Pete Domenici

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I sure hope the people in this country and those who have written about MTBE were privileged to hear the few remarks that took place this morning about the issue from the distinguished junior Senator from Texas and the Senator from Louisiana. I don't plan to speak anymore about MTBE now, but before the afternoon is finished, I will speak to it with a little more detail so people will understand that the House asked us to do this, and they didn't ask us for anything unreasonable. This is a very valid approach to a problem that cries out for a solution, other than to turn it loose and let anybody sue however they would like and see what happens. Having said that, I wish to talk about this bill that is before us from the standpoint of what is going to happen if those who have come to the floor and been so critical of the bill prevail and we don't have this bill. I don't want to go back and spend a lot of time duplicating the words that have been used about this bill. Suffice it to say, there have been enough negative words used about this bill that one might consider it is the worst thing that ever happened. I would like to tell each and every one of the Senators and each and every American who is concerned what is going to happen if this bill doesn't pass. The impression is this is just a big bill that somebody put together that has a lot of pieces to it. We don't like some of them and some of them we think are giveaways, so we ought to just kill it. I am going to use the word ``kill'' for a little while because I assume those people who have gotten up and talked that way would like to kill the bill. First, if we kill this bill, fuel diversity efforts that will help reduce our dependency on foreign oil and gas will be killed along with it. In other words, this bill is a conscientious effort to help American industry, large and small, produce alternative sources of energy for America and, in many instances, to do that, they have been given a tax incentive. All of those alternatives will be dead when this bill is killed, if it is. The ethanol program, which many have wanted for years--a few in this body don't like it, but let's just take it for what it is--everybody should know the ethanol program is dead, killed, gone, out the window. Now, there are some who would applaud it, but the overwhelming number of people, and the entire agribelt of America, is cheering that we pass it, not that we defeat it. I, frankly, do not see any way, I say to all the farmers in this country, of ever getting an ethanol bill anywhere like this if this bill is killed. So to repeat, for those who think we need ethanol to provide an alternative 5 billion gallons a year to the use of crude oil gasoline, and for farmers who want an alternative crop, kill the bill and you have killed that forever. The renewable fuels provision would replace 5 billion gallons of oil with 5 billion of domestic-produced ethanol. I have alluded to it. It will die with the death of this bill. Over 800,000 job opportunities for our citizens will go out the window, dead, killed, for those who relish speaking about killing this bill. Clean coal initiatives, which for the first time say to America, America, you are king, K-I-N-G, King Coal, and we want to provide some incentives so you might use some of that coal. Well, for those who want to kill this bill, ``King Coal'' will remain a dead product. We can inventory it, we can take note of it, and we can brag that America has coal that will run the country for--I do not know how long. The last time I read something, it would run it for 500 or 600 years. Out the window, no chance to use it because we will be using every other fuel led by natural gas and we will soon be importing liquefied natural gas because there is no way we are going to use our coal. So let me repeat in simple phrases, ``King Coal'' will remain dormant but for the small amount being used. Not a new powerplant will be built using coal. It is dead. Yesterday there was a report by a commission. The commission worked since the Northeastern blackout. They issued a report, and the summary of the report is two or three pages long. What they have concluded, I say to my colleagues, is that the principal reason for the Northeast blackout is that some companies were not following the voluntary reliability standards. Then those who made the study conclude that if this bill is passed, there should not be another blackout because the reliability standards are made mandatory and they will be enforced by criminal penalties. So nobody is going to run around taking a chance with overloading and breaching the reliability standards. Reliability means that one is doing what is prudent and there is no more reference to the use of these lines. So let us summarize that one. For the time being, and I think for some time to come, the blackouts in America will remain alive and possible because we will have thrown out the window the reliability standards that are in this bill because some want to make the case on an issue such as MTBE or the like which we are talking about today. There is regulatory certainty required for the utility industry. If we fail to provide that, FERC, with congressional direction on issues such as standard market design and transmission pricing, will be gone. They will be dead. The repeal of the Public Utility Holding Company Act will be killed. Some people have said if nothing else was in this bill, the repeal of PUHCA, a 1935 vestige that hangs around over the utility industry, prohibiting investment over some kind of fear that is no longer a reality--and look how long we have been waiting to get rid of PUHCA--I think it would be fair that I could say if this bill is killed, PUHCA is here forever. So industry that is waiting for an injection of money, they can sit by and eke out investment because the principal impediment will still be there. The repeal will have been killed. There are some who say because their States have had some unlucky or unfortunate situations, such as Enron, that consumer protections are necessary and then, of course, they look at this bill and say, I know what protections I want and they are not exactly the way I want them in the bill, so they come to the floor and say there are no protections. But I say if this bill is killed, you kill the consumer protections in this bill which are against fraud, manipulation, which force increased transparency, which increase penalties for violation of the Federal Power Act and Natural Gas Act, and they close the Enron fraud loophole. Now, you can throw all of those out the window for people who want to find fault and want to talk about a turkey and want to talk about the goodies in this bill, but I am telling you what you lose when you lose this bill. I am ready for anybody to come and say it is not true. How are we going to get these if this bill dies? Will the House come marching down the aisle, just having gone through this exercise, and say, oh, well, let's just start next week and do another one? Does the Chair think so? I think not. Do my colleagues think this Senator spent the better part of a year on it, and do they think I am going to march to my committee and start hearings and saying, oh, well, we did the best we could but we better just start over again because we heard so many speeches? Not on your life. The speeches had little to do with the important provisions in this legislation. They had to do with things that were put in the legislation, as everyone knows, when it is run through both the House and the Senate and individual bodies and then through a conference. Tax credits--let me say I am aware of the tax credit game, and this bill is filled with tax credits that people wanted and needed and on which I am sure some of my good friends are quite certain we were too generous. I note the presence of my great friend Senator Nickles and I am sure he is not going to get up and speak about MTBE and we ought to take it out, but he is going to wonder whether we put in too many tax credits. For every newspaper article and editorial that said: let's kill this bill, it is no good, there are hundreds of letters of support from the people affected. They do not write editorials. They write and tell us their problem. The people who build and sell windmills and have giant windmill projects going, they are very clear. This is the best thing that ever could have happened to them. We have made permanent the production tax credit that is sending windmills soaring in the United States, and I do not mean soaring in the air, I mean soaring in numbers. Some ask: Do you really want those, Senator? And I sometimes chuckle. I drive around and see some of them, and I am not sure. But they will build them pretty before they are finished. They will even be good looking. Right now, some people write us letters and say: We don't want any more of those. Some people in Massachusetts wanted us to put something in this bill saying the local community could stop them if they didn't want them. We couldn't get that done if we tried. In any event, the credits for that are gone. If we pass the bill, we will see it soar. Regarding solar, we received all kinds of congratulations and support from the solar industry, saying it will finally go now. It will go, but it is dead in its tracks when this bill dies, if it dies. I don't think it is going to. At least I hope not. You can go right on through. Biomass and all the others are anxiously waiting so they can begin to produce alternatives, adding to the totality of what we will use for energy in America. We have been so bold that we say the next generation, economically speaking, will be the hydrogen generation. I am not sure about that, but this bill starts us down that path. I don't know where we are going to pick up a bill that will put together the kinds of things that are involved, such as $1.6 billion to start joint ventures with the automobile companies to build this. Then there is nuclear. France leads the world. While we tremble, they build. While we worry, they have 78 percent of their electricity from nuclear power. While we run around worrying where are we going to put this waste product, do you want to take a trip to France? They will show you where they put theirs. It is a building that looks just like a schoolhouse. You walk into it and look around and you ask: Where is the spent fuel? They say: You are standing on it. What? It is right there. It is encased and they put in solvent and put in water, glass put upon it, and they are smart enough to say that will be safe for 50 to 100 years. Guess what. They say: We will find a solution or a use for it in that period of time. We stopped producing nuclear powerplants, one of the reasons being we don't know what to do with the waste. An engineering problem, and nothing more, has killed nuclear power in America. We have said maybe somebody would like to try it and we will give them some incentive to get around the difficulties involved. I hope we do it this way. Because if we don't, I think we can probably say, during my lifetime--I am not sure about the lifetime of the occupant of the chair, who is a very young Senator and very much waiting around to see this happen. You may see it, but I don't think I will, because you have to give some incentives to get started and then the public will see the new generation, something we ought to have going on in our country. I could go on. Before I stop, though, I want to talk about Alaska and natural gas. First there was a program--it is not in this bill--to capture crude oil that is in ANWR. We were told: If you put it in the bill, it will be filibustered. Isn't that interesting, Senator Nickles? You weren't for taking it out; you wanted it in. Now we have left it out and we have somebody filibustering because of the MTBE hold harmless clause. I wish we had known we were going to have cloture votes down here. Maybe we should have put it in and had cloture on a lot of things, including ANWR. But we didn't put it in, in good faith, because the minority leader said he had enough votes to kill it. So we left it out. Alaska is loaded with energy. What do we do in this bill if we can't utilize some of their energy? We tried very hard to assure the delivery of natural gas to the lower 48 because it will not be longer than 10 years until we will be short of natural gas and we will be using it from other countries. Won't it be interesting? With a State of ours loaded with natural gas, America, which is using natural gas like it went out of style, will be importing LNG from all over the world. We will say: Here we are again. Instead of getting independent, we are getting dependent. But we did try our best. This bill says bring it down through a certain area and bring it to Chicago. We said we will help the companies that will build it. We did what we could by way of credits and accelerated depreciation, but as of today we have no assurance that it will be done. We have hope, and at least we have done what we could, and it may happen. If you throw this bill out, that is not going to happen either. I don't know how long before you get anything going in Alaska, with the kind of fear and trepidation that happens every time you mention capturing some of their resources. There are many other provisions in this bill. There are all kinds of great research programs. They are misunderstood because they are not paid for; they are authorized. They are saying if, in the future, Congress wants to pay for some additional research in--let's just pick one--nanotechnology, this gives them authority but doesn't pay for it. That is one. If you add it up, you will say this bill costs all these things, but it doesn't cost those things, because those are part of-- like when you fund an education bill, you fund it for a lot more than you need and later on you pay for what you can afford. I could go through some more, but my good friend Senator Nickles wants to speak. He will be to the point. He will cite some problems with the bill, I am sure, and will also tell us some of the things that are reasonably good about it. I am glad people have not come down here and made a lot of noise about the whistleblower protection because we did continue protection of whistleblowers, contrary to what some of their main groups are saying. They just wanted more, not continued protection. But we have continued them. There are at least 10 other major issues we have done that I truly don't believe will get done in the near future. They are more or less moribund--that means dead--if we finish this bill by not voting for cloture and voting for the bill. I thank the Senator for listening. To the extent there are programs in here that others have worked hard to get in here and are very proud of and I haven't mentioned, please understand I did not mention everything. I mentioned what I could. What I didn't, I am glad, in our spare time, to get on the phone and suggest to others the rest of the things that are here. I close by saying there are a lot of ways we could have done this bill. We have been chastised, we have been ridiculed, we have been put upon because of the way we put the bill together. All I want to say to my fellow Senators is we got a bill. We tried this before. We have gone through a year, year and a half and got nothing. I started this with the idea we would get a bill and it would be reasonably close to what we would have gotten had we spent much more time collaboratively with many more scriveners, many more writers, than we had. I think that is the case. Most people who were interested saw the product long before it came to the floor. You notice I did not mention electricity reform, other than indirectly. But I will say for those who want FERC to run the entire grid, they will have that if this bill fails. For States that think we ought to have FERC doing it, they can be gleeful. We thought we ought to phase it in and we thought we ought to let some States provide differently for themselves, but we made sure they couldn't close out investors who wanted to come into their States and put in utilities. We didn't make it simple, but we let it happen and we let them get their money back, too. Those are tough issues. You don't get the bill, and you might get what some people like, or you might get that chairman over there who thinks he knows how to run it all by himself. You might get that. I didn't think that is the right way to go. But I didn't have the luxury of writing four versions. We had to write one version the best we could for everybody. We did that. I yield the floor. I thank the Senate.

Mr. DOMENICI. No, we are not.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I was going to go next, but I note the attendance of the distinguished Senator from Louisiana. He would like to speak, and I will yield to him. Let me make one or two observations regarding the speech just delivered. First, I thank the Senator from Texas for the reasonableness, the rationality of his discussion. He would not believe, the people who have listened to the debate over the last couple of days would not believe the facts as you have described them, which are the facts, with reference to MTBE. This bill does not say if somebody misuses MTBE, negligently spills it, if they have tanks that leak, if they are not careful to keep it where it is supposed to be, it doesn't say those kinds of actions are rendered nonactionable in tort liability. The safe harbor is very narrow. It says the producer of the product, which has been determined by the Government and to date determined by scientists to be totally safe and very effective, it says those who made the product are not liable for the mere fact of making it and selling it. They are not liable. If it causes harm because of other actions with reference to it, then the hold harmless does not apply. That is what the Senator has been telling us today; plus, he has enlightened us that, even as we speak today, contrary to the elaborate statements regarding people who have been damaged and hurt, the scientists in the Government still say, as a product, it is safe; as a product, it is tremendously effective; and as a product, the Government isn't even considering doing anything about it. They are not out there saying we want to stop it. I have not heard that from the EPA or anyone else--I think because they would have no evidence--that there is anything wrong with the product. I say to everybody in this country who wants ethanol, ethanol may prove, as an additive, in 15 years to cause some damage. Are we going to go back 15 years and say to the farmers who grew the crops that went into ethanol: You are collectively, as the farmers of America, liable for producing the corn that produced ethanol that produced a problem 15 years later? I doubt it, because I don't think anybody would be down here saying we want to stick all these hundreds of thousands of farmers. But right now we are saying: Have at it, trial lawyers, we hope you can get after these guys because somebody got hurt. Sue the companies that produced it. People are saying: After all, they are rich companies. That is not the American judicial system. Liability is not based on whether you have a successful company. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons some people are upset about this safe harbor is that they think the ones with money are the ones that are going to be in this safe harbor; namely, those that produced a product. They don't think there is going to be enough money for them out there in the marketplace where other things have gone wrong. They don't want to have to look for people who had leaky tanks and sue them and their insurance companies. They want to leave that to somebody else, right? They want to go after one of these companies--I don't know which one--and a number of them are in Texas. People will say: There is that old Texas again. Well, Texas has about 13 companies that produce various products related to this whole area, not just this. Some of them produce this product. If I were the Senator from Texas, I would be right here doing what he is doing. The Senator is not opposed to those companies, right, or embarrassed by them? He is saying: Good luck. He is not embarrassed that they are making money. I assume they pay a salary to people in his State. I assume these towns like them. They are not doing anything to these towns. There is no pollution in the towns where it is being produced. Those who would kill this bill over this issue have said to the farmers of the United States who want to use their crops to produce ethanol--if you vote this bill down based on this MTBE issue, you are saying to the farmers in your States--there are 12 or 15 of them--that have lots of corn and soybeans: We are taking the trial lawyers over you. You are saying: We have a choice to make and tomorrow morning we will make it, and we will choose the trial lawyers; we want to help them and forget about the farmers. That is the issue, as I see it. This will not end because we are going to go into MTBE today in a little more detail. I yield to the Senator from Louisiana. (Mr. GRAHAM from South Carolina assumed the chair.)

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I struck an agreement with a couple of Senators who have been waiting to speak. Senator Nickles would like to follow me. I ask unanimous consent that he follow me. Secondly, the Senator from California, who was just here a bit ago, asked that she proceed next, and I ask unanimous consent she proceed next.

Mr. DOMENICI. Thank you, Mr. President. I will not take too long. I wish to speak a moment to the Senator from Kentucky. First, I say to the Senator, I chair the Energy Committee, and I am very pleased that Kentucky has contributed you to the committee. You bring to us an enthusiastic approach to America's self-sufficiency, not the gloom and doom of: We can't make it, we can't do it. You are always there saying: We ought to do it. Why don't we do it? I am very pleased we were able to put in this new law a series of provisions that permit the Senator to come to the floor and speak with optimism about coal of the future, coal and America's future. Of course it is parochial but it is national. The Senator's State is a coal producer but it is a part of America. Kentucky is a State in the Union. Your State does not want to go down in coal. As I understand it, you want coal to go up. You do not want ``King Coal'' dead. You want ``King Coal'' alive. The first thing I want to do is say to the Senator, it is very interesting to see how you interpret this and how others interpret it-- that all these coal provisions are a giveaway to big business. I did not hear the Senator mention big business once, not because they are not going to be involved, but I think it is because the Senator understands you are not going to produce new, clean coal generators with nonprofit organizations. I guess the Senator assumes, as I do, that some coal company is going to apply to the Department of Energy to do this. Is that not right, I ask the Senator?

Mr. DOMENICI. So one can stand up and say: There must have been great lobbying from the coal companies. Well, the coal companies did not have to lobby. All we had to do was have a brain and to know there is coal and say: Well, what are we going to do so somebody will invest money in coal, servicing our country in a bigger and better way? If it turns out some choose to come to the floor and label that indecent lobbying by a big company, I am sorry, we could have done this if no coal company ever visited us, I assure you. I say to the Senator, we have Senators like you who told us about it.

Mr. DOMENICI. Absolutely. The truth is, whatever you lobbied for as a Senator, that is your privilege. Nobody could say you should not work for coal in this bill, that you ought to just abandon it, that you should not do that because that is representing an interest. Of course. Well, if there are no interests, there is nothing going on. Right? We just as well might go to sleep and forget about it. Another thing that is interesting, we have had at least three Senators come to the floor, including my cohort from New Mexico, saying they are against electricity provisions because they wanted FERC to have more power. Now, I did not have the luxury of making speeches about FERC. I had to write something. And here we have one Senator saying FERC should have run the whole electric system in the country. Right? Then we have this Senator. He is over here saying: You almost went too far, where we skinnied back on FERC's power. We said it can phase in over time. Right? You were not sure of that. If you had been writing it, and did not have anybody else pressuring you, you would have written it more in favor of your State. But, you see, I did not have the luxury of writing one for each State, one that affects you up the road. Then there is another State--such as Pennsylvania--saying: We don't do business like they do. We want a whole different electricity provision. I heard that. I could not write one for them, too. Right?

Mr. DOMENICI. The last time they used to write two was before the Civil War. They wrote one for the South and one for the North. But I told them: Why don't you cut it in four pieces and we will write four of them? Right? But there aren't four countries; there are just the States. So we did the best we could. I think it is a good provision. Now, what else about it? I share with you, right now, on the electric provision that here is the study. So everybody can see it--it is the first time it has been on the floor of the Senate. It is entitled ``Interim Report: The Causes of the August 14th Blackout in the United States and Canada.'' I do not think I will ask that it be printed in the Record. I will refer to it. We have gone through it and we have looked at what they said. Let me say to my friend, it says that the principal reason we had a blackout was that all of the States, with their various utility systems, had what are called reliability standards. Now, I am not a technician, but reliability means something pretty common and ordinary. I can talk reliability at home in an evening with my wife. We talk a lot about this, and she should know what that is. Reliability standards means that you appropriately and prudently load your electric wires so they are not so overloaded that something happens, or that they are clean and they do not have things imposing upon their reliability. This said it was nothing dramatic. It was not that we have an old, wornout system. Somebody said we had a Third World system. No, no, we do not. We have a first world system, not a third world system. When we have a blackout, it is big news. That is because we have a first-rate system. You know the third-rate systems nobody cares about because they are not working anyway. So the truth is, this little report says the biggest reason it went out was reliability. Well, guess what. For all the things we did so wrong in this bill, one of the principal things we provided was mandatory reliability standards. No more cheating, fudging, hiding a little, and overloading the lines during heavy use, and saying: Well, nobody will do anything-- except when it blows out. Then we all find out. So I say to everybody, we did the report. You wondered what happened. You got the study. You got a bill. The bill says, if you pass this bill, it is fixed. Right?

Mr. DOMENICI. Contrary-wise, do what some have suggested, throw the bill out, and you are right back where we were. You are right back where we were. You can sit around and wait for a blackout, just playing with your hands, worrying, sweating, saying: When will it occur? At least this bill says we know why it occurred, and we are not going to let it occur again. The Feds are going to fine anybody who is lazy and loafs around and doesn't clean up the lines. In fact, the report is pretty good that they are going to be on them to get the trees off the lines. That would be good news; we don't have to go out there line by line. But that is part of the reliability. The point I make is, for every issue people have raised on the floor that this bill doesn't do or fails to do, on the other hand it does and it doesn't fail to. Every time people say ``we don't like it because,'' there is something in it to say, ``but we do like it because.'' I regret that it can't be every single Senator taking the floor and saying: Everything in it is precisely what I want. I am glad we have people such as the Senator from Kentucky who knows that can't happen.

Mr. DOMENICI. I yield the floor.

Mr. DOMENICI. Under the order, the distinguished Senator from Texas is next; is that correct?

Mr. DOMENICI. She has been waiting. I assume she asks she be next. Will the Senator let me use 5 minutes before she proceeds?

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I want to take 5 minutes on the issue my good friend from Illinois raised here today. Has anybody thought how in the world there would be MTBE being used in all these different parts of the United States even today, even today? Has anybody wondered why it is still being used? Because it is still valid according to the laws of our land, and it is approved by the Environmental Protection Agency. This MTBE product was produced because the U.S. Government sought an additive to be applied to gasoline so it would be cleaner than gasoline without it. I want to assure everybody in this country. The Senator makes it sound as if the product is an illegal product. If he doesn't, then I would sure say, if per se this product is this dangerous, it ought to be banned. But isn't it interesting? He could say it should be, but the truth is, it is not. It has not been, and there has only been a little ripple of talking around here about perhaps shutting it down. Why has there been none? Why is the Environmental Protection Agency, not just this one, the one in the Clinton and the one before that--why did they not do something about it? The reason is there is nothing wrong with the product. The product is being used. If it is used right, it is a good product. We are going to do better when we do ethanol. But the good Senator from Illinois--I don't know how many times he will come back to the floor, how many times the Senator from Illinois will return to the floor to speak about MTBE. But his State is the second largest producer of corn in America, and the reason he is down here talking about MTBE is because he is scared of his farmers because he is not going to vote for the thing they want more than anything else--ethanol. That is what they want. He has been working on it. I have been working on it. Everybody has been working on it. And this Senator has decided, the Senator who just spoke, from Illinois, decided he would rather defend the trial lawyers who want to go after the companies that produce MTBE. I also assure you that the language in this bill does not say that anybody is immune from liability. It merely says you can't sue the producer of the product just because they produced the product. What is happening is it is being used improperly. When it is used improperly, it is producing all these ill effects across the country. Does that mean we sue the people who produced it? I repeat, it is a legal product that has been approved by the Environmental Protection Agency. The United States of America approved it and now it is being used but people don't use it right. Underground tanks leak and it leaks into the water system. Does that mean the company 2,000 miles away that manufactured the product should be responsible to clean up those water systems? Of course not. But I guarantee they are chomping at the bit to do it--do what? Not to sue the people whose tanks leaked because they are not fat enough. They are chomping to sue the big oil company that manufactured it for the last 20 years. Now I want to read the statute. The statute says: No product shall be deemed defective-- if it does not violate a control or prohibition imposed by the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (hereinafter referred to as the ``Administrator'') under section 211 of such Act, and the manufacturer is in compliance with all requests for information under subsection (b) of such section 211 of such Act. . . . If the safe harbor provided by this section does not apply, the existence of a claim of defective product shall be determined under otherwise applicable law. Nothing in this subsection shall be construed to affect the liability of any person for environmental remediation costs-- Clean up the water, sewer systems and water systems. It says: Nothing in this subsection shall be construed to affect the liability of any person for environmental remediation costs, drinking water contamination, negligence for spills or other reasonably foreseeable events, public or private nuisance, trespass, breach of warranty, breach of contract, or any other liability other than liability based upon a claim of defective product. Frankly, there is no defective product. You can go on saying where it is all over America and that is because it is legal to use it. But it is not legal to abuse it. When people abuse it, should we really, as a nation, say the people who manufactured it are liable for all the consequences? I think not. That is all we did in this legislation. If the distinguished Senator is so worried about this, I suggest he ought to vote for this bill and take care of the ethanol producers in his State and other States. He may be the deciding vote that decides we are not going to have ethanol. I wouldn't like to be in that position, I tell you, not on a weak proposition that the reason I did it was to protect the big lawyers who want to file these lawsuits. I say to all of them: File your lawsuits. When this thing is over with, file your lawsuits. It is just that you will not be able to sue the company that made the product which is legal and allowed. You can sue anybody else who caused the damage. It is like somebody who drinks some soup in a restaurant and somebody in the restaurant, instead of putting soup in the bowl, they put some poison in it. You drank it and got sick. Do you sue Campbell's Soup Company for producing the soup or do you go look for the people who put the poison in it? The truth is, maybe we would all like to see MTBE go away. But that is not the issue. The issue is whether or not we should deny the passage of an Energy bill and ethanol for the farmers of this country, a great, giant substitute for the crude oil that we are going to use; whether we are going to do that or not. If we are not, we surely ought not do it based upon the excuse that a valid product licensed by the United States improperly used is causing damage to people and we don't want to let them sue the people who produced the product but let them sue anybody else--the leaking tank owner, the distributor who distributed it wrongly, or anybody else who caused this--just because you made a legal product and somebody got hurt later on down the line, go back and sue the company that made it legally, validly, under what one might say is almost a license from the Federal Government. I thank the Senator from Texas for yielding. I yield the floor.

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Armed Services be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, November 20, 2003, at 3 p.m., in closed session, to receive a briefing on assessment of the current situation in Iraq.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on November 20, 2003, at 10 a.m., to conduct a vote on the nomination of Ms. Alicia R. Castaneda, of the District of Columbia, to be a member of the Board of Directors of the Federal Housing Finance Board; the nomination of Mr. Thomas J. Curry, of Massachusetts, to be a member of the Board of Directors of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; and S. 1531, the ``Chief Justice John Marshall Commemorative Coin Act.'' Following the votes, the committee will conduct a hearing on ``Improving the Corporate Governance of the New York Stock Exchange.''

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, November 20, 2003, at 2 p.m., to conduct a hearing on the ``Review of Current Investigations and Regulatory Actions Regarding the Mutual Fund Industry.''

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be authorized to meet on Thursday, November 20, 2003, at 9:30 a.m., on Drug Importation.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Governmental Affairs be authorized to meet on Thursday, November 20, 2003 at a time and location to be determined to hold a business meeting to consider the nominations of James M. Loy to be Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, Department of Homeland Security; and Scott J. Bloch to be Special Counsel, Office of Special Counsel.

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce and the District of Columbia, be authorized to meet on Thursday, November 20, 2003 at 10 a.m. for a hearing entitled, ``Keeping the Lights on: The Federal Role in Managing the Nation's Electricity, Part Two.''

Mr. DOMENICI

Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, I have been waiting to speak. I didn't understand what happened.

Mr. DOMENICI. After that, are we finished?

Mr. DOMENICI. No, I think I will wait.

Mr. DOMENICI. That is what I thought I said.

Mr. DOMENICI. Ten minutes.

Mr. DOMENICI. Could we substitute Senator Inhofe for me and my 10 minutes and I will come later?