Kent Conrad

Mr. CONRAD

Mr. CONRAD. Well, I wish to say this to Senator Ensign straight from the shoulder. I intend to support the amendment. I ask other colleagues to support the amendment because it is clear to me it will not be fatal to the privileged status of the budget resolution if it does not come back from conference committee. But let me say this to the Senator very clearly: There is no way it is coming back from conference committee. I am not going to put the entire budget resolution at risk for that.

Mr. CONRAD. Well, I would say this. Let's deal with the reality. The reality is, I do not remember a budget resolution around here that has gotten 60 votes. So to make the privileged status fatal, to be fatal to the privileged status is to be fatal to a budget resolution. That is the reality.

Mr. CONRAD. Mr. President, I thank my colleague for his confidence in my ability to influence the outcome of the conference committee. I don't think it may extend as far as he may wish or as far as I might wish. On a matter such as this, I don't see that there is any option. Many of us support the intent of the amendment of the Senator from Nevada. Unfortunately, it is drafted in a way that the Parliamentarian has described to us clearly. If it comes back from conference committee, in all likelihood that is fatal to the privileged status of the budget resolution. That is not a risk we can afford to take as conferees. I am confident the conferees will not permit that. At the same time, I don't want people voting against the amendment of the Senator on a technicality that then is misrepresented as their position on the underlying position contained in this amendment. With that, we have used as much time as we need on this amendment. Senator Kerry is next.

Mr. CONRAD. Mr. President, when the Senator approached me about this yesterday, I told him I would strongly oppose this amendment. I told him that because this has been hard to put together, and we have tried to have an equal sharing of sacrifice between all of the spending elements of a budget. We have tried to do it with respect to domestic spending, defense spending. We have tried to do it with mandatory spending. And international is a component of the discretionary side of the budget, so we thought it would only be fair that they be asked to make a contribution. When I told the Senator yesterday that I would strongly resist this amendment, I did not know, I was not aware, he had an offset for that amendment, and that does alter the situation. That makes it more palatable because we maintain the same bottom line. But it does concern me that we are upsetting the balance of what I think is a fair distribution of the pain of the cutbacks we have had to make. I want to be very clear about that. I am concerned that other parts of the budget are being asked to take reductions from the President's request and now international will not. So I want to say I find that troubling. I understand absolutely the substance of the argument the Senator is making, and he is right to make it. He is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. But I do hope colleagues think carefully about kind of the equity of the burden here--the equity of the burden. The second thing I want to say with respect to this amendment is that it uses a 920 offset. We came out of the committee with about $7 billion in savings in 920. That is general overhead of all of the agencies; in other words, it is across the board, goes to their travel accounts, goes to their overhead accounts. Could we take somewhat more in 920? Yes, but not much more. We came out of the committee at $7 billion. I have always tried to stay at about $10 billion in 920. This would take us to $11 billion. So I am troubled by that as well. With that said, I do not intend to oppose this amendment, but I do find it troubling on those two grounds: One, it does affect the fairness of the distribution of the pain, if you will, of the cutbacks we have had to make; and No. 2, it adds to the section 920 offsets in a way that, to me, takes it a little past the realm of what is reasonable. But with that said, I do not intend to oppose this amendment or ask colleagues to vote against it. I yield the floor. Mr. President, Senator Cornyn is next. Senator Cornyn has another one of these corrosive amendments. I told Senator Cornyn, this is the third year he has offered a corrosive amendment, that he is very much in danger of being dubbed ``Corrosive Cornyn.'' I hope he takes that with the good humor it was intended.

Mr. CONRAD. Mr. President, this amendment creates the same issue the previous amendment created, the Ensign amendment, and that is because it is overly prescriptive in terms of the Finance Committee, it puts at risk the privileged status of the budget resolution. So I wish to make a parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. CONRAD. Parliamentary inquiry: If this amendment were adopted but not brought back from conference committee, would the privileged status of the budget resolution remain intact?

Mr. CONRAD. Mr. President, I thank the Senator for her amendment. It is a very well-thought-out amendment. We appreciate her raising it and it will be in order. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. CONRAD. Mr. President, I know the Senator from Arkansas has a second amendment. It is not formally in the queue, but she is free to talk about it at this time. I am happy to yield her time to do that--to talk about it at this time but not call it up.

Mr. CONRAD. I thank the Senator. I thank our colleague, the ranking member, as well. In terms of the unanimous consent agreement, the next amendment is the Gregg amendment?

Mr. CONRAD. Senator Gregg.

Mr. CONRAD. Mr. President, I note that we also have a Shaheen amendment after the Kyl amendment.

Mr. CONRAD. Mr. President, why doesn't the Senator proceed. Amendment No. 835

Mr. CONRAD. Mr. President, this is a painful moment for me because I subscribe to virtually every element of what Senator Gregg is proposing, with one exception. The exception is on page 2, this reference ``in this resolution for one or more bills, joint resolutions, amendments, motions, or conference reports that would authorize the creation of a bipartisan task force to examine the long term fiscal imbalances facing our Nation and directs the bipartisan task force to report, with the majority approval of each participating party. . . .'' That is something to which I have not agreed, could not agree. I think that alters in a very significant way the dynamic. Senator Gregg and I embarked on this effort several years ago. At that point, with Republicans in control of the White House and Democrats in control of the House and the Senate, we agreed to a formulation that the majority in the House would get four Members, the minority three, the same in the Senate, four and three, and there be two representatives of the administration. That is 16 in total, and it would have been eight Democrats and eight Republicans. The problem that has happened since--and it would take 12 of the 16 to report. That means you could have all the Democrats and half the Republicans or vice versa. You could have all the Republicans and half the Democrats, and with that number, you could bring the matter to the Senate for a vote. What has happened in the interval? Democrats have captured control of the White House, as well as increased the numbers in the House and the Senate. So now to have a requirement to have a majority approval of each participating party I think is unreasonable. I think it is unreasonable and is not in keeping with the formula to which we had originally agreed. Why is it unreasonable? Because Republicans don't have a majority in the House or the Senate and don't control the White House, yet all of a sudden it takes a majority of them to agree on a solution for our long- term fiscal problems. That just gives disproportionate power to the minority, and a minority that is not only a minority in the House and the Senate but a party that does not control the White House either. So I could not support that. If that were not part of this, I would have a different view because then it would be very much in line with what we have talked about for several years. Let me go to the basic concept because the basic concept I do support, the basic concept being that we have to have some special process in order to address these long-term fiscal imbalances. You are never going to do it in a 5-year budget resolution. You can make a downpayment there and you can certainly get going in the right direction, which I think we do in this budget resolution, but Senator Gregg, when he says you have to have a process to get to a policy, I believe, is exactly right. I don't believe anybody who leads with a policy is going to get an answer here. I believe it is going to take a process to get there. But I think it has to be a process that recognizes the political reality of this moment in time. At this moment in time, Democrats are in control of the White House as well as the House and the Senate. So to put in a clause that the bipartisan task force, in order to report, has to have majority approval of each participating party simply goes beyond what I have agreed to in the past or what I could agree to now. So I would be constrained to object to the passage of this proposal as written.

Mr. CONRAD. Mr. President, just to review the history, because I don't agree with what was just described, in our original formulation it was 16, and 14 were Members of Congress, with the majority in the Senate getting 4 Members, the minority 3; the same in the House, the majority 4, the minority 3; two representatives of the administration, which was then the Bush administration. That meant 16 in total--8 Democrats and 8 Republicans--and it would take 12 to issue a report, 12 of the 16. That meant, at that time, that you could have all Democrats and half the Republicans or all the Republicans and half the Democrats. Now fast-forward to this year. In our negotiations, despite the fact that our previous formula, instead of producing an 8-8, would now produce 10-6 Democrats to Republicans because the Democrats have just won the White House and the White House was to have two representatives, I agreed to alter that and to go from 10-6 Democrats to Republicans to 9-6 Democrats to Republicans but still have 12 to report. That would still mean you would have to have at least half of the Republicans. If you had all the Democrats, you would still have to have half of the Republicans. That, to me, is absolutely in keeping with what we had agreed to previously, where there were 16, it would take 12 to report, and since there were 8 Democrats and 8 Republicans, you would have to have at least half the Republicans, or if you had all the Republicans, you would have to have at least half the Democrats. So I could not agree, and I just think, look, Democrats are never going to agree on a formulation, when they control the Senate, they control the House of Representatives, and they control the White House, Democrats are never going to agree that each party has to have a majority approval. I would never agree to that. I don't think it reflects the political reality that exists today. So I would reluctantly oppose it. Mr. President, I think we are now at the time that we could go to Senator Kyl.

Mr. CONRAD. Madam President, when I hear the description of this amendment given by our colleagues on the other side, and then I read it--to me, there is a bit of a disconnect. I don't see comparative effectiveness. I have been involved in writing comparative effectiveness legislation with the chairman of the Finance Committee. I don't see that as having anything to do with rationing. I don't see that has having anything to do with rationing. Comparative effectiveness research is really to determine what works in health care. It helps ascertain what are the treatment regimes that are most effective at treating different disease states. It is the scientific process. It is exactly what happened in the revolution of modern medicine at Johns Hopkins back in the early 1900s, in the 19-teens, with respect to the application of the scientific method to medicine, to test what actually works because one of the things we know in medicine today is that we are using many strategies that simply are not effective--and that is in no one's interest. That is certainly not in the patient's interest. It is not in a hospital's interest or a clinic's interest. What comparative effectiveness research is designed to do, at least that which the chairman of the Finance Committee and I have been involved in, is to get the research done and then get the information in the hands of caregivers and patients so they can make a determination as to what is the best course for treatment. It has nothing to do with our efforts in rationing health care--nothing at all. The chairman of the Finance Committee is here, and I will yield the floor.

Mr. CONRAD. Madam President, if I might, what we would like to do is get a unanimous consent agreement. Would Senator Baucus want more time on this matter?

Mr. CONRAD. I ask unanimous consent that Senator Kyl have an additional minute, that Senator Coburn have an additional 5 minutes. That would take us to close to 1 o'clock. I ask Senator Isakson, how much time would he need to call up his amendment? One minute. Then we would go to Senator Isakson for 1 minute to call up his amendment. Then we would go to Senator Shaheen. Senator Shaheen would have 20 minutes equally divided. Then we will make a further determination at that point.

Mr. CONRAD. Madam President, first of all, I wish to thank the Senator for his amendment and especially thank him for the contribution he makes on budget issues. He is a thoughtful and responsible Member. I thank him for his service. With respect to the amendment he has offered, we have a difference on this issue, and the difference is this: What he said is exactly right in the sense that we have a budget which is really effective for 1 year because we have caps for 1 year. But more than that, we are going to be back doing another budget resolution next year, so, frankly, having outyear caps doesn't mean very much. What matters are the caps for this year, and the caps we have in this budget pertain to this year. The outyear caps he is referencing--we will have another budget next year, and we will deal with that next year. Unfortunately, what has happened in the past on these caps is people have found a way to game them, and especially in the outyears. How do they do that? They come up with all of these advanced funding schemes to get around the outyear caps. What else do they do? They label as ``emergencies'' things that are really not. For example, we saw war funding in the third year of the war in Iraq and in the fourth year of the war in Iraq labeled as emergency by the previous administration as if we didn't know the war was still going on. So I say to our colleagues, the budget resolution before us has a cap for 2010, and the outyear caps, to me, are superfluous because we are going to have another budget resolution next year. I wish to also point out that the budget that is before us, in fact, has reduced the President's request on domestic spending by over $160 billion, and $15 billion in this year alone. I say to my colleagues, anybody who doesn't understand the magnitude of those cuts, come and join me in my office, or come and join me at the meetings, such as the meeting I had yesterday with certain of my colleagues who were very upset because for the next 5 years, the average annual increase in non-defense discretionary spending is 2.5 percent--2.5 percent. The Senator says, fairly, that you can have a budget that says that, but if it is not enforced by caps, it will be revised. The truth is, that is the case whether you have outyear caps or not. It is just the reality because we will be doing a budget next year, and more than that, because there is nothing quite so creative as the mind of man. I will tell my colleagues, in my 22 years on the Budget Committee, I have seen every conceivable dodge to get around caps. I think I have learned them all. I just hope very much that we get about the business of putting together a longer-term plan that deals with reforming the entitlements, reforming the tax structure, so we can get on a much more sustainable, long-term base. With that, could the Chair inform me how much time remains?

Mr. CONRAD. And how much time remains?

Mr. CONRAD. How much more time would the Senator like on this?

Mr. CONRAD. Madam President, just briefly, in a way, the Senator makes my point because none of us can foresee what happens 2 and 3 years from now. That is why we do an annual budget resolution. The numbers he just cited--who knew we were going to fall off the edge and have a precipitous decline in the economy? So what really matters to me is to have a 1-year cap that is enforceable. We will be right back here with a budget resolution next year and can extend enforceable caps at that time. According to the order that has been entered into, I am happy to yield back my time and go to Senator Tester for 7 minutes.

Mr. CONRAD. Mr. President, if I can speak to the Senator through the Chair.

Mr. CONRAD. In addressing the Chair, first of all, I apologize to the Senator for interrupting. It is important that we get another unanimous consent agreement in effect at this moment. I ask unanimous consent that at the conclusion of Senator Reed's discussion, Senator Johanns be recognized for 12 minutes and that Senator Whitehouse then be recognized for 12 minutes. I make that request.

Mr. CONRAD. This is for debate only.