Pete Domenici

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I would like to announce for the information of the Senate and the public that the following hearing has been scheduled before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. The hearing entitled ``Climate Change Science and Economics'' will be held on Tuesday, September 20th at 10 a.m. in Room SD-366. This is a continuation of the hearing held on July 21, 2005. The purpose of the hearing is to receive testimony regarding the current state of climate change scientific research and the economics of strategies to manage climate change. Issues to be discussed include: the relationship between energy consumption and climate change, and the potential effects on the U.S. economy of climate change and strategies to control greenhouse gas emissions. Because of the limited time available for the hearing, witnesses may testify by invitation only. However, those wishing to submit written testimony for the hearing record should send two copies of their testimony to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, United States Senate, SD-364 Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510-6150. For further information, please contact: John Peschke or Shannon Ewan. subcommIttee on National Parks

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I rise to discuss, for a moment on the record, what I have been telling some Senators individually and in groups about the management of postdisaster activities in the Gulf Coast area. Let me begin by saying that I am not going to add to the various discussions being had about who should decide what persons, if any, made mistakes in terms of controlling this disaster, the scourge of this hurricane. Did somebody not do what they were supposed to do or did somebody do it too late? If so, who was it, when did the mistake occur, and why did the person act as they did? That is, who was at fault in responding to this natural disaster, if anyone. I am not talking about that. I hear the rancor and the partisanship in the discussion about who should do that. I am talking about the fact that we have now the most difficult situation that America on its homeland has ever had to manage. We have never had anything as difficult as this to manage--the confusion, disrepair, individual suffering, displacement, hardship, property destruction, pollution. All of those things affected literally hundreds of thousands of people in three-plus States. We are currently in the immediate aftermath of the force that brought all those things upon us as a nation. How many people have been displaced--sometimes called refugees, but they will not be referred to as such by me--how many men, women, and children? I understand that the numbers displaced due to a natural disaster before this did not exceed 30,000. It was something under 30,000. For this one disaster, there were over 450,000 people displaced. Anybody who thinks that what we have in place to manage a crisis of this magnitude is fine doesn't understand the proportions of this event. We don't have in place the tools, the wherewithal, the ability to manage this problem--not from the time of its arrival and not now, as we work to gradually make the situation better for everybody, to a point in time that we can take a deep breath and say: We have done as much as we can for as many as we can, and as far as our country and its people and its businesses and its charities are concerned, we have completed the task of responding to this emergency. We don't have any way of doing that. Anybody who is sitting around here contemplating the work of its committee, be it a chairman of a committee or the chairman of a subcommittee, and thinking they know how to do that, let me tell you, they don't. I regret to say it. In all deference, I am one of those chairmen. I have a standing committee and a subcommittee. They are both involved in this event. One is Energy and Natural Resources. The other is Appropriations for Energy and Water, which is literally all the energy around there, pipelines and the like, and the Corps of Engineers. So I could be saying I will do my share. I will start having hearings. But I submit that this work that I would do and that any other committee of the Congress would do is as apt to be meaningless or wrong or moving in the wrong direction, when looked at a year from now, as it is to be appropriate. It isn't that we are doing anything wrong; it is that we don't know what our goal is. We don't know where we are going. We know people need checks. We know people need money. We know people need accelerated Social Security and Medicaid benefits. We also know people need housing. But does that mean we should hold a hearing in the housing Appropriations Committee and decide: Here is a new program. We are going to fund the program. It will be grants and loans, 100,000 new houses for these people? Of course it doesn't mean that at all. We need somebody to put the plan together and decide what the housing situation is going to be like for these people. Do we need interim help? Will that be vouchers? And who will start putting that together? I could go on. This is not because anybody has not done their job. Forget about that. Whatever the job that was to be done, right or wrong, is finished. What you have to do now is rehabilitate, replan, and put in place what must be done within the laws of America, with the dollars of our taxpayers. I came here in 1972, believe it or not. I was 39 years old. I don't know how I got here or why I was here. I got a great big assignment, one committee, Public Works. You new Senators who worry about your committee assignments these days, I only had one. I got a very auspicious job, too. I was ranking committee member on a subcommittee on disaster relief. I thought: Well, I will never have a hearing, but when I have been here long enough, I will go to another committee. But lo and behold, Agnes hit. Agnes was a giant hurricane that caused a Northeastern flood, all the way through Pennsylvania. Sure enough, I went to work. I learned about disasters. But what I also learned was that through the good wisdom of a Senator, who, as I now understand it, was Hugh Scott, the minority leader from Pennsylvania--he used to sit over here when we had very few seats on this side of the Aisle--he talked Richard Nixon into appointing a man to be in charge of the Agnes recovery named Frank Carlucci. You've all heard his name of late. However they found him, I don't know. They must have been clairvoyant; they must have known he was something super. He was President's Nixon's on the ground representative for Agnes for 3 or 4 years, and we came out of that. Today his job would be comparable to having all involved computers run out of one office by people in the executive branch of Government, as if the OMB moved over there to handle things. Everything ran according to plans that came out of Carlucci's office of recovery. Nixon did not use a Marshall plan. He put somebody in charge of telling us what resources we ought to use and what our options were. From that, he went on to other areas of success, so they must have picked the right guy. He held two Cabinet positions. He was a great success in business. That has nothing to do with what I am talking about, but he was apparently a very talented man. Now this President ought to pick a very talented leader, someone who is not in the Government, for a similar task. I mean no offense to the current establishment working in the Gulf Coast. They are there because we had an emergency--a disaster. But they are not there to handle what is going to be about a 10-year recovery program. I think the occupant of the Chair knows this. This recovery plan will go on long beyond the next 2 or 3 years. We better have our recovery efforts, and oversight of those efforts, occur in an orderly manner or can you imagine how many hearings we are going to have? Can you imagine how many committees are going to be involved in saying they are solving this problem? Can you imagine the number of press releases that will be issued by subcommittees that are holding hearings about fixing this thing? Can you imagine the laws they are going to bring down here to the floor to pass saying, we are solving Katrina? All those things ought to come out of somebody who is on the ground analyzing the situation. I urge the President to act. Give the position whatever name you like. I hate to use the word ``czar''. It doesn't sound right to say ``commander.'' It doesn't sound right to say ``general.'' But they ought to put somebody in charge by executive order and give them the OMB type of office experts to help them analyze this situation and present to the Congress, through the President, the information we need for us to make the decisions about what policies we want. Far be it from me to know much about managing things because I don't manage much except in my office, and I am not sure sometimes if a Senate office is even manageable. Whatever I have to manage, it probably has not been managed very well. Once I thought it was so important to manage that I hired somebody to see if they could write a manual on how you manage a Senate office. He was the greatest manager I had ever seen in New Mexico. He spent a year and a half working. He wrote a manual. When he was finished, he said: I guess I have tell you, you have to make this current about every week because things are so changeable here. So I don't know how to manage things. But what I know is that what we have now cries out for a manager or we are going to have disorder following disaster. We are going to have money following money and then people asking: What wasn't done that should have been done? The sooner a manager is put in place, the better. I hope the President will act. I thank the Senate for listening. I thank the Presiding Officer, because he is the only one who has to stay around here before we finish, and Senator Alexander for being a gentleman. I yield the floor.

Mr. DOMENICI

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

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, parliamentary inquiry: Is the Energy bill now before the Senate?

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, might I ask, is the bill under controlled time?

Mr. DOMENICI. On behalf of the leader, I am going to ask consent regarding the stacking of votes. It has not been done. I ask unanimous consent that we now resume consideration of the energy conference report--which is the regular order--for the final remarks; I further ask consent that following that 30-minute period, the Senate proceed to votes in relation to the Interior conference report, Legislative Branch conference report, and the two votes in relation to the Energy conference report, as provided under the order, with 2 minutes equally divided between the votes.

Mr. DOMENICI. Yes.

Mr. DOMENICI. I say to the Senator from West Virginia, there is a unanimous consent agreement here that has the time allotted until we are finished with the Energy bill, and the votes thereon. That will not be a long time. But everybody knows we have 30 minutes right now for the Energy bill, and after that we will commence voting on three bills that are before us. I would think the Senate would want to stay to that order.

Mr. DOMENICI. Please. Surely.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I see Senator Bingaman in the Chamber. He is going to proceed, first, with the allocation of some of the time on his side of the aisle. I yield the floor.

Mr. DOMENICI. Has the Senator concluded?

Mr. DOMENICI. I assume that Senator Bingaman has another person he would like to yield to. I will yield to one of his, Senator Cantwell or Senator Salazar.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I yield 3 minutes to Senator Cantwell.

Mr. DOMENICI. I yield 4 minutes to the Senator from Louisiana.

Mr. DOMENICI. Parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. DOMENICI. Is it not correct that the point of order is going to be made? Can that point of order be made so the Senator will not have to wait? Can it be made just before the vote on the Energy bill?

Mr. DOMENICI. Otherwise it will be made then?

Mr. DOMENICI. The Senator can make it just before the Energy bill vote and we have 2 minutes on each side then. So the Senator will not have to wait now on that.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished junior Senator from Colorado.

Mr. DOMENICI. The gentleman is correct. We did not intend to revisit issues regulated under the GLBA, or provide the Commission with rulemaking authority over financial institutions regulated under Gramm- Leach-Bliley.

Mr. DOMENICI. The gentleman is correct.

Mr. DOMENICI. The gentleman is correct.

Mr. DOMENICI. I thank the gentleman for bringing these issues to my attention.

Mr. DOMENICI. That is correct.

Mr. DOMENICI. Certainly.