Thomas Coburn

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Yes.

Mr. COBURN. That is inaccurate; 21 percent of the ATP grants over the last 14 years went to Fortune 500 companies.

Mr. COBURN. I am happy to yield for a question.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, this is an amendment to eliminate the Advanced Technology Program. I see the Senator from Michigan is here, and I am sure she will mount a rigorous defense in regard to it. There are some things people should be aware of. We had an oversight hearing on this program in my Federal Financial Management Subcommittee. We showed it to be ineffective. Between 1990 and 2004, 35 percent of the $2 billion of this program went to Fortune 500 companies--Fortune 500 companies--with 65 percent of the grants under this program never being asked to be funded outside of the program. In other words, they never went to the private sector. Almost two-thirds never attempted to get funding in the private sector. This was a program that was designed to help with technology. It wasn't designed to be a corporate welfare program. In fact, what has happened is that five companies since 1990 have consumed $376 million of this money. Let me tell you who the companies were. They were: General Motors, hardly in need of taxpayer money to fund research; IBM, hardly in need of taxpayer money to fund research; General Electric, hardly in need of taxpayer money to fund research; Minnesota Mining, 3M; and Motorola. Their combined revenues yearly are in excess of $50 billion. We are going to see a large defense of this program, because there have been some instances where it has done some good. I don't deny that. But for the $2 billion we have spent on it, what have we gotten? The House has eliminated this program, by the way. We decreased it over the last 2 years. This is a program that is not working efficiently, is not working effectively, and we are not getting great return for our money. Mr. President, with that, I will withhold the rest of my comments and retain the balance of my time.

Mr. COBURN. Let me reclaim my time. I thank the Senator for answering my question. I guess the difference is, in the long run, where is the benefit? If any of those industries are going to survive, they are going to be putting research dollars into those areas already. That is my contention. We know from the studies that, of all the Fortune 500 companies, the money that has been given to them they would have spent anyway. This is just money that they don't have to spend because we are going to spend American taxpayer dollars on it. The fact is, anybody in any of those areas, especially major companies that have all the capital resources they need--they have an inherent self-interest to fund that research. Why? Because their livelihood and their existence depends on it. What we are doing is we are saying, for the big companies, the Fortune 500 companies, we are going to take away their risk. The market has already created the risk. Their risk is to develop the program. So I would disagree. I think it is corporate welfare, especially with regard to the Fortune 500 companies that have significant assets. All you have to do is look at what is out there today, look at the share buy-backs. They have more than enough money with which to fund all these things. I can give you specific examples from GE, IBM, and Intel. All of those projects were going to be funded anyway. We just gave them a gift. We just simply gave them a gift.

Mr. COBURN. I will be happy to yield after I finish this last statement, and I appreciate the managers of this bill for the time they have given me on these amendments, and their courtesy. There is no question, there are positive aspects of this program. I said that before. The question comes--and it really comes from what Senator Stabenow said. We already give them an R&D tax credit. They already get a direct writeoff for doing this research anyway. So the American taxpayers are already paying for it. Now we come along and give them more. The point is, we do not need both. We do not need both. IBM gets an R&D tax credit, and then they get money from us under ATP for things they were going to do anyway. General Electric gets an R&D tax credit, then they get money from us in the ATP program for these things they are going to do anyway. I believe there has to come a time when we start thinking about how we spend our money and whether we are getting a good return. The fact is, with ATP, overall, all the money we have spent, we have not gotten back a return. The other point I would make is, only four States have received about 60 percent of the money on this ATP program. Ironic, isn't it? Four States. So there is great consensus among those people on a parochial basis to support this program because it is a big program for those individual States. Mr. President, I will finish by saying that all three amendments I have offered today are designed to increase transparency, increase accountability, eliminate conflicts of interests, and eliminate wasteful Government spending. That is what we have to be about if we, in fact, want to leave the heritage to our children and grandchildren that we will receive by such great sacrifice of those people who came before us. That is the real deal. The way you leave a heritage is to sacrifice today. We cannot have everything we want today if we want our kids and grandkids to have what we have experienced. I yield back the remainder of my time.

Mr. COBURN. Let me just summarize, and then I will yield back the remainder of my time. How much time do I have?

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, there is no question the ATP program has had some successes. The fact is that over $2.5 billion has gone to Fortune 500 companies over the last 14 years for research they would have done otherwise. This is a program which is outmoded. We have a way to help businesses do research and development. It is called the R&D tax credit. This is not effective. It is a poor way to spend our money. I yield back the remainder of my time. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent, with deference to the Senator from Tennessee, that prior to the vote on my amendment I be given 2 or 3 minutes to speak on it.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, the bill we have before us today is a well-intentioned, thoughtful exercise to try to change the future for our country. The Commission this bill is based on, the work and experience of those who have helped coauthor the bill, is rightly so in their concern for the future of our competitiveness. There is one problem, however. The biggest dole on our competitiveness today has to be the largesse of the Federal Government. Let me give a few examples. Last year, the American people spent $224 billion paying interest on the national debt. Last year, the American people, through our actions, spent $350 billion more than we had, which further increased that debt. In the last 6 years, the individual debt owned by American citizens-- what they are required to pay--has risen from $21,000 to almost $30,000. At the same time, the average wage in those same 6 years increased by less than $5,000. So when we think about competitiveness, we ought to pay close attention to the drags on what will be our competitive situation. The No. 1 drag today is the Federal Government. That is not to demean this bill. I would have loved to have seen a different bill, a bill that says: Here is what we are doing right. Here is what we are doing wrong. Here are some new ideas on how to fix what we are doing wrong and, by the way, here are some things we need to do to keep us competitive. We didn't do that. The Department of Education right now has 10 percent of its programs that are totally ineffective. The Department of Energy, with its $5 billion budget, has 10 percent of its programs that are highly ineffective. In other words, they are not accomplishing anything. None of that was looked at, deauthorized, or eliminated in this bill. Consequently, according to OMB, we have approximately $80 billion that is going to be authorized to be spent--some of that is reauthorization, I understand--over the next 4 years that is going to be added to the debt. People will say: This is an authorization. That doesn't mean we are going to spend the money. Why are we passing the bill if we don't intend to spend the money? We are going to spend the money. The problem with the way we spend money is we don't make the same choices the average American makes. We just chalk it up to our kids and grandkids. So I don't know where the money is going to come from. This bill is obviously going to pass. It is going to be conferenced, and it is probably going to be signed. But we will have missed a great opportunity to fix many major programs that are not working well today. This bill creates 20 new Federal programs. It doesn't eliminate one Federal program that isn't working well today. It doesn't modify, to a significant extent, those programs which are deemed ineffective and not working. What we have is great intention and great legislation, save for the fact that we are not looking at the whole story. We are not looking at the whole picture. Should Congress have to do what every family in this country does every month--make a choice? Where do we prioritize our spending for this month? Where do we spend more? What are the things on which we can't afford to spend because we don't have the money? We don't do that. We authorize programs. Then we appropriate funds. By the way, the discretionary portion of the Federal Government has grown about $600 billion in the last 7 years. Senator Carper and myself held 48 hearings in the last Congress in the Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. What we found was an astounding $200 billion of waste, fraud, abuse, and duplication. There was great opportunity to take that information and do something about it. We have not done it. The Department of Education is not compliant in terms of improper payments. They don't know where they are paying things wrong or paying things right. The Department of Energy is noncompliant in terms of improper payments. They don't know where they are paying things right and paying things wrong. We have at least 20 percent of the Department of Energy's budget that is earmarks. They don't get to decide where they spend the money; the Members of Congress tell them where they have to spend the money. There is not a sense of prioritizing what our energy needs are, what our education needs are within the Department of Energy. There is no commonsense approach to what we are doing. Consequently, the biggest problem we have in terms of competitiveness, which this bill won't solve, is more government. It creates more government rather than less government or the same amount of government that is more efficient and more effective. I don't intend to impugn the desires or the sincerity of the Members of this body who helped put this bill together. There is no question we need to address the issues that are encompassed in the legislation. That is not my criticism. My criticism is that when we have an opportunity to fix things with a bill such as this which cuts across multiple agencies, we don't do it. What we do is set up a system where more programs will be created without eliminating the ones that are not working. As a matter of fact, in this bill, in the National Science Foundation, we have a setaside. Where before the National Science Foundation did everything on peer review--everything on peer review, there was no politics saying what you have to do--we are taking $1 billion and setting it aside and we are going to tell them what to do. We know better than the scientists where we ought to be spending our money? I seriously doubt that. We claim that what we want to do is reestablish the competitiveness of the United States. I have no doubt that certain segments of this bill will go a long way in doing that. I am not critical of the intent of the bill. But I believe--and I raised this on the last bill we considered--we continue to authorize new spending. We continue to put at risk, in the name of competitiveness, the future. The No. 1 risk for competitiveness is our debt. The fact is, we are sucking capital out of the capital markets like crazy, making it very difficult for small businesses that compete in the capital markets on ideas, innovation, and sole-proprietorships and people who want to take a risk on their own. The other thing we didn't do is fix IDEA. One of our problems with education is, we passed a law that said school districts will do this for individuals with disabilities. What we promised when we passed that law--much as we will hear in 2 or 3 years as to what we promise with this law--was that we would fund 40 percent of the costs in education for IDEA. That would be the Federal load. This last year, we funded 18 percent. So we wonder why the schools can't compete, why they can't put the money into math and science, the money into competitiveness, when $16 billion a year is being absorbed by the school districts to do something we mandated them to do, which means $16 billion isn't available for them to teach and mentor math and science, for them to create greater opportunities to raise interest in the sciences. So I think if our past actions speak at all about what the future will bring, you will see we will not keep our word with this bill either. We will say things, we will do things, we will put at risk the next two generations, and we will have felt good because we did something, but we did less than what we could do. That is what we are doing with this bill. We are doing less than what we could do. We could, in fact, fix what is wrong in many of those programs in the Department of Education and in the Department of Energy today with this bill. It could have been done. It could have been done, but it was not. So, consequently, we are going to fund ineffective programs as we authorize and create and fund new programs, many of which are designed to do the exact same things, but we are not going to eliminate the programs that are not working. And lest you think I am an alarmist and known as ``Dr. No,'' think about what the obligations are of every child who is born in this country today--just today. What is it? April 24, 2007. When that baby is delivered and placed in its mother's arms, you are going to see smiles of joy and tears--none of them with a realization the child who just came into this world is faced with $453,000 in unfunded liabilities the moment they take their first breath. The contrast should be, we are talking about competitiveness. How do we create a future? What kind of future is it when we create a bill but do not address the underlying problems that are limiting our competitiveness in the first place? No. 2, even if we are trained in math and science, we are going to be so debt ridden we won't have the money to put into it. According to the Government Accounting Office, that 8 percent in interest, that $224 billion we spend now, in the year 2025--a mere 18 years from now--will be 25 percent of the budget and close to $1 trillion. Now, think about that. Should we do the hard work of eliminating the wasteful and duplicative programs before we create another? It is easy to pass legislation that does something good. It is very hard to get rid of programs that are ineffective and highly inefficient. The reason is because everybody has an interest group that supports that program, and we find ourselves adverse to challenging that group. But the real choice is between our grandchildren and today's present inefficiencies. The real choice is whether we are truly going to be competitive and create an opportunity for the next two generations to experience the same kind of blessings we have been fortunate enough to experience as a nation. The real question is, will we leave a heritage that is similar to the heritage that was left with us? I tell you, my feelings and my thoughts are I do not see movement in this body or in the Congress as a whole to start addressing the underlying problems that are facing us. It is not a question of partisanship, Democrats or Republicans. It is a question of expediency. It is hard to tell people no when something is not working well. It is easy to ignore it. Amendment No. 917 Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and call up amendment No. 917.

Mr. COBURN. Absolutely.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, the reason you ought to vote for this sense of the Senate--it doesn't say anything about authorizing. What it says is, and the American people expect, if we are going to create new programs, we ought to get rid of the programs that are not working. We spend $84,000 a second. We spent $350 billion we didn't have last year, and we charged it to the next generation. We have 10 percent of the Department of Energy that is ineffective, we have 10 percent of the Department of Education that is ineffective, and you offset none of the programs as you reauthorize this bill. We doubled up. This says, sense of the Senate, if we are going to spend more money and create new programs, we ought to go after the ones that do not work. Vote against it at your own peril.

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

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, it is a simple amendment. We are going to find out what your Senator believes with this amendment. We offered this amendment on the last bill. We had some inside baseball excuses why they would not vote for it. This is a sense-of-the-Senate amendment. It does not carry any force of law or anything. All it says is the Senate agrees that before we spend new money, we ought to get rid of the wasteful programs, we ought to get rid of the ones that are not working well, or we ought to make them better before we spend another $60 billion to $80 billion on another set of programs. That last amendment got 59 votes against it. Only 38 people in the Senate thought we ought to do that. I will tell you, I think the vast majority--greater than 95 percent--of the American public thinks we ought to do that. So this is a simple amendment. The catch with the amendment is, if you vote for the amendment and then do not change this bill to do what needs to be done to eliminate the other programs, you are going to have a tough time explaining that you agreed to this and then did something else when you voted for the passage of this bill. There is a day coming when we will not have the luxury to wait around. The financial markets will tell us what we will do. We will not have the freedom within the Senate to make those choices. We will do it under the duress of extreme financial conditions that will affect our country. So this is a simple amendment, very similar to the last one. I took the authorizing language out of it that some of the appropriators objected to, so it is very simple. The final statement in the amendment is: Sense Of The Senate.-- It is the sense of the Senate that Congress has a moral obligation to offset the cost of new Government programs and initiatives. Now, with a budget deficit last year that was claimed to be $160 billion, under Enron accounting--which was truly $350 billion, if you looked at what happened to the addition to our debt, what our kids are going to pay--it is going to be pretty hard to say we should not add more to the debt. We have a lot of people who will say the debt does not matter; whatever the debt is, is a percentage of GDP. That is fine if the underlying assumption is we have great economics, and we are not going to have contractions of the economy, we are always going to be able to compete, we are always going to be able to finance our debt. The fact is, as the Government Accounting Office says, we cannot, and the interest costs associated with that will be massive. Why would I come out here and fight friends and foes alike all the time to do this? Because I think the one shortfall of our body is that overall we are not looking at the big picture and the long run. This looks at the long run, but it does not look at the big picture. Unless we do that, we are going to find ourselves very apologetic to the next two generations because what, in essence, we will have said is we cared more about us, we cared more about our comfort, we cared more about our next election than we did any of the next two generations. So I put it to my colleagues: Vote against this and vote for the bill and be honest. But if you think if we create new programs we ought to eliminate other programs so we do not continue to expand the Federal Government running a deficit, then you ought to vote for this amendment and not vote for this bill, until it is made right, until it has captured the opportunities that are inherent within it to fix what is wrong in the Department of Energy, to fix what is wrong in the Department of Education, to fix what is wrong with all these grant programs that need to be fixed today. Let's hold us accountable. That is what the American people are expecting from us. I want to leave the Senate not being known for anything other than knowing what I did was to try to create and make sure we maintain the heritage this country has given to us. With that, Madam President, I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I love it. I love to debate the Senator from Illinois. I take a different tact, and the Senator knows that. I look at the oath I took when I came to the Senate. It didn't say ``Oklahoma'' in it; the Senator's didn't say ``Illinois.'' What the oath says is to defend the Constitution of the United States and do what is best for the country as a whole and in the long term. Now, the Senator--and I admire him greatly--admitted that he plays the game the way it is played. I am telling him that the American people are ready for the game to be played a different way--a totally different way. Part of that is looking at the authority under which we allow money to be spent and recognizing that if we are going to authorize something new, given the jam we are in, all you have to do is talk to David Walker and look at what is going to happen in the next two generations. Don't we have an obligation to look at the programs that are not authorized? Would the Senator answer this question: When was the last time he saw a program deauthorized in this body?

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

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

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and that amendment No. 891 be called up for its consideration.

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

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, this is a very simple amendment. It says: it is the sense of the Senate that we should not create new spending programs when we have to borrow money to pay for them; that, in fact, we ought to create priorities, that the priorities ought to be the same type of priorities that everybody in this country has to face every day with their own personal budget, that they cannot go out and use their credit card without having a consequence. This is a very simple amendment. I wish to read it thoroughly so everybody understands what the amendment says. It says the following: The Senate finds that-- (1) the national debt of the United States of America now exceeds $8,500,000,000,000; (2) each United States citizen's share of this debt-- from the oldest to the youngest-- is approximately $29,183; (3) every [penny] that the United States Government borrows and adds to this debt is money [that will be borrowed] from future generations of Americans and from important programs, including Social Security and Medicare on which our senior citizens depend for their retirement security; It also states: (4) the power of the purse belongs to Congress; (5) Congress authorizes and appropriates all Federal discretionary spending; (6) for too long, Congress has simply borrowed more and more money to pay for new spending, while Americans want Congress to live within its means, using the same set of common sense rules and restraints [every American faces] everyday; because in the real world, families cannot follow Congress's example and must make difficult decisions and set priorities on how to spend their limited financial resources. . . .

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I am happy to yield for a question.

Mr. COBURN. Absolutely. I agree with that.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I thank the chairman of the Judiciary Committee for stating that the debate we are having on this bill isn't really about the bill. The debate is about the process. We had an election in November, and one of the things outlined by that was that Americans are concerned with excessive spending. There are some big facts that face us. Our judiciary is not nearly as at risk as our children and grandchildren are from the lack of cogent and disciplined spending by this body. The reason we are at the place we are today is because I believe, and the vast majority of Americans agree with me, that we have to have priorities in how we spend our money. For us to be good stewards of the American taxpayers' dollars, we ought to establish priorities. This bill is a priority. I support the concepts behind the bill, and I will go through them in a minute. But what should be a greater priority for us is that we offer our children and grandchildren the same opportunities, the same freedoms, and the same liberties we enjoy. The way the Senate works is something I believe needs to be changed, and I am willing to stand out here on every bill that comes to this floor to do exactly the same thing as I am going to do today. Here is the little problem that nobody--or very few in the Senate--wants to address. We react and create a good piece of legislation. This is a good piece of legislation. But we don't do the other half of our job, and the other half of our job is to get rid of the things that aren't working well. Assume for a minute that every bill we authorize every year is done in a manner that says everything else in the Federal Government is working well. First of all, you ask the average citizen, and they would say: No, that isn't quite right. You go down, and everybody has a different complaint. But the fact is, we continue to authorize, we continue to authorize, and we continue to authorize, but we never go back and look at what isn't working and deauthorize. My complaint with this bill isn't with the Senator from Pennsylvania. He was very cooperative in trying to address my desires for us to deauthorize certain things that either have excess monies or programs that aren't efficient or aren't working as they were intended to. However, when approaching the chairman of the committee, he refused to even consider the idea that we ought to deauthorize something that isn't working in order to create this thing we all know is needed. It is a good piece of legislation, and we ought to pass it, and we will pass it. But the point that needs to be made to the American people, a point they agree with, is that authorizing a new piece of legislation is only half of our job. As a matter of fact, it shouldn't even be half. We ought to spend three- quarters of our time looking at what we are doing already that is authorized and making sure it is working efficiently. I don't think anybody in their right mind would disagree with that. We, in my subcommittee in the 109th Congress, along with Tom Carper, held 49 oversight hearings on the Federal Government. What we found is that of the discretionary budget, the non-Medicare, non-Social Security, non-Medicaid budget, $1 in every $5 we spend is either wasted, abused, defrauded, or duplicated. It hardly seems fair to a middle-income taxpayer out there, who only yesterday paid their taxes and got hit with an extra $1,500 or $2,000 under the AMT, that they would have to pay that extra money at a time when we are allowing $1 out of every $5 to be wastefully spent, misspent, abused, or defrauded. So the idea behind what I sent to all of my fellow Senators at the beginning of the year--and the Senator from Vermont knows very well why I objected to coming to the floor without a motion to proceed, without a cloture on that; it is because he represents what I think has to be changed--that we have to be responsible stewards of the American taxpayers' dollars, and we are not. The idea is to change the culture of how we work. How do we do that? Well, we don't do it by continuing to pass new authorizations without ever looking at what could be deauthorized to pay for what we are authorizing anew. What we do is we fail the test of being good stewards to the very people we represent. As I said, Senator Specter, the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, was very cooperative in trying to find those offsets. I think he basically agrees with my contention that we ought to be about doing good things, but we also ought to be about getting rid of the things that aren't working. It saddens me to think that all through this 110th Congress, I am going to be doing this on every new authorization that comes out here if my colleagues don't believe we ought to be changing the way we work. It is a simple request. It is easy to find the offsets. As the Senator from Pennsylvania knows, we had offsets for this bill in terms of deauthorizations. They weren't acceptable to the chairman because he disagrees with the underlying fundamental premise of what I believe is an absolute obligation for us in terms of being good stewards. At the beginning of this Congress, I sent a letter to every Member of this body, and I outlined some principles under which I was going to work in this Congress. I am dedicated to those principles, and it doesn't have anything to do with me or anything to do with the parties. I don't care who is in the majority or who is in the minority. It has to do with our future. That is what this is about. This is about fighting for our future and having a long- range vision rather than a short-term vision of putting out a fire somewhere. The principles I outlined said that I would put a hold--and, by the way, the chairman this morning said there was an anonymous hold. That is not true. I very eloquently and directly communicated my hold on this bill. And the letter I sent to everybody in the Senate at the beginning of this Congress directed that I would be the one holding the bills. I said this: If a bill creates or authorizes a new Federal program or activity, it must not duplicate an existing program or activity without deauthorizing the existing program. That is No. 1. And several bills I had last year were duplications. No. 2 is, if a bill authorizes new spending, it must be offset by reductions in real authorized spending elsewhere. How are we ever going to control our deficit? And we do not have, as the administration said, a $170 billion deficit. Our real deficit, what we actually added to the debt last year, what we actually added to our children's debt, was about $340 billion. So when we are adding $340 billion every year to our kids' and grandkids' debt, isn't it incumbent upon us to do the necessary things to make sure that doesn't happen in the future? Well, one of the ways to do that is to look at programs which aren't working and are not effective and which do not need authorization. What happens in the Senate is that the appropriators decide what will get spent and what won't get spent. But the authorizing committee, the committee that is charged with that area, never deauthorizes anything. So we have this continuing mounting of authorization, with limited dollars to go for it, which never forces real priorities or a debate over the priorities by the authorizing committees. The third point I made is that if a program or activity currently receives funding from sources other than the Federal Government--i.e., a match--then we shouldn't increase the role of the Federal Government in terms of increasing the percentage the Federal Government pays. Take our $340 billion deficit. Every State, save one, has a surplus. They did last year, and they will this year. So if States have surpluses and we have a deficit, we shouldn't increase our role. We shouldn't be doing that. Finally, if we create a new museum or some new cultural program, then we ought to endow it rather than set it up for its continuing cost. We should use the power of compound interest to help us save money in the future. If we really think something is important enough to invest in, we should endow that and use the power of compound interest with the idea that the endowment will earn enough money to take care of that program in the future rather than passing that new program off to our kids. Four very simple things that I ask. I also stated in that letter that if I thought something was unconstitutional, then I would object to it, also. However, that doesn't apply in this instance. There is a legitimate role for us here. This is a good piece of legislation. But it does lack one of the criteria under which I stated I would try to hold bills up. I have no intention of filibustering this bill. I have no intention of making it difficult to pass the bill. I have every intention to make it an issue with the American people that we are not doing our job and that we are better than that. We are better than that. The people in this body care. The question is, Do we care enough to put the elbow grease into doing what is necessary to preserve the future? I believe we do care. I believe we can, and I believe, with persistence--and the chairman and the ranking member know that if there is anything I am about, it is about being persistent--if it requires this type of structure in terms of bringing bills to the floor, then I am happy to oblige the Senate in that to continue to make the point. Almost 2 years ago, maybe more than 2 years ago, the infamous bridge to nowhere was brought to light, which bought about the changes we are seeing in earmarks. It was one example, which really wasn't a fair example to the Senator who had that, but nevertheless it characterized and became the caricature for the bad habits we have in Congress. My hope is that the American people will look at the commonsense approach I am trying to propose for us as we authorize new programs and say: That makes sense. Why would you continue funding things that don't work? Why would you continue authorizations for programs that aren't effective? Why would you continue authorizations for programs that are duplicative? Where one works good and one not so good, why shouldn't we put money into something that works good rather than not quite so good? So the question is not whether we should have court security. Of course we should. The question is not whether this bill should pass. It should. The question is, How do we address this fact? Every child who is born in this country today, every one of them, has a birth tax on them. It is now at $453,000 a child. People say: How do you get that? You take the $70 trillion in unfunded liabilities that we are going to transfer to this next 200 million children, and you can see what they are liable for. Take 10 percent interest. If you took a 10-percent interest rate on $453,000, simple interest, to pay the interest on the debt, to cover what we are leaving to our children and grandchildren, is $45,300 a year. The greatest moral question in our country today is not the war in Iraq, it is not who marries whom, it is not abortion, it is not child abuse, it is stealing the opportunity and the heritage this country has given us and taking that away from our children and grandchildren. I know the Senator from Vermont is not happy with me for doing this. He believes it is fruitless. But it is the very real difference between he and I. I believe there is plenty in the Federal Government that is not working right that we ought to be about fixing, and one of the ways we do that is by forcing ourselves, before we do a new program, to look at the old programs and see what is wrong with them and clean them up. You can debate that. You can object to it. But the fact is, the vast majority of Americans agree with that. We are going to be going through this multiple times this year until we get to the fact that we are doing what our oath tells us to do. That oath is to the Constitution. We cannot fulfill that oath if we continue to waste money on ineffective programs and authorize programs that are not accomplishing their goals. It is an oath that we violate, an oath to the Constitution but, more important, it is an oath we violate to the very people who sent us here. Every dollar we waste today is a dollar that is not going to reduce that $453,000 for our children and grandchildren. One of the greatest joys I have in life today is that I have four grandchildren, each one of them unique, and the great pleasure of seeing your children through your grandchildren and reliving memories. That is always couched in the idea of what can I do to make sure the future is fair and a great opportunity is made available to them and all their peers throughout this country, no matter where they come from, what family they come from. Shouldn't they all have the same opportunities? If you read what David Walker, the Comptroller General of the United States, has to say--and all you have to do is go on the Web site of the Government Accountability Office--what you find is we are on an unsustainable course. It is not what Tom Coburn says, it is what the head of the Government Accountability Office says. Things have to change. Every day we wait to change them costs us money and makes it more painful when we get around to changing them. I plan, in a moment, on offering to proceed to the bill. We are out here today because the vision that was created for us, and the heritage that was created for us, is at risk. It is at risk because we do not want to change our culture. We don't want to be responsible. We want to pass but not oversee. We want to do the easy but not the hard. The hard is the thing that is going to secure the future for our children and our grandchildren. It is easy for us to pass a port security bill. It is bipartisan. It is hard for us to do the very real work of making sure every penny, of the American taxpayers' dollars is spent in an efficient way, that it is not wasted. Mr. President, if you think $1 in $5 of the discretionary budget of this country should not be wasted, if you think the Congress ought to be about looking at everything and saying, is it working, ought to be about getting rid of the $200 billion of waste, fraud, abuse, and duplication that is in our Federal Government today, then there is no way you could disagree with the principles I outlined to all the Senators in this body. Yet we find ourselves here at this point in time because the chairman of the Judiciary Committee refuses to agree with the premise that we owe it to our children and grandchildren. That is basically it because I am not about to do that. We do not believe that is necessary. Something has to change if we are going to give our children and our grandchildren the benefits and the opportunity we have all experienced. I think that is worth taking some time on the floor, pushing the envelope to raise the awareness of the American people. I know I can't change this body through persuasion, through words. But what does change this body is the American people. The American people are the ones who send us here. If they will act, if they will put pressure on, then we will do what we are supposed to do. It is a shame we have to work it that way, but this last election proved that. It proved when we are not doing what we are supposed to be doing, the American people awaken, and they change who has the power, who has the representation. What I am calling for is let's do that for the American people. Let's do it ahead of time. Let's not make them force a change, let's do what we were sent up to do. With that I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I make a motion to proceed to the bill.