Thomas Coburn

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I wish to talk about amendment No. 2667. This is a fairly straightforward amendment. The House has $5 million for renovation of the Hoover Building. There is no question that we need to have a continuing ongoing project of renovating that. However, in the Senate, we have $17.5 million. If we look at the Commerce Department and what is going wrong, what we see is that because we are limited by funds, we don't have an active enough oversight of what is going on inside; otherwise, we could never account for the billions of dollars of waste on the census. This is a straightforward amendment. It just says: Of that $17.5 million, we are going to take $5 million, which still puts us at 2\1/2\ times what the House has, and direct it toward the Inspector General's Office of the Commerce Department. What that does is it enhances oversight, enhances transparency, and enhances communication back to the Commerce Department so we can see what is going on with an agency that is obviously troubled. The inspector general's department, and agency-wide, is fielded by tough, great people who probably would pretty much agree with everything I spent the last hour talking about. The fact is, they are limited in what they can do. They are limited by the funds we give them. So we now come down again to priorities. Do we build bicycle racks out in front of the Herbert C. Hoover Building or do we spend money making sure the inspectors general and the auditors can actually see what is going on in this agency? It is very straightforward. It is going to be a fun vote. I understand how amendments go on the Senate floor when we are in the mood to spend money and not act responsibly. But do we really want transparency, do we really want to know what is going on, do we really want to discover the reason we are in such big trouble, and do we really want to fund the inspector general at a level that will give us the information upon which we can make better decisions? That leaves alone the question of whether we will make better decisions. I have a lack of confidence on that, but at least with the right information, we will be able to, in fact, see what is going on. We continue not to prioritize funds. The Department of Commerce is going to get a 52-percent increase in funding in our version of this bill. It receives $7.9 billion in additional stimulus funds. That was 85 percent of what they received entirely in 2009, which means in a matter of 2 years we will have given them on average three times what they receive normally in a year. So we are talking about taking a small portion--$5 million--and directing it to the Inspector General's Office so they can do what is needed to be done in terms of carrying out their responsibilities. There is no question in my mind that the Department of Commerce is suffering from mismanagement. I am not directing this to the present Secretary; I am directing this backwards through the Bush administration. Here are some statements that were made in the Senate report accompanying this bill: The committee is extremely concerned about the persistent pattern of cost overruns and schedule slippages on major projects and missions carried out by the agencies in this bill. The committee remains apprehensive about the management of the census. Reports have exposed a culture within many agencies that exhibits a lack of accountability in oversight of grant funding. The committee is concerned that the Census Bureau has failed to implement three recommendations by the IG. NOAA's satellite programs have undergone extensive independent reviews after experiencing cost overruns, delays, and setbacks. The National Polar Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite system has struggled for years with cost overruns and schedule delays and a high risk of gaps occurring to the Nation's weather and climate satellites. The committee remains concerned by the lack of progress in reducing patent pendency and the overall patent backlog. I note the committee routinely takes money away from patent fees to use on other funds. As such, the committee has provided bill language to transfer funding to the Office of the Inspector General for the express purpose of conducting all audit engagements in the oversight of U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Despite these concerns--and I didn't list them all--with the Commerce Department, and a 52-percent increase in spending in the bill, if you were concerned, why would you increase spending that much? That is No. 1. The account for the inspector general is increased only by 4.4 percent. So this is a measly little $5 million out of a $17.5 million increase. The House only has $5 million for the Herbert C. Hoover Building. So we put 2\1/2\ times what the House does in the building, and we actually give the IG the money he needs to do his job. There isn't an agency that needs more oversight and more work by an inspector general than the Commerce Department. I will limit my comments on this at the present time, and I will defer to the chairman, if she wishes to speak; Otherwise, I will discuss one of the other amendments.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and call up amendment No. 2632.

Mr. COBURN. I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and to call up amendment No. 2631.

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

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

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

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to call up amendment No. 2631.

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

Mr. COBURN. I ask unanimous consent to call up amendment No. 2631.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside that amendment in order to call up amendment No. 2667.

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

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I plan on spending some time on the CJS appropriations bill, but I want to delay a moment. We are going to have a cloture vote, whether that is today or tomorrow or sometime, on the Energy and Water Conference Report. I was the one who objected to bringing that to the floor and for some very serious reasons. Unanimously, the Senate body agreed to an amendment that would create transparency in that appropriations bill. There were no objections; it was a unanimous vote. What we attempted to do was to bring to light, to the American people, not just the 30 Senators who were going to get the reports--70 percent of the Senate cannot see the reports--to the rest of the Senators and to the rest of the American people, the reports that are requested by Congress on the operation of this appropriation authority. We put in there a very specific exclusion for anything that would affect security so those items would not be exposed. There were no significant efforts to hold this in conference. So I wanted to explain for a few minutes to the American people and to my colleagues why it is important. What we have here are the following reports. The question you have to ask is, why does the Appropriations Committee not want the American people to see this information? What in the world could be a good reason for American citizens and 70 Senators to not be able to see this? There is not any good reason. I will go through and list what some of the reports are in this bill. Then I will raise the question: Why are we not letting the American people see it? Why are we not letting 70 of our colleagues see it? An annual report on the Department of Energy, on their financial balances, is important information to me. It should be to every Member of this body. But it also should be important to every citizen out there who is paying for the $1.6 trillion deficit we have this year. Actually, they are not paying, their kids are. A report by Chief of Engineers on Water Resources, but the way it is phrased, it is on a ``water resource matter.'' In other words, someone very specifically tied that so they would have information others do not have. This is government in the dark; this is not transparent government. A report by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission identifying barriers to and its recommendations for streamlining construction of new nuclear reactors. If we want to get to clean energy, that is one way to do it. Yet the barriers for that construction, we are not going to know what they are. The American people are not going to find out and 70 Senators are not going to find out. We are not going to have that made available to us. Two reports to report on the transfer of funds within the Department of Army, and a report on the transfer of funds within the Bureau of Reclamation for oversight activities--in other words, a report on the funds that are transferring for oversight, only appropriators get to see that. The American people do not get to see it. I do not get to see it. The President pro tempore right now does not get to see it. Only the appropriators. Why would we not want to share that with the American people? Is there some reason? A report by the administration on detailed accounting of receipts into and obligations and expenditures from the inland waterways trust fund. Well, what most people do not realize is when we put out a number that is our budget deficit every year, that number does not recognize what we have stolen from multitudes of trust funds, including the inland waterway trust fund, which is very important to all of the things that go on along the Mississippi River, the McClellan-Kerr Navigation System, the Upper Mississippi River, the Great Lakes. All of those are funded by the inland waterways trust fund--except we steal all of the money out of it so there is no money in it. Here is the report on it, and they do not want the American people to see it. Why would you not want the American people to see that we are stealing from the funds we have set up that were supposed to be dedicated to do certain things? Because you really do not want a transparent Congress so the American people can see what is going on. A report on remediation efforts by the Corps of Engineers through the formerly utilized Sites Remedial Action Program. Most of us do not even know what that is. But the fact is, if we have former sites that required remedial action, why should'nt we all get to see that? Why should we not be able to make a value judgment on whether the Corps did a good job and what they are doing with the money? But yet we cannot. A report detailing the implementation and progress of the measurement plans for each funded energy innovation hub. We have these hubs out there to create alternative and renewable energy, except we are not going to see what they are doing. It is not going to be available to us. It is not going to be available to the American people, and they are paying for it. What happens if there is an idea and somebody reads about it and it gives them another idea? A report by the Secretary of Energy to the Committee on Appropriations of the House and the Senate on the state of defined benefit pension liabilities in the Department for the preceding year. That is something we should all be aware of, not just a couple of staff members on the Appropriations Committee. The American people should know that, in fact, they do not have the money in the bank to fund their pension liabilities. Yet we are going to suppress that information. We are going to keep it from the sunshine. We are going to keep it from the light of day so the American people cannot see how miserably the government runs its own business. We do not want that out. We do not want you to see it. I could go on and on. I have three pages of reports. Notably, some of them are security related and should not be released to the American public, which this amendment protected. What this means is that 88 percent of the Members of the House and 70 percent of the Members of the Senate do not have available to them the tools with which to make decisions. But, more importantly than that, the American people do not have transparency in their government. They are never going to be made available for taxpayers to read. They are never going to see how sloppily the money is spent, how we borrow money from funds that are supposed to be dedicated and spend them on things that are pet political projects. We do not want them to see that. This is not controversial. The only place it is controversial is to those who are working in the dark. And the very fact that this did not come out of conference with transparency--every other appropriations bill we have passed so far has had this transparency for report language. So why would we bring it to the floor? We should be very concerned that was excluded from this conference report, for a republic cannot function, it cannot survive unless it is truly transparent to the people it represents. Our President was elected on the promise of bringing greater transparency to Washington, not only just to the workings of the Federal Government but to our daily workings as we tend to government. Congress should have supported this effort. I serve notice on the Senate that any conference report that does not have transparency, which I will offer and have offered to every bill, that comes back from a conference, I will do everything I can to block it until that is put back in it. The American people deserve no less than that. It is, in fact, their government, not 30 appropriators' government. It is not just the 30 appropriators who get to govern this country. The fact that this piece of good government, of transparency, of putting out for everybody to see what we are doing has been precluded sends exactly the wrong message to the American people. So it will be that I will come here again, and I will not give up until such time as the American people truly get to see a transparent government. The President and I passed a bill called the Transparency and Accountability Act. You can go to usgovernmentspending.gov and you can see where we are spending money. Sometime this spring you are going to see it all of the way down to the subcontractor, subgrantees level. You are going to be able to go online and see where every penny, except for national security purposes, is spent and who got the money. That is real open government. That is real democracy. That is real freedom. That is real liberty. Without that, based on the demonstration that we make here today by bringing up a bill that keeps us cloaked in secrecy, that keeps the American people in the dark, what we will have and continue to have is less and less confidence of the American people as we try to lead this country back to the greatness it once had. CJS Appropriations I am now going to spend a few minutes, if I may, talking about the Commerce-Justice appropriations bill. This is another in a long line of bills that has a double-digit increase in the size of the government, on the back of a double-digit increase last year, and on the back of a $16.2 billion shot in the arm from the stimulus. We were at $60 billion, essentially, last year, and we are going to increase it by $7.59 billion. That is a 12.6-percent, 12.7-percent increase. I brought a chart out here last week. I will bring it back again today as we debate the amendments I have. But not counting the stimulus, if we keep passing appropriations bills at the rate at which this body has passed this year, the size of the Federal Government will double in 3.5 years. I think that is probably just exactly the opposite mood of the American people today. Yet we turn a deaf ear to the fact that 43 cents out of this $67 billion that we are going to spend--43 percent of it we are going to directly borrow from our kids. We do not have the money in the bank to pay for this. We are going to finance it through a lower standard of living for our children. There is no question a portion of this increase is related to the census. The Census Bureau is in a mess. We have a good new Director. It was completely mismanaged by the Bush administration, there is no question about it, by the Secretary of Commerce, and also the Director of the Census. We had a great caretaker who replaced the previous Census Director, and he did what he could. Now we have a new, very experienced Director of the Census by the name of Dr. Groves, who is handling a very difficult problem. But it is going to come out that it is going to take $60 a person-- hear this--to count the people in the United States. Please give me that contract for 10 cents a person. Please let me do it for 10 cents a person. We are going to spend 60 cents a person-- pardon me, $60 a person, $60 a person to count the people in the United States. Go figure. Let's outline what happened to the Census. The Census routinely uses no-bid, cost-plus contracts. Whatever it costs, do it. Well, it just so happens their plan went awry. They paid bonuses to a company that failed to deliver what was ordered. The Census failed to be clear about what they wanted in terms of the electronic devices. So we have $750 million worth of junk we cannot use. Somebody ought to be held accountable for that. Do you know who that is? That is us. How dare we waste almost $1 billion on one contract, because it was a cost-plus, was not overseen. We did not know what we were asking for, and yet the people who supplied it did not lose a thing. That is a very profitable contract. That is why we have problems in the Federal Government. That is why we have $50 billion worth of waste a year in the Pentagon: because we do not know what we want, and there is no capital at risk for the people who are bidding these contracts. So, consequently, they just do whatever because it is cost-plus. They just send a bill at the end of the month, and we pay it. So we are going to have an $18 billion census that has a high likelihood of being the least accurate census we have ever had. There are probably going to be numerous lawsuits over this census. My hope is that Director Groves can, in fact, salvage the census. But when we get it, it is not going to be accurate. It is going to displace six House seats because it is going to count illegal aliens who should not be counted in terms of the apportionment for the seats in Congress. There are 561 earmarks in this bill. Two-thirds of them--hear me clearly--go to members of the Appropriations Committee. Is that not a coincidence? One-third goes to the other 70 Members of the body, but two-thirds goes to the 30 members sitting on the Appropriations Committee. The President proposed that two programs be absolutely terminated because they have zero worth, value, and contribution to the Federal Government. They are both funded in the bill. The bill is one of many we will pass that will have double-digit increases. I wonder how many families right now are seeing a double-digit increase in their income. That is a rarity today in our economy. Yet we put on the floor almost a 13-percent increase which is about the average of everything else we have been putting out here, in spite of the fact we just spent $800 billion of our kids' money on a stimulus package, and this agency received a significant portion of that. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I want the American people to know where we stand financially. The war on terror will not defeat us. We will defeat ourselves. Every known republic to the world collapsed through fiscal mismanagement. We can read the history, Alexander Tyler on the Athenian empire, several other scholarly works throughout the last two to three centuries. What we are really talking about is our kids. They are not my kids. My kids are grown. They are all in their 30s. We are talking about youngsters this age. She makes a great point. She is already $38,375 in debt, and all she owns is a dollhouse. The sad thing is, she totally underestimates, because her obligation for things we have promised ourselves for which she will have to pay above and beyond income tax rates we have today, Social Security taxes and Medicare taxes, is just a mere $400,000. So by the time she becomes 20, she will owe $800,000, if we count the interest which is coming. It is not long before we will be spending a trillion dollars a year on interest. And this number, by that time, will be $118,000. So now we will have her at $918,000 that she is going to have to pay off for us. Think about that as a moral question. Should we in fact cut the legs off our grandchildren so that politicians and political leaders today can spin things and avoid making the most difficult choices that we now need to make? If one follows the news, especially the financial news, the problem the United States faces today is the fact that the world is losing confidence in the dollar. There is a reason for that. What is the reason? The world is starting to sense that as we continue to borrow more and more billions and trillions of dollars that we will not be able to pay it back. Therefore, the world's valuation of our currency becomes less confident. Therefore, the cost to borrow in the future becomes higher. The figure I just quoted, the $918,000 per child who is born over the next 30 years, is based on today's interest rates of 3.4 percent on a 10-year note that the Government offers. What happens when the interest rates are 10 or 11 percent? We are talking about a fiscal collapse that has never before been seen in the history of the world. Yet we continue to put spending bills on the floor and laud the fact that we are only borrowing 43 cents out of every dollar we spend this year. There will come a time when we can't borrow 43 cents out of every dollar we spend. What will we do then? What will happen then? What will happen is the following: We will either see a totally debased currency which means everything we worked for our entire life will be markedly decreased in value or we will see 15, 20, 30 percent inflation. There is no other exit for this other than for us to do the following: We have to start making the hard choices now. This bill doesn't do it. From 2008 to 2009, the fiscal year ended September 30, we increased CJS by 15.5 percent. This bill comes back and increases it another 12.6 percent. Compound that out and we find, without the stimulus money they also got, that we will double the size of this agency in less than 4 years. I am not sure that is what we want. Here is what we have done so far. If we look at the bottom corner, inflation is expected to be less than 1.6 percent. Yet we see the following percentage increases: 5.7; 7.2; Energy and Water, 1.4--the only reason it was 1.4 is because they got $45 billion from the stimulus--Agriculture, 12.6; Treasury-HUD, 22.5; Interior, 16.2; and now CJS, 12.6. Most families--and I know almost every business--are making hard choices right now about what they spend money on and what they do not. They are in tough times. Somehow that hasn't reverberated to this body. If it has, it has not reverberated to the appropriations committees of the House or Senate. That will be an amendment to freeze spending at last year's level, which could easily be done, but we don't have the courage to do that. There will be several other amendments offered. They are working on an agreement at this time. I will be offering three amendments. I will wait until the Senator from Maryland comes before offering them. I understand they don't want me to call them up at this time. So I will not. One of the amendments limits funding to the National Science Foundation. It has created quite an uproar with political scientists that we would dare decrease the amount of money we spend on figuring out why politicians are vague or why certain people vote a certain way or the other way. What happens when we spend money on obvious answers is that money for the National Science Foundation doesn't go to cure a disease. It doesn't go to make an absolute impact on some child who is suffering from a chronic disease that unless the research dollars are there, they will never have a normal life or lifestyle. In fact, everybody screams when some of their money gets attacked. So the political scientists in the country, those who get this money, $91.3 million over the last 10 years that we have doled out to political scientists, that $91 million could have gone to the study of biology or chemistry or pharmaceutical science or fields of endeavor such as micronutrients or cellular metabolism or genetic manipulation so we can cure a disease. Instead, where do they spend the money? Campaigns and elections, electoral choice systems, political change, domestic conflict, party activism, political psychology, and political tolerance. What are some of the good things NSF does? NSF scientists have developed new computer-generated robotics to help people with severe disabilities. They can do what we can do, those of us who don't have a physical disability, except they can now do it with a robot. They become independent again and get their life back. NSF supported engineers that created a bone substitute that blends in tendon tissues which mimics natural bone and provides better integration so that people with lost movement in their joints have it returned. NSF created technology with their grants to engineer the next generation of biofuels. We are seeing the science. They created a new type of fiber reinforced concrete that bends without cracking. It is 300 to 500 times more resistant to cracking and 40 percent lighter in weight which means we can build bridges that will never fall down. We won't have a Minnesota tragedy again. That is the real science from the National Science Foundation. Let me give a little hint of what the National Science Foundation projects for political science have been. There is $188,206 to ask the question: Why do political candidates make vague statements, and what are the consequences? We all know the answer to that. They make vague statements because they want to get reelected. They do not want to get pinned down. It is not hard to figure out, but we blew a lot of money on it. How about a grant for political discussion in the workplace? That has to be an important priority for the country now that we are running a $1.6 trillion deficit. Here is one: television news and the visual framing of war. I am certain that is an important research topic that we should sacrifice our children's future for, and I know it must be a priority for her, this little girl, whose daddy or mama was smart enough to recognize what the real consequences of our behavior are. Or how about another study: Why people are for or against military conflicts? Nobody is for military conflicts. They are for the defense of our country. But to spend money to study why people are for or against? Tell me what that contributes to her future? I am accused of being a flatlander. I do come from Oklahoma. I was born in Wyoming. But there is one difference with us flatlanders: we actually have worked in our lives, we understand common sense, and we have had to make hard choices before. How about this study, the impact of Medicare reform on senior citizens' political views. I can tell you what it is. We take away a benefit, they are not going to like it; we add a benefit, they are going to like it. Send me the check. I will do it for free. It is plain, old common sense. It may be nice to have the statistics behind that, but we all know the answer to those questions. Here is another one: evaluate whip counts. Let me tell you what a whip count is. Every party has a whip so they can count the votes before they happen so they think they know what is going to happen on the vote, so they know what votes to bring up and what votes not to. We are going to have a study by Congress: How do whip counts impact party leaders in the legislative process? Who cares. Nobody should care about that. What we should care about is her future. We have our priorities totally upside down and turned on their ear. How about a conference on the effect of YouTube on the 2008 election. Now, the people who are interested in that are politicians because ``how do we use YouTube to get reelected?'' Should we be paying for that with your tax dollars? ``How do we keep incumbents incumbents?'' I would think a better study of political science is, how do you throw us all out. That is a better use of the funds. How do you get rid of us since we are doing such a terrible job managing the finances of this country? Or how about the ``NewsHour'' with Jim Lehrer--to pay for complete, live, prime-time gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Democratic and GOP National Conventions. Guess what. They were covered by three other networks free. We did not pay them a penny. Yet we pay this. We are going to increase NSF's budget in this bill 8 percent, the National Science Foundation. It is the one we ought to be increasing 12 or 15 percent, but it ought to be on real science, on pure science, on science that has an outcome we can measure that is not related to the observation of common fact but is new research that will derive great benefits for the people of this country. So I will be offering an amendment to limit the amount of money. We are going to hear all sorts of claims. What we have heard already on the blogs is that National Science Foundation political science research contributes to our understanding of democracy. I think we have pretty well figured what democracy is. ``Our ability to have a free and open democratic process would be significantly harmed without this research.'' You know what is being harmed is her generation, as we foolishly spend dollar after dollar on things that are not a priority--hundreds of millions of dollars on program after program after program that 90 percent of Americans could say: That might be fine if we were in a cash-rich position, but at a time when the Federal Government is about to double every 4 years and the debt is about to double every 5 years, wouldn't it be smart to not spend money we don't have on things we don't need? So that is what this amendment is. There is another claim: The loss of National Science Foundation funding will significantly harm political science research in this country. Let me give you a few facts about that. The University of Michigan--they are the receiver of the largest grant under the NSF--has a $7.5 billion endowment. That is just one of the universities--$7.5 billion--and we are supposed to keep sending, every 10 years, $100 million for political science research. Here is the political science--here it is: The heritage of this Nation is that one generation creates opportunity for the next by sacrificing, making the hard choices they need to make to make sure what has worked in the past will provide them opportunities in the future. This does not do any of that. What it says is, the ones who are on the ins, the people who are well connected now, the people who are dependent on millions of dollars of funding--when they are sitting with billions of dollars in their endowments--are worth more than she is. That is exactly the problem. Until we figure out we are going to have to make some tough sacrifices, her future is at risk. Unless we do this fairly soon, we could very well be on an irreversible course. Two or three more years of spending the way we are spending and borrowing the way we are borrowing will doom her to a standard of living 40 percent below what we see today. Those are not my words, the economists agree. The governments are going to end up consuming 45 or 50 percent of our total GDP. We are at 10 percent this year--the highest in our history with the exception of being in the midst of World War II. Never have we been in such shape as we are in today. I think we have a lot of things wrong. But the No. 1 thing we have wrong is we have forgotten that service is about sacrifice. Service is about giving up something of you so somebody else gets ahead. We cannot expect the American people to model that behavior if we are not willing to do it. If everything we do is about protecting our own vested political interests and protecting our campaign contributors and protecting the well connected and not excluding and divorcing ourselves from all of that and making great commonsense judgments, we are history as a nation. I wonder when it started. I wonder when it started that we decided we were more important than the country. I wonder when it started when we decided we would push our hand and say: Stop the heritage of this country. When did it start that we decided we were worth more than the generations that follow us? When did it start that we decided we were not brave enough to take the hits to make the hard choices so the Republic can be preserved? When did it start? When did that cowardice start because it is ever present now as we go through the appropriations process. I ran a business for 9 years, and I learned a lot doing that. I learned a lot about people. But I also learned a lot about making tough choices. We, in fact, can make tough choices and preserve what is good and best and brightest in all of us. As a matter of fact, hope comes from that, when people make those tough decisions that, in fact, consider the very personal nature of how individuals are affected and they are at work for the common good for the long run. You see, there is not a business out there today that is surviving just thinking only in the short run. If they are, they will not be here 2 years from now. They are all thinking in the long run. They are all positioning, planning, managing, developing. The same with families. They are doing that right now at the dinner table--positioning, planning, developing what is going to come next: How we are going to get where we want to go. We are in a rough period now. What do we cut back? What is the thing that we sacrifice today to secure the future for our family tomorrow? Ashamedly, not much of that exists in Washington. What does exist is a willingness to say yes to everybody, and then wink and nod and try to have it both ways. I am not a both ways kind of guy, and neither is America. The great sheet is about to be lifted over the, I would use, imbecilic methods of Washington. When transparency gets its full view, America is going to make some major changes, and I am not talking Republican-Democrat. I am talking both. This is a problem of elitism. This is a problem of short-term thinking by the political leaders of this country on: How do I manage my political career and to heck with the rest of the country. Nobody in their right mind would bring appropriations bills to the floor that have these types of increases at a time when we are stealing $1.4 trillion from our grandkids. How do we justify it? How do we justify growing the Federal Government at a time when families are struggling like they have never struggled except during World War II and the Great Depression? How do we justify that? We do not justify it. We cannot justify it. What we can do, and what will happen in the debate on the amendments I bring forward--they will be ignored. They just will not debate it. It will go away. That is what happens when we bring critical amendments to the floor and question the wisdom of growing the Federal Government larger and larger without developing a way to pay for it and without taking a critical look at all of those programs out there. There is $350 billion worth of waste, fraud, and duplication in the Federal Government right now. The American people ought to be clamoring that we freeze spending everywhere until we have done a review of every government program that is out there--just like they are doing with their own families, just like they are doing with their own businesses, just like every organization in America today is having to do, except governments. How is it this can happen? How is it we can go down the sewer drain just like other republics, knowing what history says will happen to us if, in fact, we abandon fiscal sanity? That is what this appropriations bill does, and all the rest of them we have passed because, in fact, we will double the size of the Federal Government in the next 4 years, based on 2008, 2009, not counting the stimulus. If we are running a $1.4 trillion deficit--actually $1.8 trillion when we count everything we have stolen from Social Security and everything we have stolen from, for example, the inland waterways trust fund and the other trust funds; and we have not funded any Federal pensions; and, by the way, we have not funded anything else we have an obligation for, such as VA health care or military retirement--none of those things are funded--what happens when we get in the crunch? What happens when nobody loans to us anymore? Wouldn't it be prudent to prepare for that? Wouldn't it be prudent for us to dig in as a nation--Democrats and Republicans and Independents--and say: Time out. Let's look where we are. Let's quit wasting $350 billion a year. Let's eliminate the duplication. There are 800 programs outside the Department of Education that are run by the Federal Government for education--outside the Department of Education. How about eliminating them or at least putting them in the Department of Education and consolidating them. And oh, by the way, education has done a wonderful job at the Federal Government level. As soon as the Federal Government got into our educational system, our scores started declining, our graduation rates started declining, and our college graduation rates started declining. That is the record of the Federal Government's involvement in education in this country. There is a lot we can fix, not just my ideas. The question I am asking is, Why aren't we asking the question? Why aren't the American people challenging their elected Members to the Senate and the House? Where are your priorities? Does she not matter? Does their future not matter? Answer the question: With $918,000 worth of unfunded liability and debt for which at 20 years of age she will be paying--we will be paying the interest, which means the taxes for that interest will come back to her eventually--how will she get a college education? How will she own a home besides a dollhouse? How will it happen? Will Tinker Bell just come down and give it to her? That isn't going to happen. So as we think outyears, we ought to be thinking about what our actions today are going to cost. Yet we don't. These are disturbing times. These are not just disturbing times because we face a war on terror, and they are not disturbing times because we have an economic downturn. What is disturbing is that we absolutely have avoided leadership in bringing this country back to its commonsense basics of spending money we have for things that are an ultimate priority, not spending money we don't have on things we don't need. A large portion of these appropriations bills spends money we don't have on things we don't need. We may want them. There is no question that politicians want them. There is no question that the National Science Foundation political science grantees want them. Do we need them? That is the question. And we have no leadership that will discern, at a crucial juncture in our history, a path that will bring us to not only a recovery from this recession but a recovery for an opportunity for every child her age. It is deeply personal with me. I have five grandchildren. I look in their eyes, and I see the potential of their lives and all of these other children who are out there. There is tremendous potential in them. You know what, we are going to waterboard them. That is what we are going to do. We are going to waterboard them. We are going to flood them with debt. We are going to shackle their opportunities. We are going to limit their possibilities because we don't have the courage to make the difference for their future. Mr. President, I will yield the floor, and I will come back and offer my amendments when the Senator from Maryland arrives. With that, I note the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I thank the chairman for her words on this amendment. I have learned a very critical lesson. We have an Energy and Water Appropriations bill that we did the same thing on. For some reason, it didn't come out of conference. Transparency didn't come out. I don't doubt the veracity of the senior Senator from Maryland, but I would just as soon have a recorded vote, if she would not mind. I also want to answer the story of the rat, which is a great example of the mismanagement at the Department of Commerce. It does not relate to the present Secretary at all. If, in fact, you have plumbing problems in the building, the management is supposed to raise that issue. In fact, the Department of Commerce received a large sum of money with the stimulus. The House has only $5 million for the Herbert C. Hoover Building. GSA says this amendment will not limit at all their ability to accomplish what they want to accomplish there. So if, in fact, $17.5 million is enough to get it done, why would we object to having more than that--if GSA says it is only going to pay $17.5 million, why are we putting $22.5 million in it in the first place? The example proves my point: Management is lacking. With vigorous leadership and a vigorous, strong inspector general force that is funded at the same level of increase that we fund the government, as far as percentage of increases, we could hope to accomplish that. Amendment No. 2631 I will move to my other amendment No. 2631. I spent a lot of time talking about this amendment before the chairman came to the floor. I will not repeat everything I said, but I will discuss the question of priorities. I have a great respect for a lot of what the National Science Foundation does. I have very little respect for their grants for political science as a science. Part of that is because I think it is low on the priority of where they should be spending money when we can create things through NSF to save lives and also because of some of the grants that have been spent and put out there. I will review a few of those over a short period of time and then will yield the floor to my colleague, the chairman of this subcommittee. How do you back up the fact that the National Science Foundation gives a grant for political science--here is the question asked: Why do political candidates make vague statements and what are the consequences? In the realm of science, being a physician, being trained in the sciences, first of all, it is a question to which we already know the answer. We know why politicians make vague statements. Because they don't want to get pinned down. But most important, they want to get reelected or elected. For us to send money to study something that stupid, that low on priorities is beyond me. Or why are people for or against military conflicts? Do we need that science to tell us so that the next time we are in a military conflict we go out and manipulate the American people or do we have military conflicts based on the national defense and security interests of this country, even when there are political consequences to it? The real world would never fund such stupidness. They would never allow millions and millions of dollars every year to be spent on silly things to help politicians understand why they spin or why they do not answer questions or why people might be for or against war. It is pretty easy to figure out. Or studying how Medicare reform affects seniors' political views. That is pretty easy: If it hurts me, I am ``agin'' it; if it helps me, I am for it. Yet we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars paying for grants, through the National Science Foundation, to universities that have billions and billions of dollars in endowments. As a matter of fact, Tufts University has billions in endowments. They charge their students $40,000 a year in tuition alone. They are the recipients of some of this grant work, and they are the ones squawking the loudest. So here we have an entitled class of professors in political science who now don't want their gravy train taken away when I say right now there is no way this can be a priority for this country with the debt we have and the economic situation we have. It cannot be as important as a multitude of other things for this young lady. It cannot be. I do not have any illusions about what is going to happen to this amendment. I know the appropriators reign supreme. What I am hoping is that the American people ultimately reign supreme. So as we vote to vote down this amendment or they vote to table this amendment so they do not have to directly vote on the amendment, one has to walk back and say: What is going on in Washington that you will not clean up the excesses in a time of great national distress? We will not and we haven't, and that is why we have a giant increase from last year and this year. We entered the recession in 2007, remember? That is why we borrowed 43 cents out of every $1 we spent this year because we will not make these hard, tough choices about why politicians are vague, while we continue to spend millions and millions of dollars so somebody can sit in an office and pontificate and you can see the same answer-- all you have to do is look at the news shows and you get the same answers.

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

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

Mr. COBURN. I make an inquiry of the Chair. Do we have a limit on time for debate?

Mr. COBURN. I understand. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, will the Senator agree that the Defense Department funds all sorts of research in all sorts of scientific areas, and they don't necessarily do that on the predicate--they do it on the basis of what their need is. There is a very big difference, does the Senator agree, between the social sciences and political science?

Mr. COBURN. Sure, and I am only targeting with my amendment political science, not social sciences, if the Senator reads my amendment.

Mr. COBURN. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. COBURN. I thank the chairman for allowing me to ask a question.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded. The PRESIDING Officer. Without objection, it is so ordered.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I listened very patiently to the last 2 hours about why we need a government-run plan. I want to concur with my colleagues about the problems in the insurance industry. There is no question they are great. But the reason the problems are great is because there is no real competition today. The rhetorical question is, you can't have it both ways. Nobody wants it both ways. The fact is, I saw this on the Internet this week. I thought it was appropriate for where we are. Here is a youngster walking on a street. She says: I'm already $38,375 in debt and I only own a doll house. Everybody agrees we have a too costly health care system. Everybody agrees we need to fix that. What we don't agree on is how to fix it. We have heard 2 hours of what is wrong with the private insurance industry that has not been allowed to be competitive, has not been forced to be competitive. And yet the answer to that question is that we want the government involved. The Senator from Pennsylvania talked about all the government programs. Sixty-one percent of all health care today comes through the government. Every government program is over budget, associated with fraud, and ineffective in its implementation on a cost basis. That doesn't mean we want to get rid of them. It means we want to make them better. The real problem with having the government do more is, right now 43 cents out of every dollar we are spending we are borrowing. We create a government plan. We put $60 billion into it, and we can create competition. But we don't have competition now. Everybody agrees with that. Nobody denies that we don't have good competition. But we don't have good competition because we have failed to act. The Senator from Ohio showed a chart of CEOs' pay. If they were having to compete, that pay wouldn't be there, especially not at that level. I don't disagree with that. But the way to control that is real competition. Forty-three cents of every dollar we spend this year we will borrow. And it will be worse next year. It will be 45, 46 cents next year of what we spend we will borrow. This picture doesn't talk about what she owes. This is just what the debt is now, just the $11.8 trillion. What she owes is another $400,000, because we are paying out of Medicare what we have never created the tax base to fund. So in fact what we are doing is, we are going to charge this little girl for our Medicare. The impact of that is when she was born she owed $400,000. By the time she is 20, she will owe $800,000. What will happen to her? There is no question we have positive benefits with Medicare. There is no question we are taking care of people who can't take care of themselves through Medicaid. There is a question of how effective we are doing with Native American tribes in terms of that. We are seeing improvements in veterans health care. We have all these different programs that are run through the government. So when you only have 39 percent of the health care in the country to put into the market, it is going to be very difficult to lower costs. What is the problem with health care in America today? The problem is cost. It is too expensive. It is about 40 percent more expensive here than anywhere else in the world. Why is that? Well, there are a lot of reasons for it. But the first reason is, we will not allow real markets to develop in the health insurance industry. We have stopped it. And now we come and say: We are unhappy with it, so we want to create a government plan--a government plan that will compete. I do not have any problem if you create a government plan if you fund it and make it competitive. But that is not what we are going to do. Because what we are going to do with a government plan is we are going to turn it into another Medicare. It will supply people health care. It will lower their costs. But we are going to transfer the cost to this little girl. It is just $440 billion spent on Medicare this year, of which $80 billion of it was fraud. So the problem is, which solution do you think works better? Do you think we have the history that says government-run health care is efficient and effective and, therefore, we ought to do more of it or should we say: We know what works in the rest of the industries and markets in this country. Maybe we ought to allow markets to truly compete--which nobody wants to do--to force the insurance industry into a competitive structure where you can actually see what you are getting and you can see what you are paying. The other problem about this little number is, not only does she have $38,000 in debt right now, and another $800,000 when she gets ready to buy her insurance, we are going to tell her what she is going to buy. We are going to take the freedom away from her to decide what is best for her and her family. Then we are going to yoke her with a whole bunch more taxes. There is no disagreement in this body that we need to make changes in health care; and the assumption that anybody would say that is absolutely erroneous and fictitious. We recognize that. The question is, which way do you fix health care? Do you fix it with a government that is bankrupt already, that has stolen the future from the next two generations, and add more on to them or do we get common sense back in and say: Well, first of all, we can eliminate 8 percent of the cost if we have good tort reform in this country because 8 percent of the cost of health care is defensive medicine. I read a study this week. It is interesting--and I have some passion about this because I have been on the end of those lawsuits--I would note that the vast majority of those who have been discussing health care for the last 2 years are lawyers. They are not doctors. They never laid their hands on a patient. They never stayed up 20 hours in a row to take care of somebody who needed them. They have all the answers, but they have never been in health care. Here are what the numbers are on malpractice lawsuits in the United States: Eighty percent of all the cases that are filed are thrown out of court. Of the remaining 20 percent, 89 percent are thrown out of court. So 3 percent of the cases are legitimate in this country. What do you think that is costing us? And we ignore it? We are not even going to talk about the fact that we have an extortioned service going on in health care that does not cost the lawyers a thing? It costs everybody else in this country billions of dollars a year because we are doing tests that nobody needs, except the doctors to defend themselves. And that is $200 billion a year out of $2.4 trillion. That is what the number is. So when less than 3 percent of the people--and I am all for compensating people who are truly injured. I have no problems with that. As a physician practicing over 25 years, there is no question I have made mistakes. There is no question. There are no doctors who are perfect, and, consequently, sometimes people are injured because of doctors' mistakes. Most of the time they are not. And it is not about not compensating the injured. It is about changing the mindset in this country that you can extort people into settling when you have no real claim, and that is what is going on with 85 to 90 percent of the cases. So the answer for health care is: controlling costs. So how do we best do that? It is interesting, we have had the accusation that there are no other plans out there. My colleague from North Carolina and I introduced the first plan in Congress for health care. What does it do versus what the Baucus bill or the public option bill will do, according to CBO? We cover 94 percent of Americans--identical to what the Baucus bill does. So 94 percent of all Americans will get covered under our bill. We save the Federal Government $70 billion in the first 10 years, close to $1 trillion in the second 10 years. What does the Baucus bill do? It saves $88 billion, and nobody knows what it is going to save after that. But it costs the States billions. Our bill saves the States, in the first 10 years, $960 billion. We cover more people, with no increase in the cost to the Federal Government, versus a marked increase in the cost to the States by the Baucus bill, or by the public option plan. It eliminates preexisting condition. We all agree we need to do that. Nobody is fighting that. The question is, how do you do it? Do you do it in a competitive model that costs insurance companies pain if they are not covering the people properly? And if, in fact, there is an incentive to cover preexisting conditions, then you have an incentive for the insurance companies to invest in the management of chronic care rather than ignore covering somebody. I do not deny there is cherry-picking going on right now, but it is only because we allow it. We do not have to allow it. But the answer does not have to automatically be another long-term, bankrupt plan run by the government. Nobody can deny the $95 trillion, 100-year unfunded liability for Medicare. That is GAO, that is CBO, and that is the Medicare trustees. You cannot deny that. So we have a program that seniors are fairly happy with, except the Baucus plan is going to cut a half a trillion dollars out of it. But we cannot pay for it. So we are not doing anything to drive that cost down, to drive in efficiency. What we are going to do is create more government, to have another plan that is going to get in the same shape as Medicare. We all want the same thing. We want to get everybody covered in this country. We want the cost of health care to be affordable. And we do not want to bankrupt our children. We have already bankrupted them. So the danger of having a government-centered, government-centric, government-run, government-devised, government-managed health care program--just by history, look at what we have done. Medicaid costs tons more than it was ever supposed to cost. SCHIP costs tons more than it was ever supposed to cost. Medicare costs tons more than it was ever supposed to cost. Indian health care--it does not cost more because we just let them suffer. We do not put the money into it. VA costs tons more than it was ever supposed to cost. TRICARE costs more than it was ever supposed to cost. They are all government programs. They are all way over budget. So the question the American people ought to ask is: If we all want to get everybody covered, and we all want to drive down costs, does the government have a track record that says it has done that? No. As a matter of fact, it has done the opposite of that. So it is not a matter of whether you trust in government. We have 61 percent of health care running through government. And as a physician who has practiced for over 25 years, I will tell you, it is my opinion the reason costs are out of control is not because of the insurance industry--and I am not a defender of them; as a matter of fact, I hate them about as bad as I hate anybody telling me what I am going to do to my patient--the problem is, we have directives coming from the government that have disrupted the market in health care and created this tremendous differential. The other difference that we have in the Patients' Choice Act is that we do not put another burden on the States, which all these bills do. The States are swimming in debt. They are struggling to stay ahead, and we are transferring billions, almost--we are transferring trillions of dollars of expense to the State. We are making it nice for four States. We have picked four States and we have said: You don't have any cost the first 5 years. We just, out of the hat--because they are having a little worse economic time than others, we have said: You don't have it. But for the rest of the States, it is the mother of all mandates, and they will never be able to afford it. There is also another little sneaky provision in the bills--both in the HELP bill, the House bill, and the Baucus bill--which is, we know we are not going to cut doctors' fees 21 percent. The Presiding Officer would agree to that, the Senator from Colorado knows we are not going to do that. But we are not going to recognize it. We are not going to recognize that cost. So we are playing games with the American people. We are saying: Here is what it costs, when we know it is going to cost a lot more than that because we know we are not about to do that. But we do not have the courage to admit that. We do not have the courage to ask for an honest score. The other difference is, we empower patients and States, not bureaucrats. We preserve the right, the inherent individual liberty right, of an individual to decide what is best for them rather than having the government decide what is best for them. In our bill, 9 out of 10 Americans get a tax cut. So let me draw the parallel again. We do not have a government-run program. We save the Federal Government money. We save the States $1 trillion. We get more people covered than any other plan that is out there. Nine out of 10 Americans get a tax cut. We eliminate preexisting illness. And we bend the cost curve down considerably. And, oh, by the way, we do not destroy innovation in health care, which is 75 percent of the innovation in the world, which will go away if any of these other plans are instituted--the incentive to put capital at risk to create opportunity for medical innovation. There is a lot I could say, but I think what I would like to do is yield to my colleague from North Carolina in terms of someone who has been with me, who knows health care, who has been from the start working with us to try to put forward a plan that says we can accomplish this same thing and save tons of money. Mr. President, I yield to my colleague from North Carolina.

Mr. COBURN. I thank the Senator. I am sitting here thinking, if I was sitting at home tonight listening to this, how do I hear the story that I heard for 2 hours on having a government-run plan and how bad the insurance industry is? As a physician, I don't like them a whole lot, I can tell you that. I don't like some of their tactics. I certainly don't like the way they cancel insurance policies on people. There is a lot about them I don't like. But I don't want to eliminate them. What I want to do is create a real market where they have to be savvy and compete and they have to be efficient and they have to help us help one another get well. We are going to hear a lot over the next month on health care. We are going to hear all these claims, much like we did from Congressman Grayson, who made an outlandish claim that my side of the aisle wants people to die. That is what was said in the House of Representatives. What I want is people to live. I want this little girl in the picture to live too. Do we have an unsolvable problem? No. Do we have ways of making health care costs much less in this country? Yes. Do we have ways of ensuring increased innovation and advanced disease prevention in this country? Yes. Do we have ways to protect this little girl in the photo? Yes. But the debate is over how we do that. One side says we do it by making the government a whole lot bigger--$1 trillion bigger, $3 trillion bigger over the next 20 years. That is one side of the debate. Our side of the debate says this is inefficient health care. We want to cover everybody. We never want anybody to go bankrupt or to be denied care. We think you can do that without growing the government by 25 percent. We think there are other ways to do it. We are honestly worried about our track record in Washington when we have a $1.4 trillion deficit this year and a Medicare Program that is absolutely bankrupt--it will run out of money in less than 7 years from now, totally out of money--and we are going to be borrowing it all then. Is there another way to do it? So either we make a large jump in the size of the Federal Government and add to the $838,000 that this little girl is going to have, or maybe we can work together and say the insurance companies are bad, but can we keep something like that and make them efficient? Can we allow people to buy across State lines? Can we give people opportunities to buy what they want to buy rather than being limited? Do we trust people to make good enough decisions for themselves? The Baucus plan doesn't do that. It says we have three or four plans from which you get to choose, but we are going to tell you what you have to buy. And, by the way, you have to buy insurance in this country. Think about that. I carry with me a copy of the the U.S. Constitution all the time. Every bill out there has said you don't have liberty because the Federal Government is going to tell you where you have to spend your money. You have to buy an insurance policy. So if you make a quarter million dollars a year, it doesn't matter if you want to fund that self-insurance, it doesn't count. You still have to do that. If you don't, you are liable to a tax. If you don't pay the tax, a $25,000 fine. If you don't pay the fine, you are in jail for a year. How do we get off telling people that and taking away that liberty, that freedom that is supposed to be guaranteed under the Constitution? The answer is, well, it is better for everybody because if we don't have everybody covered, then it is going to cost more because that is the big government answer to it. Maybe it will cost more if we force and drive competition, if we create transparent markets, where you know what something costs before you get it in health care. In fact, there is a real connection with the purchase of health care and the payment because everywhere we have tried that, it is working to control health care costs. But we refuse to do it. Frankly, the reason our idea is rejected, which is changing the Tax Code to treat everybody the same under the Tax Code, is because the labor unions don't want that to happen. That is exactly why. Everybody knows that is the problem. Everybody in the country knows that is the problem, but we don't have the political courage to face up to how to fix the problem. As soon as you make everybody the same under the Tax Code, you empower 35 million Americans who don't have insurance today to get it. You save the States $1 trillion over the next 10 years, and you give 95 percent of Americans a tax cut, and guys like me will pay a little bit more for my health insurance and income tax. But we will not do that because the powers that deliver politicians to Washington are more powerful than the principles and the character to follow the pursuit of the Constitution. This little girl in the picture, and everybody like her in this country, is at risk today. We are going to have this great big debate and say how bad the insurance companies are and how bad the government programs are. But the fact is, we don't have a bipartisan bill. Our ideas were thrown out, 13-10, at both the Finance Committee and the HELP Committee--13-10, 13-10, 13-10--because the idea is they didn't want a compromise bill. They didn't want to solve the problems. They wanted their way or the highway. So, consequently, we are going to get a bill. I have no doubt. But my little Lucy right here and her football--she is going to lose her football. She is not going to have any little Lucys because she is not going to be able to afford them. She is going to be paying off her $800,000 worth of government obligations starting at age 20, and she will never climb out of the pit. So when America thinks about health care, there are a lot of ways to solve it. One is to trust what makes America great--granted, with some changes--or the other is to trust the government to create more government programs. I will just add this one point. Do you realize that in the bill that passed the HELP Committee there are 88 brandnew government programs-- 88; 219 times we have held the Secretary of HHS to write in-depth regulations. Now, 88 programs interfering in health care are going to be problem enough. But 219 new sets of regulations--oh, by the way, we created the comparative effectiveness committee with the stimulus bill, and we are going to have 26 people tell every doctor in the country how they are going to practice medicine, what is right and what is not right. And, by the way, in all the committees a prohibition on rationing was voted down. What are we to think? We are going to create a large government program and grow the government by $1 trillion over the next 10 years, $2 billion-plus, maybe $3 trillion in the next 10 years, and we are going to have Washington tell people how the physicians and caregivers will treat, what they will use to treat, and all the time little Lucy will not matter if she gets sick. We will have already made her sick because we have stolen her future, her absolute future. It is a cute picture, but it sends a devastating message to us as leaders in this country. How dare we do that. I wanted to bring out my other charts tonight, but I didn't want to bore everybody. The fact is, the appropriations bills that were passed--if we keep doing what we are doing--America, hear this--we are going to double the size of the Federal Government in 3\1/2\ years. We passed the Agriculture bill today, which is 22 percent bigger, and it was 15 percent last year, and that doesn't count any of the supplemental and the stimulus money. It doesn't take long, if you are growing something at 22 percent, for it to double. My gray hair comes from the fact that I think we are missing a great opportunity to work together. I think we can solve the health care problem. I think we can do it without enlarging the Federal Government. Especially when we pay 40 percent more than anybody in the world, there ought to be savings that we can get to make health care cost less and to cover everybody else. I know we have seen the studies that show that. So why isn't it going to happen? Why isn't there going to be a bipartisan bill? It is all political. It is not about the people in this country, it is about the political power structure in this country. Problems can be solved, common sense applied to limited government and restoring freedom to individuals. There are going to be so many lawsuits in this country, most of them legitimate, over the health care bill. You will not be able to uphold a challenge to the Constitution of forcing me to pay, take my money that I earn privately and spend it on what you say I have to spend it on. It is one of the greatest denials of liberty I ever heard of, and it is going to get challenged. It is going to go through the courts fast, and I suspect the courts are going to uphold the citizens of this country rather than the power center. I yield the floor or I yield back to my colleague from North Carolina.