Pete Domenici

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. To inquire, I heard the Senator ask who be made a cosponsor?

Mr. DOMENICI. Did the Senator have an opportunity to discuss this with Senator McCain?

Mr. DOMENICI. Of all these amendments.

Mr. DOMENICI. I see. I will speak to that in my turn. I thank the Senator.

Mr. DOMENICI. I thank my colleague. Senator, were you going to get some time on an amendment?

Mr. DOMENICI. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to. Amendment No. 4521

Mr. DOMENICI. I object.

Mr. DOMENICI. If we do not do that, what will the order be?

Mr. DOMENICI. No objection.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I wish to thank Senator Bingaman. I rise today in support of S. 2739, the Consolidated Natural Resources Act of 2008. This bill is a collection of 62 individual measures that were in the Energy and Natural Resources Committee that have been considered favorably and reported to the Senate. Packaging individual bills into a single bill is not typically the way we get the natural resources side of the Energy Committee business done. It is not my preference to do it this way. However, our customary procedure has been turned on its head since the beginning of the 109th Congress, and the fact that we are here considering this bill on the floor today reflects the frustration of many Members in this regard. I have served on this committee for over 30 years, 4 of those as chairman and the past 2 as ranking Republican member. The recent controversy over consideration of this bill is simply a continuation of the efforts by the junior Senator from Oklahoma, since the beginning of the 109th Congress, to frustrate, in my opinion, the legitimate business of this committee and the Senate in maintaining proper oversight over the stewardship of Federal lands. While I am pleased my colleague's concern about the unanimous consent process on an earlier version of this bill has been resolved, I nevertheless remain concerned about the ability of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee to conduct its business and that of the Members of the Senate. In addition to the 62 measures in this bill, we have reported over 40 other bills that still need to be considered, and we simply do not have sufficient floor time to consider each of those bills individually. Typically, we have passed these bills by unanimous consent after having worked out any objections by individual Senators to specific provisions. Yet that process we have used for years to get these types of bills passed has ground to a halt because of the generic objections about authorizations from the junior Senator from Oklahoma. When I, as chairman, and now Senator Bingaman as chairman, have tried to address the objections, we have been met with new ones each time we think we have resolved the issue. Frankly, I believe much of this problem can be attributed to a lack of understanding about the jurisdiction of the committee, the importance of its business in ensuring proper management of our Nation's natural resource treasures. A bit of history would shed some light on the reasons for many Senators' frustration and is certainly something that deserves attention. The Energy and Natural Resources Committee began as a public lands committee nearly 200 years ago, providing oversight over the lands acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. It was one of the first standing committees in the Senate. Over the years its jurisdiction obviously has expanded to include energy issues as well, but easily more than half the committee's business continues to be public lands issues. Those of you who have served on the committee know this includes everything from our national parks and monuments to all the Bureau of Reclamation water projects. The committee oversees the management of the Department of Interior and the Forest Service, of 535 million acres of land, and includes 58 national parks, 88 national monuments, including those on the Mall, and over 428 million acres of wilderness areas. This is over 30 percent of the total area of the United States. The committee also has oversight of the Bureau of Reclamation projects that include more than 600 dams and reservoirs, including Hoover and Grand Coulee Dams. Our job is to make sure our national treasures are properly managed and that the departments of the executive branch charged with that task maintain a proper balance between the Federal, State, and local interests. In addition, the committee oversees all matters related to U.S. territories, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Because the jurisdiction is vast, the number of bills the Energy and Natural Resources Committee considers each Congress generally far exceeds that of other Senate committees. In the 109th Congress alone, a total of 491 bills and resolutions have been referred to the committee for consideration. Most of these measures, as with the measures that are embodied in 2739, the bill currently before us, are required because the administrative agencies either have not taken action in addressing such things as boundary adjustments, land exchanges, or other matters relating to Federal lands, as Senators feel are necessary within their States. But in the 109th, we passed fewer than half of what we should have historically passed in previous Congresses because of the Senator from Oklahoma's objections. I am hoping together we are learning and the Senator from Oklahoma will work with us and understand all these bills are authorization bills, authorizing bills. They do not spend money until something else is done. Money must be appropriated or spent by some committee or administrative body if it has authority because these bills authorize, they do not appropriate. The futile exercise ignores the balance between authorizing committees and appropriations committees; that is, the futile exercise that has been put upon us by the Senator from Oklahoma over the last 2\1/2\ years. Let me pursue this point a little further, Mr. President. The Constitution says, ``No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law. . . .'' Note that the Constitution says, ``appropriations.'' Under most circumstances, an authorization does not compel an appropriation of money from the Treasury. So, as I have attempted to reason with the Senator from Oklahoma, authorizations that involve the HOPE of appropriations occur all the time in this body. Most of the time, appropriations fall far short of the authorized level of spending. A case in point is the decision of Congress to not spend as much money on No Child Left Behind as the authorization bill would have allowed. In some cases, appropriations are made in the absence of authorization. So, clearly, the passage of these lands bills compels no appropriations bill in the future, and, thus, no point of order under the Congressional Budget Act lies against these bills. My attempts to persuade the Senator from Oklahoma of this fact have failed, leading to this Senator's frustrations. Let's be clear here: these are authorization bills, they compel no appropriations in most cases, and spending to carry out the intent of the vast majority of these bills is contained in the salaries and expenses of the Departments within whose jurisdiction these matters lie. So, the premise of the Senator from Oklahoma--that these bills will inflate spending and increase the deficit--is fundamentally flawed. As I have noted, most of these measures have no direct cost to the Treasury; rather, they set priorities for the Departments for the use of their administrative budgets that will be appropriated each year. But one of the principal objections the Senator from Oklahoma has raised to all the bills the committee has is they cost too much money or, as he puts it: They will some day cost money. That may be true. But the Congressional Budget Office reports on most of these bills that the administrative costs to implement them would be negligible. In the rare instance where the bill would require significant resources, no action could be taken unless there were additional appropriations. So, basically, there have been no reasons for holding up these bills. The business of the Committee that is before us in this bill should have been able to have been taken a long time ago. I do not believe the judgment regarding park boundaries in Wyoming, a land exchange in Arizona, a water project in Colorado, should supplant that of the 23 members of the committee--that one Senator should supplant that. Those 23 members of this committee make their judgments on information compiled by a professional staff with a combined service of relevant departments in Congress of over 70 years on the Republican staff side alone. They spend a great deal of time on these bills. They know more than anyone else. They give that knowledge to us, the 23 members, and we vote. It is not as if these bills are put together, brought here, much time, effort and money and resources are put into them before they are put together and before we ask the Senate to pass them. I hope we will not find ourselves in this bind again. We have four amendments offered by the junior Senator from Oklahoma. I have seen them all. I do not think any of them have received appropriate hearings. I do not think any of them have had the study that goes into the bill, that are in this bill before us. For that reason and many others, I do not intend to vote for them. I do thank the Senator from Oklahoma, the junior Senator, for finally arriving at something that will conclude the matter. It will be concluded today, and many Senators will be pleased and many House members will be pleased, and all I can tell them is: We have tried our best to do this sooner, and we will try our best to do the next one sooner rather than later. In the face of all of this, I cannot in good conscience vote to delay passage of at least some of the bills that we have worked so hard on in the committee and that are packaged in S. 2739. The amendments the Senator has filed under the unanimous agreement are sweeping generic changes to aspects of Federal land management. While aspects of some of them may have merit, they should only be considered through the committee process where the substance and consequences can be illuminated and debated in hearings. I doubt that there is any Senator, including me, who is 100 percent supportive of every line in these bills that compose S. 2739; but, as with everything else we do around here, there had to be give and take on both sides of the aisle to come to agreement on many of these measures. And since it has not been my experience that we will ever be able to satisfy the junior Senator from Oklahoma, I recommend that we proceed to pass this bill without amendment. I yield the floor and thank Senator Bingaman for yielding to me.

Mr. DOMENICI. For both of us?

Mr. DOMENICI. Might I ask my colleague from New Mexico, how much time do you have left?

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, first, I want to say to the Senator from Oklahoma that I have nothing but respect for him, and we have talked about the profession he practiced before he was a Senator, saving lives and being a doctor. But I do want to say that I wholeheartedly disagree with his approach to these bills and to what the Senator is doing in the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in producing these bills for a vote. I think the Senator is wrong. I hope the Senate understands what he is doing, and I think if they do, they could each say to him: We appreciate what you are trying to do, but it is the wrong way to do it. It won't work. Now, if you talk to Senators about what is going on in the Senate, I think most of them will tell you today that the Senate is borderline dysfunctional. We can't get things done. There are too many nuances that have been imposed upon us that we didn't know when we were putting them on that they were going to run us in all different directions, but we are there. So we can hardly get things done. It is kind of a dysfunctional body. Along comes a bright Senator, and here is a package of bills, and so he looks at them and says: Oh my, this is a way to show I am going to save money. Well, Senator, you have the wrong package of bills. You have got the wrong package of bills. There will be plenty of opportunity for you to save the taxpayers money. Every appropriations bill or facsimile thereof--supplemental--put them together, 10 in 1 or one at a time, but plenty of opportunity for you to save money by attacking pieces of the appropriations bills. That is how you save money. And for all those who are watching the good Senator from Oklahoma, all they have to do is say: Senator, we think you are on the right track, go after the appropriations bills. I am not asking you to, because I am an appropriator, but I am telling you if you want to save money for the taxpayers, that is what you should do, and there is plenty of opportunity.

Mr. DOMENICI. I had intended to ask unanimous consent for 5 minutes. Did I not get it?

Mr. DOMENICI. I thank the Chair. Secondly, Senator, if you want to save the taxpayers money, then go after the place where the money is that is about to break your country, and that is the entitlements for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. If you want to save your taxpayers from ruination, then get involved in reforming those programs so they do not make us go broke. Anybody who knows about your government will tell you, dear Senator, if that is what you want to do, Domenici is right, go after appropriations; that is where money is spent. Go after entitlements; that is where money is spent that is going to break your country. And to prove to you that this bill does not spend money, all I can do is do it the way the Senate does it and ask the Congressional Budget Office: How much do these bills cost the taxpayers? Senator Bingaman, you asked that, and I don't know whether you already said it, but I am going to repeat it. This is Senator Bingaman's letter. He asked the Congressional Budget Office. Now, we have to have institutions that take care of things, don't we? The Congressional Budget Office, not the Senator from Oklahoma, is charged with evaluating a bill and telling us about it. You know what they told us about this bill? Not only does it not cost money, it makes money. This bill will bring into the Treasury in the next 4 years $48 million, because we have authorized the disposition of a couple of boats that were under lease. We said: Okay, go ahead and buy them, and they gave us the money. So contrary to all the debate about costing money, and the taxpayers going broke, the bill makes money. Now, you can say: Oh no, it doesn't, I have another way of figuring it out. That is what the Senator says. But we can't have another way to do everything around here, another way to figure out what bills cost. We already have enough ways to figure them out, and they have got us so confused with what we have that we don't need any more. But if the Senator thinks he has a new one, and that is to delay this bill and take a piece of it and talk about it and say it is a bad piece that doesn't make sense, that is fine. But don't say you have a new way to protect the great public of America from overspending and that is to take after a lands bill full of authorization that nobody heretofore has thought of taking on for appropriations purposes, because it doesn't appropriate. The good Senator is phenomenal. He is a phenomenon. But he isn't so great that of all the time in history we have had to look at these land bills nobody has said: We are going to follow each one and see how much it costs. That is one of his amendments, to follow its cost into government. You know what that means? It means there is a whole new set of books we have to set up. His approach will cost more money and wreak more havoc if we have to do that--find out how much they cost, even if he does them himself, as he suggested. He is going to see how much these authorizations cost, if anything, as they reach fruition--if they do. Now, having said that, each and every one of the amendments offered by the Senator is very erudite. They lend themselves to discussion and debate. But every one of them, Mr. President and fellow Senators, every one of the amendments is so complicated, so full of contortions and turning the government this way and that way, that they ought to at least have a hearing. They haven't had a hearing. They shouldn't be adopted on this bill, where we have carefully had hearings on the bill, had votes on the bill, with 23 Senators participating before we put them in this package. We should not put these four new ones on, one of which has to do with local government approving the acquisition of property by the Federal Government for parks. Before you can sell your property to the government, local government has to take a vote, and then 10 years later they have to take another vote to see if they were right. Do you understand, in the argument for simplicity of government, for making sure everybody can have their way, we have made government more complex by these amendments than anybody could ever imagine? I, for one, say my hat is off to the Senator. I hope he finds a new approach, something new to attack to save money, but not a group of lands bills that are authorization bills only, that we have been told by the Congressional Budget Office will cost nothing in the way we handle bills here. Now, if you want to change the way and have a new way to figure out how much bills cost, then we will have to have a long debate on which way we are going to do that. I thank the Senate for listening, and I thank the Senate for yielding me some time, and I thank the Senator from Oklahoma for letting me speak as long as I have.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. DOMENICI. Doesn't that letter say ``if appropriated''?

Mr. DOMENICI. That means if it is not appropriated, it doesn't cost anything.

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, the turn of the year marked the 20th year the El Malpais Conservation area in western New Mexico has had the benefit of special Federal protection. Two decades ago with the help of the delegation, Congress passed legislation to ensure the protection of this culturally and geographically significant portion of New Mexico, while an amendment of mine allowed the nearby native tribes to continue to utilize the area for their traditional religious and cultural activities. Located just south of Grants, between State highways 53 and 117, the El Malpais conservation area is unlike any other in the United States. This unique area is an important cultural resource for the pueblos of Acoma, Laguna, Zuni, and Ramah Navajo. El Malpais, meaning ``the badlands,'' describes the hardened lava plains where molten rock once flowed thousands of years ago. The uneven cooling of these lava flows created many lava tube caves throughout the designation which now provide for a unique hiking experience. This exceptional conservation area also contains the West Malpais and Cebolla Wilderness areas, spectacular sandstone cliffs and canyons, and a habitat for a multitude of desert vegetation such as aspen, pine, juniper, fir, grasses and cacti. The El Malpais conservation area offers visitors guided tours, picnicking, camping, biking, and horseback riding in designated areas. Last year I was able to help secure $250,000 for the purchase of 200 acres of inholdings at the El Malpais national conservation area. This additional acreage is an important additional step to preserving the history and consolidating the varied landscapes contained within this one of a kind conservation area. Our public lands are truly national treasures, and as such, they demand our most thoughtful management. The outdoors in New Mexico reminds us all of the things we hold so dear. I am proud to have played a role in ensuring the expansion and continued protection of El Malpais. This New Mexico treasure remains much the same as it did as so many years ago, and I am glad this will be the case for generations to come.

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have 1 minute to answer the statement made by the Senator from Florida.

Mr. DOMENICI. I don't care if the Senator wants 5 minutes.

Mr. DOMENICI. Madam President, what happened in this case, with reference to shale oil, is the United States has as much shale oil in these two States--Colorado and Utah--as the Saudi Arabians have oil. We had that arranged in our Energy bill, where it was being researched by major American oil companies. In the dead of night, the appropriators changed the law in an appropriations bill and put a moratorium on final regulations so that those who are investing money to see if we can produce this with $100-a-barrel oil out there, or not, they have to look at a moratorium as to whether they should invest money. There should not be a moratorium. It is protected by law. This is somebody up in one of these States putting a moratorium on in appropriations with nobody around. This Senator wasn't there. If I were there, it would not have happened. We would not have had a bill. We would have had to filibuster that bill because it is so wrong to, in appropriations, say no to the largest body of ore in America that could substitute for crude oil. You might say: Why didn't we do it before? We didn't do it because oil wasn't high enough. Now it is.

Mr. DOMENICI. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I thank the Senator. I wish to correct the record, if the Senator from Tennessee has no objection. The lease we modified, which had a moratorium on it in the offshore, was lease 181. I believe the Senator said: 187. I would not correct it, but it is commonly known as 181, so I thought we should fix it. I am not going to speak very long because the truth of the matter is, the distinguished Senator, Mr. Alexander, has done a marvelous job explaining this package. Everybody should know we Republicans tried, on a budget resolution, to come up with some ideas. Some of them are simple, but all of them are good. All of them will do some significant good for the energy problems that confront everyday people and that confront the budgets of everyday people. It is good we sit down and say: Well, even though this is a budget resolution, can we come up with some things that will be helpful? I think we have. This amendment he has put in will attempt to bring down the price of gasoline, which would have the biggest effect on family budgets. As he says, we are looking at ways to help the family budget, while the Democratic budget we are on is going to wreck the Federal budget. What I am going to do is talk about, quickly, things I see in this amendment that are important. First of all, as the price of gasoline at the pump continues to rise, and our level of dependence on unstable foreign regions continues to rise, we must take action every opportunity we get. But instead, when the majority has chosen to take action on their own--and they had a chance a couple months ago--they have taken action that moves things in the wrong direction. Consider the Omnibus appropriations bill from last year. Hidden within those hundreds of pages, without transparency, were provisions that could have a profound negative effect on the Nation's energy security. First, it contained a 1-year moratorium on final regulations on oil shale. This little amendment my good friend Senator Alexander has offered says that regulation change--which was made in the back room, not open to daylight, not part of debate--be removed. I suggest we have already, in the Omnibus Energy bill, provided whatever the citizens of this country need as protection--environmental protection and the like--for this shale development. We have a company, Shell Oil, that is spending a huge amount of money onsite to see if they can find a way to convert this shale oil so it can be used as part of America's ever-growing need for oil and related products. We should not have put a moratorium on final regulations in an appropriations bill. So it takes that away. Secondly, in that same appropriations bill--in the dark of night, without being open to public discussion--a $4,000 fee was added to permits for drilling for oil. The Senate did not know anything about it. We have not debated it. It is the wrong direction. When you are producing something, you do not add more cost to the production and hope to get more. When you add a secret $4,000 fee, you cause less production, not more. This amendment does the right thing and says, openly and publicly: We want to address it. We take that $4,000 fee off because it never should have been there. It is moving in the wrong direction. According to the Department of Interior, the oil shale in the United States is the equivalent of 1.23 trillion barrels of oil. As we import millions of barrels of oil and send $400 billion this year to unstable regions of the world, the majority chooses to make it more difficult to produce American resources. With the second provision, the majority chooses to increase the costs on small producers in my home State and others by putting this $4,000 permit fee on the drilling using ordinary rigs to drill for oil. That should not have been done, and we fix that. The Alexander amendment takes a better approach than the majority did. It removes the impediments to producing more of the subject matter that will help us out of our dependence and makes things better for the average American in due course. One last thing I would mention as my last observation: In this bill, we considered that on the Atlantic and Pacific side of the offshore waters, we are leaving over 15 billion barrels of oil and over 50 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the ground. As we debate about the price impact of 60,000 barrels per day being put in the strategic petroleum reserve--our Nation's energy security asset--we leave over 1 million barrels per day locked up underground in Arctic Alaska, and we have allowed about 15 billion barrels of oil to remain locked up under our ocean. The Alexander amendment does only what it can do, but it seeks to revisit the debate on domestic production in light of these new facts and new costs facing Americans. The amendment also seeks to improve the efficiency and cleanliness of the way we produce and use electricity. The Senator has explained that as much as it needs to be, and better than I can, so I will say no more. This amendment overall does not do all that we need to do to strengthen our Nation's energy security, but it is a vast progrowth improvement over the approach laid out by the majority in two provisions which I have talked about, and then we have added an additional three that are good and will help the American people. I wish to close by saying, I am firmly convinced the American people are being hurt every day. We are being made poorer--day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year--because the cost of oil has gone up so high. Yet we have not been able to minimize our dependence, although we passed some very formidable laws to address it in time, in due course. But for now we continue to use more than we did last year and more than we did the year before. At $100-plus a barrel, there is no question we are not adjusting to that very well. We must do everything we can to avoid that continued use. This amendment will do a little bit. If the committees that are charged with and given jurisdiction were to pass it, it would help. In the meantime, there is no question we should seek every opportunity to minimize our dependence upon foreign oil so as to permit our economy to grow again and become powerful again. This Senator is fearful we are going in the wrong direction, principally because oil is too expensive, and we must import too much of it. Mr. President, I yield the floor and thank the Senator for permitting me to join him in his amendment today.

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the Senator from Alabama, Mr. Sessions, the Senator from Texas, Mr. Cornyn, the Senator from Louisiana, Mr. Vitter, and the Senator from South Carolina, Mr. DeMint, be added as cosponsors to my bill to authorize the National Guard to provide support for the border control activities of the United States Customs and Border Protection of the Department of Homeland Security, and for other purposes, S. 2716.