Thomas Coburn

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. So wait a minute. If we can find the money.

Mr. COBURN. I will allow that in a few minutes. If this bill is that important, and the majority whip says we will fund it if we can find the money, rather than saying we are going to fund this because this is a priority--and he has the power to make sure that gets done. Don't let anybody kid you. If he wants this bill funded, he can get it funded. So the point is, either it is going to be funded and it is going to get spent and the argument about authorizations is bogus or there is going to be a real question on whether it is going to get funded. If there is a real question about whether it is going to get funded, then the importance of the issue isn't nearly as great as we have explained it to be, which goes back to an argument we have had for the 6 years I have been here. I understand you don't agree. I am a hardheaded guy from Oklahoma who actually believes we ought to make hard choices, we ought to downsize the government rather than grow it; and when we have an issue such as food safety, what we ought to do is hold accountable the agencies--let me say it again--we ought to hold accountable the agencies, because I am not sure that we don't have enough rules now. What I think we have is not enough effectiveness of the agencies and the dollars they spend. With the exception of foreign inspections, which I fully support--I fully support--anybody who wants to sell food in this country ought to pay for the inspections and we ought to be able to certify that it is safe. I have no problem with that. There are a lot of components of this bill I agree with. But I refuse to agree to a unanimous consent request until we start looking at the real problems underlying not just the FDA and USDA but the Pentagon, Health and Human Services, the Department of Justice. The waste in this government and our refusal to look at that waste and eliminate it so we can do good things is one of the reasons--not the only reason, one of the reasons--we find ourselves $13.4 trillion in debt. Ideally, how would we go about this? Because one of the complaints is: Coburn, you stop things in their tracks. How would I have done it differently? So I think I owe you an explanation. First of all, the tomatoes were never contaminated. They were thought to be contaminated. It was the jalapenos. So we, our agencies, identified falsely a food that wasn't contaminated. So the agency is responsible for the $350 million cost for the tomatoes. That is a very important point. The incompetency of the agency cost $350 million, which is a very different story than my colleague from Illinois talked about. It was jalapeno peppers. So how should we go about this? Before we do one other thing on food safety, every one of those agencies ought to know we are looking over their backs all the time. That is the first thing. We should have routine oversight hearings on the appropriate committees three to four times a year. The second thing we ought to do is we ought to say, GAO, we want to know everybody who has anything to do with the quality of food in this country as far as a Federal agency and we want to know their line responsibilities, we want to know their authorities, we want to know X, Y, and Z, and their effectiveness. Because a GAO study at the Department of Agriculture, as well as the FDA, says they are incompetent at most of this stuff. I will be happy to give my colleagues the quotes. They lack the competency to carry out--how else do you explain that the FDA cost the State of Florida $350 million by falsely claiming that tomatoes weren't any good? That is incompetence. There is no excuse for it. There was no hearing held to hold them accountable. It is ignored in this bill. So how would we go about it? We would find out everybody who has anything to do with food safety. Then we would do what Senator Durbin wants to do. We would eliminate the duplication. We would make one line authority: This agency is responsible for all the food safety in this country. That is a marvelous goal, Senator Durbin. This bill delays that happening. He is on to the right thing. We need to get there, I agree. But when you go to Piggly Wiggly or Homeland, as we have in Oklahoma, and you go to the freezer section and buy a pizza for Friday night when--in Oklahoma, you are going to play dominos after high school football is over. If you buy a cheese pizza, the Department of Agriculture is responsible for that. But if you buy a pepperoni pizza, it is the FDA. I may have them reversed. I do have them reversed. The FDA is responsible for cheese pizzas. How does that make sense? It is a symptom of the disease in Washington. First of all, it is stupid. Second of all, it is inefficient. Third of all, it guarantees the two agencies are not going to be talking to each other. The Food and Drug Administration and the USDA have--I think my number is correct; I may be wrong--187 agreements for how they work across the field. Except you know what happened with regard to the egg situation. Nobody paid attention to the agreements. We have the rules. USDA did not tell the FDA. Then, finally, we have an egg producer--the State of Iowa has done tons of stuff to say this guy's quality is poor. Did USDA do anything about it? No. Did the FDA do anything about it? No. USDA knew there was a problem. It did not need any more inspections. They knew there was a problem. They did not communicate it to the FDA as per their protocol. What do we have going on here? We have a mess. As well-intentioned as this bill is and as hard as the Senators have worked on it on both sides of the aisle, it does not fix the cancer in the lung that caused the pneumonia that caused the fever, cough, chills, and malaise of the patient. Until we start drilling down to get to the real problems, the real issues of food safety, we are going to spend a lot of money. We are going to create a whole lot more regulations. We are going to have another 200-plus page bill. What we ought to say is, time out. Let's do some things. Let's have a one-page bill that can pass by UC today that says we are going to do safety inspections on foreign foods. Done. We can do it. That takes care of our foreign food. A good portion of our seafood is imported. It is farm raised. It is important. We can do that tomorrow. We can have sanctions and penalties and criminal penalties for Federal bureaucrats who do not follow the rules of their own agencies. Everything was in place on the egg situation. We did not execute. We did not carry the ball down the field. Here is what we know about the DeCoster Egg Farms. They are a habitual violator. They have had eight known run- ins or citations from State and Federal regulators. They were designated by the State of Iowa as a ``habitual violator.'' Robert Reich called the state of the farms simply atrocious. USDA inspections--I have a copy of the inspections--routinely noted unsafe and unsanitary conditions without communicating any of those concerns to the FDA. What we had was a failure to execute. It was seen. It was known. What we had in place did not work. But this bill does not fix that. It does not fix that. I have treated a lot of people with toxic e. coli in my life. That is what causes kidney failure. Salmonella hardly ever does that. It is not a fun disease to have. There is nothing in this bill that says we are going to prioritize pathogens. You see, e. coli, compared to all the rest of the pathogens, is much more important in terms of hospitalization, death, morbidity, and mortality. So any food safety bill ought to work on the most ravaging problem first, not treat them all the same. Yersinia pestis, shigella, and salmonella cause enteritis, that is true. Rarely will you have long-term effects from those. But from toxic e. coli, it is a whole different actor. We ought to prioritize what we do in food safety through the food safety problems that cause the major problems. We do not do that. I know I have disappointed my colleague from Illinois. I know he has worked hard on this bill. We have some very stark philosophical differences about how to make the government work better. I hope through the next few years to convince him more often than not to go in a different direction. I know Senator Harkin's heart is one of the softest and best in our body. If somebody has a problem, I don't care what it is, he is interested in it. For disappointing my colleague, I sincerely apologize. For standing on my principles and what I believe, I do not. I do not see a great future for our country if we do not start changing the way we do things, whether it is drilling down and looking at what the real problems are with the agencies and doing the appropriate oversight and taking priorities and getting rid of things that do not work and making things that do work work better. I worry about my grandkids, and I worry about all of our grandkids. With them at $43,702 today per man, woman, and child in this country, we cannot do it anymore. I am not going to do it anymore. I will be as compliant as I can be living within my principles, but I am just not going there. For that, I apologize. I apologize for disappointing my colleagues, but I sincerely regret we could not have solved some of these problems along the way. I yield the floor and yield to the Senator for a question, if he wishes.

Mr. COBURN. I want to continue my point, if you don't mind. You have always been courteous to me and I will be courteous to you, but I wish to continue for a few minutes and then I will give my colleague the chance to respond.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I thank the leader. I ask unanimous consent to be recognized for 15 minutes.

Mr. COBURN. I would not need one because the bill would already be offset.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, and I will not object if the Senator changes the proposed agreement to say that the only amendments in order, other than the committee-reported substitute, will be these three: Harkin-Enzi substitute amendment, which is fully offset and has been agreed to by both managers, which will be agreed to as original text for the purpose of further amendment; the Harkin-Enzi technical amendment; and the Tester amendment in regard to small farms.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, there is nobody in this country who doesn't want our food to be safe. There is no question, we all rely on the intent that the vast majority of food is safe in this country. There is no question that we have some problems with food safety. But the biggest problem we have is in fixing the symptoms of the problem rather than the problem itself. I hope America will pay attention to this. Ask yourself why it took the Food and Drug Administration 10 years to give us an egg safety standard and that no oversight committee of either the House or the Senate, through the previous 10 years, held an oversight hearing to ask why it has taken 10 years to get that egg safety standard. It came out 10 days afterwards, coincidentally, to the salmonella infection we have recently seen. As a practicing physician who has treated Shigella, Salmonella, Yersinia pestis, Campylobacter, and Listeria monocytogenes, which are infectious gastrointestinal bacterial diseases that can come from food, I want it to be safe. What I want more than that is for the organization that is supposed to keep it safe to do its job. The problem with this bill, besides it not being paid for, is it doesn't fix the real problem. The American public should know, if you go to the grocery store anywhere in this country and buy a pepperoni pizza, the FDA is responsible for food safety. But if you buy a cheese pizza, it is the USDA. How does that make any sense to anybody in America? What happened on the farms in Iowa, as far as eggs, is the USDA knew there was a problem, but they didn't tell the FDA because the FDA is only responsible for the egg once it gets out of the chicken. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? It was then shipped and was the responsibility of the FDA. This bill doesn't address any of those problems. As we look to solve a very critical and real problem--and I acknowledge Senator Durbin's work on this and that of our chairman and ranking member. I had a staff member at every meeting they had raising these same objections. We now have a bill that will cost the American public $1.5 billion over the next 5 years that doesn't fix the real problem. The real problem is the lack of focus of the agencies to do their job. It does not eliminate the crossover and lack of consistency. If you buy red meat in the store, you only have to trust one agency. But if you buy an egg, you have to trust two. If you buy a salad or lettuce, you have to trust two. They are not talking to one another. There is nothing in this bill that makes them do that. What we have done is we have created a lot of new regulations, with a lot of money, without solving the real problem. The only way we get to the real problem is to have the FDA up here once a week for the next 4 weeks and have the USDA up here once a week for the next 4 weeks, talking about these critical crossover issues. In the bill, it actually states that nothing in this act or an amendment made by this act shall be construed to alter the jurisdiction between the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of Health and Human Services. In other words, there is a prohibition to alter the responsibility so we might have safe food--in other words, to hold one agency accountable, rather than two so one can point the finger at the other. We had a House hearing today on the egg recall, and the fact is that is what happened. USDA knew there were problems. But the FDA didn't know there were problems until after somebody got sick. So we create a high level of additional regulation, a high level of various inspections--and I am not against inspections. I eat salad like the rest of us. Sometimes I am not accused of being human, but, in fact, I consume the same food everybody else does. I don't want to get sick from it. But we can't continue to pass bills that pile on regulations that cost the American people $1.5 billion and don't fix the real problem. That is the problem. My objection is it is not paid for. I will hear the objection that it is an authorizing bill. Oh, really. It is just an authorizing bill. So that means there is not any money going to be spent? Then we aren't passing the bill to do what we want it to do. Because if we say we are not responsible for spending another $1.5 billion, then there is no problem. It is not spending money. If it is not spending money, it is not going to do anything. But if it is spending money, we ought to decrease the priority somewhere else within the waste of the USDA--which there are billions--and within the FDA, which has tons of properties they are not using that could pay for this bill easily. We ought to eliminate the things that are not working. So I want our food to be safe. As a practicing physician, I know the public health aspects of this bill. But I refuse to go forward when we continue to make the same mistakes that have given us a $1.4 trillion deficit and have given us lack of control and oversight of the bureaucracies. The biggest thing is, we are not holding anybody accountable for this because we will pass this. Then, the next time there is a food problem, in terms of contaminated food, we will pass something else. In between times, there will not be the first oversight hearing to say: What did we do that didn't work and show us a result that works. Is it efficient, effective, and did it improve the safety of the food? We will not do that. We will just react and pass another bill. I am through passing bills that don't solve the real problems. I am through spending the next two generations' money, when we can't make the priority choices. The fact that we have refused to say we are going to eliminate something that is very low priority to be able to have a food safety bill, then that tells the American people we are not up to the task of getting us out of our problems. I know everybody in this body wants safe food--even me. I am not tired of taking the hits for holding up this bill. We can't be perfect on food, but we can be a whole lot better. This bill can solve some of the problems, but it is not complete. It hasn't looked at the levels it needs to straighten out the bureaucracy on food safety. It hasn't eliminated the overlap. Nobody with any common sense says you will have pizzas in the grocery store, one controlled by the USDA and one by the FDA. It is clueless. It does not fit. The reason the one that does not have any meat on it is controlled by the FDA is because it has a milk product. It has cheese. But the one that has pepperoni on it has cheese too. How did we get there? Where are we going to establish responsibility and accountability with the agencies that are responsible for food safety? I look forward to working with the majority leader. I will take a less than perfect bill anytime. But I will not take a bill that is not paid for and does not come out of the hides of our children and grandchildren. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN. I have no problem.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, today I have introduced two separate bills, S. 3790 and S. 3791, intended to hold members of Congress and other Federal employees to the same tax rules Washington imposes on the rest of America. In 2009, the Internal Revenue Service, IRS, found nearly 100,000 civilian Federal employees were delinquent on their Federal income taxes, owing over $1 billion in unpaid Federal income taxes. When considering retirees and military, more than 282,000 Federal employees owed $3.3 billion in taxes. These bills are not intended to single out the majority of Federal employees who work hard and pay their taxes, but members of Congress and Federal employees have a clear obligation to pay their Federal income taxes. Legislators and government employees should not be exempt from the laws they write and enforce. The very nature of Federal employment and the concept inherent to ``public service'' demands those being paid by taxpayers contribute their fair share of taxes. They should lead by example. Tax delinquency rate among congressional employees exceeds the rate of all returns filed nationwide. Taxpayers are fed up with those in Washington living under a different set of rules than the rest of America. At a time when Congress may allow taxes to increase on some or even all Americans, Congress should not expect other Americans to pay more taxes when they are not even paying the taxes they owe under the rates they set themselves. The bills I am introducing are fair to Federal employees and other taxpayers. Both bills carefully reach only those paid by the taxpayers who have willfully neglected to pay their incomes taxes. The legislation excludes elected officials or Federal employees who made oversights in their personal taxes but willfully agree to pay them, or if they are challenging the delinquency in court or through the IRS. Instead, it targets those who willfully neglect or avoid the pay their taxes. Specifically, it excludes Federal employees from termination and Members of Congress from repercussions if the individual is currently paying the taxes, interest, and penalties owed to IRS under an installment plan; the individual and the IRS have worked out a compromise on the amount of taxes, interest and penalties owed and the compromise amount agreed upon is being repaid to IRS; the individual has not exhausted his or her right to due process under the law; or the individual filed a joint return and successfully contends he or she should not be fully liable for the taxes, interest, and/or penalties owed because of something the other party to the return did or did not do. The first bill requires all Federal employees to be current on their Federal income taxes or be fired from their jobs. The second bill requires Members of Congress to report any outstanding tax liability. If the Member possesses a tax liability, this bill would require the appropriate congressional committee to launch an ethics investigation and the Member's salary would be reduced in accordance with the amount he or she owes. These bills require no more of members of Congress or Federal employees than is required of other Americans. It should be a priority of this Congress to pass these solutions as a way to guarantee equal treatment under the law. This is especially important at this time when our national debt exceeds $13.5 trillion since this legislation is estimated to reduce the Federal deficit by at least $3 billion. I hope my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will support these bills to demonstrate their commitment to requiring Congress to live under the same rules it imposes on the rest of the country. It is time for every member of Congress to pay their taxes rather than simply spending the taxes of others.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, there has been much debate over the past year regarding ``secret holds'' stalling the consideration of presidential appointments or slowing expedited passage of legislation by the Senate. Lost in this discussion has been an issue that should be a far greater concern for taxpayers--``secret spending.'' This body routinely attempts to pass hundreds of bills costing tens of billions of dollars or more in secret without debate, votes, or amendments. It does so using an unofficial process not found in Senate rule books known as the ``hotline.'' The U.S. Senate is often referred to as ``the world's greatest deliberative body.'' This is because Senate rules grant each of the Senate's 100 members rights that cannot be overridden by a simple majority, including the right to require debate before a bill is considered or passed. Yet, the Senate practice known as the ``hotline'' often prevents and precludes debate. In fact, Senators often do not even read the bills being passed using the hotline. The term ``hotline'' or practice of ``hotlining'' bills does not appear in the Senate's official rules, but this procedure is utilized nearly every day the Senate is in session. A hotline is an informal term for an alert sent to members of the Senate giving notice of a proposed agreement to allow a bill or resolution to be approved by the Senate without debate or amendment. A measure that is ``hotlined'' is recorded in the Congressional Record as a being agreed to by unanimous consent, UC. Hotlines occur at the discretion of the Majority Leader in consultation with the Minority Leader. The leader's office contacts each Senate office with a message on a special alert line called the ``hotline,'' which provides information on what bill or bills the leader is seeking to pass through unanimous consent. Hotline notices are only given to Senate offices. If there is an objection to the bill being ``hotlined,'' a senator is asked to call the leader's office and give notice of intent to object to the bill being passed by unanimous consent whenever such a request may occur. The process of notifying the leader's office of an objection to ``hotline'' is informally referred to as a ``hold.'' In practice, instead of requiring explicit unanimous consent to pass a bill, the ``hotline'' process only requires a lack of dissent. In many instances, bills are hotlined for which no text, description, or budget estimates have been made publicly available. In some Senate offices, the ``hotline,'' or request for unanimous consent to pass a measure, may never even reach senators, and the decision to allow a bill to be approved without debate is determined by staff, who do not even read the bill. When a bill is ``hotlined,'' the public is not informed and neither is the media. Only the offices of senators are alerted. It is therefore a form of ``secret spending.'' Much like a ``hold'' can be kept from the public, so can the ``hotlining'' of bills, which can cost billions of dollars. The vast majority of legislation approved by the Senate is done so via the ``hotline'' under the guise of unanimous consent. According to the Congressional Research Service, CRS, ``in the last ten Congresses, 110th-101st, an average of 93 percent of approved measures did not receive roll call votes'' and ``in the 111th Congress through February 1, 2010, 94 percent of approved measures were approved without a roll call vote.'' Every time the Senate passes legislation without full and open debate, the American people are done a disservice. The Senate should not pass a new bill if its text, purpose, and budget estimate are not available to the general public. Taxpayers and the media should have the right to read and analyze legislation prior to its passage. Senators, likewise, have a responsibility to know the contents of legislation prior to granting consent for its passage. Additionally, hotlining bills take away the accountability for legislation approved by the Senate. Since there is no recorded vote for most hotlined bills, senators have no culpability for most of the legislation approved by the Senate. The lack of of an objection from unelected staff should not be sufficient to pass legislation that could spend millions or even billions of dollars and significantly alter U.S. laws. In many cases, if a senator objects to a hotline request--even if the objection is merely to be granted sufficient time to study and review the text, cost, and impact of the legislation--special interest groups will immediately label the senator who is trying to be diligent as an undemocratic obstructionist. But the truth is neither democracy nor taxpayers are served well by this process. ``Hotlining'' bills enable the hasty passage of legislation without the public's knowledge or feedback. This process benefits politicians and special interests rather than taxpayers. Senators have an obligation to their constituents to do their jobs, which includes reading the bills and understanding the impact of legislation passed by Congress. Today I am introducing the ``Stop Secret Spending Resolution'' along with Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri. This bi-partisan legislation would provide transparency and accountability by prohibiting a bill or joint resolution from passing without a vote until the hotline notifications are available on a public website for at least 72 hours. The public notice much include: a cost analysis completed by the non- partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO); the number of new programs created by the legislation; and the actual legislative text. The new 72 hour rule would not apply to noncontroversial item such as post office namings and sense of the Senate resolutions; nominations; any legislation relating to an imminent or ongoing emergency; or a unanimous consent request made when a quorum of the Senate is present. Voters are demanding Congress bring greater accountability to the legislative process. Ending secret spending represents a meaningful first step to guaranteeing increased accountability and transparency by providing sufficient time for the public to review legislation before it is passed by Congress. I ask my colleagues on both sides of the aisle for their support of this legislation.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, today I have introduced two separate bills, S. 3790 and S. 3791, intended to hold members of Congress and other Federal employees to the same tax rules Washington imposes on the rest of America. In 2009, the Internal Revenue Service, IRS, found nearly 100,000 civilian Federal employees were delinquent on their Federal income taxes, owing over $1 billion in unpaid Federal income taxes. When considering retirees and military, more than 282,000 Federal employees owed $3.3 billion in taxes. These bills are not intended to single out the majority of Federal employees who work hard and pay their taxes, but members of Congress and Federal employees have a clear obligation to pay their Federal income taxes. Legislators and government employees should not be exempt from the laws they write and enforce. The very nature of Federal employment and the concept inherent to ``public service'' demands those being paid by taxpayers contribute their fair share of taxes. They should lead by example. Tax delinquency rate among congressional employees exceeds the rate of all returns filed nationwide. Taxpayers are fed up with those in Washington living under a different set of rules than the rest of America. At a time when Congress may allow taxes to increase on some or even all Americans, Congress should not expect other Americans to pay more taxes when they are not even paying the taxes they owe under the rates they set themselves. The bills I am introducing are fair to Federal employees and other taxpayers. Both bills carefully reach only those paid by the taxpayers who have willfully neglected to pay their incomes taxes. The legislation excludes elected officials or Federal employees who made oversights in their personal taxes but willfully agree to pay them, or if they are challenging the delinquency in court or through the IRS. Instead, it targets those who willfully neglect or avoid the pay their taxes. Specifically, it excludes Federal employees from termination and Members of Congress from repercussions if the individual is currently paying the taxes, interest, and penalties owed to IRS under an installment plan; the individual and the IRS have worked out a compromise on the amount of taxes, interest and penalties owed and the compromise amount agreed upon is being repaid to IRS; the individual has not exhausted his or her right to due process under the law; or the individual filed a joint return and successfully contends he or she should not be fully liable for the taxes, interest, and/or penalties owed because of something the other party to the return did or did not do. The first bill requires all Federal employees to be current on their Federal income taxes or be fired from their jobs. The second bill requires Members of Congress to report any outstanding tax liability. If the Member possesses a tax liability, this bill would require the appropriate congressional committee to launch an ethics investigation and the Member's salary would be reduced in accordance with the amount he or she owes. These bills require no more of members of Congress or Federal employees than is required of other Americans. It should be a priority of this Congress to pass these solutions as a way to guarantee equal treatment under the law. This is especially important at this time when our national debt exceeds $13.5 trillion since this legislation is estimated to reduce the Federal deficit by at least $3 billion. I hope my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will support these bills to demonstrate their commitment to requiring Congress to live under the same rules it imposes on the rest of the country. It is time for every member of Congress to pay their taxes rather than simply spending the taxes of others.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I rise today to speak on the nomination of Ms. Jane Stranch to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. I am concerned about Ms. Stranch's nomination to the court of appeals because, like many recent judicial nominees, she embraces the use of foreign law by the courts, which is contradictory to the Constitution, the judicial oath, and the intent of our Founders. I reached this conclusion after carefully reviewing her record, her hearing testimony, and her responses to written questions following her hearing. For example, in response to my question asking her whether it is ever proper for judges to rely on foreign or international laws or decisions in determining the meaning of the Constitution, Ms. Stranch admitted she believes using foreign law in limited circumstances is appropriate. First, she stated that she is ``aware of only a very few cases in which [the Supreme Court] has referenced non-U.S law in a majority opinion, including Roper [v Simmons],'' but, then she continued: ``In these few cases, references to foreign law were made for such purposes as extrapolating on societal norms and standards of decency, refuting contrary assertions or confirming American views. None of these cases used foreign or international law to interpret a constitutional text. The Supreme Court's restraint on this issue is a model for the lower courts.'' Ms. Stanch's misleading answer fails to recognize that, by looking to foreign law to determine whether the imposition of the death penalty for those under 18 has become ``unusual,'' the Court is allowing foreign law to influence its interpretation of a constitutional text. Her statement that the Court is merely confirming American views or refuting contrary assertions is disturbing because foreign countries' views on the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution are irrelevant to what our Founders wrote and believed. Also, Ms. Stranch commended the Supreme Court for its ``restraint'' in its use of foreign law when an appropriate answer would be to condemn the Court for using foreign law at all. Her answer implies that she believes using foreign law is appropriate in some cases, as long as it is limited use. Ms. Stranch compounded my concern about her views on the appropriate use of foreign law when she responded to my next question asking under what circumstances she would consider foreign law when interpreting the Constitution. She responded that, as a judge, foreign law ``would be used as confirmatory only'' in her cases. This answer suggests a judicial activist approach where she will use foreign law to confirm whatever result she deems appropriate. Ms. Stranch further states that because ``references [to foreign law] are so rare at the Supreme Court level [it] suggests even rarer usage in the lower courts.'' Allowing that the lower court should use foreign law rarely is deeply concerning. Judges should not be using foreign law at all. Ms. Stranch's answers to questions relating to the proper interpretation of the eighth amendment are also problematic. In response to a question asking how she would determine what are the ``evolving standards of decency'' with regard to the eighth amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, she responded by citing the language in the opinion that the Court has ``established the propriety and affirmed the necessity of referring to the `evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society' to determine which punishments are so disproportionate as to be cruel and unusual.'' But, she then continues stating: ``The Court held that the beginning point of that determination is its review of objective indicia of consensus as expressed by enactments of legislatures. The exercise of the Court's independent judgment regarding the proportionality of the punishment followed.'' While she is merely reciting what the Supreme Court did in the Roper opinion, she fails to acknowledge what is concerning about the Court's opinion. First, it is concerning that when the Court in Roper was looking to ``objective indicia of consensus as expressed by enactments of legislatures,'' it was not only looking at other States' laws--as opposed to the law of the State in question--but also to foreign legislatures' laws. Rather than look to other legislatures for ``evolving standards,'' the proper analysis in this case would have been to look to the meaning of the text when the Founders wrote it. Thus, the Court should be determining whether capital punishment for persons under 18 was considered ``cruel and unusual'' when the Constitution was written. To do otherwise embraces an evolving and ever changing Constitution. Ms. Stranch fails to acknowledge this concern. Second, Ms. Stranch admits that the ``exercise of the Court's independent judgment regarding the proportionality of the punishment followed,'' but does not acknowledge that a Court should not be making these types of ``independent'' determinations. Ms. Stranch's answers on foreign law are concerning because she not only misstates how the Supreme Court has used foreign law in its cases, but she also refuses to pledge not to use foreign law herself. In fact, she believes that ``rare'' usage of foreign law by the lower courts is appropriate. For these reasons, I will vote against her nomination and urge my colleagues to do the same. I also would note that I believe Ms. Stranch is just one of many concerning nominees by this administration who embrace the use of foreign law by judges. This trend first became apparent with the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor last year. Prior to her hearing, Judge Sotomayor stated that outlawing the use of foreign law would mean judges would have to ``close their minds to good ideas'' and that it is her ``hope'' that judges will continue to consult foreign law when interpreting our Constitution and statutes. She also said ``I share more the ideas of Justice Ginsburg in thinking, in believing that unless American courts are more open to discussing the ideas raised by foreign cases, and by international cases, that we are going to lose influence in the world.'' Similarly, Ms. Elena Kagan asserted that ``it may be proper for judges to consider foreign law sources in ruling on constitutional questions.'' She further stated that judges can get ``good ideas'' from the decisions of foreign courts. For this reason among others, I opposed both Supreme Court nominees. Even lower court nominees, such as Third Circuit Judge Thomas Vanaskie, have embraced the trend. In his testimony, Judge Vanaskie implied that he believed the Supreme Court used foreign law correctly in the much criticized cases of Lawrence v Texas and Roper v Simmons, and said the ``opinions of international tribunals and foreign courts may be relevant'' when interpreting our Constitution. Because of his statements on the use of foreign law and his expansive view of the commerce clause, I opposed his nomination. Looking to foreign law is a tool of activist judges who seek to reach the outcomes they desire, based on their personal sympathies and prejudices, rather than on the law. As Justice Antonin Scalia aptly described it, the Court is merely ``look[ing] over the heads of the crowd and pick[ing] out its friends.'' Further, judges who do so violate their judicial oath. A circuit court judge must swear to ``faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon her as a judge under the Constitution and laws of the United States.'' The oath requires our judges to evaluate cases based on U.S. laws and the U.S. Constitution, not the decisions of foreign countries who do not treasure the same liberties and fundamental freedoms enshrined in our Constitution. The decisions of foreign countries should have no bearing on an American judge's decisions. This progressive trend of looking to foreign law is deeply disturbing and is something I hope my colleagues will consider when voting on this nomination and the administration will consider when nominating individuals in the future.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I am here to talk about the nominee, Ms. Kagan, for the Supreme Court, but I thought I would put it in the context of how I view what we are doing. As a physician, a father, and a grandfather taking a look at where we are as a nation, it is very worrisome to me. The 62 years I have lived have been fraught with great opportunity, great challenges, but never with a fear that what we have in this country may not last. I have to admit to my colleagues that I have that fear now. And it is not an unfounded fear. You see, this year we will borrow almost $1.6 trillion from our grandchildren. We will borrow in excess of $4 billion a day-- money we don't have. At this moment, we owe $13.35 trillion. No question, we are the biggest economy in the world, being fast caught by other large economies. The uniqueness of the American experiment could have been predicted by those who studied republics because freedom and liberty were the basis for such an explosion in growth and wealth and freedom and standard of living. The poor in our country live far in excess of half of the world's populations because of the great republic we are. I believe we have a short period of time to right the ship for our country. We have large disagreements in this body on how we do that, and others' ideas have as much value as mine. But it is not debatable the kind of trouble we are in as a nation. It is indisputable. We have a mountain of debt, and we are going to have interest costs that are going to chew up our freedom and chew up our children's prosperity and opportunity over the years that lie ahead of us. So we have great responsibility as we place somebody on the Supreme Court. Our constitutional responsibility is to advise and either give consent or not give consent. I have no doubts that my speech on the floor this afternoon will change any Senator's mind. It won't. But what I hope to do is to lay out the questions, as we put Ms. Kagan on the Court, of where we will be with the basis of her philosophy. I have served on the Judiciary Committee for almost 6 years. I have been through four Supreme Court Justice hearings. I have met with four-- actually, more than four--prospective nominees to the Supreme Court, and the responsibility is heavy. Elections do have consequences. They give the President of the United States the right to appoint, with advice and consent, all the judges in this country, as well as numerous other officials. But none is greater and none is more important than a Supreme Court Justice. My concern with Ms. Kagan is whether she really believes in what our Constitution says, and by her own words she fails to meet that test. So I think it is time for an extra parameter to be considered in light of the difficulties we face when we give consent for somebody who is going to be in a lifetime position who will, I believe, have negative consequences for our future. And I am going to spell out why I believe that. Ms. Kagan is a highly qualified woman who has attained much in her young life. She is highly intelligent, highly articulate, and quite pleasant. I believe she did the best job of at least letting us get to see some of what she thinks of any of the Supreme Court nominees we have heard, and I give her credit for that. But what I saw causes me to shake in my boots, and let me tell you why. Ms. Kagan made two critical statements. She believes Supreme Court precedent trumps the original intent of our Founders. Think about that for a minute. We just heard the Senator from Delaware mention Brown v. Board of Education. Under that philosophy, reaching back to our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, Brown v. Board of Education would never have happened. We would have had ``separate but equal'' had we relied on Supreme Court precedent and not the underlying body of our Constitution. As I was reading recently, I came across something written by Calvin Coolidge. He is not very often quoted in this body, and for some of that I understand why. But one of the other things Nominee Kagan did was she refused to embrace natural rights in her testimony before the committee. You see, the whole foundation for our country is based on the fact that the rights we have are not given to us by the Congress of the United States or the Government of the United States or the Constitution of the United States; they are inherently ours. They are inalienable rights--the right of life, the right of liberty, the right to pursue happiness. We have a government to be a caretaker, to ensure our rights are not infringed upon. So lacking that understanding--and it wasn't just once that she was asked that; she was asked that in terms of Blackstone's principles on the right of an individual to defend their life. She does not embrace that concept. It was not only evident in her plain words that she spoke but in her answers indirectly to other questions. So we have a Supreme Court nominee who believes that the wisdom of men today, outside of the Constitution, based on precedent, trumps the wisdom that was brought forth by our forefathers in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. And there are other proofs for this that I will go through during my speech to explain. Listen to what Calvin Coolidge had to say: About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776; that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter. Or the Constitution that followed it. If all men are created equal, that is final. It can't be improved upon. It can only be lessened. If all men are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. It cannot be improved upon. It can only be lessened. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. The power of the U.S. Government comes from the power we loan to the government as people and citizens of the United States. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers. Well said, Calvin Coolidge. Well said. So we have before us a judge who said the following to me during our hearing: To be honest with you, I don't have a view of what are natural rights, independent of the Constitution. Oh, really? So we are going to have a Supreme Court Justice who has no view of what our inalienable rights are other than what the Constitution says? Where can that take us? It can take us anywhere she wants to go, outside the bounds of the very liberties we loan to the government to have a civil society. If you look at the Declaration of Independence, it says: We hold these truths to be self-evident-- Why aren't they self-evident to her? Why doesn't she hold an opinion on them-- that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . . We have inalienable rights. We have natural rights. Yet we are about to put a Justice on the Supreme Court for life who, by her own words, does not have a view of what are natural rights. I don't know anybody who is an adult in this country who doesn't have a view of what they think are their natural rights. This is a quote from Elena Kagan: In some cases original intent is unlikely to solve the question, and that might be because the original intent is unknowable or might be because we live in a world that's very different from the world in which the framers lived. In many circumstances, precedent is the most important thing. No, that is just the opposite of what Coolidge had to say about the Declaration of Independence, just exactly the opposite. More modern, we got it right. Natural rights do not matter. Our wisdom, our intellect, our arrogance--of a government and the governing body--has more import, has more value, has more to do with what we do today than the wisdom of those inalienable rights and the Constitution that came out of it. Do you realize that in the Constitution, for every time it gives us a responsibility, it says four or five times what we can't do? Because the Framers were interested, and knowing the condition of men, that we would abandon--our tendency would be to allow the concentration of power to abandon those very principles they put into the Constitution. What did Madison have to say, just on the general welfare clause of the Constitution? He anticipated the Elena Kagans of this world. He said: With respect to the words general welfare, I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators. You see, that is how we have gotten into trouble as a country. That is why our economic future is not secure--because the Congress has exceeded its authority under a limited Constitution and the courts have failed to rein us in. They have failed to recognize their obligation. So we are going to have someone who believes that the precedent and wisdom of modern men is much more important than the original intent of our Founders to keep us free, to secure our liberty, to provide our inalienable rights to the pursuit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Here is another area. If we read the Constitution and we read where they have set up our judicial system, what they reference, they say: The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority. . . . They gave no wiggle room for the utilization of foreign law in interpreting the U.S. Constitution--none. Here is Elena Kagan: It may be proper for judges to consider foreign law sources in ruling on constitutional questions. Here is what the Constitution says. Here is what the nominee to the Supreme Court says--exactly opposite of what the Constitution says. In other words, it is OK to use any source of law you want, not the source that the Constitution says you will be bound by in your oath. Let's take it a step further, same quote: ``Judges can get'' good ideas ``on how to approach legal issues from a decision of a foreign court. It may be proper for judges to consider foreign law sources in ruling on Constitutional questions.'' Here is their oath: I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as a justice under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God. ``Under the laws and the Constitution of the United States'' is not foreign law. That is the U.S. Constitution and our statutes. So as soon as she takes the oath, her very philosophy violates it because she honestly testified that it is fine to use foreign law to interpret our laws and our Constitution. Again, how did we get in the trouble that we are in today? How did we get that 20 years from now every man, woman, and child in this country is going to be responsible for over $1 million worth of debt? How did we get to the point where $350 billion of waste, fraud, and duplication occurs every year in the Federal Government? How did we get to the point that we can take people's rights away because we deem so in the Congress, in our smart, modern wisdom that lessens liberty and freedom throughout this land? We do it because we do not use the book, and we don't follow the oath that we are sworn to uphold; that is, the U.S. Constitution and the laws of this land. Then it comes to the commerce clause. Elena Kagan: The commerce clause has been interpreted broadly. It's been interpreted to apply to . . . anything that would substantially affect interstate commerce. When asked if a Federal law requiring Americans to eat three fruits and three vegetables every day would be unconstitutional, Ms. Kagan avoided the question by simply saying, ``That would be a dumb law.'' Madison had something different to say: Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. He is talking about us. If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. We have had this vast expansion since the late 1940s in this country in the commerce clause. It started with Wickard v. Filburn. A farmer raising chickens was raising his own wheat. But the Government didn't want him raising his own wheat because they had allotted limits during the 1930s, the Great Depression--limits to what you could grow. So he owns his own land, he has his own chickens, but the Supreme Court said: You can't raise your own feed. You have to buy it from somebody. So here we started with the Supreme Court ruling and moving in to take away the freedom of an individual farmer to raise his own feed for his own chickens for a greater good--supposedly to control the price and availability of wheat. What has happened to us since then? Look at the expansion of the commerce clause and how it is moving power away from those who are governed without their consent to a central government in Washington. What does Ms. Kagan complain about during the hearing? That she thinks the Supreme Court may be moving to reverse that--of which she adamantly disagrees. When asked about the Seminole case and the Lopez case, she worried that it moves us back to individual freedom and a more restrictive commerce clause, a commerce clause that says our rights are more important than those of the government. That goes back to the basis that she doesn't believe we have natural rights. The fundamental question of whether an individual, free in a country, can walk on to the Supreme Court and disavow inalienable rights and natural rights, that is a very dangerous concept because if you don't believe in natural rights, you don't worry about taking them from those who are governed. You don't worry about the Congress taking them from those of the governed. We are about to move to a point where we are going to put somebody in a lifetime position on the U.S. Supreme Court who believes in foreign law utilization to interpret the issues before it; who believes that precedent trumps original intent of the Founders--in other words, the arrogance is we are much smarter than they were, our wisdom is much better, we are more modern, therefore things have changed, therefore we have to ignore what they have said; that the commerce clause is boundless; even if Congress passes stupid laws, they have the right to do it and there is no obligation on the Court to look at the Constitution and the documents behind it and what our Founding Fathers had to say about the authority and what they intended and meant as they wrote that clause into the Constitution. Then, finally, one last point. She does not believe in the individual natural right that you have as a person to defend yourself. She wouldn't embrace that--which implies, very rightly so, that the second amendment, even though we now have precedent, is at risk under Elena Kagan as a Supreme Court Justice. So, summing up, we are going to put somebody on the Court that I see will further the problems we have versus starting to reembrace the principles that made this country great. Are we going to embrace what has gotten us into trouble? Are we going to embrace the $13.34 trillion worth of debt growing at $1.4 trillion to $1.6 trillion today, that is stealing the opportunity of the future? We are. We are going to put her on there, and her wisdom and her vision is very different from our Founders, our Constitution, and our natural rights. This will be a huge mistake for this country if we want to solve the problems in front of us. As I said, I don't expect anybody to change their vote on the basis of my viewpoint. I will congratulate her for being more honest and open on her testimony than others would because normally we would not find out these things about judges. With a worried heart, I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following letter be printed in the Record.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I have listened to my colleague from California. I am somewhat amazed to think she would imply we don't care about the unemployed. The fact is, we do. I went through the list of the things she mentioned, as did the Senator from Vermont. I was not here in 2001. I was not here in 2003. I was not here when both the wars were initiated. I had no part in any of that. But even had I been, the fact is, we can help two groups of people with this unemployment insurance. There isn't anybody on our side of the aisle who doesn't think we ought to pass extended unemployment benefits. To state or imply that is absolutely absurd. It is not about stalling. The majority leader did not allow one amendment to allow us an opportunity to have a vote on whether we ought to pay for it. The question isn't whether we help the unemployed. Every time we have offered ways to do so--as a matter of fact, five times it has been rejected that, in fact, our grandchildren should not have to pay for the unemployment benefits of the people who are unemployed today. Five times it has been rejected. Multiple times we have chosen to not do the responsible thing for two groups of people. It is easy to come to the Senate floor and throw darts at people who have a drastic disagreement on where we stand in this country. But to imply that they don't care is out of bounds. The people in Oklahoma who are not getting unemployment checks today I care about just as much as the people who don't have a job who aren't getting one. But there is another group of people whom I am pressed to serve in Oklahoma as well; that is, their children. The assumption that this body can't make the hard choices to eliminate things that are much less important, much more wasteful, an absolute waste of Federal dollars and eliminate those things to pay for unemployment insurance is out of the bounds of reality. My colleague from California mentioned several times that all the people who are getting these extended benefits have paid into a fund. They paid zero. This is extended benefits. The extended benefits are 100 percent paid for by Federal tax dollars. It is the 26 weeks, the routine unemployment, that is paid for through the unemployment fund. The extended benefits, long-term benefits, don't come from any pot of money except the pot of money of our grandchildren's future. Let's put that to rest. There is not a Republican or a Democrat or an Independent in this body who does not want these folks to get extended unemployment benefits. We do. The question is, at a time when we are going to borrow $1.6 trillion this year alone against the future of our children, whether maybe we can find $30 billion, that doesn't come anywhere close to the priorities of helping people who are unemployed today. I reject out of hand the idea that we don't have any compassion. The fact is we do. As a matter of fact, our compassion is both short term and long term. We are thinking about the habits of Congress that continually put the credit card into the machine and borrow against the prosperity and well-being of generations that follow. Let's not have any more talk about the fact that we don't want people to have unemployment. We do. We do want them to have unemployment. Multiple times we offered ways for that. It may, in fact, pass this afternoon or early this evening that we are going to extend them and not pay for it. But as the Senator from California said: It is a defining moment. It certainly is. Is the Federal Government, in this difficult economic situation, going to at least make some small attempt to rein in the $300 billion worth of waste, fraud, abuse, and duplication in the Federal Government? The answer we get is no. Discretionary programs over the last 2 years, not counting the stimulus--we can have the stimulus debate some other time--have risen 19.6 percent, when the average wage went up less than 2 percent. The Federal Government is now twice as big as it was in 1999, not counting the stimulus. We have 6,400 sets of duplicative programs that the body will not touch. They are all designed to do good things for people. They are highly inefficient, highly ineffective. Yet what we will do is not that hard work to get rid of the things that aren't working. We will just charge our children so we can say we took care of unemployment. Hard times require hard decisions. What we are seeing is the easy way out. The easy way out is to not pay for this. The easy way out is to charge it to our children and grandchildren. There is no difference in the level of compassion. Everybody wants to take care of those who are unemployed. The easy way is to put it on the backs of our children and grandchildren. The question is, Will we do the right thing for the country? Will we do the best right thing for the country or will we do the easy thing, the politically expedient thing, class envy, ``I am going make somebody look bad because they don't agree with me on the timing of something'' or will we act as a body that will ensure both caring for the now and ensuring the future? It is easy in the Senate to spend money you don't have. The bias is for it. The hard thing is to take and do the best right thing. My colleagues, many on both sides of the aisle, in numerous cases over the last 5\1/2\ years, have too often done the easy thing. We have all these fingers pointing at this administration did this and this administration did this. There are plenty of problems for every administration and every political party to be considered guilty on because too often both groups have done the short-term politically expedient thing rather than the best right thing for the country. I had, at one of the events that my staff attended this weekend, an individual in Oklahoma who lost his unemployment insurance. He said: You tell Dr. Coburn to be sure and continue to pay for it. I want my unemployment insurance. I need my unemployment. I will not be able to make my house payments unless I get that. But I don't want that to come from my children and grandchildren. I want it to come from the excesses and waste in Washington today. So there is another viewpoint, even though we hear it is a critically nonpertinent viewpoint. This isn't a partisan issue. This isn't a delaying tactic. This is a real philosophical difference on how we get out of the mess we are in. A lot of my colleagues are not happy that I am a Republican a lot of times because I go after my party just as much as I go after anybody else's. But the fact is, core principles matter. Go look at the history of republics. The Senator from California talks about a defining moment. The defining moment for the Athenian Republic was when they decided to start spending money they didn't have on things they didn't need. Here is our option today. The reason we are going to have motions is because we were given no opportunity to amend. That is the only reason we will have motions to suspend the rules. It has nothing to do with a delaying tactic. It has to do with a debate and a Senator's right to offer amendments. The Senator from California would be doing the same thing if the shoe was turned the other way. If she was precluded from offering amendments, she would find a way to offer an amendment, if she believed from a position, a conscientious position that can be defended on the basis of facts. You don't have to agree with it, but you can't deny there are economic factors that should play in how we pay for unemployment insurance. You can demean us. You can say we are mean. You can say we don't care. But the fact is, none of that is true. It is an absolute untruth. The defining moment is, Will we embrace the quality that built this country in the first place? That is, being responsible for the problems that are in front of us and not shifting that responsibility to generations that follow. That is what this debate is all about. When we left here for one break, we had agreed with Senator Reid and Senator Levin about extending unemployment insurance. We were told by the Speaker of the House that she wasn't about to set the precedent of starting to pay for unemployment insurance. Why not? When we have a $1.6 trillion deficit, when we have $13.3 trillion worth of debt, when we are mortgaging the future of our children, we are stealing opportunity away from them as we do it, why not? Why not meet the challenges that are in front of us by responding in a way that says meeting people's needs today is important, and it is important we not take away from the needs of the future as we do so. Yet we are lectured that it is a partisan debate. There is nothing partisan about this. In my soul, I want to help everybody out there who is unemployed and facing the tough times. But also in my soul is that I do not want to mortgage the future of any more American children, when we have tremendous amounts of waste, fraud, and duplication that can easily be eliminated. One of the motions I am going to offer is to cut $40 billion from the Federal Government. America, tell me what part of this you do not agree with. The fact is, we are going to ask that we quit wasting money on real property. We spend $8 billion a year maintaining property we do not want. We have $80 billion worth of empty buildings. It is costing us $8 billion a year. Should we continue to spend that $8 billion or should we not spend that $8 billion and take that $8 billion and pay for unemployment insurance? How about collecting unpaid taxes from Federal employees and Members of Congress. That is $3 billion. As to currently hired Federal employees, it is already adjudicated they owe $3 billion. I think we ought to pay it back. I do not think we ought to borrow from the future of our children and grandchildren because we do not have the guts to say: Pay up. Quit cheating the Federal Government, employee of the Federal Government. That is a small number in terms of the number of employees, but that is a big number: $3 billion. Let's have them pay up. Why is it we are not going to eliminate $8 billion in bonuses to Federal contractors who did not meet the requirements to get a bonus, yet we gave the bonus anyway? Why not eliminate that rather than charge this to our children? Tell me why you will not vote for that? Do you think we ought to be paying bonuses to people who do not deserve them, contractors? It is $6 billion over a 4-year period in just the Defense Department alone. But you do not want to get rid of that? You would rather charge the money to our kids than make the hard choice of alienating some defense contractor or some government contractor because they got something they did not deserve in the past, when somebody is unemployed who deserves to get unemployment insurance? I do not understand it. Or eliminating nonessential government travel--one of the things President Obama wants to do. We spend billions--$14.8 billion, in excess of that--on Federal travel. We are some of the worst abusers. Yet we will not discipline ourselves and set an example that we can use a teleconference rather than getting on an airplane and going somewhere--a video teleconference. At a time such as this, when we are having an economic problem, we will not make the hard decision to make tough choices that are maybe not as fun, maybe not as easy. What I have found is a video teleconference is a whole lot easier than travel, but we will not make that hard choice. We are not going to tell the agencies they are going to have to do it. We will not even put on a Web site all the times we violate our own rules on pay-go. On February 12, we passed a law. It used to be a rule in the Senate, but now we passed a law. It is called pay-go. It says you cannot have new spending unless you pay for it. Since February 12, when the President signed that law, we have violated it to the tune of $223 billion, where we said: Oh, time out. The pay-go statute does not apply. We don't have to pay for it. We don't have to eliminate all the inefficiencies, all the duplication. We don't have to go after any fraud. We are just going to charge it to our children and grandchildren. Where is the integrity in that? Where is the integrity? Where is the character in that? Where is the courage to do the tough thing that accomplishes both helping the people who are unemployed but helping our kids and helping our Nation? There is not any. There is none. It is the easy way out. Lest you think I am making up this stuff, let me give you some examples of Federal duplication. I will just give you four easy examples. We have 70 different government programs--70 different sets of bureaucracies--that spend billions of dollars a year, and on none of them is there a metric to measure whether they are effective to help people with food who are hungry. Why 70? Why across six or seven different agencies? Why not one or two programs keenly focused with metrics on saying: Are we feeding them or not? Why not eliminate 68 sets of bureaucracy and overhead? That is a small one. We have 105 different sets of programs to incentivize our young people to go into math, engineering, science, and technology. It costs $3 billion a year, for 105 different programs, in 9 different Federal agencies. They are not in the Department of Education. They are everywhere. Nobody knows the data, but nobody will vote to make them accountable, make them transparent, eliminate the overhead, streamline the bureaucracy. No, we do not want to do that. This body has voted against doing that multiple times when those amendments have been offered. We have a total of 78 job training programs outside the Department of Labor, costing billions of dollars a year, none of which have a metric on them. Yet we do not want to streamline that, eliminate it, get it down to two or three that are focused--some on the chronically unemployed, some on the new workers coming in, some on those who are handicapped who might need special assistance. No, we are going to keep the 70-plus programs we have because they are somebody's baby, all of which are highly inefficient and none of which can prove effectiveness when you measure them with a metric because they do not have a metric. They cannot demonstrate they are effective. So the debate is not about whether we want to help people who are unemployed. The debate is about whether we want to help the people who are unemployed as well as the generations that follow us. I am amazed, and continue to be so, how easily this body can abandon common sense. I do not know if we do not have it to begin with or if we are similar to a magnet, and it is two positives, so we repel any common sense. But nobody would run any organization--private, public-- business or anything else the way we run the agencies in the Federal Government. When you start wanting to do something about it, the only thing you get is: We can't. Well, the American people are asking us today: Please, do what you can. Do what you can. What we can do is we can pay for unemployment for the next multiple periods of months by eliminating things that are absolutely unnecessary. Do you realize we can save $4.5 billion over the next 10 years by not printing stuff that people do not want. It is all online. We can save $450 million a year just by putting common sense into the Government Printing Office. It has been voted down three times on this floor this year. Why not? Why do we continue to take the easy task when the future of our country is going to be determined on whether we take the hard road and do the hard thing that benefits both the coming generations and those who are experiencing problems today? I tell you why it is. It is because we say we care, but we do not. We play the game, but we do not get in the game. Getting in the game means that you get criticized, that you offer ideas, some of which may work and some of which may not, but you are not afraid to change the game because our kids' future, our country's future depend on changing the game. What we have heard today is the resistance to changing the game. We do not have a future if we do not start making hard choices. It is an easy choice for me to vote with the Senator from California to pay for unemployment benefits. I want those people to get it. It is a hard choice for me to vote against it and say: Let's pay for it. If, in fact, you will pay for it, I will vote with you. It is not like we cannot find $40 billion. Every third grader in this country can find $40 billion in this budget. There is no rocket science to it. There is so much waste, so much duplication, and so much fraud that anybody can find it. The question is, Do we have the will to do the best right thing for this country? One of the things I have learned in 5\1/2\ years in this body is that when people use straw men and people use half-truths, it is usually because they are hiding something. What is being hidden from the American public today? What is this debate truly all about? Is it just about unemployment or is it about we like the way things are? We do not want to change the way things are, we do not want to get out of our comfort zone to solve the real problems of America, so, therefore, we will use all sorts of tactics to deflect what the real issues of the day are. What are they? The Senator from California rightly outlines that millions of Americans need unemployment compensation right now. I am all for it. What is the other truth about where we are? The truth is, this country is on an absolute unsustainable course. The American people have awakened to it. They know it. As the Senator from California knows, this is not new for me. I have been doing this for 5\1/2\ years. So it did not matter if it was the ``bridge to nowhere,'' which a Republican authored, or unemployment compensation today, I think we use common sense and do the best right thing for America, not the politically easy thing. So the challenge before us today is to go home and explain, when this bill passes, why we charged it to the least of us. That is whom we are charging it to: to the least of us. I told a story not long ago. In my profession as a physician, I have delivered nearly 4,000 babies--maybe over that. I quit counting. But the thing that has always gotten me, when I am delivering a baby--and I have a mother there and a father there and that baby comes out--is to see the glow on the face and in the eyes of those parents. The glow is about hope and promise for the future and about what things can be and the potential that is unlimited when that new life is here. You see it in the parents, and you see them puff up and say: Wow, what a phenomenon. As I think about what we do today, we are stealing that. We are taking it from those kids because we refuse to have the backbone and courage to do the hard, yet the best right thing for this country. We will hear a lot of speeches about how bad we are because we want to pay for it. We will be talked down. It will be said that we want to obstruct. I honestly admit I don't want anything to go through this body that isn't paid for. You can count on it every time. Everybody on that side of the aisle, and most on my side of the aisle, have run in cross-wise with me on things that aren't paid for. They know. It is not a fetish; it is that I actually recognize the long-term future of this country depends on us getting our fiscal house in order. So it is a defining moment, as the Senator from California said. But it is not the defining moment she thinks it is. It is the defining moment of whether this body is going to grab onto and truly accept the responsibility given to us by the American people. Will we truly accept it? How we act on it determines our commitment to this country. I don't disagree with those who just want to get it through and get people paid. They have a right to have that position. I am not demeaning that position. I am just saying the country can't last if we keep doing it. Our kids don't have a future if we keep doing it. If we look at the budget projections for our country, we will run--even with the tax increases that are coming at the end of this year--we are going to run $1 trillion deficits until 2020. Let me close with one final thought. We have a $4 trillion budget. We are going to run a $1.6 trillion deficit this year. That means we are going to borrow that from our children. The deficit by this time next year will be close to $14 trillion. Have my colleagues ever thought about what $1 trillion is? My colleague from Georgia explained it to me. I didn't believe him, so I did the math. If we spend $1 a second, so that means we spend $60 a minute, or $3,600 an hour--$3,600 an hour, the wealthiest in our country probably don't spend that, but let's say we did--how long would it take us to spend $1 trillion? The answer is 31,709 years spending $3,600 an hour before we ever get to $1 trillion. We get $1 trillion deficits $30 billion, $40 billion at a time, which is the cost of this bill. The way we start getting out of debt is to stop adding to it. If we go back to February 12 when the law went into effect on pay-go, and we add this bill to it, we are going to be at $\1/4\ trillion since February 12 that this body will have added to our children's deficit. It is not our debt. Nobody in this room and probably very few people listening to this debate are going to pay one penny against it. It is all going to be borne by the children coming. So what is pay-go about? Pay-go is about this, America: You pay and we will go spend. We are seeing evidence of it today on the Senate floor. It is not just that we pay; We pay, our children pay, and our grandchildren pay. We are going to pay with real dollars, but our grandchildren are going to pay with lost opportunity, lower levels of education, lower levels of everything in the future. There is not one problem in front of this country we can't solve. We can't solve them by borrowing money that we don't have to spend on a good thing, let alone a bad thing, but on a good thing while we allow hundreds of billions of dollars to be wasted every year in this country. So when we hear the cry that somebody doesn't care, we have to ask the question, What do they care about? Can we care for those who are unemployed today as well as care for our kids? Yes, we can. It is really not all that hard, with the examples of waste and duplication. There is $100 billion worth of fraud in Medicare that we can document. So there are all sorts of things we can do. The question is, Do we have the courage? Will we step to the line? Will we do what is best for our children and the unemployed? That is the question. It is not that somebody doesn't have compassion for the unemployed. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, this is a very straightforward amendment. It is a re-vote where we voted 100 to 0 to make sure we are transparent with the American people about when we change and go around pay-go. All it does is create a Web site so the American people can see when we have done that and how often and what the total amount is. We voted 100 to nothing for it the last time it was presented to this body. I yield back my time.

Mr. COBURN. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I move to suspend provisions of rule XXII for the purpose of proposing and considering my motion to commit with instructions with respect to H.R. 4213, which is at the desk.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I move to suspend provisions of rule XXII, including germaneness requirements, for the purpose of proposing and considering my amendment No. 4493.

Mr. COBURN. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I rise today to discuss the introduction of S. 3627, The HIV/AIDS Save Lives First Act of 2010. This important piece of legislation will make crucial improvements to our approach to bilateral global AIDS efforts. As a practicing physician and former co- chair of President Bush's Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, I have introduced this bill to ensure that our global AIDS continue to prioritize life-saving medical treatment and reduce the transmission of the disease from mother to child. The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief--known as PEPFAR--has been wildly successful and has begun to reverse the course of the AIDS epidemic worldwide. Two and half million HIV/AIDS patients from 30 different countries currently have access to lifesaving treatment because of PEPFAR. A 2009 report found that from 2004-2007 as many as 1.2 million lives had been saved because of the program. In 2008, Congress and the President in an overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion passed the Tom Lantos and Henry J. Hyde United States Global Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Reauthorization Act of 2008 to continue the important life-saving work of the PEPFAR program. It is of grave concern, then, that our fight against AIDS is now at risk of failure. A recent New York Times article, ``At Front Lines, AIDS War Is Falling Apart,'' details how hundreds of thousands of patients are being denied promised care in countries such as Uganda--a country once held up as PEPFAR's success story. Government officials have confirmed the rationing of treatment slots and have advised their partners to support ``an equitable system of triage for total ART [antiretroviral drug treatment] slots. . . .'' Former UNAIDS chief Dr. Piot remarked about past success and doubts about the future: ``Then, we were at a tipping point in the right direction,'' he explained. ``Now I'm afraid we're at a tipping point in the wrong direction.'' We must not lose sight of the fact that HIV/AIDS is a disease that we can diagnose, treat, and prevent. Not only does treatment save lives-- it is the best prevention tool we have. Treatment lowers viral loads, which reduces the likelihood of individuals spreading the disease by as much as 92 percent. Treatment reduces transmission among partners, eliminates baby AIDS, and keeps those with HIV in the medical system where they can receive proper counseling and care. And the availability of treatment is integral to promoting HIV/AIDS testing and early diagnosis. With the U.S. spending more than $6.7 billion on global AIDS efforts, we are not losing the war on AIDS due to lack of commitment or resources. Instead, we are losing because of misplaced priorities. We can eliminate the tragedies of baby AIDS and AIDS orphans and prevent the spread of HIV by focusing on saving lives by expanding access to treatment. It costs less than $300 a year to keep someone with HIV healthy and alive, about the same price to cover the airfare to send each of the 25,000 participants to the ongoing AIDS conference in Vienna. If saving lives is truly our priority, we must ask every time we spend a dollar intended for AIDS relief if that dollar would be better spent paying for lifesaving treatment that would keep a mother alive, a family together, or a baby born free of the virus. If you ask Africans what PEPFAR is, they will tell you it is about AIDS treatment. It is the treatment component of PEPFAR that has made it the most successful U.S. humanitarian effort in history because it has literally saved the lives of millions, preserved families and communities, and rescued countless babies from being born with an AIDS death sentence. The PEPFAR program's long-term success relies on the promise of life- saving medical treatment to those in need. Unfortunately, according to a recent report the recent moratorium on new enrollees in the program has already caused an estimated 3,000 deaths. The HIV/AIDS Save Lives First Act strengthens the current policy that requires a majority of all funding under PEPFAR be spent on life-saving HIV/AIDS treatment. Specifically, this legislation would increase the treatment allocation to 75 percent of all PEPFAR funding. It also sets the modest goal that by 2013 we treat 5 million people with HIV/AIDS. Many claim that we cannot treat our way out of this epidemic, but they ignore the simple truth that treatment is prevention. Analysts from the World Health Organization published research arguing we can drastically reduce the transmission of AIDS and virtually halt the widening epidemic in Africa within a decade through aggressive routine testing and early treatment. Other prevention efforts remain an important component of the program. Without the reliable promise of access to treatment, however, the PEPFAR program will not enjoy long-term success. This legislation ensures that the PEPFAR program fulfills its promises, saves the most lives possible, and reduces transmission of the disease. The HIV/AIDS Save Lives First Act also allocates a small percentage of funding for the critical diagnostic screening that must be ramped up dramatically if we are to locate and treat every infected person in the countries where PEPFAR operates. Finally, the bill acknowledges that every baby infected with HIV by her mother during birth or breastfeeding is a largely preventable tragedy. The bill would target baby AIDS for complete elimination with 100 percent coverage with the medical protocols that prevent almost all instances of mother-to-child HIV transmission. The Save Lives First Act requires recipients of funding to spend no more than $500 in annual PEPFAR funding per patient they treat. As recently as 2008, documents provided by the administration show that the PEPFAR program spent $1,100 in annual treatment costs per patient. This is unacceptable--inefficiencies come at the cost of human lives by limiting the number of patients PEPFAR can treat. The most commonly prescribed drug regimen costs just $64 per year and many organizations are providing care to patients for no more than $250 per year. For example, Doctors Without Borders has had remarkable success in achieving treatment efficiencies and now reports that its per-patient treatment costs in Malawi were only $237 per year. While costs may vary from country to country--and patient to patient--it is both reasonable and important that every funding recipient under PEPFAR limit their aggregate per patient expenditures to $500 per patient. The costs of drug regimens continue to fall dramatically, and PEPFAR must take advantage by providing treatment to more individuals. The HIV/AIDS Save Lives First Act would require that any funding recipient under PEPFAR be limited to a treatment allocation of $500 per patient treated. This act would also set the modest goal that PEPFAR would treat 5 million patients by 2013. If the program's per patient expenditures were down to $500 per patient, the program should actually treat 6 million patients by 2013, and if everyone were as cost- effective as Doctors Without Borders, we could be treating 10 million patients. In the rare instance of a country in which per patient expenditures remain above $500 per patient, it is more than reasonable to assume that these more developed countries have the resources--along with other global partners--to ensure that the per patient treatment expenditures ensure access to the highest-quality treatment for each patient. Everyone can agree that dollars provided to HIV/AIDS treatment should go directly to patient care--not bloated administrative budgets. A common way of protecting this important principle is to limit the administrative budget for PEPFAR funding recipients. The HIV/AIDS Save Lives First Act limits administrative overhead to 10 percent of total expenditures for every funding recipient under the program. The bill also limits the State Department's administrative budget for PEPFAR to 10 percent of total funding. Again, treatment is prevention. But this strategy relies on identifying HIV positive individuals who are unaware of their status and linking them to treatment and counseling. The first step to any prevention strategy is an aggressive testing strategy. Unfortunately, only about 40 percent of people with HIV in developing countries are aware of their status. The HIV/AIDS Save Lives First Act sets aside 5 percent of PEPFAR funding to dramatically ramp up rapid HIV diagnosis to identify people who do not yet know their HIV status in order to get people into treatment and early reduce their transmission rates through treatment and education. This bill also sets a target of conducting 1 billion rapid tests by 2013 and sets aside 25 percent of testing money to help countries implement a policy of universal, opt-out rapid HIV testing. Rapid testing and access to treatment are particularly important to end baby AIDS, babies being born infected with HIV or becoming infected during their first year through breastfeeding, once and for all. An estimated 430,000 children were born in 2008 newly infected with HIV, mainly through mother to child transmission. About 90 percent of these infections occurred in Africa. Only 28 percent of pregnant women in Sub-Saharan Africa received an HIV test in 2008. Moreover, the World Health Organization reports that access to AIDS drugs is severely limited in developing countries, with fewer than 10 percent of pregnant women with HIV in those countries having access to medication for their own health. Of course, dramatic gains are seen when universal testing of pregnant women and newborns is provided along with appropriate prophylaxis of infections that are that are identified through testing. In the United States, new cases of baby AIDS have been virtually eliminated. Studies have found that 99 percent of babies were born uninfected if an infected mother was diagnosed and proper treatment was administered. Botswana, a country that used to have HIV infection rates as high as 50 percent of child-bearing-aged women, instituted these interventions. Ninety-two percent of pregnant women in the country are now being tested and the drop in HIV-positive mothers delivering infected babies dropped from 35 percent to 4 percent from 2004-2007, with 13,000 HIV- infected moms being identified annually. Prevention of mother-to-child-transmission, PMTCT, is cheap per life saved: as of 2008, estimated costs of PMTCT drugs to prevent the spread of HIV for (1) mother/child pair was US$167--generics--and US$318-- branded--and the price of drugs and treatment have only declined since. The HIV/AIDS Save Lives First Act sets a target of eliminating baby AIDS in all PEPFAR countries by 2013, and sets out expectations for how to work towards that target by screening 100 percent of pregnant women and newborns in PEPFAR countries and providing prophylactic or ARV treatment for all HIV-positive moms or babies. By emphasizing providing lifesaving treatment under the PEPFAR program, we can continue the enormous success we have had in saving lives and preventing the spread of this terrible disease. It is my sincere hope that my colleagues adopt these common sense policy changes that will significantly reduce human suffering, keep families together, and save millions of lives.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I rise today to discuss the introduction of S. 3627, The HIV/AIDS Save Lives First Act of 2010. This important piece of legislation will make crucial improvements to our approach to bilateral global AIDS efforts. As a practicing physician and former co- chair of President Bush's Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, I have introduced this bill to ensure that our global AIDS continue to prioritize life-saving medical treatment and reduce the transmission of the disease from mother to child. The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief--known as PEPFAR--has been wildly successful and has begun to reverse the course of the AIDS epidemic worldwide. Two and half million HIV/AIDS patients from 30 different countries currently have access to lifesaving treatment because of PEPFAR. A 2009 report found that from 2004-2007 as many as 1.2 million lives had been saved because of the program. In 2008, Congress and the President in an overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion passed the Tom Lantos and Henry J. Hyde United States Global Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Reauthorization Act of 2008 to continue the important life-saving work of the PEPFAR program. It is of grave concern, then, that our fight against AIDS is now at risk of failure. A recent New York Times article, ``At Front Lines, AIDS War Is Falling Apart,'' details how hundreds of thousands of patients are being denied promised care in countries such as Uganda--a country once held up as PEPFAR's success story. Government officials have confirmed the rationing of treatment slots and have advised their partners to support ``an equitable system of triage for total ART [antiretroviral drug treatment] slots. . . .'' Former UNAIDS chief Dr. Piot remarked about past success and doubts about the future: ``Then, we were at a tipping point in the right direction,'' he explained. ``Now I'm afraid we're at a tipping point in the wrong direction.'' We must not lose sight of the fact that HIV/AIDS is a disease that we can diagnose, treat, and prevent. Not only does treatment save lives-- it is the best prevention tool we have. Treatment lowers viral loads, which reduces the likelihood of individuals spreading the disease by as much as 92 percent. Treatment reduces transmission among partners, eliminates baby AIDS, and keeps those with HIV in the medical system where they can receive proper counseling and care. And the availability of treatment is integral to promoting HIV/AIDS testing and early diagnosis. With the U.S. spending more than $6.7 billion on global AIDS efforts, we are not losing the war on AIDS due to lack of commitment or resources. Instead, we are losing because of misplaced priorities. We can eliminate the tragedies of baby AIDS and AIDS orphans and prevent the spread of HIV by focusing on saving lives by expanding access to treatment. It costs less than $300 a year to keep someone with HIV healthy and alive, about the same price to cover the airfare to send each of the 25,000 participants to the ongoing AIDS conference in Vienna. If saving lives is truly our priority, we must ask every time we spend a dollar intended for AIDS relief if that dollar would be better spent paying for lifesaving treatment that would keep a mother alive, a family together, or a baby born free of the virus. If you ask Africans what PEPFAR is, they will tell you it is about AIDS treatment. It is the treatment component of PEPFAR that has made it the most successful U.S. humanitarian effort in history because it has literally saved the lives of millions, preserved families and communities, and rescued countless babies from being born with an AIDS death sentence. The PEPFAR program's long-term success relies on the promise of life- saving medical treatment to those in need. Unfortunately, according to a recent report the recent moratorium on new enrollees in the program has already caused an estimated 3,000 deaths. The HIV/AIDS Save Lives First Act strengthens the current policy that requires a majority of all funding under PEPFAR be spent on life-saving HIV/AIDS treatment. Specifically, this legislation would increase the treatment allocation to 75 percent of all PEPFAR funding. It also sets the modest goal that by 2013 we treat 5 million people with HIV/AIDS. Many claim that we cannot treat our way out of this epidemic, but they ignore the simple truth that treatment is prevention. Analysts from the World Health Organization published research arguing we can drastically reduce the transmission of AIDS and virtually halt the widening epidemic in Africa within a decade through aggressive routine testing and early treatment. Other prevention efforts remain an important component of the program. Without the reliable promise of access to treatment, however, the PEPFAR program will not enjoy long-term success. This legislation ensures that the PEPFAR program fulfills its promises, saves the most lives possible, and reduces transmission of the disease. The HIV/AIDS Save Lives First Act also allocates a small percentage of funding for the critical diagnostic screening that must be ramped up dramatically if we are to locate and treat every infected person in the countries where PEPFAR operates. Finally, the bill acknowledges that every baby infected with HIV by her mother during birth or breastfeeding is a largely preventable tragedy. The bill would target baby AIDS for complete elimination with 100 percent coverage with the medical protocols that prevent almost all instances of mother-to-child HIV transmission. The Save Lives First Act requires recipients of funding to spend no more than $500 in annual PEPFAR funding per patient they treat. As recently as 2008, documents provided by the administration show that the PEPFAR program spent $1,100 in annual treatment costs per patient. This is unacceptable--inefficiencies come at the cost of human lives by limiting the number of patients PEPFAR can treat. The most commonly prescribed drug regimen costs just $64 per year and many organizations are providing care to patients for no more than $250 per year. For example, Doctors Without Borders has had remarkable success in achieving treatment efficiencies and now reports that its per-patient treatment costs in Malawi were only $237 per year. While costs may vary from country to country--and patient to patient--it is both reasonable and important that every funding recipient under PEPFAR limit their aggregate per patient expenditures to $500 per patient. The costs of drug regimens continue to fall dramatically, and PEPFAR must take advantage by providing treatment to more individuals. The HIV/AIDS Save Lives First Act would require that any funding recipient under PEPFAR be limited to a treatment allocation of $500 per patient treated. This act would also set the modest goal that PEPFAR would treat 5 million patients by 2013. If the program's per patient expenditures were down to $500 per patient, the program should actually treat 6 million patients by 2013, and if everyone were as cost- effective as Doctors Without Borders, we could be treating 10 million patients. In the rare instance of a country in which per patient expenditures remain above $500 per patient, it is more than reasonable to assume that these more developed countries have the resources--along with other global partners--to ensure that the per patient treatment expenditures ensure access to the highest-quality treatment for each patient. Everyone can agree that dollars provided to HIV/AIDS treatment should go directly to patient care--not bloated administrative budgets. A common way of protecting this important principle is to limit the administrative budget for PEPFAR funding recipients. The HIV/AIDS Save Lives First Act limits administrative overhead to 10 percent of total expenditures for every funding recipient under the program. The bill also limits the State Department's administrative budget for PEPFAR to 10 percent of total funding. Again, treatment is prevention. But this strategy relies on identifying HIV positive individuals who are unaware of their status and linking them to treatment and counseling. The first step to any prevention strategy is an aggressive testing strategy. Unfortunately, only about 40 percent of people with HIV in developing countries are aware of their status. The HIV/AIDS Save Lives First Act sets aside 5 percent of PEPFAR funding to dramatically ramp up rapid HIV diagnosis to identify people who do not yet know their HIV status in order to get people into treatment and early reduce their transmission rates through treatment and education. This bill also sets a target of conducting 1 billion rapid tests by 2013 and sets aside 25 percent of testing money to help countries implement a policy of universal, opt-out rapid HIV testing. Rapid testing and access to treatment are particularly important to end baby AIDS, babies being born infected with HIV or becoming infected during their first year through breastfeeding, once and for all. An estimated 430,000 children were born in 2008 newly infected with HIV, mainly through mother to child transmission. About 90 percent of these infections occurred in Africa. Only 28 percent of pregnant women in Sub-Saharan Africa received an HIV test in 2008. Moreover, the World Health Organization reports that access to AIDS drugs is severely limited in developing countries, with fewer than 10 percent of pregnant women with HIV in those countries having access to medication for their own health. Of course, dramatic gains are seen when universal testing of pregnant women and newborns is provided along with appropriate prophylaxis of infections that are that are identified through testing. In the United States, new cases of baby AIDS have been virtually eliminated. Studies have found that 99 percent of babies were born uninfected if an infected mother was diagnosed and proper treatment was administered. Botswana, a country that used to have HIV infection rates as high as 50 percent of child-bearing-aged women, instituted these interventions. Ninety-two percent of pregnant women in the country are now being tested and the drop in HIV-positive mothers delivering infected babies dropped from 35 percent to 4 percent from 2004-2007, with 13,000 HIV- infected moms being identified annually. Prevention of mother-to-child-transmission, PMTCT, is cheap per life saved: as of 2008, estimated costs of PMTCT drugs to prevent the spread of HIV for (1) mother/child pair was US$167--generics--and US$318-- branded--and the price of drugs and treatment have only declined since. The HIV/AIDS Save Lives First Act sets a target of eliminating baby AIDS in all PEPFAR countries by 2013, and sets out expectations for how to work towards that target by screening 100 percent of pregnant women and newborns in PEPFAR countries and providing prophylactic or ARV treatment for all HIV-positive moms or babies. By emphasizing providing lifesaving treatment under the PEPFAR program, we can continue the enormous success we have had in saving lives and preventing the spread of this terrible disease. It is my sincere hope that my colleagues adopt these common sense policy changes that will significantly reduce human suffering, keep families together, and save millions of lives.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I submit the following notice in writing: In accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII for the purpose of proposing and considering the following amendment to amendment No. 4425 to the House amendment to the Senate amendment to H.R. 4213, including germaneness requirements: At the appropriate place, insert the following:

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I submit the following notice in writing: In accordance with rule V of the Standing Rules of the Senate, I hereby give notice in writing that it is my intention to move to suspend rule XXII for the purpose of proposing and considering the following motion to recommit with instructions of H.R. 4213: The Senator from Oklahoma [Mr. Coburn] moves to recommit H.R. 4213 to the Committee on Finance with instructions to report the same back to the Senate with changes to include: (A) a reduction in unnecessary government printing and publishing costs to save $4.6 billion over ten years; (B) a requirement to sell off $15 billion worth of unused and unneeded federal real property; (C) a requirement for the Internal Revenue Service to collect any unpaid taxes from federal employees, which would bring in $3 billion, including nearly $2.5 million owed by employees of the U.S. Senate; (D) a prohibition on bogus bonuses for government contractors whose projects are over budget, behind schedule, or do not meet basic performance standards, saving more than $8 billion over ten years; (E) a prohibition on nonessential travel by government employees to save $10 billion over ten years; and (F) a requirement the Secretary of the Senate post on the Senate's public website the total dollar amount of new borrowing and spending and other violations of PAYGO approved by the Senate since the PAYGO law was signed into law.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter dated July 20, 2010, to Senator McConnell.