helping people who do not want to help themselves. But I can tell you a little help from time to time from the Federal Government pays rich dividends, and we ought to be spending where it pays rich dividends. We ought not to be spending it on dancing raisins in Japan that scared half the children of Japan out of their wits. It was in English, and they did not understand any of it. Little shriveled raisins--they thought they were aliens. That was $3 million worth of scaring Japanese children. I could go on with the horror stories. I am not going to belabor it. About everything that needs to be said has been said. I want to point out again that we are spending $2 billion on export enhancements right now. Why are we adding this piddling amount for the biggest corporations in America? If the people on this list right here--which is a lot longer than that list--cannot fend for themselves, this country is in more trouble than I thought it was. I am here to help people who cannot fend for themselves and who need and deserve help. This $110 million--I am not asking you to put it anyplace else. Put it on the deficit. You could not find a better place to put it. I yield the floor.

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

Mr. BUMPERS

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

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Phil Schwab, a congressional fellow in the Democratic leader's office, be granted floor privileges during floor consideration of the agriculture appropriations bill.

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

Mr. BUMPERS. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, first, I want to thank my distinguished colleague from Mississippi, Senator Cochran, chairman of this subcommittee, for his very kind and generous remarks directed toward me. And I would like to reciprocate by saying that this committee has always been marked by a lot of conciliation and cooperation. I chaired the subcommittee for a couple of years. I did my very best to collaborate and cooperate with Senator Cochran when he was ranking member. And we have had that kind of relationship. And I think the Senate would be well served if every committee chairman and ranking member could stand on the floor and honestly say that they have had fine cooperation with each other. That is not to say that Senator Cochran and I have agreed on every jot and tittle in the bill. We have not. But considering the limitations under which he has been laboring, namely, what we call the 602(b) allocation, I think he has performed an outstanding--an outstanding--job of cutting this budget dramatically in accordance with the 602(b) allocation and yet funding programs that both he and I believe are absolutely critical to rural development and agriculture in this country. Some $40.2 billion, or 63 percent, of the total funds in this bill go to funding the Nation's domestic food assistance programs: food stamps, national school lunch program, elderly feeding programs, supplemental feeding programs for women, infants and children, usually described as the WIC program. Everybody believes--it is a strange thing--I must say this, some of the social programs which have fallen into disrepute around here and everybody wants to cut has not been true of the WIC program. Everybody knows that if a poor pregnant woman does not get a decent protein diet, the child is going to be brain deficient. And everybody knows that for virtually pennies that can be curbed and eliminated. And the WIC program is designed to make sure that poor pregnant women get a decent diet because we all benefit from that. [[Page S 13693]] I might digress just a moment to say, Mr. President, that everybody in this world was not so favored as I was. I chose my parents very well. A lot of people have not had that opportunity. And so this idea of, ``Smell me, why can't everybody be rich and beautiful like me?'' has come into too much vogue in the U.S. Congress. There are an awful lot of people who never had a chance from day one. And some of these programs that everybody thinks were put in over the past years, starting with Franklin Roosevelt, were done just on a whim and caprice or to get votes--there is enough of that to make that characterization credible--but people should realize that these programs were designed to fulfill a purpose. Why does anybody think we have Social Security? Incidentally, now I am not here just to deliver a moral sermonette this morning, but just to make a few points I do not think hurts occasionally. Why do you think we have Social Security? I am not going to belabor the point. Everybody knows why we have Social Security. It is because parents were oftentimes sort of thrown on the mercy of society because their children either would not or could not take care of them. So Franklin Roosevelt very wisely decided everybody is entitled to a little dignity in their old age. And that is the reason it is easily the most popular social program that has ever been developed in this country. And now it is not particularly a social program because it is self-funding. And why is it we have food stamps, which is within the jurisdiction of this committee? We have food stamps because we made a conscious decision in about 1972 that we did not want any child in this country going hungry. I just returned from a trip abroad which included Mongolia. I notice that the First Lady visited Mongolia about a week after some of us were there. You always learn more on those trips than you think you are going to. Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, which is struggling to democratize, which needs our help, has 4,000 children under 10 years of age on the streets. And they die in the wintertime. Strangely enough, that city's motto is ``The coldest capital in the world.'' They need a new PR agent. I cannot imagine anybody wanting to visit a city because it is the coldest city in the world as a capital city. But my wife Betty, who has spent her life in children's programs, got extremely concerned about that when we got there and discovered that. And she went to some of the facilities where they care for children. And she said these children--they have a central heating system there, which serves virtually the whole city. Can you imagine--can you imagine being dependent on one gigantic pipe to heat an entire city? Well, anyway, these children live in those pipes in the wintertime, but even so they die in great numbers. They are cast out by their families, abandoned by their families through no fault of their own. In this country, we decided in 1972 that we did not want street children, we did not want any child to suffer from lack of food. So that is the reason we have food stamps. I use those illustrations simply because they are two of the most powerful I can think of. But back to the WIC Program, we have fully funded WIC, as long as I can remember in this committee, whether the Republicans or the Democrats are in charge. The Senator from Mississippi has very consciously and nobly made sure that that program was fully funded in this budget. Mr. President, while we have an awful lot of money in this budget, the amount that the chairman and the committee has to deal with is very small by comparison. Out of $60 billion plus in the bill, virtually all of it is entitlements, such as food stamps--$28 billion this year, with a $1 billion reserve. The President wanted a $2.5 billion reserve. That simply is not possible within the framework of the amount of money with which we had to deal. Of the $60 billion plus this committee deals with, only $13.6 billion is available to us in outlays; that is, the money that will actually be spent in 1996. So we met our allocation. We cut in places where it hurts. The President says he will veto the House bill, for reasons I am not going to belabor here. I do not believe the President will veto this bill, though he has voiced some concerns. So, Mr. President, having said all of those things, I would be remiss if I did not say there is one thing that still troubles me about the bill and the only really serious disagreement--and this is a friendly disagreement with my distinguished chairman--and that is the Market Promotion Program. Both the House and Senate have funded the Market Promotion Program, I believe, at $110 million. The House put $110 million in, and that is what the Senate bill has. Senator Bryan and I will attempt to strike that from this bill at some point during the deliberation on it. Again, I am not going to belabor that except simply to say I have always--no, not always, I think I may have supported this once or twice--but for the past 3 or 4 years, I have been very much opposed to the Market Promotion Program because it gives money to the biggest corporations in America to help them sell not wheat, not corn abroad-- we have $2 billion in export incentives now, this is only $110 million. This helps McDonald's, for example, introduce the Big Mac around the world. I do not know what McDonald's sales are. My guess would be somewhere between $10 billion and $15 billion a year. My question is, why on Earth should we be subsidizing McDonald's? Why should we be subsidizing Gallo Wine, another company not exactly a pauper? There are literally hundreds of corporations on the list, and virtually every one of them are quite able to do these things on their own. I just simply cannot support that. Last year, we got beat badly. I think we got 36 votes last year--37. We only got 37 votes last year to kill this program. So it seems to me well and healthy. The phones are ringing off the wall now by the companies who enjoy the few million bucks they get out of that program every year. It is an amazing thing, is it not, how everybody knows exactly when these appropriations bills are coming up. This morning, I watched an ad by the Boeing Corp. It shows all these children in the classroom talking about how wonderful space is, shown intermittently with people space walking. It just so happens that the space station is on the agenda this week. So all these ads start flooding television, and I know that my efforts to kill the space station are probably dead on arrival. When I think about how we had to labor over this bill to provide money for wastewater and drinking water for rural areas, and as we cut education unbelievably, and as we cut welfare unbelievably, as we are now proposing to cut the earned income tax credit, which I think is one of the best programs to deal with welfare we have ever invented, and then I see us headed toward a $94 billion--$94 billion--to throw something into space that we might use to go to Mars. Forget all that medical science research. The Russians have had space stations up for 20 years. If they have gotten anything out of it, they have very carefully guarded it. Nobody knows what it is. We have been sending shuttles up for as long as I can remember now, and what have we gotten out of it? I noticed this week they developed some tools that they say will work to put the space station together. I do not want to do the space station debate here. I am simply saying that the deficit is the No. 1 problem in the country, and everybody wants to do something about it, including yours truly. I have been standing back there at my desk since I have been in the Senate saying that. It is a question of priorities. We do not need the space station; we need to educate our children. We do not need the Market Promotion Program; we need to build water and sewer facilities for our rural people under the heading of rural development. We need it for Head Start. This morning when I went downstairs, Betty was sitting with a man who used to be the dean of the department of public health at Harvard, Howard Hyatt. Over the years, because of Betty's activities in the immunization programs and the peace movement, she got to know Dr. Hyatt. He is secretary of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. So I got a chance to visit with him for about 30 minutes before I came to work. [[Page S 13694]] He says the American Academy of Arts and Sciences have a lot of projects going, but one of their new ones is literacy. That does not sound very sexy; everybody talks about literacy. But what they want to do, of course, is to develop a program, as they are doing in a pilot program in Boston right now, to try to develop early intervention, which is the key to everything. If a child cannot read, the child has not a dog's chance. So I told him I would try to help. That is what Head Start is all about, early intervention, teaching children to read. Mr. President, one of the things trendy in this country is everybody wants to jump on agriculture. You read all those stories lately about how terrible agriculture is and how much they suck out of the Federal Treasury. The truth of the matter is, the American farmers still produce food for the American consumers at a smaller price than any nation on Earth. Happily, commodity prices are at a point now where these subsidies do not amount to nearly as much as they used to, but everybody wants to do away with them. We produce rice in our State and we will ship it to Japan for $250 a ton. The Japanese farmers get $900 a ton for growing rice in their own country. Mr. President, I understand that Senator Reid has an amendment and will be here shortly to offer it. I hope that during the course of the day, we can dispose of some of these amendments, start voting on them at 5:15 this afternoon, and finish this bill no later than tomorrow. Again, my sincere thanks and congratulations to Senator Cochran for the magnificent job he has done under unbelievably difficult circumstances. I yield the floor.

Mr. BUMPERS

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

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I have just been advised that Senator Ford would like to be added as having one relevant amendment. Otherwise, we have no objection to the list as read by the chairman.

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, what is the pending business?

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I object.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, let me start by asking the Senator from Pennsylvania, before he leaves the floor, if he thinks this country is fair to the children, when the District of Columbia, under this bill, is going to get $4,222 per child, and the State of Arkansas is going to get $390. Do you know why a child in the District of Columbia is worth $4,200, 11 times more than the child in Arkansas? Because for years, the Federal Government says whatever you put in, we will match it. So they have matched it over the years. And now we are institutionalizing a gross inequity. What we are saying in this bill is, if you happen to come from a poor State, no matter how hard you try, no matter how much money you did your very best to put in AFDC, you could not match Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts. Those States made a monumental effort, and we should congratulate them for it. But to say now 1994 is the be-all and end-all, whatever you contributed in 1994 is what you are going to get forever? In short, if you are poor, you stay poor. If you are affluent, you stay affluent. There are Governors in this country--the Republicans got a lot of Governorships last year, and I guarantee you that a lot of them have already cut their contribution. No matter, it is 1994 that counts. I cannot believe we are doing this. I could not vote for this bill in 100 years with this formula in it. How will I go home and tell the people of my State that a child in New York is worth $2,200 and their poor children are worth $400, or a child in the District of Columbia is worth $4,200 and our children worth $400?

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. I am immensely flattered, Mr. President. [[Page S 13355]] Mr. President, when I first came to the Senate we had some great people here: Hubert Humphrey, Abe Ribicoff, Jacob Javits, John Pastore, Scoop Jackson, Ed Muskie--truly great men, great Senators who believed in the theory of enlightened self-interest, who believed in governing. Hubert Humphrey used to make a great speech, and he said, ``This will never be a great place for any of us to live until it is a good place for all of us to live.'' I agree totally with that statement. As I think of those words and the author, I cannot help but wonder what Hubert Humphrey would think about a bill that said, ``If you are rich and affluent, we will make you more affluent; and if you are poor, we will punish you and make sure those in poverty stay in poverty.'' Well, even the people in the U.S. Senate would take strong exception to that if they believed that was our philosophy or that was what we were about to do. Mr. President, that is exactly what this bill does. Senator Graham has covered just about everything that needs to be covered. As Mo Udall used to say, ``Everything that needs to be said has been said, but everybody has not said it.'' So while I know that much of what I have to say will be repetitious of what my good friend, and the real author of this amendment, the Senator from Florida, has said, it bears repeating to make sure that the all Senators understand what they are voting on. In 1994, the AFDC formula allowed the following: If the States want to add more money to their AFDC program, the Federal Government will match it dollar for dollar. So what is the result? The result is the same as it has been for years under this formula. The ``haves,'' the affluent States, put more money into AFDC, so they get more money. If they add $100 per child per year, the Federal Government gives them another $100. That whole concept is flawed, totally, fatally flawed, because what it says is, ``If you are wealthy, we will make you wealthier, and if you are poor, we will make you poorer.'' (Ms. SNOWE assumed the Chair.)

Mr. BUMPERS. I have no problem with that. I think the Senator from Texas wishes to speak.

Mr. BUMPERS. Does the Senator from New York wish to speak at this time?

Mr. BUMPERS. Madam President, everybody knows that this amendment is a fair proposition. What Senator Graham and I are suggesting is that we divide all the money in the pot by the number of poor children in the country and we allocate it to the States based on the number of poor children each State has. For example, if we had 10 million poor children in the country, we would divide the total pot of money by 10 million and that amount would be paid to each State for every poor child in that State. Madam President, the problem Senator Graham and I are trying to solve is a result of the formula we've used for the AFDC Program since its inception. Under that formula, the more affluent States have, over a period of years, received the lion's share of the Federal money because they were able to put more State money in the program, and we were matching it. On the face of it, we should applaud States that have tried to improve and do better for themselves. But we should not penalize those who are not affluent and who could not put more money in. Think about this for a moment. I want Members to think about this. I have good friends in this body from States who make off like bandits under the Dole bill. Just take the State of Rhode Island. We have two fine Senators, my dear friends from Rhode Island, but I do not believe either Senator from Rhode Island would say they believe that a poor child in Rhode Island is worth $2,244 a year, but a poor child in my home State of Arkansas is worth only $394. What in the name of all that is good and holy are we thinking about here? All my life I have had to say I come from a poor State. I hate to say that. But I have always believed that being upfront and candid about your own plight is good for the soul and good for understanding. I cannot believe that we are about to pass a bill that allows New York, for example, to get $2,036 for every single poor child on AFDC, and my State $394. They get five times more than my State. If this were State money I would not squawk. But it is not. It is Federal money out of the U.S. Treasury, and we are saying that if you come from an affluent State which has been able to put more and more into the program, and we have matched it more and more as you put more in, you will benefit permanently. We are looking at a gross inequity and we are ratifying it. We are institutionalizing it for all time to come. States like New York, the home of my very good friend and ranking member on the Finance Committee, will always do very well under the Dole formula. The Dole formula claims to correct these inequities over time. For example, if my home State of Arkansas goes below 35 percent of the national average for concentration of poverty, the Dole formula provides a little honey pot from which the State can get a 2.5-percent bonus. How that warms the cockles of my heart. If my State gets that 2.5-percent bonus it will only take us 84 years to reach the national average. And it will only take us 177 years to catch up to New York. If I thought I would live to see that, I might favor it. Unhappily, I will not be around. Sometimes as I get steamed up making these speeches on the floor I get to thinking, am I living in a loony bin? Is this actually going on? Is it happening? And often the answer is yes. If you want to take all this Federal money and give it to every poor child in America on an equal basis under the proposition that a poor child in Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, North Dakota is worth as much as a poor child anywhere, count me in. And then if the State wants to enrich that, let them. They have a right to do that, even though, Madam President, school districts all over America are being ordered by the Federal courts to equalize their school expenditures among the poor districts as well to bring them up to par with the more affluent districts. If you come from an affluent school district in my State you get voice, glee club, debate. You get field trips, you get everything, because the people in that district are more affluent and the more affluent they are, the more advantages and opportunities they want their children to have. So they vote for higher taxes to support those programs. Then you take some poor school in the Mississippi Delta. I do not care how hard they try. I do not care how much they stretch out. I do not care how much they sacrifice. They can never, never reach the affluence of the more prosperous school districts. So the courts are saying nowadays, you cannot do that anymore, you have to equalize these State funds. This bill says that in the very first year, a State has to get 25 percent of the people on the rolls into the work force. I am going to say women, rather than people, because the adults in this program are almost exclusively single mothers with children. I do not say this to be sexist. I say it because that is the way it is. This bill says to each State, New York and Arkansas alike, that during the first year, 25 percent of these women must enter the work force, and, if they do not, we are going to penalize them by reducing the amount of their block grant. By how much? Up to 5 percent. I want you to think about the lunacy of that provision. They say: Get these women into the work force. But there is not enough money in the bill for child care, even if there were jobs available and women wanting to take them. There is not enough money in this bill to provide the kind of child care you would have to have to even come close to getting 25 percent of these women into the work force. I do not want to stray too far afield, but the Senator from New York was quoted in the paper the other day with a magnificent statement. Ten years from now, more and more thousands of children are going to be sleeping on the grates in this country. This bill is a veritable assault on the children of this country. I wonder where some of these people who purport to have these great family values and Christian beliefs are when we are debating things like this? Why do they not sense the inequities of this? Why do they not understand that millions of children who have little chance now are going to have much less chance in the future when this bill becomes law? You think about West Virginia, with an administrative cost of $13.34 per caseload per year. I am sorry the senior Senator or junior Senator from West Virginia are not here to hear me laud [[Page S 13356]] and commend their State for their very low administrative costs in the present AFDC Program. I did not get a chance to check it in my State, but I know our average is in that vicinity. The national average is $56, and in some States it is as high as $106. Under this bill we are rewarding those States with high administrative costs. We are rewarding States that have a $106 administrative expense and punishing the State of West Virginia for being good stewards over the administration of their funds. Madam President, every year for 5 years--you have to get 25 percent of the women off the rolls the first year, the next year you have to have 5 percent more, the next year 5 percent more, until, in 5 years, 50 percent of these people are off the rolls. On a point that is not relevant to this amendment, I submit to you that 20 percent of the people on AFDC today are incapable of either finding or holding a job. What happens to them? One morning one of my sons came home. I have to tell you, all my children are pretty liberal when it comes to poor people. They have good values. I am immensely proud of every one of them. My son, who practices law downtown in Washington, DC, said, ``Dad, I wish you would go with me in the morning. Our firm is in charge of feeding the homeless people in the morning.'' ``Where?" ``A project called SOME, So Others May Eat. I think it will be good for your soul.'' It was nearing Christmas. My daughter, who was in school in New York, was home for Christmas. We all went. The temperature was 28 degrees, and 400 men and 2 women were standing outside waiting for the dining room to open. So I flipped pancakes for 3 hours--the best day's work I ever did. Then I went around, just like I would at a political rally, talking to these men. ``Where do you come from?" I found that one-third of them had jobs. About a third of them had a drug habit. And a third of them were essentially dysfunctional, they could not hold a job. And being dysfunctional is not peculiar to men, it is also true of women, and a lot of women on AFDC today cannot and will never take, or be able to hold, a job. What happens to them? If the goal is to get everybody off the rolls, how on Earth are you going to do it? Senator Graham made a very salient point a moment ago about some States trying to meet their mandates. They have nothing left after they meet the mandates. I think he said in Florida, 63 percent of the funds that Florida will get will go to meet the mandates and what is left will go out in AFDC grants. In my State it is almost 80 percent, which means when we meet the mandates of this bill, we will have $40 a year per child to hand out. The most cruel among us may say, ``Well, you have food stamps on top of that.'' Food stamps will not pay the electric bill. Food stamps will not pay for a child's medical care, for housing, or for his clothing. I cannot believe how callous and indifferent we are to the least among us. I started off mentioning de Tocqueville. I never tire of talking about him. He talked about enlightened self-interest. That is a very simple proposition that has governed my entire life. The principles I learned in Sunday school in the Methodist Church and the principle of enlightened self-interest that I learned from reading ``Democracy In America'' have governed my life, and that is where my values come from. And what does it mean? It means that when some poor soul is reaching for the first rung on the ladder and you are on the top rung, you do not step on his hands. You reach down and take his hand and you pull him up. You pull him up because it makes him a better citizen, it makes the country a better country, and it makes me a better person. How could anybody quarrel with those three principles, all of which are unassailable? So that is what is wrong with this bill. We are reaching out and giving a hand to some and we are stepping on the hands of millions who did not have a dog's chance to begin with and will have even less. Madam President, I could not vote for this bill. I will never vote for a bill that includes so many things I deplore in this country. I might also say I would hate to have to go home and explain to my folks why I voted for a bill that uses their tax dollars and sends back to them only $394 for each poor child at the same time it sends the State of California $1,716. You can use all the sophistry in the world. You can use every kind of convoluted argument in the world to try to defend this. It is indefensible. So, Madam President, I am honored to join my good friends and colleagues, Senator Graham and Senator Bryan, in trying to bring some sense and sanity to this bill. There are a lot of things about this bill I do not like. I would have a very difficult time voting for this bill even if this amendment was agreed to. I am not terribly worried about that. But, for the life of me, when you look at that map and you see the States that are helped and the States that are hurt under this amendment--which simply says divide the pot of money by the number of poor children in this country and send it out to them on a per capita basis--you cannot improve on that. So I am hoping when the rollcall is up on this amendment, people will look at that chart and realize we are not talking about State money; we are talking about Federal taxpayers' money. We are distributing it in the most unkind, most unfair way I can imagine. I yield the floor.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. Mr. President, I wonder if the distinguished floor manager would yield for a question. We are going to vote tomorrow, as I understand it. We are going to stack the votes on these amendments. I just wondered if there had been any kind of consent agreement about allowing the proponents and opponents 2 or 3 minutes before each vote to sort of recapitulate the amendment.

Mr. BUMPERS

Mr. BUMPERS. I thank the Senator. I stood here and pleaded with this body to put a moratorium to stop this practice, but lost 50-48. Four days later, the Stillwater Mining Co. filed an application with the Secretary for patents on approximately 2,000 acres of public land in Montana for $5 an acre--roughly $10,000. If the Secretary winds up having to deed the land, and he certainly will under existing law, to the Stillwater Mining Co., the next story you read in the Washington Post will be that the Secretary of the Interior has deeded 2,000 acres of land belonging to the people of this country for $10,000 and underneath that 2,000 acres lies $38 billion worth of platinum and palladium. Mr. President, are these my figures? No, they are the figures presented by the Stillwater Mining Co. Mr. President, 2\1/2\ years ago, Stillwater said they did not know whether they could make that pay off or not. They say there is $38 billion worth of minerals under it, but they did not know whether they could make it pay off. Really? A year ago the Manville Corp., which had jointly formed the Stillwater Mining Co. with Chevron bought Chevron out and took Stillwater public at roughly $13 a share. Last week, Manville sold its remaining interest in Stillwater to a bunch of investors for $110 million plus a 5-percent royalty based on a net smelter return. Not bad for a company that 2\1/2\ years ago said they did not know whether they could make it profitable or not. A year ago, when Stillwater went public, the stock sold for $13. 1 year later--how I wish I had invested in this one--the stock is worth $23 today. It had been up to $28. We cannot find the money for child care in the welfare reform bill, while, at the same time, we deeded away $1 billion yesterday, and are getting ready to deed away another $38 billion. Just before the recess, I offered an amendment on the Interior appropriations bill to renew a moratorium on the issuance of patents pursuant to the 1872 mining law. However, the Senate defeated the amendment 51-46. Instead, my friend from Idaho offered an amendment that would require mining companies to pay fair market value for the surface of the land in the future, but that is just for the surface, not the minerals. So instead of paying $275 yesterday, the Faxe Kalk Corp. for $1 billion worth would have had to pay $20,000. What a scam. Talk about welfare, welfare for some of our biggest corporations, while we beat up on the children of this country and say to the mothers, ``No, we cannot give you child care for your child so you can go to work.'' Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. BUMPERS. I wonder if I can impose on the generosity of the Senator from Oklahoma to yield 5 or 10 minutes to me in opposition to his position.