Pete Domenici

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, it is very difficult to listen to words like, ``The President of the United States is looting a veterans' health care program,'' and ``the Senate Budget Committee continues to loot.'' Mr. President, almost everybody on that Budget Committee who voted for this probably votes for everything the U.S. Congress proposes for veterans. But what has happened here is very, very interesting. Here is the expansion of a program in a dramatic way. One would assume it is rather dramatic, since it is going to cost about $10 billion over 5 years. Congress has never voted on the program, number one. It is so inconsistent, in terms of causal connection between something that happened while you are in the military and your death, that the President of the United States, on two occasions --not one, but two successive budgets--has not funded any money to administer this expanded program. As a matter of fact, this year the President refused to fund it and removed the money needed from the veterans' overall available moneys, I assume because the President believed it probably was never going to happen. That is two points. The third point: Not a single claim under this proposed expansion has ever been granted to this day. I take that back. The staff says 200 claims have been granted. What we are saying is the President is right on this one. Before the afternoon is finished, we hope we can talk about another way to see who is right without having to do what the distinguished Senator from West Virginia, Mr. Rockefeller, asks for. We are working on that, because, if anything, Mr. President, and fellow Senators, we ourselves need some clarification about what this program is all about. I want to give two examples. I am not an expert like my friend Senator Rockefeller, who is on the Veterans' Committee, apparently is, or Senator Specter, who works hard in that area and is chairman. Here is one example. If a young man started to smoke when he was 16 years old and he smoked for 4 years, and he joined the Army when he was 20 and he smoked for 4 more years, and he only served 4 years and he got out, and then he continued to smoke for 40 years, and he got cancer, this expansion of the program never before considered says that the Federal Government, the military, is responsible for his cancer. Do you have that? He started smoking before he went in. He smoked for only 4 years while he was there. Now he gets a benefit for cancer. If he dies, his widow gets a widow's allowance because something happened to him in the military and we should pay for the death and a widow's allowance. Frankly, I do not believe anybody who has been talking about this veteran's benefit understood that. I will give you the more typical one. You join the military. Most of these are going to be people who were not in for a long time because they are the veterans who were coming in while we had the draft. So you have a 20-year-old joining and he smokes. Here is one. He smokes for the 2 years that he is in. Then he continues thereafter to smoke for 40 more years. He dies of cancer. His widow gets a benefit allowance because he smoked for 2 years in the military, and continued thereafter on the premise that he became addicted to nicotine in the military and, therefore, we should pay for it. There are all kinds of examples like that. I don't know all of the examples. Of the three that I stated, one of them may not be exactly right. But I am in the ballpark about what is happening. I believe we ought to follow the lead of the President and not permit this program to go into effect now. I did not say that we should kill the program. I said I believe we should come up with a way so that we don't implement the program now so that we don't create any false hope immediately, but that we find a way to get this program appropriately evaluated and that we find out here in the Congress what it is all about. I am hopeful before too long that we will have an approach to try to do that. I know frequently in these kinds of situations it doesn't do a lot of good to talk and to explain because maybe people have already made up their minds. I hope not on this. Let me tell you, there is no question that we are not denying veterans any health benefits they are getting today. If 200 people have gotten the claims, it certainly is just the beginning. There will be many more. We ought to take a good look at it before we decide that it is right. Frankly, I look forward to taking another look at this in some appropriate way for a reasonable period of time. I hope the veterans' groups in this country will say, well, the Senate quite appropriately wanted to take a look. They did not say we weren't entitled to this. But it is very, very different than anything we have done before. In a sense, it is sort of saying if you smoked at any time in the military and smoked thereafter, that the military is responsible for everything that happens to you if you smoke for 25 more years because somehow or another you became nicotine addicted in those years while you were in the military. I repeat: This does not change all of the veterans' benefits with reference to existing programs that are being carried out. I understand with reference to hospital treatment that Senator Rockefeller is alluding to the fact that if this isn't continued on and if it doesn't continue starting right now that some veterans will not be as high up in the rank of using the veterans' facilities as they would be if this program were in effect. But I suggest even there that we ought to take a look for a reasonable period of time and get this analyzed thoroughly before we proceed. I yield the floor and reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. DOMENICI. I believe we will go to Senator Rockefeller, if he is ready.

Mr. DOMENICI. I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. DOMENICI. In the interest of reducing the time, I will accept the Boxer amendment numbered 2176, and I yield back the time I was going to use to speak, and she has yielded all her time but 1 minute.

Mr. DOMENICI. Is the minority going to respond? I suggest the absence of a quorum, and I ask unanimous consent it be charged equally.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, how much time does the Senator from Texas have?

Mr. DOMENICI. We are operating under a time agreement where you are in control of 15 minutes and the opposition has 15 minutes.

Mr. DOMENICI. I yield the floor.

Mr. DOMENICI. I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I add to the list amendment No. 2229, the Feinstein amendment. And I assume we will have to adopt that separately.

Mr. DOMENICI. I move to reconsider the vote by which the amendments were agreed to en bloc.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I have a list of amendments by number. There are 21. And I will not cite each one but, rather, I will send the list to the desk for consideration. These amendments have been agreed to. And I would like to agree to them en bloc. There is no objection on our side and no objection on their side, the Democrat side. They are both Republican and Democrat amendments.

Mr. DOMENICI. They did not. But they used to leave all kinds of little notes on my pillow and stuff them underneath. Mr. President, let me just say, it is a question in politics if there is ever enough spending by a Government. How much is enough, I ask? Is $825 million provided in this budget resolution to take care of advertising to have a positive impact on our children smoking enough or should we have more? I tell you, that is twice as much as the President asked for. I assume if a Democratic President has some $400 million and we have $825 million, that probably--probably--we have enough. Having said that, there are so many programs being talked about to come out of that pot of gold, that giant piggy bank, many of which nobody knows will even work. If you have national advertising programs and preventive programs in drugs where you are going into schools, talking to the kids, running advertising and it is not working a bit--in fact, there are more drugs--one would have a tendency to be a bit skeptical, it seems to me, about whether we know how to do that, be it for drugs or for cigarettes. In the final analysis, we have decided in our budget resolution to take every priority that we can find consistent with our 5-year agreement and fund them as best we can consistent with the agreement; that there be no new discretionary spending. What is happening now, just so everybody will understand, we asked those experts who talk about our money supply, our interest rates, the wonderful economy, what are we supposed to be most concerned about to keep the message out there that we are fiscally responsible and we are aiming at a balanced budget for a long time? They tell us, ``Don't breach the agreement that you entered into with reference to how much you can spend each year as you appropriate annually.'' We all say we will not do that. That is right. But, Mr. President, what this budget that is before us and what the President chose to do is to take another pot of money and say, ``We'll spend it another way and it won't count against those agreed-upon expenditures.'' That is called new entitlement programs. So this litany of new programs cannot be paid for under the budget agreement. But it can be paid for if you choose to create new entitlement programs that will go on forever even though the money from which they are paid has a terminal time. So I believe we did the right thing. We look forward to an era of balanced budgets, an era of solid economic growth, an era during which we fix Social Security permanently and during which we fix Medicare permanently and we actually put our budget where our mouth is, and that is to do those things. I yield back any time that I might have. And in due course I will make a point of order against the budget. But I do not choose to do it now. I say to Senator Hutchison, if you would let me dispose of a series of amendments, I would really appreciate that. Amendments Nos. 2187, 2204, 2217, 2212, 2225, 2233, 2235, 2236, 2237, 2239, 2240, 2246, 2248, 2250, 2253, 2258, 2263, 2264, 2266, 2269, and 2270, en bloc

Mr. DOMENICI. Sure.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I don't know how we judge right and wrong, whether I am right or wrong after an eloquent speech, as my friend called it. But, look, this afternoon we are going to vote and sometimes in America, democracy says the one that gets the most votes wins. I don't know if that means you are right, but I can tell you we are going to win and they are going to lose. I don't know what that means, but I think that is pretty good. In addition, let me suggest, I, too, am worried about what is happening to our young children who smoke. It is wonderful for me to be able to say that I smoked heavily until 8 years ago. I have eight children and not a single one smokes. So I am very pleased about that. I don't know what that means either, except it is just a statement of fact.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I know that Senator Hutchison is waiting, but I want to use some of that 6 minutes. I am not sure I will use all of it. Let me take a little. Amendment No. 2244

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote by which the amendment was agreed to.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I say to Senator Stevens, I understand, working with the other side, this amendment includes nondefense where there are serious discretionary estimating inconsistencies.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, outside of this, Senator Stevens wants to offer an amendment that is going to be accepted. I ask unanimous consent that he be permitted to do that without it being charged to either side.

Mr. DOMENICI. I ask unanimous consent I be allowed to manage that amount of time in opposition.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, how much time was used in excess of the 15 minutes?

Mr. DOMENICI. I see the minority leader is here. Maybe he wants more than 18. He can try to get it off the bill, but I remind him that we made a deal we weren't going to do that, so I will keep my remarks brief. First, Mr. President, I would like to say the basic difference between this proposal and the President's--and it is very fundamental, and everybody should understand it--is that we thought if there was going to be some new money to spend, that we ought to take a look at what American programs were most in need of money, and we found that there are two American programs. They are not State programs, they are not city programs, they are not school board programs--they are ``the U.S. Government does them, or they don't get done.'' They are the Social Security system and the Medicare system for our seniors--but we are all going to get to be seniors, so therefore all of us. What we did in our budget was say very, very simply: If you settle this tobacco agreement--which seems to me to be getting further and further from reality, but let's just say if it gets settled--put all of the Federal Government's receipts from it into the program that is most in need and that has been most adversely affected by smoking. That is the Medicare Program. It is interesting that while the President's program and the Democrat program--the President suggests $124 billion in new programs, and the litany sounds wonderful. We have heard some of it here this afternoon. I can't tell for certain, but it looks like the budget before us does a little better. It looks like it has $88 billion to $100 billion in new programs, new spending. I ask, whether it is $124 billion in new money or $88 or $90 billion, is it right? Is it correct? Is it the right thing to do, to put not one nickel toward Medicare, which is the largest American program in jeopardy? And, as I debated this earlier in the week, I showed in a very simplified, simple chart, what will happen to the Medicare trust fund starting in about 10 years. And the deficit line goes in a line downward as if we are aiming it towards the middle of the Earth--which we used to say that's where Hades was, when we were little kids. For starters, that is one big difference, and we are proud of that difference, for we put a very substantial number of billions into that very needy program so those national commissioners trying to put it together will have some extra resources to save Medicare for the seniors of today and the seniors of tomorrow. When you do that, you cannot pay for all the new wish list of programs that have been alluded to here today and that our President alluded to in a dramatic speech to the American people as the State of the Union. As a matter of fact, had that wonderful pot of gold--to wit: the cigarette companies' agreement--not been around when the President of the United States was preparing his speech, he could not have told the American people that there were any new programs. You know why? Because he agreed. He agreed that for the next 5 years there would be little or no increases in the discretionary programs of this country. That was the deal. That was the agreement. So, lo and behold, the expectation quotient rises from that night to this moment on the floor of the Senate, when the big pot of gold is there, to start a whole bunch of new American programs. Frankly, as I indicated, everybody should know that most of the list of good things that we cannot afford, that the Democrats are speaking to, most of them won't come into existence if we don't have a big, gigantic pot of gold coming from the tobacco companies. That is point No. 1. Point No. 2: With reference to smoking and its relationship and cost to the American taxpayer, and to our programs, the distinguished occupant of the chair has the most forthright sense-of-the-Senate resolution that he will offer during this debate, and I hope we adopt it. It just says that every penny we get out of the tobacco settlement should go to Medicare, because Medicare suffers a $25-billion-a-year hit because of seniors who, when they were young, smoked, got sick, and Medicare pays their bill. Pretty logical. I commend him for it and for his leadership in that regard. Nonetheless, they would ask, aren't we going to take care of some of the needs that we know about because of smoking? And we say yes. But we didn't wait around to do them based upon a settlement; we did it by reducing other programs and paying for them. So, for those who wonder, the National Institutes of Health, which everybody says should be increased so they can work on some prevention areas of cancer that have been affected by smoking, gets a $15.5 billion increase in the next 5 years, the largest in the history of any research entity that the United States funds. And then, education. You see, we don't forget what we agreed to last year. We have a 5-year agreement on education, and it is one of the high-priority agreements between the President and the Congress. We didn't forget about it in the second year. We fully fund the increases in education, and they are very significant. What we said is, we should put $2.5 billion, minimum, for the disabled of our children being educated by our public schools. A disgrace exists today with a Federal Government which mandated this assistance years ago, committed to pay 40 percent of its cost, and is still paying 9 percent as of this day. While the schools foot the bill, we write the laws, even though we agreed last year that education money would first be applied there to bridge the gap between the 9 percent and the commitment. The President saw fit to go with new programs and not that; but not us--$2.5 billion. That means those school systems can hire new teachers. We don't have to pay for teachers from the Federal Government's tax coffers, which we have never done in history. We say relieve the burden on the schools and they can hire them. We put an additional $6.3 billion in education--an increase--so that we can fund in due course some programs which will have flexibility built in for our public schools, including such things as teacher training and those kinds of things that will bring some accountability to the public school system of our country. And we are proud of that, too. It is not as if there is nothing in, it is just we chose these instead of others, and we think these are prudent choices. Then we could go on from there and talk about criminal justice. We all know we cannot cut that; it must go up. We increased that in our budget, because it was a high priority item when we made our 5-year agreement that we worked so hard together on, Democrat and Republican and President. So it is not as if we did not do some of these things that the Democratic leadership is here touting that they would do and we didn't do. It is just that we did not increase net spending by $84 billion. The Democrat budget does. Net tax increases of one type or another--$80 billion in that proposal. We did not do that much. The reduction in the surplus--there is a cutting of the surplus in half, under their proposal, from 8 to 4. That is not a lot of billions, as we throw them around here, but nonetheless a significant thing to note. Mr. President, I believe the budget we produced in the Budget Committee, if it were to become the cornerstone for this year's appropriation bills and tax reduction--for there is $30 billion worth of tax reduction in ours. It is provided for by closing loopholes and other tax advantages, many of which have been listed as items that we should consider for more than a decade, and some of them 15 years. So ours is pretty well balanced. I am convinced, having familiarized myself as best I can, and I think perhaps with a few exceptions as well as anyone in the Senate, ours would be good for the future growth of the American economy and would continue this dramatic, sustained economic growth that is bringing us revenues and bringing us jobs. Frankly, Mr. President, I don't believe there is very much in the Democratic budget or the President's budget that would contribute significantly to those positive things that we all cherish and want so much. I yield the floor and reserve whatever time I have. Mr. DASCHLE addressed the Chair.

Mr. DOMENICI. How much time remains on the Democrat side?

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, following the next amendment, which I think will be the Lautenberg amendment, we will propose to the Senate a long list of amendments that we will accept and propose to accept by voice vote or by accommodation by both sides agreeing. So we will do that and that will take care of another long list of amendments. Then what will be left will be the ``vote-arama,'' and we will try to narrow those down in our personal conversations with Senators. Our leader will be along shortly to discuss this with Senators, also. According to the order, Senator Lautenberg's amendment will now be the pending business. Amendment No. 2244

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I thank the Senators for participating in what has been an exciting debate. I have a consent agreement that has been worked out between the majority and the minority. I ask unanimous consent that the following amendments be debated between now and approximately 4 o'clock, under the same terms as agreed to last night, with the exception of second-degree amendments, which are now limited to 10 minutes equally divided: Brownback amendment No. 2177, which has already been debated; Boxer amendment No. 2167; Specter amendment No. 2254; Lautenberg amendment No. 2244; Kyl amendment No. 2221; the two amendments that we have just heard debated, the Nickles amendment and the Kennedy amendment, Nos. 2282 and 2183, respectively; a Hutchison from Texas amendment No. 2208; and the last in this series is the Rockefeller amendment No. 2226. I further ask that at the conclusion or yielding back of time on each of these amendments, and any second degrees, all remaining time on the budget be considered yielded back, and the and the Senate proceed to stack rollcall votes, under the same terms as last night.