Thomas Coburn

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, in 2007 I offered this direct amendment. We spent 3 hours on it on the Senate floor. Everybody agreed we needed to get rid of this program then. We had some concerns. The thing I do not understand is why we are waiting the extra 5 months to shut down a program. There is nobody who needs this program. That 5 months--just that 5 months of continuing the program--costs the American taxpayers $18 million. So if, in fact, we are going to shut down the program, I would like to understand the logic of turning it down in January instead of October 1. First of all, nobody is using this system now. Nobody is using it. Why can't they notify in 3 months all the people--which is zero--who are using this today? The other question is, why does it take $35 million? Where is the backup detail that shows what the costs will be? Maybe it is $18 million.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, the problem with this is the earmarks. It is not that New York may not need this. It is that you have taken 50 percent of the money for 10 States. The other 40 States will have to divide the remaining portion of this money for those types of emergency centers and the calculation of risk. It ought to be true competition based on real risk. There is no question New York has greater risk than Oklahoma; that I do not deny. But the fact is, we have taken half the money away from 40 other States and said: You have to compete on the remaining portion, and you may have requirements greater than those earmarked in the bill. I support this amendment. I wholeheartedly ask my colleagues to do the same. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN. So why does it take $18 million? There are only seven stations left, and we are talking about facilities that are smaller than these four desks. Tell me how it takes $2.5 million per buoy to shut them down. Only from Washington would it take that much money. Where is the basis for the knowledge that it takes $18 million?

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

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I would tell the Senator from Washington, first of all, I do appreciate that the Senator is attempting to shut this down, and I thank the Senator for that. It has been long overdue. But I do question the amount of money it takes to shut this down. We know the bureaucracies always want more money than what is necessary. You have allowed in this bill that whatever is not used they can plow back into anything they want to use it for. Why would we not terminate it at the end of the fiscal year? Every month we are running it, it costs $3 to $4 million--$3 to $4 million. I know it does not seem like a lot when we are going to have a $1.8 trillion budget deficit this year, but I do not understand why we would not do it. I say to the Senator, I appreciate the fact that he is doing it. I think it can be done for a lot cheaper, and I think it could be done sooner, and I would hope the committee would consider that. With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I make a constitutional point of order that the earmark for the Durham Museum in Omaha, NE, as contained on page 21, line 15, after the word ``mission'' through line 20, violates article I, section 8 of the Constitution, and also violates the 10th amendment of the Constitution of the United States.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I wish to spend a few minutes talking about the legislative branch and us and where we find ourselves. I do have an amendment and I appreciate the consideration of it. Right now, the average income in this country is down four-tenths of 1 percent this year. Historically, people wonder why Congress cannot control spending. They cannot control spending because they cannot even control their own budget. We are going to see about a 3.2-percent increase in the bill. The House is coming in at 6.1. In conference, we will decide what the legislative branch increase in expenses is on the American public. The reason that spending is out of control and the reason we are shackling our grandchildren with an enormous amount of debt--another $5 trillion in the next 5 years--is because we don't even do a good job managing our own office budgets. I am on the floor a lot complaining about wasteful spending, earmarks, and other issues. I don't do that without setting the proper example in my own office. I have been here 4 complete years. I am in my fifth year. During that time, I have turned back, in 2005, $321,000; in 2006, $529,000; in 2007, $516,000; and in 2008, $491,000--about 16 to 17 percent of my budget. If I can do that, the question the American people ought to ask is: Why can't everybody up here do that? Why can't we manage our own legislative branch expenses? With the economic environment in which we find ourselves today, the American people ought to be asking what are our elected leaders doing to cut their expenses because we are borrowing a good portion of this money. Why are we not setting an example? If we don't do it, then we are certainly not going to have the various Federal agencies do it. If you look at spending increases, outside the omnibus and the Recovery Act, Congress increased spending almost 7.2 percent last year. The budget has in it 7.3 percent. That is three times the rate of income growth prior to this recession. Yet we are growing the government three, four times faster, and we are growing our own budgets two and a half or three times faster. This time, it will be five or six times faster than Americans' income is growing. The question has to be asked: If we are not good stewards with our own offices, how can we be good stewards with the money entrusted to us? Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 1369 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, this is a very simple amendment. It says we will take the money we spend and make available online to the American people how we spent it. Right now, there are a limited number of books published. We transfer it from computers to a book, but we don't give it to the American people so they can see how we are spending money on our office accounts. Senators Nelson of Nebraska and Reid have graciously said they support this amendment. We will have limited debate. The one way to get this spending under control in our individual offices, as well as in the Federal Government, is to make available to the American people how we spend it. So my hope is this will be a short period of time, and at the end of this year, the American people can go on a Web site and see how Tom Coburn spent his money, in terms of running the office of the junior Senator from Oklahoma. I think they will find I am as frugal with their money in my office as I am trying to be frugal on the floor when it comes to wasteful spending. There is $350 billion worth of waste that will go through this year, without one stroke of it being eliminated--$350 billion worth of waste and not one legitimate stroke will be eliminated as we go through the Appropriations Committees and the President's budget--and he is trying to eliminate some. But we won't even do a line-by-line review. I hope we will accept this amendment and lead by example, and the American people can hold us accountable for how we spend their money. With that, I yield the floor.

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

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

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

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I want to spend a few minutes tonight talking about what is going on in Honduras. I have a lot of friends in Honduras, and I have this peculiar worry that we find ourselves on the wrong side of freedom in the situation that is happening in Honduras. As you read the press clips, what we have heard is there was a coup. That, in fact, is not true. The Supreme Court of Honduras, under the direction of the Congress, asked the military to intercede because the President of Honduras had violated their own laws. Yet our State Department and our foreign policy sided with Hugo Chavez, Raoul Castro, and the former President. There is no question that improvements have been made in the past in Central and South America, but tonight we find ourselves supporting an anticonstitutional President of Honduras when, in fact, the Congress of Honduras and the Supreme Court of Honduras have said he is violating their laws. So rather than look at the whole picture, we have decided we will intervene in our diplomacy on the side of a Chavez-type, would- be dictator because what was happening in Honduras was an effort to change so you could have a President for life in Honduras. That is what was going on. That is why the Congress and that is why the Supreme Court of Honduras acted. We now are siding against the people of Honduras. What is little known is 800 to 1,000 Venezuelan thugs were admitted into Honduras, in the week prior to this, with Honduran passports to create chaos or a systematic attempt to create upheaval and discord and rioting by Chavez's thugs. So now we find ourselves, the free United States, siding with somebody who wants to make sure the Honduran people are not free, to create another petro czar dictator in South Central America. It is tremendously important we get this right. I think we are heading in the wrong direction right now. I think we are heading in the direction where we are going to make sure Honduras falls into the fold of Hugo Chavez, the last thing any of us should want. He has become the dictator in charge of Venezuela. He has nationalized American assets. He has corrupted the free Democratic process, and he seeks to do that in all the other areas where he can maintain influence. In fact, he was doing it. The other thing that is important that is not well published is that the President of Honduras was totally associated with drug cartels, cash, the distribution and transmission of drugs into this country, and the moneys associated with that were used to buy people to support his pursuit of permanent power. Now we find ourselves out there on a limb with our foreign policy without looking at the whole story. My main concern is about all those people who do want freedom in Honduras, who do believe we model in this country what they aspire to, and now the country they aspire to is siding against the vast majority of the people in Honduras. No illegal acts took place under the orders of the supreme court by the military--no illegal acts. Yet we didn't look at it close enough, and we have made now foreign policy decisions I fear are going to be irreversible. There is no question things could be done better in Honduras, but there is also no question things could be done better here. For us to decide to side with the factors that are going to force Honduras into a situation similar to Cuba and Venezuela makes my blood boil, because not only are we going to eliminate and limit the freedom of those great people, we are going to help perpetuate the loss of freedom in that hemisphere. So I call out to the President and the Secretary to do a reassessment. Let's relook at the facts. Let's talk to the people on the ground. Let's make sure we have the facts and the knowledge about what the vast majority of people in Honduras want. You can stimulate chaos if you pay enough money and bring enough people in to do that, which was the intent of President Zelaya. My hope is that we will slow down, that we will use caution at every turn as we interface with the situation. The Honduran people have the right to have their Constitution followed. That is what they did when they executed the imposition of removal of the President of Honduras. They followed their own law, their own Constitution. They don't have the right of impeachment, but they do have the right of carrying out the orders of the supreme court, which were given. For us to take this position--and this strong of a position--on what I feel has been a diplomatic lack of information of what is truth in Honduras speaks poorly for us as a nation and, most importantly, undermines the hopes of the people from Honduras. With that, I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.

Mr. COBURN

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

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I wish to spend a few minutes this evening to outline where we are and one possible solution to help us as a nation. We are on a course to double the debt in 4\1/2\ years. We are on a course to triple the debt over the next 10 years. Think of what that means for our children and our grandchildren. That is not President Obama's fault. I am probably one of the few Republicans who will say that. It is Congress's fault, because Presidents don't get to spend money we don't let them spend. We are the ones who offer the spending bills. How did we get here? How did we get to the point where we are borrowing money that we don't have against our children's future to spend on things we don't need? It is simple. We have forgotten what the Constitution says. We have ignored the Constitution at almost every turn. Today, myself and 17 other Senators introduced a bill which is called the Enumerated Powers Act. It goes back to article I, section 8 of the Constitution. Here is what it says. It very plainly lists the responsibilities of the Federal Government. When you think we are going to have a $3.6 trillion budget and a $2 trillion deficit this year--and that is real accounting; that is not Washington gimmick accounting--how did we get to where we could do that? How did we get to where we can put our children and grandchildren in such dire straits in their future? We got to it by ignoring the enumerated powers of the Constitution. If you go to the textbooks and read the history, you will see that Madison wrote that section. If you read what he had to say about what he meant in article I, section 8 of the Constitution, he said, People are going to try to get around this. People are going to try to say it doesn't mean what it means. But, in fact, here is exactly what we mean. Anything that we don't want the Federal Government doing, we are going to specifically reserve for the States. That is where the 10th amendment came from in the Bill of Rights. Because you can't limit what the Federal Government does without saying, Here are the things that should be done, but they should be done under the authority of the people and the States. When Ben Franklin left the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he was asked by somebody in the crowd: What did the convention produce? He said: It produced a republic. Then he said: If we can keep it. Well, I can tell my colleagues that ``if'' is a great big word. We have a Medicare Program that over the next 30 years has a $39 trillion unfunded liability. So the factors I have mentioned already don't have anything to do with that. That is $39 trillion on top of $11.5 trillion today and $2 trillion more we are going to add to the debt this year. Then we have Social Security, which is unfunded. We have Medicare Part D that has an $11 trillion unfunded liability. Then we have Medicaid, which is about $17 trillion. So what we have basically done is abandoned what our Founders thought was prudent so we could enhance politicians. We put that big ``if'' up there for our kids and our grandkids. The task of keeping a republic now falls to this Congress. It doesn't look bright. We passed a stimulus bill, $787 billion. By the time you count the interest rate over the next 10 years, it is $1 trillion. We passed an omnibus bill that increased spending by each branch of the government over 9 percent. We passed an emergency supplemental that had $24 billion in it that we didn't need, but we spent it, which will raise the baseline in future years, which will raise spending even further. The first appropriations bills coming out are a 7-percent or 8 percent increase when inflation has been a minus four-tenths of 1- percent increase. The whole purpose behind this bill is to say when you write a bill in this Congress and any Congress that follows it, you have to know in that bill where you get the authority in the Constitution to spend this money or to authorize this program. You can still introduce a bill without it, but it creates a point of order that says a Senator can challenge that bill on the basis of what the Constitution says because you have not clearly stated in this new piece of legislation where you get the authority as a Member of the Senate to author it when, in fact, it is outside the authority given to us under the Constitution. The bill then sets up a debate on which the Senate will have to vote. I am not so naive as to believe I will win a whole lot of those, but I know I will win something, because the American people want to hear that debate, and that debate is something they are not hearing today. They are not hearing our justifications why we can take freedom away and we can make a bigger, more powerful Federal Government that is going to borrow more money from their children to spend on things we don't need, money we don't have. The American people are entitled to hear the reasoning behind why we know so much better than they do, and to hear the reasoning why we can ignore the wisdom of our Founders in terms of our ability to grow the Federal Government. The Federal Government is far too big and far too removed from people's lives today. That is why we are feeling this rumble out in the country. That is why people are worried about the deficits. That is why people are worried about their children's future, because the debt is going to triple over the next 10 years. We can't even come close. Interest payments next year are going to be close to $500 billion. Think about that. Just the interest on the debt is starting to approach a half a trillion dollars a year--a half a trillion dollars a year. Had we been prudent and not borrowed money, that would be a half a trillion dollars we could either give back to the American people or create tremendous abilities and opportunities in terms of solving some of the problems in front of us today. Health care, for example. The reason why we can't get a health care bill out of the HELP Committee is because nobody is satisfied with the tremendous costs that CBO has estimated because we are spending tons of money. We don't have the money, so we are now handicapped. This bill, S. 1319, requires that each act of Congress shall contain a concise explanation of the authority, the specific constitutional authority under which this bill would be enacted. What it does is makes Congress go to the Constitution, and particularly article I, section 8, and say, here is where I get the authority. We won't win many of those arguments, even though many of the bills will be outside of the authority granted us under the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson thought such an exercise was vitally important--we have ignored his advice--he thought it was important for Congress to undertake in order to study what those who ratified the Constitution had in mind. In a letter in 1823, he said this: On every question of construction, let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed. There is no question what the context and the meaning was of our Founders when they wrote out the enumerated powers section. We have prostituted it to our own demise. The words of Benjamin Franklin ring true today: Can we keep it. If we can keep it. S. 1319 is a little exercise in self-discipline for the Senate that maybe we ought to be explaining to the American people where we think we get the authority to trample on the 10th amendment, to tell them what to do, how to do it, and by the way, we need some money to tell you how to do that. The whole goal of the Enumerated Powers Act is to make us accountable. My whole goal in the Senate has been transparency. We ought to be transparent about how we get or where we get or from where we get the authority to grow the size of this government even further and to make it less effective. Finally, in a recent speech, retiring Justice David Souter recently commented that the American Republic ``can be lost, it is being lost, it is lost, if it is not understood.'' He went on to cite surveys that show Americans cannot even name the three branches of government. That is why he and retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor have both undertaken, in their retirement, efforts to restore America's civic education. I am convinced that if Americans know what is in the Constitution, they will start holding us accountable. Part of our job ought to be to explain how we can be accountable. We have 17 Senators who think this is a good idea. That is a lot for a bill in the Senate. I encourage my colleagues to look at this bill, to become accountable and transparent with our constituencies. I will end on one final note. When the Presiding Officer was sworn in this year, he took an oath. That oath said he would uphold the Constitution. Not once in his oath did it mention the State of Alaska from where he and the people he represents in the Senate hail, but his oath was sworn to the betterment of this country, not to the betterment of Alaska, as mine is to the betterment of the country, not to the betterment of Oklahoma. For Alaska and Oklahoma can't fare well if the country doesn't fare well. So our Founders knew that when we took this oath to uphold the Constitution, they knew our direction would be national interests and long term. We have fallen away from that. We have become parochial and we have become short term. This bill says you can still cheat on the Constitution, but now you have to explain to the American people why you are cheating, and there will be a point of order against any bill that doesn't provide an explanation to the people. That is one of the ways we get our country back because the American people become informed. I guarantee you many will become outraged when they hear some of the statements on why the Senate thinks we have the authority to do some of the things we do. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I thank the Chair. One of the questions we ought to ask the American people is: Would you rather pay the costs you pay today for the quality of care you currently receive or would you rather get in line, pay less, not have the same quality, and not get to choose the health care you are going to get or your family is going to get--defer the decisionmaking about you and your family's health care to a government bureaucracy? All of us agree, Democrats and Republicans, we want to fix health care. All of us want prevention, wellness, management of chronic disease. All of us want as much freedom as we can give the American people. But the difference lies in how we do it and who pays the bill. That is why I started out with the article from Adrian Rogers. We are going to spend $2.4 trillion on health care this year, and we are going to get back $1.7 trillion worth of health care. We should not be spending a penny more. What we should be saying to the Senate is: Why aren't you fixing what is wrong with this terrible, broken system? And the answer is: We need more money. That is the government's answer every time. Every time: We need more money. We need a new program. We do not need a new program. What we need is to allow the individual entrepreneurship and ingenuity of the American people and give them the resources with which to buy their health care and make their personal choices, and what you will see is a dynamic that squeezes $500 billion to $700 billion out of the cost of health care in this country. There are a lot of components. Health care is a complex issue. Everybody who worked on it knows it. It is hard in a 20- or 30-minute talk on the floor to explain a bill fully. But if you had absolute access, and you could afford health care, and you got to make the choices, and it did not cost your kids any more in the future to pay for that by borrowing against their future, most Americans would say: I will buy something like that. That is a fix. And by the way, we are going to incentivize the $40 billion we spend every year supposedly on prevention to where it is actually making some difference on cost. We are going to quit paying for food that is terrible for you through the Food Stamp Program. We are going to fix the School Lunch Program so we do not feed you high carbohydrates and fat. And we are going to give you protein, fruits, and vegetables. We are going to do that which is necessary to put us on a glidepath to where we have real health care instead of sick care in this country. People will buy that. I cannot wait for the real debate to start on health care. When you hear the talk, and you read the articles that have been written--just for example, on comparative effectiveness, the director who is involved in that in England said it was the biggest mistake they ever made. It explains why people in England die earlier. It explains why they have a cancer cure rate about a third lower than ours. It explains why people cannot get care because they have a government option. They have a government option that eliminates the ability for true choice, true access, and true affordability. One of the things our bill will do is make sure, no matter how sick you are, you get an insurance policy. When it comes time for renewal, they cannot deny you. Our bill gives everybody insurance in this country and incentivizes you to the point where you will have extra money with which you pay for the additional costs associated with that care. Our plan does not mandate anything, except the base minimum plan is the base minimum plan the Members of Congress get. If you want to buy more than that, you can. But nobody is going to tell you what you have to buy. You buy what is right for you, what is right for your family. One of the costs of health care in this country--and it is about 8 or 9 percent of the cost of health care--is doctors like me ordering tests you do not need because I fear a malpractice lawsuit. We incentivize the States to make changes--very simple changes--do not eliminate the right of any individual to go to court, but set up health courts or set up judge-doctor-lawyer panels or a combination thereof, and we give them extra money if, in fact, they will do that. It is an easy, cheap buy. Because if we reform the tort system State by State, we get back about a hundredfold for every dollar we put out that comes out of health care that will then go to prevention, wellness, and management of chronic disease. We have cost-shifting in this country. If you opt out and you go to an ER, your State can buy you a high-deductible policy, whereas you are still covered. You are not going to ever lose your home because you had an accident or you had a major health complication because you will be auto enrolled as soon as you hit the ER. So we eliminate about $200 billion in cost-shifting. I have just outlined $500 billion that can go away under our bill out of $2.4 trillion--money that does not help anybody get well, money that does not prevent anybody from getting sick. I had an orthopedist in my office today and he had a patient who he thought had a torn anterior cruciate ligament. That is a ligament connecting the femur to the tibia. And she could not relax. He is a good orthopedist. By clinical exam, you can tell if somebody has torn an ACL, anterior cruciate ligament. So he said: Well, you can't relax. We'll do an MRI. So she comes back a week later and says: Doctor, I didn't do the MRI. I didn't want to pay for that. And she brought a glass of wine with her, a glass of chardonnay. She said: I think if I drink this, about 15 minutes after I drink this, I think I will be relaxed enough for you to do it. Well, sure enough, she did, and she relaxed. She had a torn ACL, and she never had to have an MRI. It just saved us about $1,800. It saved her and us $1,800. He could have given her xanax and done the same thing. But the point is, she made a logical decision not to spend $1,800 because there was another way of doing it. Part of that was because she had a $5,000 deductible health care policy, so she made a good economic choice. Multiply that 100,000 times in this country every month and see how much money we can take out of the health care system by people acting in their own best health interest and financial interest. We have a lot in front of us, and we have a lot that is riding on us. I hope we get to see the bills, which we have not seen yet, and what people want to do. The first bill out is: The government does everything; the government is in control. There is not one government program that either offers the services or is not bankrupt that we have on health care today. Medicare is bankrupt. Medicaid--we are bankrupt, so they are bankrupt. They have $80 billion worth of fraud in Medicare; $40 billion worth in Medicaid. The Indian Health Service is a sham, especially on the reservation, because we do not have the quality and we have not put the money there. Why shouldn't a Native American have an insurance policy to be able to buy health care wherever they want? Why shouldn't a veteran be able to get care wherever they want rather than have to travel 200 miles to a VA health care center? Why can't we keep the commitment that we would say: If we are going to offer you access, then we are going to offer you access to the best, the highest quality health care, with you making the decisions about your care, when you get that care, and who gives you that care. The patient has to come first. Senators' egos have to come second. And we have to fix this program in a way that not only solves the health care crisis but does not create another crisis for our children down the road. With that, I yield the floor. I thank my colleague from Rhode Island for his patience, and I wish him a good night.

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I ask for 10 additional minutes.

Mr. COBURN. I wish to take a few minutes this evening to kind of discuss with the American people what is going to happen on health care--what it looks like is going to happen. As a practicing physician, there are things I know that if we start from ground zero we would do in health care in this country. But as I was reading some articles, I pulled this quote. This is by Adrian Rogers, and it really belies what is happening right now with this idea of transferring the wealth. Here is what he said: You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not take first from someone else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they worked for, that, my dear friend, is about the end of any Nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it. Those are pretty wise words. As I think about the trillions of dollars that have gone through Congress this year and the fact that our spending is totally out of control, with minimal effect other than things like the Senator from Georgia--had we actually spent the $35 billion on a tax credit to stimulate housing rather than spending about $100 billion on true, true stimulus activities and another $680-some billion on other items, and the fact that all of a sudden we are now talking about pay-go--that is about me paying and you going--and we have spent $800 billion in the last year and avoided pay-go 15 times in the Senate in the last year. Fifteen times we have said: Oh, time out, pay-go does not count. And we spent another $800 billion. What that means is we did not have the money, we borrowed it. So as we start into the health care debate, there are some things I believe are critically important that I think most Americans would agree with. The first is that individuals ought to be in charge of their health care. Nothing should stand between you as a patient and your physician. No bureaucrat, no government-run program should get in between that relationship. The second thing I know is you ought to be able to pick what you want, you ought to be able to afford what you want, and you ought to be able to do that at the time that is appropriate for your health care needs. That means you have to be in charge of your health care, you cannot have someone else. I am reminded of that fact because we have a Medicaid Program in which 40 percent of physicians in this country do not participate, and what we are really saying to people on Medicare is: We will give you health care, but we will limit a large number of physicians and providers because we are not willing to pay what it actually costs to do that. The third thing is that we cannot assume, which we have, and I am worried we will, that people cannot manage their own health care, that they have to have Uncle Sam manage it for them. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are some key components. Health care is about people. It is not about an insurance company, it is not about your employer, and it is certainly not about the government. It is about you. And if it is about you, you ought to be in control of that--absolutely, without a fact be in control. You ought to have a caring professional who will be able to spend the time with you to truly teach you prevention, to truly work with you on wellness, to truly manage your chronic disease, and then we ought to recognize that those services ought to be paid for, not outlandish fees but appropriate payment. You recognize that in none of the government-run programs, which is now 60 percent of health care, do we truly pay for prevention. We will pay for it when you get sick. That is why we have ``sick care'' in America. We do not have health care, we have sick care. And we do not have real insurance. What we have is prepaid health expense, which about 20 percent, 25 percent of the money that went into that health insurance doesn't ever come back to help you get well or prevent you from getting sick. So we ought to be about the fact that we know there is something wrong with health care in America today. We all know that. We are dissatisfied, whether it is the bills you get after you get a test that you can't read or can't understand or you have to wait or have an approval to get something. Regardless of what your doctor thinks, you still may not be able to access that care. There is no question we need to fix health care, and I will be the first to admit we need to do that. But how we do it--how we do it is ultimately important, not just for the health care of Americans, but it will markedly impact our economy. The very idea that we have to have another $1.3 trillion to $2 trillion to fix health care does not fit with any realistic set of facts anywhere else in the world. We spend twice as much per person in this country as anybody else in the world save Switzerland. We are not getting value for what we are buying. Now, why aren't we? One of the reasons we are not is because you are not in control of your health care. You do not get to see a transparent price or quality or availability for what you purchased because we have given over the payment for that to some other organization. So we are less inclined to be prudent purchasers because it is not coming out of our pocket, whether it is Medicaid or Medicare or a health insurance plan. We ought to be about fixing that. And our health care cannot be about bureaucrats in Washington. It is personal. It is also local. The trust in a patient-doctor relationship is enhanced by transparency of the cost and transparency of the quality. You ought to be able to go and buy a health care service and know what it is going to cost before you buy it, and you ought to know that you are likely to get great outcomes based on transparency of quality. That has to be there. The second thing that has to be there is you have to know we are going to spend the dollars in a way to prevent you from getting sick, not just take care of you once you get sick. Grandmom was right: An ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure. Yet we do not incentivize that in any of the Federal Government programs we have today. And we do some--especially in the ERISA-based plans or the company-owned plans, they have learned this. A great plan that is out there that people are fortunate to have is Safeway. Safeway's health care costs have risen one-half of 1 percent in the last 4 years. The average of other plans of other employers has risen 42 percent. What is the difference? Why is it that Safeway, with 200,000 employees, has been able to have only half a percent, plus they also have increased satisfaction with the health care they are getting? What is the difference? The difference is prevention and wellness and management of chronic disease. So anything we do that does not address prevention and incentivize it, wellness and incentivize it, and management of chronic disease and incentivize it will not make any fix we do here sustainable. We can cover everybody in the country. We can charge $1.2 trillion or $1.3 trillion to our kids over the next 10 years and we can get everybody covered, but if we have not fixed the sustainability to where we do not have a 7.2-percent automatic inflation in health care every year, we will not have done anything. And it will not be long before we will not be able to afford it, and then we will take the people in the government-run option and we will put them into Medicare, and then we will do a price control. There is no question that we need to carefully address America's health care challenge. We need to find immediate measurable ways to make it more accessible and affordable without jeopardizing quality. We need to make sure we give individuals choice at every point in the health care continuum. And we need to make sure we allow personalized care. We are not a bunch of cattle lining up in the chute. Everybody is different. Everybody needs to be able to make their own decisions. On top of that, the No. 1 thing we have to do is protect the doctor- patient relationship. Half of getting well is having confidence in the person who is treating you. When you do not get to choose that, as you do not in Medicaid and oftentimes in Medicare because we are limited to the doctors who are taking Medicare, you are limiting the outcome. If you cannot get treatment when you need it, there is a crisis. If you are denied the ability to choose the doctor or hospital that is best for you, that is a crisis for you. If you cannot afford the coverage you need for you and your family, then you have a crisis. We need to stop looking at it from a global perspective and restore the humanity to health care. We need to focus more on people and less on the system. I have a lot of ideas on health care. I, along with many others, have introduced the Patient's Choice Act, where we allow everybody to have insurance in this country. We equalize the tax treatment for everybody in this country. All the studies say that any plan Congress puts forward, our plan will do as well or better with some major differences. We do not raise the cost at all. It does not cost anything. As a matter of fact, it saves the States $1.3 trillion over the next 10 years just on Medicaid alone. And every Medicaid patient out there will have a private insurance program, and nobody will ever know if they got it through Medicaid or not. They will be truly accessing and having the care, and we will not raise taxes on anybody to do that--no one. The other thing we do is, if you like what you have today, you can keep it. You absolutely can keep it. If what you have is what you want, it gives you care when you want it, access to the doctors you want or to the hospital you want, and you can afford it, you are going to keep it. But if you would like something different, and not be locked in, not having to stay at a job because you are afraid you will not have insurance when you leave, you need to look at what we are talking about. There is no preexisting illness exclusion. There is no individual mandate, although there is an auto enrollment where you can opt out. If you do not want health insurance, you do not have to take it, but you do not get the tax credit that goes along with buying it. So, in fact, of the 46 million people who do not have access to care today through an insurance program, they will have it under this program, and they will have prevention, and they will have wellness, and they will have a medical home or an accountable care organization to manage their chronic disease, help them manage it. And they will get to do that where they want to do it, not where some bureaucrat tells them they will do it or where some insurance company tells them where they will do it. We have a chance to hit a home run for the American people on health care--not just on their health care, but keeping us globally competitive, keeping jobs here at home instead of shipping them off where the labor costs and health care costs are less. We have a chance to hit two home runs. The question is, Will we do it? We have before us in the HELP Committee a draft of a bill that has three big blanks on it. We do not have any analysis by the CBO on what it is going to cost. We have no knowledge about what it costs, and we are going to be marking that up in a week. We are supposed to get health care done in 6 weeks in this country, which is 17 percent of our GDP, one-sixth of our economy, and we are going to do it without knowing what we are doing. The parameters under which this Senate is addressing health care are a prescription for disaster. What we should do is put out the bills, have a legitimate debate about what is a proper way to go, and let the American people hear the debate and see which way to go. I will tell you, if you allow the American people to decide: Here is a government- controlled option or here is my option, with me choosing everything, me not depending on the government, me making the choices for my family-- when I want it, where I want it, and how I want it--individual freedom and liberty will win every time over a government-mandated program or a, quote, public government-run insurance company.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I have given a lot of thought to this, and I appreciate what the leader said about health care. I am the only practicing physician in the Senate. We have one of our colleagues who is no longer practicing. But it struck me, as a physician, that what we should do in health care ought to be what our patients want us to do. What is it the people--the very personal aspect of health care--would like to see? There is no question we have big problems in health care. There is dissatisfaction in the insurance side, with Medicare and Medicaid, and the lack of access. But what is it we should be talking about that will solve the insecurities, the problems, the concerns of the American people? I wish to go through with you a little list of items I think individuals in this country would agree with on how we ought to handle health care. First, we ought to make sure health care is available to everybody in this country and that it is affordable. We will spend, this year, $2.4 trillion on health care, or 17.5 percent of our GDP. Yet we know that out of that $2.4 trillion, $700 billion doesn't help anybody get well and doesn't prevent anybody from getting sick. We now have an administration that wants to spend another $1.3 trillion over the next 10 years, or $130 billion more per year, to try to solve this problem. The money is not the problem. We know, in Medicare alone, there is $70 billion to $80 billion worth of fraud and in Medicaid $40 billion worth of fraud and that is in the government-run programs. The second thing we ought to make sure of is that everybody can be covered. We can do that with the money we have today. We can make sure everybody gets covered. The other thing we ought to do is make sure everybody who has a plan they like today can keep it. After all, health care isn't about health care, it is about individuals, it is about persons, what they desire, what they need, and when they need it. We can, in fact, fix the fraud, waste, and abuse in health care. It is something we can do. Not long ago, we discovered we had one wheelchair that had been sold multiple times by one durable medical equipment company in Florida, but it was never delivered, and they collected $5 million from Medicare for that one wheelchair. That is just the tip of the iceberg of the fraud. Another thing we know we need to do, and that patients want us to do--because we have a government-run system for 60 percent of our health care today--is we ought to prioritize wellness and prevention. Do you realize Medicare doesn't pay for wellness and prevention and Medicaid doesn't pay for wellness and prevention? So we don't have wellness and prevention. What that leads to is additional chronic disease, which we then will have to manage--a disease we could have prevented. Another issue I was thinking about--especially with my patients--is that some are employed and have insurance through their employer, but those who are employed but don't have insurance or they own their own business or they are self-employed, they get a totally different look from the IRS about their health expenses. If your employer pays for it, there are no taxes, but if you have to pay for it or you are self- employed or you have your own business, you have to take dollars, after tax, and pay for your health care. So one of the things we have to do is equalize that so everybody is treated the same under the Tax Code for their health care. How does that work out? Well, if your employer provides your health care, you get about $2,700 worth of tax benefits a year. But if you provide your health care, you get only about $100 worth of tax benefit. It is ironic because it is so unfair to say you don't get the same benefit under the Tax Code because you happen to either work in a place that doesn't provide health insurance or you own your own business or you are self-employed. The other issue I thought about that my patients would want is: What should we not do? What should we make sure we do not do? I think about my patients, and the last thing they want is more government involvement in their health care. We heard the minority leader talk about what happens in Canada when you get sick and how you have to wait and what happens in England when you get sick and are denied care because you are not worth it because of your age. Health care delayed, in the case of the lady he mentioned from Canada, is death. Health care denied, as he mentioned about the gentleman from England, is death--for both those individuals. If you think about the government-run health care programs today, talk about Indian health care, a government-run program that is so substandard nobody would embrace it. If you think about VA health care--although it is improving through the years--it is still far below the standards of health care in this country. Then, if you think about the fraud in Medicaid and Medicare and the hoops everybody has to jump through, in terms of those two programs, I think most Americans would say: Let's fix it so everybody can have what they need and let's make sure everybody gets covered and let's make sure we do that without having government bureaucrats deciding what, when, and how we get our care. The final issue is we know one of the problems we have today--besides a recession--is this huge amount of people who are unemployed. Yet we also know 72 percent of all new job creation comes from small business. A proposal is floating out there that we are going to tax you, through a pay-or-play mandate, if you don't provide health insurance for your employees, and you are going to pay into the government to do that. That will kill job creation in this country. We can fix health care. It needs to be fixed. Everybody agrees with that. How we fix it is the most important issue we are going to deal with in the next 2 years. The idea that we can come to a solution of this in the next couple months, with the complexity we have, will assure us of one of two things: One is a government bureaucratic takeover of health care, or a piece of legislation that will deny care, which will put somebody in between a patient and their doctor and will either delay care or, in fact, will raise the cost of health care. As somebody who has practiced for 25 years in the field of medicine, obstetrics, and allergy, what I know is that we have a good health care system if we can get the government out of it and not put more government into it. What we need is fairness in access, fairness in the Tax Code, and allow the true American experiment to work in health care as we have had it work in so many other things. I yield the floor.

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Madam President, I wish to speak for a few minutes on the bill we are proceeding toward and to ask a few questions of the American public. We have a bill that is going to regulate tobacco, and I am OK with us regulating tobacco. I do not have any problems with it. I think we should do it. What we should be doing is banning tobacco. Nobody up here has the courage to do that. It is a big business. There are millions of Americans who are addicted to nicotine. And even if they are not addicted to the nicotine, they are addicted to the habit. But we have a bill, we are trying to do something positive, and we find ourselves constrained by our own shortsighted vision. We have an agency called the Food and Drug Administration. I have had a lot of experience with them. I manufactured medical devices in the 1970s and had several investigational new drug permits under them. I know the rigors under which INDs are managed and the care that is put forth by the employees of the Food and Drug Administration, as well as their advisory councils, as we go through that. But if we go back and look at the charge of what the Food and Drug Administration is, the Food and Drug Administration is about safety and efficacy--``safety,'' meaning they are responsible to make the judgment that if we are going to approve this medicine or this device that is within an acceptable risk--there is always going to be down sides to anything they approve, but within an acceptable risk, in total, it is going to be better for the country. In this bill, we allow existing tobacco products not ever to be eliminated. So we are going to take products that we know are not safe and we know are not efficacious and we are going to apply the resources of an agency that is having trouble meeting its demands right now, as well as meeting the demands of food safety right now, and we are going to take resources and put them there. The first problem with that is we send a totally mixed message to the Food and Drug Administration: Your job is no longer about safety and efficacy; your job now is to warn everybody about the downside of tobacco. We know that. What we have to do is stop new addiction. We know that. If we really want to make a difference in health and we want to eliminate dependence on tobacco, what we have to do is to stop the addiction. We have had all of these lawsuits through the years where billions of dollars have gone into attorneys' coffers, and about 40 percent of it has gone into, supposedly, stop-tobacco-use programs, and we are going to say to the Food and Drug Administration: Your job is about safety and efficacy, making sure that what it says it does, it does, and we are going to turn them into a different kind of agency. I believe that is where this bill is misdirected. We ought to have an agency that does control tobacco, that does heavily regulate its advertising in terms of the warnings on the packages, in terms of limiting what young people can get to, so we can actually stop this trend toward addiction. But to do it in the Food and Drug Administration sends a mixed message: No longer is our job efficacy, no longer is our job safety; our job is to control advertising, we are going to control packaging, we are going to control and have them report to us on the contents of all of these thousands of bad products that are associated with tobacco, that are in tobacco--not just nicotine and not just the effects of the tobacco, whether it be inhaled or chewed or sucked on. The fact is, we are going to change the direction of the agency. So what should we do? We should regulate tobacco. We should set up a way for us to do that which will effectively stop new addiction, especially among young people because that is where it starts. It starts with the young, and there are certain personality types as well as certain genotypes that, even with some of the medicines we have today, cannot wean themselves from the addiction to nicotine. So why wouldn't we go another way? We have the Department of Health and Human Services, of which FDA is a part. Why wouldn't we create a smaller agency that is just about tobacco, just about regulating tobacco, so that we can see clearly--and we can also do it, by the way, for about a fourth of the cost of what it is going to cost to do it under the FDA. So for one-fourth of the cost, we can create a new agency within HHS that will be solely focused on this and this only, that will have one primary objective, and we will force and guide and direct and measure whether they are accomplishing their purpose. Instead, we are going to hide it in another agency that is struggling today. We are at $400 million to get a new drug through the FDA right now. That is the cost of processing. That doesn't even talk about the research costs, but the new drug. That is just the cost to get it through the trials and get it through the FDA. We have all of these drugs today that aren't approved, that could be saving people's lives, because we can't get it through the FDA. And now, what are we going to place on the FDA? We are going to place the regulation of tobacco on the FDA. Tobacco is not safe. In no way is it efficacious for any individual. Yet we are going to put a segment within the FDA and say: Run it the way you are running the rest of the business. It makes absolutely no sense to me. It doesn't mean that the goal behind this legislation isn't a good goal. It is. It is a good goal, but how we are doing it and where we put the control of this is totally counterintuitive. I think if you would ask anybody in America, you want the people who are approving the drugs that are good for you to also control--why don't we put alcohol under them? Why don't we put the DEA under them, under the FDA? If, in fact, we want a controlling agency, then let's move it to the DEA--the Drug Enforcement Agency--or Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, right? Why don't we put it in ATF? We already have other agencies. But to put it in the FDA, when the total goal of the FDA is to approve new products for our benefit, our safety, and to cure health needs--tobacco creates health needs; it doesn't cure them. The only thing I know that it cures is if you get a wasp or a red hornet sting and you take some chewing tobacco and put it on the sting, it takes the pain away. I experienced that a lot as a young boy. My grand dad would pull it out and put that plug right there, and the pain would go away very quickly. That is the only efficacious thing I know about tobacco. So I would just ask my colleagues to think again about what we are doing. Let's do the intent of the bill, but let's do it in a way that makes sense, that doesn't send a cross signal, and either put it into one of the other organizations we already have that is handling products that are bad for Americans--not products that are good for Americans--or let's put it into a separate agency where we can see it transparently and clearly. I wish to make one other point. Inside this bill is the banning of any new nicotine products. I wish to tell my colleagues that is totally shortsighted. If you are a smoker today and we could get you off of smoking even though we still give you nicotine and we can do that through a new product, such as a dissolvable flavored lozenge, where we supply the nicotine addiction to your body but you are no longer creating lung disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, bolus emphysema, or increasing your chances for heart disease and hypertension, markedly increasing your chances for lung cancer, if we could convert that to something that would satisfy the demand yet wouldn't harm the rest of your body--we ban that in this bill. We stop all positive movement through commercial products to create a nicotine source that is other than chewing tobacco or cigarettes or cigars. So why would we want to do that, especially if, in fact, we could take these millions of smokers today who, most of them, their habit is--there are two addictions they have. One is the nicotine craving that actually hits at the intercellular level. It is called a nicotinergic interface in terms of receptors on certain parts of the body. If we could do that in a way that would allow us to put nicotine in there to solve it but not cause all of the other disease, why would we say with this piece of legislation that we are never going to let that happen? Yet we are. I don't understand it. We could do that in a way where that could be highly restricted to only people who had a prescription, where they were already nicotine addicted. So there are things we are missing in here from a general health standpoint that are going to be very harmful because what we are saying is: You can use the nicotine patch, you can take some of the new drugs that work in the brain to relieve the nicotine addiction, but rather than supply something in a harmless way that has no other ill health effects--I don't understand why we would not do that. So I would appreciate my colleagues considering my comments. I believe the FDA is the last place we ought to put this. I think we ought to do it. We ought to change some of the things on how we are going to do it. We ought to create a capability to have nicotine supplied other than through chewing tobacco or cigars or cigarettes so that we can take the effects of it that we know are very harmful today and lessen them for the citizens who are addicted to nicotine. My hope is that we wake up before we pass this bill because what we are really going to do is we are kind of shooting ourselves in the foot. If we really want to stop and help those people who are already addicted and really want to prevent new addictions, then we have to allow for some of these new products, and we ought to do it at an agency that doesn't have purposes counter to what the charge of that agency is. With that, I yield the floor to my friend from Oregon. I also thank him for being so kind to allow me to go first.

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

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. I will. I withdraw my request.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I asked the managers of the bill if I could have some time to discuss this bill for a moment. I offer a lot of amendments around here and, quite frankly, there are several amendments I should have offered, or should call up, but I am not going to call up because, quite frankly, I am not prepared to do it. I wanted to talk about this bill because it has been described in a lot of ways as funding for our troops, as things that we have to do. I want to put a few holes in that for a minute. There is funding for our troops in this bill, there is no question. We need to do that. One of the promises of the President--and I hope it comes about this next year--is we will never see another one of these to fight the wars. It will be incorporated, as it should have been in the past. I am on record of voting against three of these requests from the Bush administration for the fact that it should be incorporated into the regular budget. We know we have these expenses. When we do a supplemental or an emergency--that is what we are calling this--there is something that happens most people do not realize. Mr. President, 100 percent of this bill will be borrowed by the Treasury when we start spending the money. This is not money we have. It is money we are going to borrow from the next two generations because the Congress refuses to make priorities of what we need to do, and we continue to spend money on things that we should not be or do not have to do, which are not a priority, and the money we are going to spend is borrowed money. We have not heard much of that in the entire debate on this bill. Every dollar will be stolen from the future of the next two generations to come, and most of the people who are hearing my voice today will not pay the cost of this significantly large bill. It was not all that long ago that the entire Federal budget wasn't the size of this, less than 45 years ago. Yet we are going to pass, in very short order, with very few amendments, a bill that does a lot of things besides fund our troops. Of course, there is another thing most Americans don't know. It is that all the things that are in this bill that go to other executive branch agencies will be utilized to raise the baseline next year for the starting point of the budget process. In other words, we are raising the baseline. So when we look at it, when it comes through the budget next year, and the appropriations cycle, it will not be what we actually appropriated under the budget. It will be under the budget plus what we spent on the supplemental. We do not go back to where we should be. We go back to an elevated area because we had an emergency spending bill. There is money in here for the United Nations Development Program, Peacekeeping Operations, $721 million. Here is a fact that most Americans don't know. Forty percent of every dollar spent by the United Nations on peacekeeping operations is absolutely defrauded or wasted. So in this case, $300 million of the $720 million that we are going to appropriate, some shyster connected with the United Nations, either in New York or in some foreign country, is going to steal that money. It is not going to go to help anybody keep the peace. It is not going to go to clothe and feed someone. It is not going to go to protect the rights of those who are discriminated against, those who are living not under the rule of law; that, in fact, $300 million out of the $720 million isn't going to do anything except line the pockets of crooks. Yet we have that report, which we had to get from the U.N. because we don't have transparency on where our money is going. That is the U.N.'s own report. Yet there is nothing in this bill that requires them to give us an audit of how they are spending it. There is no metrics on how it is going to be spent, and there is nothing in this bill that says they are going to have to tell us and show us that they didn't let it get defrauded or get stolen. We are not paying attention. We are running like there isn't an economic crisis. There is another area in this bill that is extremely disturbing to me, which is that we are going to give a $1.3 billion pay raise to all the Foreign Service officers in this country. They hire 500 to 600 new ones each year. They have 25,000 applications for these jobs without this pay raise. This is called a locality pay differential, and it started because it is so expensive to live in Washington that we give a 21-percent increase to all Foreign Service officers who get stationed in the United States, but we are now going to give it to them no matter where they live. So what we are talking about is a $15,000-a-year pay raise on the basis of nothing, to people who, on average, make more than $75,000 a year. Ask yourself a question: When we send a colonel to South Korea, do we give him a locality pay increase? No. When we send a sergeant to take care of the troops who are stationed around the world, do we give him a pay increase or her a pay increase? No. And they just happen to make a third of what our Foreign Service officers make. Yet with one broad stroke we are going to add $1.5 billion over the next 4 years, and then at least $400 million a year to everyone who works for the State Department. Why are we doing that? Why are we saying Foreign Service officers are more important than our men and women in uniform? Why are we creating a differential when, in fact, there is no hardship, and we are having no trouble getting employees. By the first data I put out there, we are not. There are no statistics to suggest they have a greater loss than they are capable to reproduce. Yet in this bill, $400 million a year, just as a gift--just as a gift. Think how demoralizing that is to the men and women who wear the uniform of the United States. We have decided that technocrats are more important than the people on the front lines. We have decided that, not based on merit, not based on performance, we are just going to give them a raise. I don't have any objections due to the cost of living in DC that we might have a differential pay for that. But why would we say no matter where you live--if you live in Muskogee, OK, where I am from--and you happen to work for the State Department; that because you work for the State Department and not because you produce more or do a better job, you are going to get a 21-percent pay increase that is never going to get rescinded. What are we doing? And why are we doing it? Also in here is $.5 billion for the start of--and they have a legitimate claim, the State of Mississippi--a hurricane prevention program. We asked the Corps to do a study. We are putting money in. It is unauthorized money. It has never been through the committee, and I am not saying that we may or may not want to do this. But the Corps hasn't even finalized their evaluation of the study on whether it is viable. Yet this is the first $.5 billion in a $2 billion to $7 billion project that I am not sure right now, without authorization of the appropriate committee, we are going to jump in line ahead of every other priority program that the Corps of Engineers has just because we can do it. And the Corps hasn't even accepted the premise of the study on which the money is going to be spent. America, wake up to what we are doing. This ship has a lot of holes in it, and we are taking on water faster than those with common sense can bail it out. These are just three prime examples of things in this bill that ought not be handled the way they are handled in the bill. The No. 1 thing we are not doing is we are not being honest with ourselves about where this money is coming from and how much more it is going to cost the people in this country who are struggling every day just to pay their mortgage, just to put groceries on the table, and to pay their utility bills. We are going to give $108 billion to the IMF. We had an amendment that got defeated. The fact is--and pay attention to this--it may not help. The assumption is we will get paid back because they have never not paid us back in the past. Well, this is a different day, and there is a high likelihood that, even though we only charge $5 billion for the cost of this $108 billion loan, we will never see a penny of it come back--a very high likelihood--especially if you look at the total debt and money assets of all the European countries compared to their GDP ratio. We wring our hands and say: Well, we have to do this. We have to do this. What we have to do is preserve America first. What we have to do is defend America first. What we have to do is restore confidence in America. The way we are doing it with this bill does just the opposite. I am sorry I haven't had time to go after the issues in this bill. There are tons of things we ought to be doing differently, and if we are not going to do them differently, we ought to hold the Members accountable on a vote to say why we are not doing them differently. Borrowing this money against our children's future and not making hard choices on some of the $350 billion worth of fraud and waste that we know the Federal Government has, not even looking at it, not making an attempt to pay for any of it, to me, is a tragedy. It is not just a tragedy of the moment because what it clearly spells out is that there has been no change. There is no change in behavior. There is no recognition of the difficulty we are in. There is no set of priorities that says we do what is most important for the country first, and if it is not really that important, we don't do it at all now so that we can protect the way of life we have come to know. I am disappointed in us because we have failed to grasp the seriousness of where we are today in this country. And where we are is not far from losing the essence of what America stands for. Madam President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. COBURN

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, as I told the Senator from Connecticut, the underlying bill has many things I am in favor of. I don't want to see it fail on this, but nor should we want to see the second amendment trampled, nor should we want common sense to go out the window as we apply laws in this country. The fact is, we have had very many good commonsense amendments come out of the Senate that don't come out of conference committee. I am not sure I would expect a different result on this one. The fact still remains that we have an incoherent policy that takes away a right that has been done by bureaucrats. If we decide we don't want to do that, then that is the Congress speaking that we are not going to do that, and that is fine. But to have bureaucrats eliminate some of these second amendment rights and do so in a way that causes people confusion and puts people at risk is wrong. So I thank the Senator for his comments. I hope he can support the amendment because it is a commonsense amendment. He has supported many other of my amendments. What you do in conference will determine whether it comes back out with that on it. I yield back the remainder of my time.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, following up on what the Senator from Virginia said, there actually was an event in his State on the Blue Ridge Parkway where a gentleman who was licensed to carry failed to stop completely at a stop sign and was stopped. Under his law, the laws of the State of Virginia, he was licensed to legally carry, but the park ranger found that he had guns in his car--all within the laws of the State of Virginia. Yet he was convicted because he drove through an edge of a national park, carrying a gun in a national park. Senator Webb has described it well. This is about establishing clarity. You still can't go out and target shoot. You can't hunt. But what you can do is be within the law. So by protecting the second amendment and by protecting States rights, we will have common sense. I would make the other point--the Senator from Connecticut is here-- if your State says: We don't want to do these things, you can under this amendment. So if you have a national park and you don't allow guns in the State park, you can say you don't allow guns in the national park. So it follows completely. When the Senator from Connecticut asked me about this today, I went back to my staff, and, in fact, that is the case, that State law will reign supreme as long as there is consistency within the State and the park that is part of that State. So I also agree with what Senator Webb said, which is the natural reaction is, this is nuts. It is not nuts. It is about commonsense application of the second amendment. It is about States rights, and it is about not putting people in jeopardy who are in jeopardy today because they are lawfully carrying out the laws of their own State. With that, I reserve the remainder of my time.