Thomas Coburn

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, the amendment is very carefully written so it will not allow the enforcement of administration of funds. If you will carefully read public law--that is how we got it germane--it does not allow the enforcement. It doesn't mean they can't do it. The money can still go out. If you still want to do the enhancements, you can. It simply says you may not have to if you don't want to. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. COBURN. I want to finish my point. The Department of Transportation in every State is not run by idiots. Their No. 1 goal is for the protection and enhancement of their citizens. We are now saying to Oklahoma or Colorado or Delaware, you don't get to make the decision about what the priority is because 10 percent of the money you get has to be spent this way. All this is saying is for this year alone--for this year alone--you can opt out of certain provisions. Some you may want to do, some you may not want to do. But if you choose to put $7 million in to take a curve out of a road that is killing people versus building a bike trail or a sound barrier, you can do it. You are actually going to save more lives. It will make no difference in the number of jobs created or saved. It has no effect on that whatsoever. The exact same amount of money is going to be spent, and it is all going to be spent on construction of what the highway trust fund was--I am not saying these are not good ideas. I am saying it is the priority of placing them ahead of safety and improving roads, improving bridges. How do we explain to the family of the person who was injured in Tulsa, OK, that we are going to build a sound barrier rather than the bridge where a piece of concrete fell through his windshield and critically injured him? That noise is more important than that individual's life? I say give the freedom back to the States for this one year to not require a mandatory 10-percent allocation to enhancements. Most of the States probably will not take that. But I can tell you, in my State, where we have the second or third largest number of deficient bridges, we are going to build bridges, we are going to fix the broken bridges, we are going to save people's lives, and we are going to save more people's lives. By the way, our taxpayers put the money into the highway trust fund for this with every gallon of gas. Oklahoma has never gotten more than 94 percent back and over the last 20 years has averaged less than 80 percent of what we send here. So it is highly insulting in this year of tough, difficult times for us to get less than what we send up, one, and then say: 10 percent of it you cannot spend on the greatest need in your State; that we know better, Washington knows better. Washington does not know better. We do not preclude any of the enhancements anywhere else. If the State departments of transportation want to do every enhancement and go to the 10 percent, they can go to it. What we are saying is, if your State has a need that is critical to saving people's lives, maybe you don't build a sound barrier right now but, in fact, you fix the road or you repair the bridge. It is common sense. The question will be, Do we do what is best for the American people or do we stand with the dogma that says we know better? Can we trust Governors and State departments of transportation to make good decisions for the safety of their individual citizens in their States? I think we can. I am not excited about what will be the outcome of this vote, but I tell you that this kind of common sense--it does not eliminate it. It just says we should do that. To save the Chamber time, I will ask unanimous consent to withdraw-- Mr. President, I want Chairman Murray to hear this, if she will. I would ask unanimous consent to withdraw amendment No. 2370 which puts a limit until the trust fund is stable. I will stop that. I will withdraw it, if I can have unanimous consent to do that.

Mr. COBURN. We will spend the time voting on something I don't think will be adopted anyway. On amendment No. 2371, none of the claims the Senator from California made are accurate. They are not accurate. There will be no decrease in jobs. There will actually be the opposite of what she said--enhancement and saving lives. There will be a real ability for the States to make the best decisions for their citizens. With that, I yield back the remainder of my time.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw the amendment; amendment No. 2370.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, 13,000 people died on American roads last year because of the quality of the roads and bridges. We have spent $48 million in the last 4 years on museums, some of which are already closed. The money we collect from taxpayers should be prioritized to build roads, bridges, and highways. This amendment is a simple amendment. It says we should be spending right now, this next year only, no money for museums until we get the roads back. I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I believe the desk has a modification to amendment No. 2370, and I ask unanimous consent for that modification.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I wish to talk about all three of the amendments I plan on getting votes on. I will give a little summary on amendment No. 2371. The way the highway trust fund spending is set up now is that if we send your State $100 million, $10 million of that $100 million has to be spent on enhancement projects, regardless of the condition of your roads, regardless of the condition of your highways, regardless of the condition of the bridges in your State. All this does is allow States to not have to follow that in this, No. 1, tough economic time; No. 2, when we know highway deaths related to roads and bridges alone account for 13,000 deaths a year. So we will intend to ask for a vote on that. It does not prohibit the States from doing these enhancements, much as was claimed in debate yesterday but, rather, gives an opportunity for the States to make good value judgments about what is in the best interests of their State in terms of highways, roads, and bridges. Amendment No. 2372 Amendment No. 2372 is an amendment which requires us to prioritize. Unbeknownst to most Americans, money that is collected from the purchase of your gasoline has been used--$28 million of it, as a matter of fact--to fund transportation museums. That may be a great use in a time when we are not in the economic situation and circumstances we find ourselves in today. What this amendment does is say, until we get out of the trouble we are in and until the trust fund gets back to where it needs to be, we shouldn't be prioritizing and we shouldn't be earmarking money for transportation museums. It goes back to common sense. The money we are collecting in gas taxes ought to be used to repair and build highways and bridges and roads, not fund museums. As a matter of fact, several of the museums that have been funded in the last 5 years are already closed. They came through earmarks. We spent millions of dollars. Nobody had any interest in them; consequently, they were closed. In this one bill we have one that has been earmarked. It may be the right thing to do, but now is not the right time to do it. So what this amendment simply does is say that for this year--this year only--we are not going to allow lower priority items such as a transportation museum to displace money that could be used to enhance somebody's safety or protect their life. I don't know what the outcome on this will be, but I think it will be a telling statement for the Congress that if we decide museums are more important than somebody's life--more important--the priority is there--it will show a disconnect in this Congress as to whether we are willing to make good priorities with Americans' taxpayer dollars or do we continue to ignore common sense and spend the money the way some or one or many individuals would like to do it, without regard to what the original intended purpose for the money was and without regard to the very serious situation we find with our roads, highways, and bridges. Senator McCain and I asked the Government Accountability Office to look at where the money was spent over the last 4 years prior to this year, and $3.7 billion of highway money went for transportation enhancements, of which museums are one. Granted, it wasn't a lot of money, but when you take $38 million and apply it to defective bridges in Oklahoma, what you can do is fix 75 of our defective bridges-- bridges that are putting people's lives at risk and money that Oklahomans paid out that ought to come back and take care of the problems we have. The same for Colorado. The same for Missouri. The same for all these States. We are behind. We have 137,000 or so bridges that are suspect in this country. We recently had an individual in Tulsa, OK, who was seriously injured when a chunk of concrete fell from a bridge through his windshield. So it wasn't the people driving over the bridge; it is the people going under the bridge who are put at risk, simply because we have focused money on things other than highways, bridges, and roads. So it is by law right now that we have to spend 10 percent of that money, and some of it goes to museums. All this amendment says is, right now, let's not spend money on museums and let's fix roads and highways and bridges. We authorized $4.1 billion over the last 5 years for transportation enhancement set- asides. All of that comes out of the 10 percent mandatory--and I have the other amendment I talked about before. Let me go through what the GAO report said: $850 million had to be spent on scenic beautification and landscaping projects. Well, $850 million could have built a lot of highways in this country. It could have repaired a lot of those 137,000 bridges. Yet we mandated that the money got spent on something other than roads, highways, and bridges. We allocated $488 million for behavioral research. There is no question that some of that is absolutely necessary in terms of us making decisions. We allocated $224 million for 366 projects to rehabilitate or operate historic transportation buildings--$224 million. That is half of what Oklahoma spends a year on what they get from the trust fund, and we did it to preserve historic buildings and transportation novelties rather than spend it on highways, roads, and bridges. We allocated $84 million for road-kill prevention, wildlife habitat connectivity; $28 million, as I said, to establish 55 transportation museums; $19 million to control outdoor advertising. What this GAO report says is we refuse to make the hard choices about priorities. All this museum amendment says is not now. For 1 year, let's spend the money we were going to spend on museums and put it into real infrastructure, real highways, real bridges. Amendment No. 2370 I have one other amendment I wish to discuss--and then I will reserve the remainder of my time and give the chairman her time--and that is amendment No. 2370. We know, because of the increased price of gasoline, and we know because of the economic recession we find ourselves in, that dollars going into the highway trust fund have been added. As a matter of fact, twice in the last 2 years, we have borrowed money from our children and grandchildren to keep the trust fund viable because the taxes coming in off the trust fund have not kept up with the pace of spending we have authorized and subsequently obligated to be spent. We know the highway trust fund is on the brink of insolvency. Within a year, if we don't get the 18-month extension which I think is being planned, we will go back and steal another $7 billion or $8 billion from our kids to keep this system viable. What this amendment says is, if we are going to do that or until it becomes viable on its own, we should preclude the transportation enhancement program. We know we don't have enough money to take care of the very serious problems we have on our roads, on our highways, and with our bridges. Yet we continue to force the States to spend 10 percent of their money not on highways, roads or bridges. That doesn't make any sense. So this is a much stronger amendment than my earlier amendment that says, until the highway trust fund becomes solvent, until we quit stealing money from our kids and our grandkids and actually pay as we go, pay for what we are wanting to do, at least that 10 percent of the money is going to get spent on real roads, real bridges, and real highways, not on enhancements. I know many do not agree, and I am readily perceptive of their disagreement. The fact is, if you go out and poll the American people and you ask them: Should we fix the highways that allow 13,000 people a year to die because of the quality of the highway or should we build a walking trail or a sound barrier, they will all say: Fix the highways first. Come back and do these other things later. Should we build a museum when we have roads in disrepair? No. They will all say that--unless they are the ones benefiting directly from the money going to an earmarked project for a museum. So it is not a question of common sense, and it is not a question of priority; it is a question of whether we will break the chain of how things are done here and, in fact, say: American taxpayers, you are paying this money every time you pump a gallon of gas, and we are going to make sure that goes for roads, bridges, and highways first; and when we get extra money, we will then enhance the areas around or surrounding the highways. I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. COBURN. I think, first, the Senator doesn't understand amendment 2371. It doesn't eliminate any money. It allows the States to opt out of the enhancement if, in fact, it is better. The Senator talks about life. With 13,000 people killed on bad roads last year, that didn't have anything to do with driving skills or the cars or anything else, other than we didn't put good roads into place. It is a question about priorities. There will be no job loss at all. There will be no decrease in spending under amendment No. 2371. What it simply says is that you don't have to take 10 percent of your funds anymore and spend it on enhancements, if you know you have people who are going to die because you don't fix a road. She talks about 200 deaths versus 13,000 deaths. There are 137,000 deficient bridges. Should we fix the roads or build a sound barrier? Which one is important? Should we fix the roads or build another museum? Should we fix the roads or enhance walkways? It is not as if we don't have walkways and trails. The question is, where is the greatest need? And will we make prudent judgments about giving freedom back to the States and say if, in fact, they don't want to enhance in this tough economic time, they don't have to? It doesn't preclude California or Washington State from doing enhancements. They still can. It just says that in those States that have significant critical infrastructure needs and roads that are at high risk, under amendment No. 2371, they get a chance to opt out and do what is best for their citizens and their State, and to fix some of the bridges, instead of building a walkway or a bicycle trail. They will be able to fix a bridge or fix a road and take a curve out where people are dying, instead of building a museum. It is not onerous. The arguments are specious. The fact is, we are giving back to the States and saying they can prioritize this. If you think enhancements are not as important as the risks you have on your highways, you can opt out--this year only--and put it into roads, bridges, and highways.

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

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I wish to spend a few minutes this morning on some amendments I have offered. I ask unanimous consent to withdraw amendment 2373.

Mr. COBURN. Will the Chair advise when we will be out of morning business?

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

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I will spend some time discussing the amendments we have. There is some opposition to our amendment to allow the States to opt out of being required to fund transportation enhancements. This does not eliminate the enhancements. What it simply does is give the State of Colorado or the State of Oklahoma the opportunity to say, with roads in such disrepair and 138,000 bridges in disrepair, that we have the ability, if we so choose, to take all of the money, instead of 90 percent, and apply it to solve the problems we have. So it will not force California to not do enhancements. It will not force any State to not do them. It will give them the privilege of electing whether they want to do those enhancements when, in fact, we have such a critical need in terms of roads, highways, and bridges. So the goal of this--and it is important to know where the money comes from. The money is taxes that are collected from individuals in Colorado and Oklahoma and every other State that are then sent here and then sent back. In my State--I do not know about Colorado--we have never gotten more than 93 percent of what we have sent here. We used to average about 74 percent. But now, as to the money that does come back, 10 percent has to be spent on enhancements, whether that is sound barriers or walking paths or bicycle paths or numerous other enhancements, as under the SAFETEA-LU bill. So what this amendment does, it does not force anybody to not, but it gives them the option to fix the problems in their State. I would note that the National Transportation Safety Board notified us that last year 13,000 people died on our highways, not because they made a driving error, not because someone else made a driving error, not because they had a problem with their automobile or with their truck, they had the accident because the roads were substandard. Thirteen thousand people lost their lives. So the question of priority, of whether my department of transportation in Oklahoma ought to have the ability to fix roads and bridges instead of building sound barriers ought to be left to us. This amendment is for this year only. It does not eliminate, does not change the law. It just says: We are going to give you the option this year with this money, if your State has needs--and Oklahoma has significant needs; I know Colorado does because I am there a lot--that we do not necessarily spend it on sound barriers, that we can actually spend it on something that is going to save somebody's life. So it does not force anybody to not do enhancements but gives them the right to choose the priority of saving lives over enhancements, if they so desire. The Senator from California made a statement yesterday about what this amendment would do. There is no force in this amendment other than to allow. It allows the States the freedom to do what is best for their citizens rather than saying 10 percent of the money they get back has to be spent on things that are not going to save lives, are not going to enhance safety, but, in fact, are going to enhance aesthetics. So I think it is a commonsense amendment. There is no force; that if California wants to continue to spend 10 percent of their money on enhancements, they can. There will be nothing that will keep them from doing that. It will be what the State decides to do rather than what we decide to do. Since it is money taken from those States, it would seem we would want to give the States the option to make the best priority choice for those dollars for their individual citizens. I am very appreciative of Senator Murray's agreement to take two of our amendments that are based on transparency to the American public. One requires HUD to report to Congress on homes that are owned and the cost to taxpayers so the American people see what the Department of Housing and Urban Development is doing. The other is an amendment to make available to the public all the reports--and there are numerous reports required in this bill of the Transportation Department--to make those available to the public as well so it is in the light of transparency. I am very thankful for Senator Murray's agreement on those two amendments. I have two other amendments I will talk about when Senator Murray gets to the floor. Otherwise, Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COBURN

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

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and amendment No. 2370 be called up.

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

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

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and amendment No. 2371 be called up.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and amendment No. 2372 be called up.

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

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I wish to spend a little bit of time talking about the problems before us in terms of transportation, and then I will go back to these amendments based on whatever the chairman wishes and however she wishes to handle the debate on these amendments. What I think about is that right now our transportation trust fund is not growing at the rate at which our needs are growing. I do not think anybody--neither the chairman of the Appropriations Committee nor the committee that is responsible for the transportation authorization program--would disagree with that. I do not think anybody else would disagree that in a year when we are going to have a true, not an Enron accounting, but a true budget deficit of $1.8 trillion by the time you count the money we are going to steal from Social Security and other trust funds, that we are going to have $1.8 trillion we are going to borrow from our grandchildren, and at a time when we have, at a minimum, 130,000 bridges in disrepair in this country. And that is the Department of Transportation's own numbers. Out of 600,000-plus, 130,000 either have to have lesser loads or fewer number of vehicles going across them or do not meet the designs needed for the loads they are carrying or are crumbling and are not expected to collapse but are falling apart, that at this time we ought not to be spending our money on anything except roads and bridges. The debate Senator McCain put out here is just one way of getting at the problem. Inside the Transportation bill is a requirement that if a State gets money and they want to fix a bridge, 10 percent of the money to fix that bridge has to go to make things look nice around it. That is great if we are running a great surplus or we are not borrowing the money from our kids. But right now the fact that we mandated that obligated moneys to State highway and transportation departments, that they have to spend 10 percent of the money that is obligated on aesthetics makes no common sense. It does if we have an excess of funds. It is something to which we would all agree. But when we have the problems where we have 13,000 people a year dying because of the quality of the roads in this country--not quality of vehicles, not driver error, but the quality of roads--and we have this large number of bridges that are truly in the long run not safe, why would we be spending money on anything other than roads and bridges in a transportation project, as far as surface transportation? I am not talking about trains and inner-city buses. I know we have to do that as well. But for the proportion that goes out, why would we not spend that money on the real needs that are out there? Madam President, 13,000 lives is a lot of lives. Actually, it is one of those benchmarks on which you can measure Congress. We would rather have $5 billion worth of earmarks that make us look good at home than make sure that $5 billion goes toward saving somebody's life by repairing a road that needs to be fixed right now--right now--not next year, not 2 years from now, right now. Why are we going to have these things that make us look good and may be a need but may not necessarily be a priority? How many of them are a priority over the fallen-down bridges in this country? The families who lose members because of road quality in this country do not think those are priorities. They think fixing the roads and bridges are priorities. But you see, we have a disease in the Senate and in the Congress: We think we know better. We do not want to make the tough priorities that might not sell well in a particular area in our home State that would, in fact, solve some of the major problems with transportation in this country because we will not look as good. And yet we can spend money on taxiways for airports that have six flights a day and have very few people through it and subsidize every passenger to the tune of $130 when if they could drive an hour and find an airport, we would not have to spend any of that money on it. Most of us drive an hour to get to the airport. But yet we do earmarks. We decide, the wisdom of us--it is pretty interesting. I heard the ranking member talk about oversight. There is not any significant oversight going on in this Congress. I almost laughed out loud. For every hearing we have, we ought to have 10 oversight hearings. We talk about we are going to say where the money goes, and then we don't follow where the money goes. We don't do our job of oversight. The NextGen, I understand that is an important priority. I am not questioning that. But the point of Senator McCain's amendment is not NextGen, it is earmarks. It is the fact that at least here is something we know is going to buy safety in aviation, whereas the rest of the earmarks are not. We have an earmarked museum in the bill. Tell me, at a time when we have 9.7 percent unemployment, we have a trust fund for transportation that is belly up, that we are stealing the money from our kids every 6 months to keep it viable rather than from the taxes of consumption of gasoline and diesel, tell me that is a priority right now when we have run a $1.8 trillion deficit. The fact is we refuse--we refuse--to make the hard choices in Washington. We make choices for our political purposes. We make choices for the well endowed. We make choices for the well connected, for the well heeled, whether it is beach nourishment and the hundreds of millions of dollars that are made off that or it is a museum or a bike path or the restoration of a train station. Tell me where those are in terms of priorities of the 9.7 percent of Americans who do not have a job and are looking for one and the other 6 percent who are so discouraged they are not even looking anymore. Tell me why that is a priority. Senator McCain's point is dead on. There is a commonsense test, which is, would the average guy with the same amount of money fix the bridges and fix the highways or would he do the superfluous stuff, the enhancement stuff, the feel-good stuff if it were about his kids and his family? The average guy would not. But you see, we are not the average guy. We do not have to play by the rules because we know that the court of public opinion only comes after us once every 6 years, and if we can, in fact, enhance our ability to raise our campaign funds, if we can, in fact, look good to the well connected, then we are going to be able to find a way to say a message something different than what we actually did. That is pretty cynical, but when we have 13,000 people dying on roads every year because of the quality of the roads--and those are not my numbers, those are NHTSA's numbers--wouldn't you think every dollar we have ought to fix the roads and fix the bridges and wait on the aesthetics until later? Wouldn't you think the common man with common sense would say, Let's do the most important thing first, that buys us the most safety and the best transportation effect, rather than make the politicians and their well-heeled buddies look good? I understand why people are upset with the Congress. It is because we make decisions that do not have much connection with reality. And then after we do it and we don't do the oversight that is required, we blame it on an administration. I thought the debate about whether we could trust the FAA--we can trust the FAA if we do the following things: make sure they will be before us every 2 or 3 weeks talking about the progress of what they are doing; making sure we are having the oversight hearings; making sure we are doing our job to make sure the bureaucracy with which we give the responsibility to carry out policy is, in fact, being held accountable and, if not, withdraw the funds through a special rescission package to make sure that since you are not acting responsibly, we are going to withdraw your money. The last time there was a true rescission in the Congress was 1995. We talk a big game about what a good job we do in oversight and good judgment. What happens is staff members make the decision of what gets included and what does not get earmarked. Sometimes it is based on economic priorities and sometimes it is based on the economic priority of who is running for reelection. The other problem we have is things are not very transparent here, in spite of our President's desire that they be that way. I have a couple of amendments that are going to make sure the public reports that are required in this bill are made available to the American people, not just to the committee staff; to make sure that HUD reports to Congress on homes they own and the cost to the taxpayers, not just to a committee of Congress. Amendment No. 2371 I now call up amendment No. 2371 and ask that it be the pending amendment.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I wish to talk about what this amendment does. This amendment forbids the mandatory spending of that 10 percent of money on things that are not going to make a difference when it comes to highway safety and bridge repair. And it says that Gary Ridley, the director of the department of transportation in Oklahoma, can take all of the money and make new bridges and new roads and repair bridges and does not have to worry about taking 10 percent of the money and spending it on aesthetics. At another time, another place, maybe we would want to do that. But with our infrastructure crumbling, and with the trust fund not with enough money because of the economic shape in which we find ourselves, to continue to mandate that every transportation department in the country has to spend a full 10 percent of their money, not on what is important, but on something somebody may like, not on something that is about safety, but on what somebody may like and what may look good, to me does not connect with common sense. I am probably a minority in that opinion in this building, but I am not in the minority in that opinion in this country. When times are good, we can afford to make such discretionary spending mandates on the States. When times are tough, when infrastructure is in poor shape, when the quality of our roads is taking people's lives every day, and when our bridges are falling down and chunks are falling off of them and injuring people severely, as happened in Tulsa 6 weeks ago on an interstate bridge, and falls through the windshield of a car and critically injures an individual who is driving down the interstate, it is time for us to use common sense on how we spend this money. I would make one other point; that is, that this bill, compared to last year, in terms of real numbers--not in terms of the numbers that have been spun out there--is a 22-percent increase. If you go through all the appropriations bills we are bringing to the floor and what we have already passed, it is like there is no recession going on. There is absolutely no inflation. Yet we are growing government at 12 times the rate of inflation, and we are doing it on bill after bill after bill. There is no apology anywhere from the Appropriations Committee that we are sorry we have to spend this increased amount of money, in spite of the fact we absolutely don't have it and that we can't winnow down and make our priorities sharper and better. No, what we do is we just bump the number. In case you are interested, if you include contract authority, there is $75.8 billion. Even if you don't include contract authority, you have a 12-percent increase. In the HUD portion of the bill, we have a 10-percent increase. So it is not just transportation. We are increasing housing and urban development 10 percent. So there is no inflation; tax revenues are down. There is no question we have greater needs, but there is no force to say: How do we more efficiently put out the money? How do we hold those spending the money more accountable? How do we get greater value for the money we are spending? No. You know what we do? We take the credit card out of our pocket, and we put it in an ATM that says: Charge to our grandchildren and charge to our children. That is what we do. Then we come up here and we say: This is absolutely necessary. The vast majority of families in this country today are making tough decisions--very tough decisions. They are either saying: I have a job or I am lucky to have a job or, boy, am I thankful. I don't want to end up without a job, so I think I will start prioritizing where I have to spend money. The people where one of the two workers in the family have lost a job are making those tough decisions every day: What is an absolute necessity and what isn't? Actually, it is more than the average American. Almost every American is making those kinds of decisions today. But isn't it curious the Congress isn't? Isn't it curious we don't prioritize? Isn't it curious that it has been years--whether under Republican control or Democratic control--since we have had an appropriations bill that comes out and spends less money? Are all these agencies efficient? Could it be done in a better way to get better value with less money? Could we force savings in these branches of government? Those questions aren't even being asked. There are no priority questions being asked. What we do is we say: Here is our 302(b) number; how are we going to spend the money, rather than seeing what is the need, how efficient is the bureaucracy utilizing that money under the policy proscriptions we give them, and what are we going to do about it? So we come out spending hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars with millions of earmarks. I heard mention about the earmarks. What the American people need to know about earmarks is this: It is not the earmark that is bad, it is the extortion that comes with the earmark. Because everybody here knows that if you have an earmark in an appropriations bill and you don't vote for the appropriations bill, the next time you want an earmark, guess what happens. They happen to remind you that: Oh, you had an earmark in the last one, but you didn't vote for the bill. So since you are not supporting our bill, we are probably not going to be as likely to include your earmark. What does that do? The problem with earmarks is it takes the focus off what we are doing collectively in the best interest of the country and makes the focus about the individual and the State. There is nothing in this document--which is the U.S. Constitution-- that gives us the right to think about our States. When you are sworn in here, they do not say: Mr. Coburn, Oklahoma, you will uphold the Constitution as long as it protects Oklahoma. It says: You will uphold the Constitution. Our Founders knew that any State couldn't be healthy unless we as a nation were healthy. Yet earmarks undermine that every time and force us back to parochialism--not Federalism but parochialism. So we take the money from individuals in the various States, and then, through our wisdom of all knowledge in Washington, we send it back so we look good, rather than leaving the money there in the first place and letting you decide how best to spend your own money. So we don't lessen spending. We always increase it. We claim oversight--which we never do to the level that is required with a government as big as this--and then we complain that somebody wants to eliminate earmarks, and not because the individual earmark may not be a good thing--I can't think of many earmarks that probably aren't good things--but because the earmarks aren't necessarily a priority for the Nation as a whole. That is the difference in being and enhancing statesmanship versus politics. It is OK for Oklahoma to lose for a period of time if our country gets better. I have explained that to my State. I have refused to do earmarks for my State. The reason is we are in a big pot of trouble right now as a nation--a large pot of trouble. If you watch the dollar index in the markets, what you see happening in the last 2 weeks is the value of your savings going down because the value of the dollar is declining rapidly. Everybody knows that the money we are borrowing today will only be able to be paid back through highly inflated dollars. So what you have worked for your entire life, what you have dreamed for your kids, we are undermining here a little bit in this very bill. It is just a little bit, but a whole bunch of little bits becomes a lot. So here we go. We don't make the priorities, we don't make the hard choices, and we increase the spending a ridiculous amount for the time we find ourselves in, knowing a good portion of the spending is going to be borrowed from our kids. We watch the dollar flounder, knowing that the amount you have put aside for your children in the future isn't going to be worth anything. It is a pretty sick, neurotic system we are operating under because it doesn't have enough sunshine on it, and that was the purpose for Senator McCain's amendment. That is the purpose for this amendment, to have some transparency. Let's have some common sense. Let's not force State transportation departments that need critical dollars for bridge repair and road repair to spend it on a bicycle path nobody is going to ride or a sound barrier that truly doesn't cut the sound. Let's spend it on roads and bridges. Let's not force them to make choices that are stupid. Let's trust people to do what is right. There is another observation I would make, and then I will close. I was born in 1948, and I have seen a shift in our country in that 60- plus years. Our nature and our history used to be that we trusted American citizens. I am talking of the Federal Government. We assumed you would do the right thing. Unfortunately, today, so much of the assumption of the Federal Government--especially as it relates to the States--is on the basis that we know you are going to do the wrong thing, and we are here to catch you; that we know better, and we are going to tell you how to do it, when to do it, and where to do it. That has come about as we have had Supreme Court rulings taking away the constraints our Founders said were necessary. It is called the enumerated powers of the Constitution. It is article I, section 8, if you want to look it up. If you read what Madison and Jefferson had to say about that, we have been totally violating the intent of what they said, what they meant, and what they knew we would say about what they meant for the last 30 years in this country. So we find ourselves in a position where we dominate with the power of dollars and taxation to the detriment of our freedom, to the detriment of common sense, and to the detriment of good will. I am not sure how the chairman and ranking member will respond to this amendment, but for this time and this situation we find ourselves in, we ought to eliminate this mandatory 10 percent and let Oklahoma and Kansas and Texas and Kentucky and New York build bridges and highways, not build aesthetics with the money which we took from them and are now sending it back but sending it with all these restrictions on it. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and that amendment No. 2374 be called up.

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

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent, as well, to call up amendment No. 2377.