Pete Domenici

Mr. DOMENICI

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I understand that we have about 6 minutes on our side.

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. I will use 1 more minute and yield the time. I understand the minority leader is in a predicament because of this being a bill that the consensus was worked out not by his side, although there were some, but predominately by this Senator on this side. I believe the American people are going to say on every major aspect of America's growing dependence, the price of gasoline, the price of natural gas, wiping out of the fertilizer industry in America which affects our agriculture, and on and on, they understand we need an energy bill. We need this bill. This is as good as we will ever get. Having spoken as well as I can for as long as is prudent in the Senate where one can speak too long--the House does it in 2 or 3 minutes; if they would have forced me I guess I could have done that--but as I started out saying, as the chairman of this committee, it has been a good week and a few good things have happened. There has been some evidence that people want to get this bill done. I yield the floor.

Mr. DOMENICI. How much time do we have?

Mr. DOMENICI. I yield my time to Senator Craig.

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I must tell my colleagues that, as chairman of the Energy Committee, I am having a good week for a change. On Monday, Senator Cantwell came to the floor and sought unanimous consent to bring up one piece of the Energy bill. On Tuesday, the minority leader came to the floor and offered a portion of the Energy bill as an amendment to the Internet tax bill. We seem to be on a roll. Members know this country has a serious energy problem. They are feeling the political pressure to do something about it. That is good news for this chairman, who has waited so long and worked so hard seeking to develop some sort of political consensus on a broad energy bill. Fellow Senators, I have never in my 31 years worked on legislation that is so hard to piece together, because every time you have a comprehensive bill, you show it to somebody and they read it in its entirety, they find one piece out of hundreds they cannot support. If I had the wisdom and the time to go to every Senator and let them read it and say what can I take out that would make you happy and have you go for this bill, I assume that when I was finished, this 900-page authorizing bill would probably end up being just a few sheets of paper. The truth is that America is crying for a comprehensive energy bill. America is not worried about one Senator's particular concern about one particular aspect. They are worried about the fact we will soon be importing natural gas. We have been using our own natural gas, and now predictions are that we are going to be using foreign natural gas in large quantities very soon. The consensus that I indicated to you is very hard to achieve. In the last Congress, the House and Senate both passed bills but were unable to resolve their differences in conference. I am not speaking of a few months ago; I mean the last legislative session, the last Congress. Last year the Senate considered energy legislation for somewhere on the order of 3 months before we were able to pass a bill off the floor. This time we got a conference agreement. I have been criticized for that conference. Some say we didn't have enough meetings. Some say the meetings were not open to the public. Others say they were not open to the Democratic staff. Let me tell you, this is good rhetoric, but the truth is we conducted one of the most open conferences that I have been in in almost 32 years in the Senate. We made agreements public as they were reached and at the end, before we circulated the agreement for signature, we held an open meeting and reconsidered all the amendments. When amendments could be agreed to by both bodies, we made changes. That is very different than the way most conferences are conducted. I have asked Senators on both sides of the aisle if they have been involved in bills where they were the minority and they didn't even participate in the conference, and many have said that is almost the course of things as we live in this Senate. Yet we did our best to use the Internet as a new tool. We submitted this to all the press through the Internet. They knew more about this bill if they wanted to report it than anybody has ever known. While doing that, we obviously submitted it to the minority and the minority staff. I responded to that criticism by dramatically reducing this bill. It is a slimmed-down energy bill. It dramatically reduces the cost for the nontax portions. We have reduced the cost from $5.4 billion to a minus $1.3 billion.

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce, along with several of my colleagues from both sides of the aisle, legislation that will protect U.S. trademarks and their legitimate owners from the effects of the confiscations decreed by the Cuban government. My colleagues and I believe in the fundamental principle that property rights must be respected and that it is wrong for governments to take property from individuals and companies, whether nationals or foreigners, without payment of prompt, adequate and effective compensation. We uphold the firmly established principle of our law and public policy that foreign confiscatory measures must never be given effect on property situated in the United States. When the Castro regime took power in Cuba, it engaged in a program of wholesale confiscation of property in Cuba, including property owned by Cuban nationals as well as by U.S. and other non-Cuban nationals. The Cuban government also purported to extend the effects of the confiscation to property, such as trademarks, that the confiscation victims owned in other countries, and took other actions in an attempt to seize control of such assets. To protect U.S. trademarks and their legitimate owners from the effects of the confiscations decreed by the Cuban government, Congress enacted Section 211 of H.R. 4328 (PL 105-277) in 1998. This law, referred to as Section 211, prohibits enforcement of U.S. rights to trademarks confiscated by the Cuban government, except with the consent of the legitimate owner. Section 211 simply made it clear that the universal U.S. policy against giving effect to foreign confiscations of U.S. property applies with equal force in the case of U.S. trademarks confiscated by Cuba. Section 211 was challenged in the World Trade Organization (WTO) by the European Union (EU). In January 2002, the WTO Appellate Body finally resolved that challenge by finding in favor of the United States on all points except one. The Appellate Body made a narrow finding that, because Section 211 on its face does not apply to U.S. nationals, it is inconsistent with the national-treatment and most- favored-nation principles under the TRIPs Agreement. The Appellate Body fully supported the principle embodied in Section 211, that is, the non-recognition of uncompensated confiscations and the protection of intellectual property ownership rights. The revision required to broaden the application of Section 211 to include U.S. nationals amounts to no more than a minor, technical fix. The legislation that we introduce today makes it clear this well- founded law applies to all parties claiming rights in confiscated Cuban trademarks, regardless of nationality. Such a technical correction will satisfy the WTO ruling and prevent the EU from applying trade sanctions against the United States at the end of this year. Moreover, this legislation does three things: it maintains protection for original owners of confiscated Cuban trademarks; it applies to all people, regardless of nationality; it clarifies that trademarks and trade names confiscated by the Cuban Government will not be recognized in the United States when the assertion is being made by someone who knew or had reason to know that the mark was confiscated. This bill does not in any way decide which party owns a Cuban trademark in the U.S. nor does Section 211 prevent the Cuban government or its various entities from having access to our courts or from registering legitimate trademarks in the U.S. As long as the trademark was not confiscated, the Cuban government can legally register any trademark it desires. Moreover, even if the Cuban government stole a trademark in the 1960s, it can still register the trademark in the U.S as long as the original owner has consented. Once revised, Section 211 is consistent with all of our international treaty obligations including the Inter-American Convention on Trademarks. The Inter-American Convention expressly in Article 3 allows non-recognition of a trademark when such recognition would be contrary to the public order or public policy of the state in which recognition is sought. There is no doubt whatsoever that allowing title to U.S. property to be determined by a foreign confiscation violates U.S. public policy. Section 211 simply makes it clear that the universal U.S. policy against giving effect to foreign confiscations of U.S. property applies with equal force in the case of U.S. trademarks confiscated by Cuba. Nothing in any treaty or in international law is inconsistent with that rule of U.S. law. I believe this piece of legislation is a simple technical corrections bill which will ensure that a fairly simple, but important, U.S. law is WTO-compliant.

Mr. DOMENICI

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

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

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that there be a temporary holdup in the reading of the amendment.

Mr. DOMENICI. Will the Senator object if it was understood that the reading could continue as soon as we finish our discussion? Temporarily, just 5 minutes per side and then the reading will continue.

Mr. DOMENICI. And nothing will change.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, might I engage in a conversation with the distinguished Senator from Nevada and talk for a minute and tell him what is happening? What I sent to the desk is a bill we will now call S. 2095, the comprehensive bill that we took to the Senate floor that Senator Dorgan alluded to. It was H.R. 6. We heard arguments that it was too expensive. This bill is no longer expensive. As a matter of fact, it is negative cost. It puts money back in the Treasury. We heard that Republicans could not vote for it, and some Democrats, because of MTBE. That is out of this bill. It is no longer there. I went back to the drawing board, took out direct spending, the raising of revenue was taken out of this bill, and it was put in another bill. So there is no raising of revenue that goes in this bill. It is in the tax bill that will be up next week. What I came to the floor of the Senate to do, and I say this to the distinguished acting leader of the minority, was to see, rather than piecemeal this bill, if we couldn't get an agreement that S. 2095 could become the subject matter and that we may have three or four or five amendments to a side. That is what I propound to the Senator from Nevada. I know how strongly Senator Daschle feels about this energy bill as it pertains to all the items he wants, including ethanol, and all the other items I described. He would have no objection to any of them. MTBE is out of the bill. It is no longer subject to criticism because it costs too much. As a matter of fact, it is about as cheap a bill as you can get and still get an energy bill. It does a lot of exciting things. With reference to the electric grid, it does great things to eliminate gridlock and to do other very important activities. I do not want to waste the time of Senator Reid going through this bill because I think he knows what we are doing and he knows what he is doing. I want to save this energy bill. I want to make sure everybody knows it is still alive and that it is good what happened here because some time in the next couple of days, we are going to prove that this energy bill still lives. I do not intend to kill the amendment of Senator McCain. That is not my purpose. I want to make sure everybody knows and everybody in this country knows we have a good energy bill that is alive, and we have the tax portion alive in another area. Frankly, I did not think we could get this far. But I thank the distinguished minority leader for opening up this door. He opened it a little bit, and I made a nice wide door and put in the whole bill. That is what this is about. A little tiny piece of the bill yielded an opportunity to put the whole bill in here. Now all I ask is that we sit down and make an agreement that this bill be looked at--I could say to the distinguished Senator who spoke about a bill that had been passed some time ago, I can almost guarantee him that if he liked that bill, he will much more like this bill than the one he voted for before. It is much better. It is much more streamline. It accommodates a lot more interests, and I believe we could get an overwhelming majority of votes for it. I want to close by saying if there is anybody in this country who does not know there is an energy crisis, then they must have been sleepwalking for the last 6 months because we are in a crisis of high order. I am offering a way to make sure we keep alive an energy bill that will work. I yield the floor and reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. DOMENICI. Is it possible we could take that off the reading of the amendment?

Mr. DOMENICI. We would think that it would, but that is a guess, although it would be a pretty good guess.

Mr. DOMENICI. First, I wish to talk about what is going on in the Senate. I could hardly believe my friend--and he is my friend; what he said about our working together is true, but I could hardly believe my ears when he suggested that the Republicans are keeping us from voting in the Senate. I mean, I have a list of what has been going on for the last 3 months. You know, it is nothing. It is not because of the Republicans, but the Democrats on every issue have said they want to filibuster it. We have had more clotures in the last 3 months than any 3 months in the history of the Republic, unless there was one after another on one bill of which I am unaware. So let's talk about that in reality. Let me say to my good friend Senator Reid, if he thinks there is only one good provision in this bill that everybody might vote for, let me tick off what is in this bill and ask you if you think it would be 51 or 61 votes for it. Let me start: Encouraging the production of domestic oil without violating the environment; encouraging the development of more natural gas from three sources, all American; encourage the building of necessary infrastructure such as the Alaska natural gas pipeline; encourage more renewable energy--everybody speaks about it, this bill promotes it, and we can't pass it--promote energy efficiency; promote clean coal technology; increase R&D on a variety of technologies and improve our electricity grid. These are the things in this bill. I don't care how big it is, how many pages are in it. If the distinguished minority leader can bring up one piece of it because it is popular, then I believe I ought to be entitled to bring up the rest of the bill which is also popular. Remember, there is no MTBE in it. If we would have brought that first bill here without MTBE in it, it would have already passed; we would be finished. Yet this bill is more stripped down than that. Because in addition to MTBE not being in it, I have already told you that it doesn't cost anything. I have told you the tax provisions are somewhere else, and I have just given you a litany of what is in it. I submit, before we are finished, if it takes all night or however long you want us to be here reading it, that we will have a vote and it will be a cloture on this bill and I submit there will be two of them. There will be one on Senator Daschle's and one on Senator Domenici's. I believe Senator Daschle's will fail and I believe mine will pass, and what we will have is we will have the hope and have alive the idea that a good Energy bill, which we have gone through and swept with all kinds of brushes to make it a bill that everybody likes, will be pending before us. I am hopeful that in the process we will not have taken so much time that Senator McCain can't get his bill done. I am very hopeful of that. I hope Senator McCain's staff understands that all I have been speaking of, unless we have to stay here all night and tomorrow to get this read, I am looking for the time, looking ahead here and figuring that you can get your amendment done and we can get an important decision by this institution, in light of the terrific price of gasoline, whether they want an energy bill or not. That is going to be a good one to watch and it will be a good one to have a vote on, I will tell you. How much time do I have remaining?

Mr. DOMENICI. And how much does Senator Reid have?

Mr. DOMENICI. Do you want to yield our time back?

Mr. DOMENICI. I would take 1 in addition in case you say something that needs to be rebutted.

Mr. DOMENICI. Certainly.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I wish the Senator from Arizona were here, because I would like to tell him I agree with many of the things he said. I certainly did not come to the floor--in fact, I left after the last vote, assuming I would not be back down here. I thought we were going on with something and that his bill, which had been debated, although it had a number of small amendments--I thought it would go through here and become law. But I have to admit between that little visit to my office and what I got on the phone about 25 minutes ago were very different. I don't want to be accusatory; I just want to say the minority leader, over a long period of time, has been in the same predicament we have all been in with reference to an Energy bill. He has been in the same predicament regarding ethanol as we have. We produced the first bill this year that had ethanol in it. As a matter of fact, everybody remembers that comprehensive bill was defeated by two votes in a cloture. It got 58 votes--that first one. What we have is somebody has taken a piece of the Energy bill and attached it not directly to the McCain amendment but to the tree on the side, as an amendment which will fail when McCain passes. Nonetheless, I guess making the point that you had a vote on ethanol does somebody something. Amendment No. 3051 to Amendment No. 3050

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I want to suggest I am very pleased this happened, because I now send to the desk S. 2095 as an amendment to the Daschle amendment.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that further reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. DOMENICI. I did not hear the Chair.

Mr. DOMENICI. Senator, I yielded to you without knowing you were going to use all the time I had remaining.