Byron Dorgan

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I am pleased to join Senators Levin, DeWine and Bond to introduce the Kidney Transplant Clarification Act of 2006. This legislation will help save lives by increasing the number of kidney donations made by living donors. There are currently 90,608 people in the United States who are on the national organ transplant waiting list. More than two-thirds of those on the waiting list suffer from end stage renal disease and are in need of a kidney transplant. Unfortunately, the number of people on the waiting list continues to grow far faster than the number of organ donors. In North Dakota alone, there are currently 91 patients who are waiting for a kidney transplant. The good news is that patients with end stage renal disease who require a kidney transplant no longer need to wait for a kidney from a deceased donor or from a blood relative. Advances in medical science now make it possible for friends and spouses to donate a kidney to a patient in need. Of the 16,004 kidney transplants in 2004, 6,647 were from living donors. The bad news is outdated Federal laws inappropriately stand in the way of widely adopting several innovative approaches that would increase the number of kidney donations from the living. One of these strategies is called a paired kidney donation. Here is how it works: Joe wants to donate a kidney to his wife Kathleen but can't because of incompatibility. Likewise, Suzy wants to donate a kidney to her husband Scott but can't because of incompatibility. A paired donation helps match up these couples so Joe can donate a kidney to Scott and Suzy can donate a kidney to Kathleen. The other approach is called a kidney list donation. Here is how it works: Rebecca wants to donate a kidney to her husband Grant but can't because of incompatibility. In this case, she decides to donate a kidney to someone who is already on the national waiting list. Once the donation is made, Grant is added to the waiting list but is given allocation priority for a kidney that becomes available in the future. The Kidney Transplant Clarification Act will clarify that paired and list kidney donations are allowed under the National Organ Transplant Act, removing a barrier that has prevented more kidney donations from living donors from occurring. The National Organ Transplant Act, which was enacted in 1984, prohibits any person to acquire, receive or donate any human organ for anything of value. The purpose of this law is to prohibit the buying and selling of human organs. I agree with this law. The last thing that we want to do is sanction organ trafficking. Yet, when this law was enacted, paired and list kidney donations did not exist. It is important that we clarify that these innovative strategies to increase the number of kidney donations from living donors are allowed under current law. The Kidney Transplant Clarification Act will not only save lives, it will save the federal government and taxpayers money. Patients with end stage renal disease require dialysis, which is covered by Medicare. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Medicare spends about $55,000 per patient per year for dialysis. On average, patients with end stage renal disease wait 4 years before receiving a kidney transplant. This means that every kidney donation made from a living donor has the potential to reduce the number of people on the waiting list and save the government as much as $220,000. Mr. President, I encourage my colleagues to support this legislation.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I am pleased to join Senators Levin, DeWine and Bond to introduce the Kidney Transplant Clarification Act of 2006. This legislation will help save lives by increasing the number of kidney donations made by living donors. There are currently 90,608 people in the United States who are on the national organ transplant waiting list. More than two-thirds of those on the waiting list suffer from end stage renal disease and are in need of a kidney transplant. Unfortunately, the number of people on the waiting list continues to grow far faster than the number of organ donors. In North Dakota alone, there are currently 91 patients who are waiting for a kidney transplant. The good news is that patients with end stage renal disease who require a kidney transplant no longer need to wait for a kidney from a deceased donor or from a blood relative. Advances in medical science now make it possible for friends and spouses to donate a kidney to a patient in need. Of the 16,004 kidney transplants in 2004, 6,647 were from living donors. The bad news is outdated Federal laws inappropriately stand in the way of widely adopting several innovative approaches that would increase the number of kidney donations from the living. One of these strategies is called a paired kidney donation. Here is how it works: Joe wants to donate a kidney to his wife Kathleen but can't because of incompatibility. Likewise, Suzy wants to donate a kidney to her husband Scott but can't because of incompatibility. A paired donation helps match up these couples so Joe can donate a kidney to Scott and Suzy can donate a kidney to Kathleen. The other approach is called a kidney list donation. Here is how it works: Rebecca wants to donate a kidney to her husband Grant but can't because of incompatibility. In this case, she decides to donate a kidney to someone who is already on the national waiting list. Once the donation is made, Grant is added to the waiting list but is given allocation priority for a kidney that becomes available in the future. The Kidney Transplant Clarification Act will clarify that paired and list kidney donations are allowed under the National Organ Transplant Act, removing a barrier that has prevented more kidney donations from living donors from occurring. The National Organ Transplant Act, which was enacted in 1984, prohibits any person to acquire, receive or donate any human organ for anything of value. The purpose of this law is to prohibit the buying and selling of human organs. I agree with this law. The last thing that we want to do is sanction organ trafficking. Yet, when this law was enacted, paired and list kidney donations did not exist. It is important that we clarify that these innovative strategies to increase the number of kidney donations from living donors are allowed under current law. The Kidney Transplant Clarification Act will not only save lives, it will save the federal government and taxpayers money. Patients with end stage renal disease require dialysis, which is covered by Medicare. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Medicare spends about $55,000 per patient per year for dialysis. On average, patients with end stage renal disease wait 4 years before receiving a kidney transplant. This means that every kidney donation made from a living donor has the potential to reduce the number of people on the waiting list and save the government as much as $220,000. Mr. President, I encourage my colleagues to support this legislation.

Mr. DORGAN

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

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I understand the current business. I ask unanimous consent that my presentation appear in the Record as in Morning Business.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I yield the floor and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I will spend a few minutes talking about energy. There was a letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal, I believe, this morning or yesterday morning, responding to an editorial where I had given a response to an editorial. The writer to the Wall Street Journal was taking me to task for saying there is not a ``free market'' in energy or in oil. My point was there is no free market in oil. He said he doesn't know what I have been drinking or where I got these thoughts. He said there is a free market in oil. Let me describe all of this in the context of President Bush's State of the Union Address in which he suggested that we are ``addicted'' to oil and we need to move toward greater independence with respect to oil, especially coming from off our shores. First, on the subject of a free market, there is no free market in oil. A substantial portion of oil comes from halfway around the world, under the sand in the Middle East, in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran. A substantial part of the world supply of oil comes from that region. And those OPEC ministers, having formed a cartel, sit around a room and decide how much they are going to pump and at what price. That is a cartel. Cartels are the antithesis of the free market system. Yet the OPEC countries have this cartel, produce a great amount of oil, and they decide how they are going to manipulate price and supply. That is No. 1. No. 2, you have the large oil companies, bigger and much stronger because of the blockbuster mergers in recent decades, especially in the last one. These oil companies used to be one company, and now they are a company with several names, such as ExxonMobil. That used to be Exxon, and that used to be Mobil. They decided to fall in love and get married, and now it is ExxonMobil. Last year, ExxonMobil made $36.1 billion--the highest profit ever recorded in corporate America. ExxonMobil. Then there is Chevron-Texaco. It used to be Chevron, and there was Texaco. They discovered they liked each other and they got hitched, making it Chevron-Texaco. And then we have ConocoPhillips, which used to be separate companies. Once they decide to marry up and merge, they save all these names. So there is ExxonMobil, Chevron-Texaco, and ConocoPhillips. Maybe some day they will all merge, and when you put them all together, they will be ExxonMobil ChevronTexaco ConocoPhillips--just one company. The blockbuster mergers mean these companies are bigger, stronger, and have greater capacity to influence the marketplace. So you have the OPEC ministers in a closed room talking about supply and price and how they affect supply and price and the manner in which they want to affect it. You have the oil companies, larger and stronger, having more muscle to influence the marketplace. And third, you have the futures market. The futures market, rather than simply providing liquidity for training, has become an orgy of speculation. So those three things are what determine the price of oil and the price of gasoline. It has very little to do with the so-called free market. Yet we hear all these people talk about the free market. Do you think it is the free market that gives us a company such as ExxonMobil, with profits of $36.1 billion last year? That is not a free market. That is the price of oil which is somewhere between $60 and $70 a barrel. That is up from $40 a barrel average price of the year before, at which point this company had the highest profits in their history. So it went from an original price of $40 a barrel to over $60 a barrel, and the company had no additional expenses at all. That price went to that level and it stayed relatively at that level, and it has dramatically boosted the profits of all of these oil companies--Shell, $25.3 billion; B.P., $22.3 billion; $36.1 billion for ExxonMobil. Listen, all the gain is here with the big oil companies and the OPEC countries. All the gain is here, and all the pain is on the side of the consumers, people trying to heat their home in the winter, people driving to the gas pump trying to figure out how much it is going to take to fill up their tank. They are paying the higher prices, and all that goes into these coffers, higher profits. And that is sent also to the OPEC countries. The President talks about an addiction to oil. I would use that term. We are hopelessly addicted to oil. I don't suggest that we have an oil anonymous organization where we show up on Wednesday nights and confess that we drove our Humvee 10 blocks to pick up a bagel. What do we confess to? Well, we have a 6,000-pound vehicle and we decided we needed to run an errand to buy a piece of ribbon. That is not what I suggest, nor is it what I expect the President suggest. Addiction to oil. Let's think about that. We suck 84 million barrels of oil out of this Earth every day. Every single day, 84 million barrels are sucked out of the Earth. One-fourth of it, 21 million barrels of oil, goes to this country, the United States of America. We use fully one-fourth of all the oil that is extracted from this planet every single day. Sixty percent of all that oil we use in this country comes from off our shore, and much of it from troubled parts of the world. If, God forbid, something should happen to the supply of oil from Saudi Arabia tomorrow, we would have a huge problem. Our economy is, in fact, attached to the ability to get oil from other parts of the world that are very troubled parts of our planet. If terrorists, for some reason, interdicted the supply of oil, shut off the supply of oil tomorrow morning, our economy would be in deep trouble. Obviously, there are national security interests here. Does it make sense from a national security standpoint to have the American economy running on 60-percent foreign oil, much of it coming from troubled parts of the world? The answer to that is no. Of course not. So in addition to national security issues, you have the issue of the unfairness, of huge profits for the major oil companies, huge profits for the OPEC countries, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and others, and then substantial pain for people, many of whom can't afford it, pain in the form of higher prices. Energy independence: That is the watchword. Energy independence, they say. What does all this mean? Let me go back for a moment to January 13, 2002. January 13, 2002 is the day the Ambassador for Saudi Arabia showed up at the White House in the Oval Office. Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador, was then told at a meeting in the White House on January 13 that this country was going to attack Iraq, invade the country of Iraq. It is interesting that not until the next day did the President notify the U.S. Secretary of State. On January 13, at a meeting in the Oval Office--and again, this comes from Bob Woodruff's book ``Bush at War''--the President called in and notified the Saudi Ambassador to the United States that we were going to war with Iraq. The following day, the President notified his own Secretary of State that he had made a decision to go to war with Iraq. Interesting. It describes something about the relationship this country has with Saudi Arabia and the importance it places on that relationship. This occurred, by the way, as my colleagues know, following 9/11/ 2001. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens. Of the 19 hijackers who flew the planes that hit this country, 15 of them were Saudi citizens. We had Saudi citizens rounded up on private airplanes leaving this country. Then in January of 2002, the President calls the Saudi Ambassador to the Oval Office and tells him we are going to war with Iraq. The following day, he tells our own U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell that he has decided to go to war with Iraq. I recite that because it describes a very special relationship this country has had with Saudi Arabia, and perhaps a very unhealthy relationship. Under the Saudis' noses and eyes, I believe, there has existed a network of madrassas, schools and other activities in which terrorist organizations developed and flourished, and we bore the brunt of that on 9/11/2001. As long as they left Saudi Arabia alone, it was going to be all right; They could develop their terrorist cells. The fact is when we go to the gas pumps in this country and fill our tank and pay the kind of money we are paying for that petroleum, there is a fair amount of evidence, and it is written evidence coming from numerous studies, that we are actually helping to finance terrorism. There are many steps we have to take to deal with that. The first and most important step, however, is for us to understand this addiction to oil from the Middle East. The addiction to oil from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and Iraq and elsewhere is a very unhealthy circumstance for our country. It is relatively easy to talk about addiction and fairly simple to talk about the need for energy independence. It is quite another thing to get there. I mentioned a moment ago driving a 6,000-pound car to go get a bagel. By that I meant a Humvee. Understand, I have never driven a Humvee, but I understand they weigh about 6,000 pounds, and I don't mean to demean anybody who would drive a 6,000-pound Humvee. But I do have, as I have indicated before, only broken knowledge of Latin, and when I drive up to a stoplight beside a Humvee and look over and see a Humvee on the street next to me, I think of a Latin phrase I learned in high school, not in formal class, but the phrase was ``totus porcus.'' I look at Humvees, 6,000-pound vehicles, and I understand that no one has been serious in this country about suggesting that we change the way we do things. Are we suggesting that we get better gas mileage in our automobiles in any significant way? I looked at a vehicle the other day that is an identical vehicle to the same model that was produced 10 years ago. Guess what. It has exactly the same rated gas mileage. In 10 years, we can't add 1 mile per gallon. Whether it is conservation, efficiency, better gas mileage, or any dozens of other issues on the side of using petroleum products, or if it is on the side of producing petroleum products, we don't have a national plan. We don't have a plan that represents this country's crucial interests in actually getting to some kind of independence or some percentage of independence of foreign oil. We need one, and if the President's call in his State of the Union is an honest attempt to get there, I am with him. But it is not so much what we say, it is what we do that will determine our energy future. I was proud in the last week or two to join my colleagues Senator Domenici, Senator Bingaman, and Senator Talent in offering legislation to open the Gulf of Mexico for additional production. We believe there is somewhere around 6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas available for production in lease 181. It was ready for production in 2001 and the President took it off the books because his brother was Governor of Florida and didn't want it produced, so it has not been produced. But the fact is on a bipartisan basis here in the Senate we have a fair number of people on the bill that has been introduced. So let's produce, let's get that natural gas and get it into the pipeline. The issue of additional production, especially coming from renewable fuels, makes a great deal of sense to me. I talked about lease 181, that is drilling, and that is production from drilling, oil and natural gas. We have a pipeline that needs to get done that we have already supported, from Alaska to the United States, transporting substantial portions of natural gas to the United States, but those who are supposed to be doing that have been dragging their feet on that. We do need fossil fuels to be producing more. But we also in the area of renewable fuels need to understand, we can decide to substitute for traditional fuels a substantial amount of renewable energy if we decided our country could do that. Wind energy. Wind energy has great potential. Taking energy from the wind and producing electricity from it, perhaps even using electricity in the process of electrolysis to separate hydrogen from water and creating hydrogen fuel to run a hydrogen fuel-celled vehicle. All of that makes great sense. But you only do that as a country if you set goals and decide that is the direction you want to head. Biofuels, ethanol. I was part of a group that set a new renewable fuel standard, saying we are going to get to 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol by the year 2012, doubling the use of ethanol in our country. That means you go in the farm fields on a renewable basis every year, produce corn, as an example, and produce ethanol fuel from corn that extends America's energy supply and also produces a new market for family farmers. All of these things are doable. Other countries have done them. Brazil is an example of a country that has done remarkable things with the extension of renewable fuels. Our country has not because we have not had a plan. Now we are getting there. Last year's energy bill was a start. The bill we have introduced on lease 181 is another piece. There is much more to do, but we will not do anything close to move toward something you could call energy independence unless we as a country have a rational plan, a thoughtful plan. There has been a lot of discussion about who created this energy plan of ours. It goes all the way back to the year 2001 when there were secret meetings and we had people coming to town to participate in these meetings, and virtually all of these countries, I understand, played a role in meetings such as that, although we can't find the names because they claim that the meetings were not public. The Vice President and others convened meetings, developed an energy policy, but it has not been a policy that has done anything other than lead us toward greater dependence on foreign sources of oil. Slightly over 60 percent of our oil is coming from off our shores. That is scheduled in a very short order to go to nearly 70 percent. It has been an inevitable climb, from 60 to now 70. We are going to have to decide as a country, are we going to change that or aren't we? There is not much more we can do for this country's economic security and national security that is more important than to take this kind of energy plan and to decide to embark on something that will strengthen this country and make us less dependent on unstable parts of the world for the production of our energy and for the transport of our oil. It is interesting to me that we never see that which goes in our gas tanks. My father ran a gasoline station, among other things. So when I was a kid, on nights and Saturdays and weekends, I was pumping gas. Some people say my occupation hasn't changed very much. But I pumped gas, and people would drive up and I filled their car with gas. I did that when I was a kid for years and years. When you think about this, we never see that product. So it comes from under the sands of Saudi Arabia. The Lord has seen fit to give us this wonderful bounty called the United States of America. There is no other country quite like it. Yet we have this prodigious appetite for energy. We use one-fourth of all the oil that is sucked out of this earth every day, and a substantial part of the oil, for some reason, exists halfway around the world under the sands of a very troubled part of our globe. So in Saudi Arabia, where there are dramatic deposits of oil--we are not quite sure how large those deposits are because the Saudis won't let anyone verify all that--it is pulled out of that sand. It is cheaper to pull it out of that sand than anywhere else on the face of the Earth, and then it is put in a pipe, it goes to a refinery, put in another pipe, goes to a dock, put on a ship, comes to this country on a tanker, is offloaded into a refinery, goes on a pipeline, perhaps goes to a truck, gets sent to a gasoline station, pumped through an underground tank and pumped through a hose into your car, and no one has ever seen it. Nobody has ever seen that gallon of gasoline. That is the way it works. But literally in this country our economy and our future are held prisoner by this unbelievable dependence on foreign oil. It affects everything we do. It affects our foreign policy. We have gone to war over oil. It affects everything. So the question for this President and this Congress, not tomorrow but today, is how do you reach some sort of independence? How do we make our country less dependent on something we desperately need for our future economic opportunity and growth, less dependent on oil from overseas? I know there are as many suggestions on how to write a new energy policy as there are Members of the Senate. But I do not believe, with all due respect, that there is a Republican or Democratic way to write an energy policy or a conservative or liberal way to write an energy policy. I think there is a right way and a wrong way and a smart way and a pretty stupid way. But it seems to me that we need to begin to find the best of what each of our political parties has to offer in terms of an energy policy and find a way to construct, from the best of what both have to offer, something to assure us that our economy will have the energy that it needs for the future. This is not some academic discussion, as is often the case on the floor of the Senate. There are people who, this winter, do not have enough money to heat their homes because prices are too high. That does not, by the way, have anything to do with supply and demand. You see these profits, the highest profits in history for the oil companies. You don't see gasoline lines. Has anybody seen any gas lines around here, people lining up for hours to get gas? No. There is no shortage. In fact, something came across my desk yesterday--an oil company is shutting down a portion of its refinery because it wants to restrict supply. Why? It wants to keep prices where they are. They like these high prices. There are a lot of ramifications. There are enormous riches for the big oil companies and enormous pain for the American consumer, and that is the short term. The question in the short term is always: Who is going to stand up for the American consumer? I introduced a bill, along with my colleague, Senator Dodd, from Connecticut, a couple of months ago, that would have imposed a windfall profit tax on these oil company profits, only on the profits above $40 a barrel. Incidentally, last year, 2004, represented the highest profits in history at $40 a barrel. We proposed a windfall profits tax at 50 percent on profits over $40 a barrel, with all the proceeds to be sent back to the American consumers as a rebate. Interestingly enough, I guess it was 65 Senators voted against that because they do not want to take money from the oil industry and provide it as a rebate to consumers. I think you ought to even the score a bit. There is no justification for these profits. These companies have not exhibited additional expenses. These are extraordinary profits, the highest in the history of corporate America, and all the American consumers are feeling the pain. That is the short term. We have tried, in the short term, to address it with the windfall profits tax rebate bill and we have not been successful. But that is not over. Then in the intermediate to longer term, we have to do more. We need a real plan for energy independence, a real plan, one that addresses alternative fuels and renewable fuels, enhances the recovery of fossil fuels in a way that is protective of our environment. We need to be doing all of that together, reaching a set of goals that our country establishes. You can't do this without leadership. So my hope is that, both from the White House and also from here, we will begin to see some leadership toward energy independence--I mean some real leadership. Talking about it is one thing. It doesn't mean anything. People have been talking about this forever. It is a waste of breath unless it results in real planning. I have mentioned before the book McCullough wrote about John Adams. It was a fascinating book and had lingering questions from John Adams as he was traveling around the world representing this new country they were trying to form. He spent time in France and England. He would write back to his wife Abigail. At least as I read the book, it would seem that he would write to Abigail and lament to her in his letters: Where will the leadership come from to form this new country of ours? Where will the leadership emerge to put this new country we want to form together? Then in the next letter he would write: Well, then, there is really only us--there's me, there's George Washington, there's Ben Franklin, there's Thomas Jefferson, there's Madison, there's Mason--and of course in the rearview mirror of history we know the ``only us'' now represents some of the greatest human talent ever assembled. But every generation of Americans asks the identical question: Where will the leadership come from? Where will the leadership emerge, real leadership, to steer this country in the right direction? With respect to energy policy which relates to both our economic security and our national security, time is wasting, and there is not a more important subject for us to address, beginning now. The question remains: Where will the leadership come from? That question is addressed to both the White House and the Congress, asking for, finally, what the best of both political parties ought to have to offer this country.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, we are voting on a motion to waive the Budget Act in order that the bill creating an asbestos trust fund can continue to be considered on the floor of the Senate. For the past couple of years, I have encouraged the creation of some kind of a trust fund to settle the many asbestos claims that are clogging our court system. The current tort system does not work at all, in my judgment, with respect to asbestos-related claims. According to the RAND study, lawyers on both sides of the issue are getting 58 cents of every dollar spent on asbestos litigation, which means that the victims are only getting 42 cents of every dollar expended. In addition, there are some very sick people who are getting no help while some people who will never get sick are getting awards. Frankly, that isn't fair or equitable. So I have been sympathetic to the creation of some kind of a trust fund, and I know that the chairman and ranking member of the Judiciary Committee have worked very hard to develop the trust fund proposal now being considered. I also know that the motion to waive the Budget Act is considered by some a technical issue. But some recent studies, including one done by my colleague Senator Conrad, the ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee, suggest that the potential budget exposure to the United States Government is substantial. The Conrad study indicates that this trust fund could fall short by more than $150 billion, which in the out years will put powerful pressure on the Congress to fund the shortfall. This country has a Federal budget that is increasing its indebtedness by $704 billion in this fiscal year alone. We also have a trade deficit of $720 billion this year, for a combined $1.4 trillion debt problem. Our country's economic future is threatened by this massive debt, and I am reluctant to put in place anything that might substantially add to that burden. The prospect that this trust fund could fall far short of that which is necessary to reimburse asbestos victims makes it a very real possibility that the Federal Government would be forced to add to its debt by covering the extra liability for those asbestos victims. Until or unless those issues are resolved, I feel that the best course is to support the point of order in the hope that the authors of the legislation can resolve these differences and offer us greater confidence that this legislation will not add to the crushing debt that America already faces. Therefore, while I will support the point of order, I will continue to work with my colleagues to find a solution that addresses this important issue.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, this morning about 8:30 the administration released the information with respect to the 2005 trade deficit that our country has experienced. The trade deficit for all of 2005 was described this morning as $728 billion. That means about $2 billion a day every day, 7 days a week. That is $2 billion a day more in imports from other countries into our country's marketplace than we are exporting to them, and it relates to the lost jobs that are such a problem in our country. When you import products from abroad, twice as much as you are able to export to other countries, you are in effect exporting America's jobs. The chart I show now shows the number with China alone. Almost one- third of the trade deficit is with China. We can see what has happened with China from 1996 to 2005. The trade deficit has gone up, up, way up every single year. It is out of control. This trade deficit is reflective of, once again, a massive number of American jobs being shipped to China. Then they produce products and ship the products back to our country. It weakens our country. It means we lose jobs. We lose economic strength, especially in the middle class. It is a crisis we must address. There is no social program as important as a good job that pays well in this country. We will debate social programs now for weeks and weeks because the President this past Monday sent us his budget for the next year. We will debate about the need for social programs. But as I said, there is no social program, in my judgment, as important as a good job that pays well. That makes everything else possible for an American family. Let me talk a minute about these good jobs. The good jobs are leaving. Ford Motor says 30,000 people will be laid off. At General Motors, 30,000 people will be laid off. It goes on and on. Increasingly, companies are moving their jobs from the United States to China, to India, to Bangladesh, to Indonesia. So the jobs that remain are jobs that have a downward pressure on wages, more and more pressure to get rid of retirement programs, more pressure to strip health care benefits. In my judgment, that is going to head this country toward serious trouble. This economy works because we built a broad middle class and people go into their jobs often with job security for nearly a lifetime. At Ford Motor Company and General Motors, when people went to work there 40 years ago, they often stayed there for a lifetime. Now, of course, that is not the case. General Motors called its 300 top parts suppliers to a meeting in Detroit recently and said, by the way, we think you need to be moving your jobs to China to cut costs. So General Motors says it. The parts supplier which split off from General Motors, called Delphi, which is now in bankruptcy, says it. They want to pay $8 to $10 an hour. What is going to happen to this economy if we continue to see downward pressure, fewer jobs, fewer good jobs that pay well, downward pressure on wages, and we see more and more of these jobs being exported to other countries? I think I know the answer. The answer to that is we will have less and less opportunity in our country, less economic growth, and we will have fewer good jobs left. My colleague Lindsey Graham from South Carolina and I yesterday announced a piece of legislation we have introduced that would change what is now called PNTR with China. PNTR is permanent normal trade relations. That means China now has normal trade relations with our country. It is permanent. It did not used to be that way. We used to have to vote every year on whether to extend what was then called ``most favored nation status,'' now called ``normal trade relations.'' We used to vote on that every year. But it became permanent in 2000 and we no longer vote on it. My colleague Lindsey Graham and I decided we wanted to revoke permanent NTR and restore again an annual debate in this country about China and about trade with China. I don't mean to say China is the only issue because it is not. Obviously, with this chart we can see the single largest trade deficit is with the country of China. It is growing, it is significant, and it is dangerous. By the way, most of this Congress and the White House will simply sleep through all of this. They are not awake for these issues; no one thinks this is a problem; no one cares much about it. So what if it is $2 billion a day more than we import than export? Who cares? Another 30,000, million or 2 million jobs shipped overseas. Who cares? It is not anybody at the White House who loses their job, so we do not hear about this. But for a lot of the American families, it is a very serious problem. We believe a significant part of the problem rests with China. Almost a third of that trade deficit is with China. China's markets are still too closed to our products. They say they are open, but they are not. China is awash in counterfeit goods and piracy. Two-thirds of the goods that come into our country that are counterfeit goods come from the country of China. And China does nothing about that. China, as we know, is an attractive place for American companies to move their workers. I will not do it today, but I have given plenty of examples--Huffy bicycles, Radio Flyer, Little Red Wagons, Etch-a- Sketch--I could go on for a long period of time. Those jobs go to China because you can hire people for 30 cents an hour in China. You can work them for 7 days a week and you do not have to give them a day off for months. And the Chinese Government looks the other way. You can do that in China. You cannot do that here. So that is why these companies are moving their jobs to China. American companies move their jobs to China. They produce the product, ship it to the United States to sell it in the U.S. marketplace, and then they run their income through the Cayman Islands, in a tax-haven country, so they do not have to pay taxes or at least avoid as much as they can of their tax burden. It is a very serious problem. In discussing this issue of normal trade relations, we have to remember who we are dealing with. Yesterday, my colleague from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham--described the case of a man named Shi Tao. Not many Americans, perhaps, know Shi Tao. But Shi Tao was sentenced, in April of last year, to 10 years in prison. He happens to be a journalist. He was ``divulging state secrets,'' which is the reason he was sent to prison in China. He is a former staffer at the Contemporary Business News agency. He was convicted of sending to foreign Web sites the text of a message from authorities in China warning journalists of the dangers of ``social destabilization'' from the return of certain dissidents on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. So he sent this to some foreign sites, and, as a result, he was charged with ``divulging state secrets'' and sent to prison. Much of the evidence against him came from a company called Yahoo!, an American company. The Chinese Government traced the e-mails sent by Mr. Shi Tao--a journalist--they traced those e-mails with the cooperation of Yahoo! They asked Yahoo! to provide the information. Yahoo! did. And now this fellow is in jail for 10 years for passing on an e-mail by the Chinese Government that said they worried about the dangers of ``social destabilization'' from the return of dissidents on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Reporters Without Borders, an organization that we hear about these days, has complained that Yahoo! has disregarded ethical concerns in an effort to maintain a good business relationship with the Chinese Government. There are other cases that are similar to this. Last month, Google, an American company--a great American success story, I might add--agreed to censor its search engine results in China, agreeing to free-speech restrictions in exchange for better access to the fast-growing Internet market in China. This shows you the power of money and profits over ethics and morality when it comes to doing these kinds of things. Google, last month, rolled out a new version of its search engine that is easier, specifically for use in China. What has happened is, previously Government barriers that were set up to suppress information had prevented the Chinese users from using Google at all. So in order to obtain a Chinese license, Google has agreed to omit Web content that the country's Government officials find objectionable. That includes information about Taiwan's independence and the Tiananmen Square massacre, and so on. It is particularly concerning, I think to me and to a lot of others, that we have American companies helping the Chinese authorities track down a journalist who did nothing wrong, was engaged in some free speech, and now sits in prison for 10 years. But I digress. My main point is that we have a pretty serious trade problem. It is a trade problem that is significant in a lot of ways, and is by no means limited to China. We run very large trade deficits with everyone with whom we have had a trade agreement. We run big trade deficits with Mexico. We run big trade deficits with Canada, with Europe, with Japan, and yes, with China. A part of it, of course, is the basic incompetence of our trade negotiators. And the other part is a trade strategy that has been embraced by this and previous administrations and this Congress that chants about ``free trade''--not caring, of course, whether trade is fair--and has allowed American corporations to decide to structure trade in its own image. And that image is to decide it wants to produce where it is cheap; that is, take Huffy bicycles away from Ohio and fire 900 workers. Move it to China, pay them 33 cents an hour, work them 7 days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day, and then send the Huffy bicycles to America to be sold in Sears, Wal-Mart, and Kmart and believe that is good for our country. It is not. It might be good in the short run for some consumers in this country, but, after all, America is not going to be measured in the long term by what it consumes. It will be measured by what it produces. Economic health is about what you produce, not what you consume. I believe this morning's announcement will produce one more large yawn at the White House, one more large yawn in the Congress. I do not know exactly what it is that is going to provide a tipping point that will finally convince policymakers we are headed toward very serious trouble. It is unsustainable to have a fiscal policy that increases the debt in this year from our budget policies of $704 billion and a trade policy that increases the trade debt in this year of $720 billion. That is $1.4 trillion in combined debt. That will choke this country. We know better than that. We know what to do. We know better than to sit around on our hands and gnash our teeth and wipe our brow. We need to get busy and solve these problems. But first they have to be recognized. There is this blissful ignorance these days about a fiscal policy that is wildly offtrack and a trade policy that has not worked for some years, that is shipping America's jobs overseas and weakening this country. This Congress and this President have a responsibility to address this head on. My colleague, Lindsey Graham from South Carolina, and I joined on the legislation I described yesterday, and I hope my colleagues will support it. Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN

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

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I am pleased to join Senators Feinstein, Collins and a number of my other colleagues to introduce the Medicare Drug Formulary Protection Act of 2006. This legislation will improve the new Medicare prescription drug benefit by preventing prescription drug plans from unexpectedly dropping coverage of prescription drugs that were covered when seniors enrolled in the plan. Although seniors enrolled in the new Medicare drug program are only able to change their health plans once a year, nothing prevents insurers from dropping drugs from their plans on a whim. Under current law, prescription drug plans can change which drugs they cover as long as they provide 60 days notice to their enrollees. It is difficult enough for seniors to navigate the confusion and complexity the Administration has built into the Medicare prescription drug benefit. They ought to be able to do so secure in the knowledge that once they have picked a plan, the plan will not change on them midstream. Seniors need the protection and certainty this legislation extends to them. I had some hopes for this new Medicare plan, but it has become a complete and utter mess. In North Dakota, we have 41 different plans being offered by 17 different companies, and we have the highest percentage of senior citizens in the nation with no prescription drug coverage. In North Dakota, 68 percent of seniors still do not have prescription drug coverage. With the sign-up period nearly one-third over, only 9,000 seniors in North Dakota have voluntarily signed up for the program. More than 70,000 seniors still lack coverage. Other States in the northern Great Plains region are not far behind. Fully 67 percent of South Dakota seniors have no prescription drug coverage and in Montana 65 percent lack coverage. Wyoming also ranks high, with 61 percent of its seniors without prescription drug coverage. I have asked Secretary Leavitt to dispatch a survey team to North Dakota and neighboring States to determine why enrollment rates in the new Medicare prescription drug program are among the lowest in the nation in our region of the country. In the meantime, we need to enact the Medicare Drug Formulary Protection Act and other commonsense reforms like the Medicare Informed Choice Act and the Medicare State Recovery Act. The Medicare Informed Choice Act would extend the enrollment deadline until December 31, 2006. We need to enact this legislation right away. Seniors need more time to evaluate their options. Extending the enrollment deadline will also give Congress time to address some of the problems that have kept more seniors from enrolling in the benefit. The Medicare State Recovery Act will ensure States are reimbursed for the cost of prescriptions for low-income seniors and people with disabilities who were improperly denied coverage under Medicare. I want this new benefit to work. That is why I urge my colleagues to support these efforts to improve the benefit and make it less confusing for seniors.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I am pleased to join Senators Feinstein, Collins and a number of my other colleagues to introduce the Medicare Drug Formulary Protection Act of 2006. This legislation will improve the new Medicare prescription drug benefit by preventing prescription drug plans from unexpectedly dropping coverage of prescription drugs that were covered when seniors enrolled in the plan. Although seniors enrolled in the new Medicare drug program are only able to change their health plans once a year, nothing prevents insurers from dropping drugs from their plans on a whim. Under current law, prescription drug plans can change which drugs they cover as long as they provide 60 days notice to their enrollees. It is difficult enough for seniors to navigate the confusion and complexity the Administration has built into the Medicare prescription drug benefit. They ought to be able to do so secure in the knowledge that once they have picked a plan, the plan will not change on them midstream. Seniors need the protection and certainty this legislation extends to them. I had some hopes for this new Medicare plan, but it has become a complete and utter mess. In North Dakota, we have 41 different plans being offered by 17 different companies, and we have the highest percentage of senior citizens in the nation with no prescription drug coverage. In North Dakota, 68 percent of seniors still do not have prescription drug coverage. With the sign-up period nearly one-third over, only 9,000 seniors in North Dakota have voluntarily signed up for the program. More than 70,000 seniors still lack coverage. Other States in the northern Great Plains region are not far behind. Fully 67 percent of South Dakota seniors have no prescription drug coverage and in Montana 65 percent lack coverage. Wyoming also ranks high, with 61 percent of its seniors without prescription drug coverage. I have asked Secretary Leavitt to dispatch a survey team to North Dakota and neighboring States to determine why enrollment rates in the new Medicare prescription drug program are among the lowest in the nation in our region of the country. In the meantime, we need to enact the Medicare Drug Formulary Protection Act and other commonsense reforms like the Medicare Informed Choice Act and the Medicare State Recovery Act. The Medicare Informed Choice Act would extend the enrollment deadline until December 31, 2006. We need to enact this legislation right away. Seniors need more time to evaluate their options. Extending the enrollment deadline will also give Congress time to address some of the problems that have kept more seniors from enrolling in the benefit. The Medicare State Recovery Act will ensure States are reimbursed for the cost of prescriptions for low-income seniors and people with disabilities who were improperly denied coverage under Medicare. I want this new benefit to work. That is why I urge my colleagues to support these efforts to improve the benefit and make it less confusing for seniors.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce legislation which would deal in a small but, I hope, meaningful way, with the crisis of youth suicide in Indian Country. On the reservations of the Northern Great Plains, the rate of Indian youth suicide is 10 times higher than it is anywhere else in the country. This needless loss of young boys and girls whose whole lives lay ahead of them is a very serious problem. I am pleased that last year, the Senate Indian Affairs Committee held two hearings on the tragic issue of teen suicide and the urgent need for prevention, intervention and treatment services. We heard the testimony of youth and family members, representatives of the Indian Health Service and other agencies of the Department of Health and Human Services, and Indian professionals who work with young people. We continue to sift through their recommendations to find possible solutions that could be proposed in legislation. I believe it is urgent that solutions be put forward now to deal with this troubling problem. Following the Committee's second hearing on Indian youth suicide last summer, several more Indian young people attempted suicide on the Standing Rock Reservation in North and South Dakota. Thankfully, their lives were spared and their attempts not completed. But time is running out for addressing this tragic issue. When the Indian Affairs Committee marked up legislation to amend and reauthorize the Indian Health Care Improvement Act last October, I offered, with Senators Conrad and Smith, an amendment which had three components, all of which were presented as ideas at the Committee's hearing in Washington, DC, on June 15, 2005, on Indian youth suicide. I am very pleased that my amendment was unanimously adopted. The legislation which I introduce today parallels one part of that amendment to the Indian health reauthorization bill, and would authorize the Indian Youth Telemental Health Demonstration Project. The Secretary of Health and Human Services would award grants under this 4- year demonstration project to five Indian Tribes and Tribal Organizations that have telehealth capabilities. Grantees would provide services through telemental health for such purposes as counseling of Indian youth for suicide prevention, intervention and treatment; providing medical advice and other assistance to frontline tribal health providers; training for tribal community members, elected officials, tribal educators and health workers and others who work with Indian youth; developing culturally-sensitive materials on suicide prevention and intervention; and data collection and reporting. My proposal has been revised since it was adopted as an amendment to the Indian health reauthorization bill in response to Administration concerns about expanding new health care programs or services to Native Americans living in urban areas. I will leave the Federal Government's obligation to provide health care to urban Indians--most of whom are in urban areas because they or their parents or relatives were relocated from their reservations or Alaska Native communities under federal policy--to be discussed another day. Many Indian reservations and Native villages in Alaska are in remote locations and quite isolated, and experience much more limited access to mental health services than in our nation's cities. The testimony received by the Indian Affairs Committee showed that it is particularly in these communities that there is a crisis among the youth. Accordingly, the bill I propose today is intended to provide services for counseling, medical advice and training and educational materials under this new demonstration project to Indian youth living on reservations and in Native villages. I thank my colleagues who have joined me in this initiative and who have added thoughtful insights for ways to address this crisis that deprives many tribal communities of one of the richest resources, our youth. I look forward to continuing our efforts and developing a more comprehensive legislative proposal on this sensitive and very important issue. I urge my colleagues to support this legislation. I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill as introduced be printed in the Record.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce legislation which would deal in a small but, I hope, meaningful way, with the crisis of youth suicide in Indian Country. On the reservations of the Northern Great Plains, the rate of Indian youth suicide is 10 times higher than it is anywhere else in the country. This needless loss of young boys and girls whose whole lives lay ahead of them is a very serious problem. I am pleased that last year, the Senate Indian Affairs Committee held two hearings on the tragic issue of teen suicide and the urgent need for prevention, intervention and treatment services. We heard the testimony of youth and family members, representatives of the Indian Health Service and other agencies of the Department of Health and Human Services, and Indian professionals who work with young people. We continue to sift through their recommendations to find possible solutions that could be proposed in legislation. I believe it is urgent that solutions be put forward now to deal with this troubling problem. Following the Committee's second hearing on Indian youth suicide last summer, several more Indian young people attempted suicide on the Standing Rock Reservation in North and South Dakota. Thankfully, their lives were spared and their attempts not completed. But time is running out for addressing this tragic issue. When the Indian Affairs Committee marked up legislation to amend and reauthorize the Indian Health Care Improvement Act last October, I offered, with Senators Conrad and Smith, an amendment which had three components, all of which were presented as ideas at the Committee's hearing in Washington, DC, on June 15, 2005, on Indian youth suicide. I am very pleased that my amendment was unanimously adopted. The legislation which I introduce today parallels one part of that amendment to the Indian health reauthorization bill, and would authorize the Indian Youth Telemental Health Demonstration Project. The Secretary of Health and Human Services would award grants under this 4- year demonstration project to five Indian Tribes and Tribal Organizations that have telehealth capabilities. Grantees would provide services through telemental health for such purposes as counseling of Indian youth for suicide prevention, intervention and treatment; providing medical advice and other assistance to frontline tribal health providers; training for tribal community members, elected officials, tribal educators and health workers and others who work with Indian youth; developing culturally-sensitive materials on suicide prevention and intervention; and data collection and reporting. My proposal has been revised since it was adopted as an amendment to the Indian health reauthorization bill in response to Administration concerns about expanding new health care programs or services to Native Americans living in urban areas. I will leave the Federal Government's obligation to provide health care to urban Indians--most of whom are in urban areas because they or their parents or relatives were relocated from their reservations or Alaska Native communities under federal policy--to be discussed another day. Many Indian reservations and Native villages in Alaska are in remote locations and quite isolated, and experience much more limited access to mental health services than in our nation's cities. The testimony received by the Indian Affairs Committee showed that it is particularly in these communities that there is a crisis among the youth. Accordingly, the bill I propose today is intended to provide services for counseling, medical advice and training and educational materials under this new demonstration project to Indian youth living on reservations and in Native villages. I thank my colleagues who have joined me in this initiative and who have added thoughtful insights for ways to address this crisis that deprives many tribal communities of one of the richest resources, our youth. I look forward to continuing our efforts and developing a more comprehensive legislative proposal on this sensitive and very important issue. I urge my colleagues to support this legislation. I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill as introduced be printed in the Record.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, on behalf of Senator Schumer, I ask unanimous consent that Tovah Calderon, a detailee from the Department of Justice, be granted the privilege of the floor during today's session.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. My friend from Iowa came to the floor to speak a bit this morning on a couple of subjects I spoke about yesterday. Let me again say I have very high regard for Senator Grassley. We worked together on a good number of issues. I enjoy working with him. But there are times when you have disagreements on policy, and we certainly have that on an issue I am going to talk about. It is an issue he talked about this morning as well. Actually, there are a couple of tax issues. Before I do, however, I want to just make a slight correction to the remarks that were made by the Senator from Pennsylvania a few minutes ago. I heard him say the Democrats were holding up this bill on, I guess--I think he said a technicality. I think he said it was a technicality. I think that was the impression he intended to leave, obstruct or holding this up on a technicality. I guess the technicality is our interest in offering amendments. I know to some that is not a pleasant thing around here, to have people offer amendments and actually debate them and vote on them, but that is the way the system works. The reason there are not amendments offered-- and I would try to offer one right now, but I would be unable to offer one--is because the majority party has done something that is called filling the tree. It is a parliamentary procedure to make sure every branch of this legislative tree is filled so that no one is allowed to offer an amendment. For example, while this bill is on the floor, under the rules of the Senate, I should be able to offer an amendment. The majority party decided to fill the tree, as it is called, so no one on this side may offer an amendment. So when my colleague from Pennsylvania said the Democratic side of the aisle is using a technicality--whatever, I forget his term exactly--to hold this up, I am sorry that is not what is happening at all. He made a point that I share. I think it would be great to work together. I think there ought to be less rancid partisanship and we ought to find ways to work together to do the Nation's business. We, after all, represent the same interests. We represent the interests of this country. I hope we represent the interests of the American people. I would like to find areas where we can work together. In this case, however, let me just say there is no obstruction going on here. The only obstruction is we are obstructed from being able to offer an amendment which in ordinary circumstances the rules of the Senate would permit. I regret that. I wish the majority party would have allowed me. I would have offered the amendment yesterday, in fact, and I would offer it right now. I have an amendment to offer. I guess we will vote on it later because you will have to have a circumstance where we can offer the amendment. I suppose the purpose is to allow amendments to be offered when all time is expired so there is no debate that is allowed. I guess that is probably the purpose. But I did want to disabuse anyone of the notion left by my colleague from Pennsylvania that somehow it is this side that is hanging all of this up. It may be inconvenient to have people offer amendments in the Senate, but there are a couple of hundred years of tradition of this inconvenience. The inconvenience is to be able to offer ideas, debate the ideas in the form of an amendment, and then have a vote, and the vote determines whether the idea that is offered represents public policy that the full Senate will accept. Let me just respond to a couple of things my distinguished colleague from Iowa has said. Yesterday, I gave a presentation talking about something called deferral. I know most of these things sound like foreign language around here. Deferral of income tax obligations is what it is. If a company does business overseas, an American company does business overseas and earns income overseas, at some point when it brings those profits, that income back to our country, they will be required to pay an income tax to our country for the income they have earned. They will get a credit, actually, against taxes they paid to a foreign country so they will not be double-taxed. But when they repatriate that income, as it is called, they have to pay a tax. My colleagues in the Congress, a sufficient number of colleagues who represent the majority, decided that they wanted to have a kind of little sweetheart deal for companies that would repatriate their earnings because many companies park their earnings for a long while overseas and don't bring them back. When they bring them back they have to pay the full tax rate. My colleagues said: Let's create new jobs in America by allowing these companies to bring their income back, and we will give them a special superdeal. You have heard of blue light specials; this is the blue light special of all specials. It says you bring that money back from overseas, you get to pay not 35 percent, not 30 percent, not 25 percent, not 15 percent or 10 percent--which is the lowest income tax rate that is paid by the lowest income earner who has to pay income taxes--you get to pay a 5.25-income-tax rate. Who is the ``you''? The biggest companies in our country: Ford Motor, for one thing. I mention that because when they announced they are going to lay off 30,000, they also said: By the way, we picked up a quarter of a billion dollars of tax refunds under the Jobs Creation Act. Isn't that interesting? Ford Motor said in the same press release: We are going to lay off 30,000 workers in this country and, by the way, we were able to get a quarter of a billion dollars, a $250 million benefit from the jobs creation tax rate special benefit of 5.25 percent. The whole purpose was to create jobs in our country and, at least in the most recent job announcement of 30,000 jobs lost, the very company that announces 30,000 jobs gone points out they got a quarter of billion dollars under this provision. My colleagues seem to suggest the provision really does work, it is helpful. No, it doesn't work. It didn't work. By my calculation, the income that was parked overseas and at some point would have had to have been repatriated to this country, that income would have borne a tax that is about $104 billion more than what was paid under the 5.25 percent. Is anybody going to have to answer to that? I don't know. Maybe not. Maybe nobody cares--$104 billion. You could reduce the Federal debt, reduce the annual budget deficit. You could probably provide some health care to people who do not have it, perhaps help some kids who are hungry, perhaps provide health care for kids who are sick, improve some classrooms in schools that need improvement--maybe there is a lot of things you could do. But $104 billion, that is a tax break given to the biggest corporations in this country who brought income back to our country and would have had to pay normal income tax rates but were told by this Congress that we are going to give you a superspecial deal that no other American taxpayer has: 5.25 income tax rate. Wouldn't every American love to pay a 5.25 income tax rate? But they can't. That deal is just reserved by the Congress for some bigger interests. I didn't vote for that. I didn't support it. I strongly opposed it. My colleague who sat in this chair right here, Senator Fritz Hollings, who is now retired, offered the amendment to strip that out, but we were not successful. So this blue light special, 5.25 percent special income tax rate for big interests who were bringing money back from overseas--it got done and $104 billion, as I calculate it, was saved by those who otherwise would have had to pay regular income tax rates. I wanted to respond to that because I still think that was one of the goofiest ideas in the world for this Congress to embrace, saying let's provide a 5.25 tax rate because we think it will create jobs. The evidence is all around us. It didn't create jobs. In fact, I have charts saying the largest companies that got some of the biggest benefits--one company got a $14.5 million benefit and laid off 14,500 people--almost complete and perfect symmetry, wasn't it? Except they were supposed to have hired people if they got this kind of special tax rate. They just forgot and laid them off, I guess. Let me go to the other point which is what persuaded my colleague to come to the floor and engage on this issue, and that was the point I made yesterday. We have a provision in our Tax Code that says to someone in Iowa or North Dakota or Colorado or Pennsylvania, if you have a manufacturing plant and you are across the street from your competitor and your competitor has a manufacturing plant and you produce exactly the same products but you do something different, you move your jobs to China and manufacture your widgets in China, your competitor across the street stays home and manufactures them here in this country--one thing has happened as a result of that move. We have embedded in this Tax Code a perverse incentive that says: By the way, we will give you a break. You move those jobs to China, close your plant door, get rid of your workers, produce in China, and we will give you a tax break. You are not going to pay as much in income taxes as your competitor across the street who stayed in this country. I think that is wrong. Going all the way back to 1961 with John F. Kennedy, proposals have existed to change it. Going back to 1987, the House actually passed legislation to change it. But we can't change it any longer because now, of course, the big economic interests that benefit a lot from that--and we have a lot of companies getting rid of American workers, padlocking their doors and shipping the jobs to China. I have spoken about many of them on the floor of the Senate. We have a lot of companies that like this tax break. Why? They like to hire people for 33 cents an hour, produce the product in China, sell it in Cincinnati or Toledo or Pittsburgh, and then run their income through the Grand Cayman Islands, through the Ugland House on Church Street on the island of Grand Cayman, that houses 12,748. It is just an address, of course, but the purpose is to reduce the tax burden. My point is on four occasions when I offered amendments on the floor of the Senate so we ought to at least decide as a country that we will not provide financial incentives in the Tax Code for those who decide to move their jobs overseas--that ought to be the least we ought to do. That ought to be the baby step in the right direction--but four times we have voted and on four occasions those big interests that really like this and have benefits from it have been able to persuade a majority of the Senate to oppose closing that loophole. I indicated yesterday I would once again offer that legislation. I would offer it right this moment except I am prevented because the majority has done what is called filled the tree and prevented anybody from offering any amendments. My colleague from Iowa came down this morning and offered what I believe is called the Banana defense. That is what he called it the last time he offered it. It had to do something with bananas. I don't know, maybe we could debate apricots or tailpipes or bananas. It doesn't matter to me what the product is. We could have a long debate about it. I will just call this the banana debate then. But whatever the product or circumstances, the question remains: Do you believe that our Tax Code ought to provide financial benefits and rewards to companies that have decided to move their jobs overseas? Should Huffy bicycle have gotten a reward for firing all their workers and producing Huffy bicycles in China? Should Radio Flyer little red wagon have gotten a benefit from moving all their jobs overseas? Fruit of the Loom, should they have gotten the benefit? I could go on at some length. Fig Newton cookies, when they went to Monterrey, Mexico, should they get a benefit? If you think yes, then good for you, and I suppose the benefit will continue to exist in our Tax Code, but we are going to continue to vote on it. I am not deterred. As far as I am concerned we can vote 10 times on it. At some point there will be enough people filling the seats in this Chamber to understand that at a time that we have a crisis, and it is a crisis with substantial numbers of jobs moving outside of this country in search of lower labor costs to produce products to ship back into this country, at a time when we have that kind of crisis and the American people are facing downward pressure on wages, they are facing the stripping away of their pensions, the loss of their health care--at a time when we have that kind of crisis, the question is: Will there be enough people filling the seats in this Chamber to stand up and say let's take the first baby step in addressing it? The first baby step is to say: Let's not provide incentives in the Tax Code for companies to move those jobs overseas. If we can't do that, we can't solve this problem. But we will have plenty of chances. We will have one more chance now. We had four chances previously. I respect everybody's ability and interest to vote however they choose in this Chamber. I don't demean their reputation nor diminish their capability. I only say that I feel very strongly that if they support this provision, they are wrong. They are wrong for this country. The right public policy position is at least to have some basic neutrality on the question of whether we want to export jobs and whether we want to have the financial incentives for exporting jobs in our Tax Code. I regret that we don't have a back and forth. I would love to have a real debate about this because I know there are those who benefit handsomely from this who want to continue it and want it to remain in the Tax Code. But I feel strongly that this provision that is known as deferral--and, incidentally, my repeal of deferral does not go to the John F. Kennedy proposal on repealing deferral. My repeal on deferral is rather narrow. It is those companies that leave this country and ship back into this country. I think it is a perfectly appropriate thing, especially now given the crisis we face with jobs and opportunities in this country, for us to do that. I have a right, under the procedures of the Senate, to offer this amendment. I should have the right to offer it at the moment but I am not because there is--I guess the word ``obstruction'' is to be used-- obstruction at the moment is the tree is filled so that no one can offer an amendment. So we are going into some process that is a vote- arama, and I will offer the amendment, and we will have a vote. Let me finally say it again. There is not one Member of the Senate that puts on a dark suit every morning and comes to work here that has ever been threatened to have their job outsourced--not one. There is not a person here that is ever going to have their job outsourced. Maybe they do not think much about it. I don't know. We have all of these people in blue suits who come here every day and we talk and we talk, and mostly we talk. We are good at talking. But the question for most Americans who worry about their jobs and who see their neighbors' jobs moved overseas is, Will their jobs be moved? The question for them is, Will Congress do something about it? I mentioned a few moments ago the Ugland House in the Grand Cayman Islands, which is a slightly different approach than the Tax Code I have been describing. I wanted to mention that there is a man from Bloomberg News named David Evans who has done some reporting on this Ugland House. The Ugland House is a house on Church Street in the Cayman Islands. It was, according to news reports, dug out by David Evans, who has done the research. This is a five-story white building that houses 12,748 companies. It doesn't really house 12,748 companies--it is an address. This is a five-story white house address on Church Street in the Cayman Islands. Why would 12,000 companies congregate to have an address in this five-story building? There is only one reason. And, by the way, every one of them are represented by the same law firm. Why? So they don't have to pay taxes, that is why. They want to access cheap labor in Asia, sell in America, and run it through the Cayman Islands so they don't pay taxes. That is what this is all about. Because we have a tax bill on the floor of the Senate, I have another amendment that I will not be offering now for those companies that want to congregate at an address in a tax-haven country, the Cayman Islands. But if you are creating an address to have a tax haven and avoid taxes, you shall be treated for tax purposes as if you have never left our country. You don't get to claim that you now have an address in the Ugland House, and, therefore, you are running your income through that house. My legislation would say you are going to be treated as if you never left for business purposes. We can shut that down like that, if Members of Congress have the interest and the will. Does anybody believe this is anything other than a huge scam, by having a little five-story house with 12,000 businesses congregate there under the umbrella of a law firm that runs their mail through that place in order to avoid paying U.S. taxes? Thanks to David Evans for the work he has done. But in many ways, I think this is the tip of the iceberg. There is substantial tax avoidance going on. Some of it is legal. The first description I made today was the description of the avoidance of what I think is about $104 billion in taxes under the 5.25-percent special tax deal. The other one I mentioned, deferral for those who move their jobs overseas, that is in law. I am not criticizing companies for following the law. I am criticizing the Congress for not changing the law and doing what we should do--stand up for American jobs. I was thinking I had actually done plenty yesterday to either aid or injure my cause, however one views these issues. But when I heard my colleague from Iowa come to the floor today, I at least wanted to respond to that. As I was coming over, I heard my colleague from Pennsylvania say someone else was obstructing, I guess, the work of the Congress over what I think is a technicality, and the technicality was we wanted to offer amendments. I say to my colleague, there is never a technicality when someone wants to offer an amendment. If the rules allow us to offer amendments, just have the amendments, have a little debate, vote regular order, and let it go. When it is done and the dust is settled, we decide what we decide, and everybody is responsible for the vote they cast. My colleague from Pennsylvania said he wished we would be a little less partisan. So do I. I think we need to find ways to make this a little less partisan. A good step in that direction would be, for example, for somebody to right now come out and say: We have a bill on the floor, let us have regular order. If amendments are, by the way, allowed, let us go ahead and offer them. Will you give us a time agreement? Sure. Vote, act the way legislators should act, and at the end of the day, we will all feel better about that. That is what the Senate ought to be about when we call this the greatest deliberative body in the world. It has slipped a bit. We can regain that status if we only decide amendments are good and not bad things. Debate is good--not bad. The noise of democracy coming from the Senate is welcome noise for the American people, if we are engaged in constructive debate about issues that matter. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. I thank my colleague from Delaware. Mr. President, the issue that is going to be debated now and voted on later today and perhaps tomorrow is the revenue piece of the reconciliation bill. I know that sounds a little like a foreign language to some people, but we have a process here called reconciliation. One part of that is spending, and the other part is revenue. This is the revenue side. For all of us, the question is, As we legislate here, are we gaining ground or losing ground? Are we moving our country ahead, or are we falling behind? I listened attentively last night to the President's State of the Union Address. He described some of these issues, although he did not describe domestic policy in much detail. The first half hour or so was about foreign policy. There is no question that Iraq is very important. The war on terrorism and national security are issues that are very important to our country. But I also believe it is important as well to begin taking care of things here at home, and we have a lot to take care of. I have told my colleagues before about a wonderful man in North Dakota called the Flying Farmer from McCody. McCody is a town of about 80 people. The Flying Farmer from McCody goes out to county fairs and State fairs and he takes an old car he fixed up--he works in a machine shop--then he puts up a ramp and jumps other cars; a daredevil kind of thing. The Flying Farmer from McCody. He jumps cars at county fairs. But he is also in the Guinness Book of Records. John Smith, the Flying Farmer from McCody, is in the Guinness Book of Records. He is in there because he drove a car in reverse 500 miles, averaging 36 miles an hour. I don't know who would want to drive a car in reverse 500 miles or who would want to set a record for a reverse speed of 36 miles an hour for 500 miles, but he owns the record. That is probably a perfect metaphor for the U.S. Congress--setting records for going backward. The question for us is, Can we move forward? Can we take this country forward, move ahead, and advance this country's interests? As we talk now about the revenue side of reconciliation, we are talking about taxes. So let me talk a bit about the tax system and where we are. In recent days, we have had an announcement by Ford Motor Company that they are deciding to cut 30,000 more jobs. They cut 10,000 last year. They are going to cut 30,000 more workers. This follows on the heels of General Motors. General Motors announced it was going to cut 30,000 workers. By the way, the top guy in General Motors who is in charge of acquiring parts called all the suppliers of General Motors together, some 300 of them, the CEOs of the parts companies, and said to them this last year: You need to start outsourcing your parts production to China to bring your costs down. The parts for General Motors, Ford-- shut down the jobs, move jobs to China. Is our country moving ahead or backward when we see these things? The reason I mention this Ford announcement is Ford announced that at the same time it was cutting 30,000 jobs, from the Washington Post, Ford said: Repatriation of foreign earnings pursuant to the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 resulted in a permanent tax savings of about $250 million. Let me describe that in English. What Ford said is they picked up a quarter of a billion dollars in tax breaks under the act Congress passed that they called the American Jobs Creation Act. They announced that same day, we are cutting 30,000 people. How is it that Congress passes something called the American Jobs Creation Act and the company that announces it gets a quarter of billion dollars of benefit under that act at the same time tells us it got that benefit that it cuts 30,000 jobs? How does that work? Does that make sense to anybody? Do people who pass this kind of legislation and call it the Jobs Creation Act, do they seem embarrassed when they see this? It is not just Ford Motor. I should not pick on Ford Motor. But Hewlett-Packard brought $14.5 billion back from abroad and cut 14,500 workers. Colgate Palmolive, Motorola--I could go on. What was this little scheme called the 2004 American Jobs Creation Act? Here is what it was. It said for those companies which have parked income overseas and have not repatriated their income yet back to this country--which when they do, they will owe on it with a credit for foreign taxes paid--we will give you a special deal under this Jobs Creation Act. If you bring your money back to this country, you can pay a 5.25 tax rate. That is one half the tax rate of the lowest income American who pays income taxes. So we said to the biggest companies in the world: If you bring your income back, we will give you a deal--5.25 percent. That is the income tax rate you pay. We now know they repatriated somewhere around $350 billion. By my calculation, this Congress--not with my vote by the way awarded those companies $104 billion in tax breaks. I don't know of anybody who actually stands up and boasts about that here on the floor of the Senate. They do it because they believe in this sort of thing, but they don't want to brag about it. But I hope those who talked on this issue, when this American Jobs Creation Act was passed, would come to the Chamber and recite for us what they said then and what we know now. They said if we give these biggest companies huge tax breaks, it will create jobs in this country. Now what we know is--and Ford is the best example of it--they announced: We got a quarter of a billion--thank you, Congress--and we are going to cut 30,000 workers. It is right on down the line. I could spend some time talking about these companies. I will not do that, only to say those who believed this was a jobs creation act now should be disabused of that notion. We talk about our Tax Code and suggest what is the best way to use our money. They decide the best way to use our money would be to go to some of the largest corporations in America that are doing business overseas and say to them: If you bring that money back, you can pay the lowest income tax rate in America--yes, it is lower than your neighbor, lower than the person down the street, lower than the person up the block, lower than the person out on the farm. You get to pay the lowest tax rate in America. That is almost unbelievable. It is stranger than fiction. But that is exactly what the majority in this Congress did. One would think it should be profoundly embarrassing when we see the results. Let me also say that this is not just about providing big tax cuts to companies. It is a situation where, with these kinds of tax policies, when we say, Put up a slice of bread here and let us slather some butter all over it, what we are saying to these companies is, We want to encourage you to actually take jobs and move them overseas. We want to tell you that, if you will fire your American workers, padlock the front gate on your American manufacturing plant, and move it all to China or India or Sri Lanka or Bangladesh or Vietnam, we will give you a tax cut. I know people must listen to that and say: That cannot be true. That would be absolutely nuts; you cannot possibly be accurate. But I am. I am. We actually offer a tax cut for companies that get rid of their American workers, outsource their production, and then ship the production back into this country for sale on our store shelves in Toledo and Pittsburgh and Los Angeles and Fargo. Produce it in China, sell it back here, and we will give you a tax break. I want to draw a circle around all this because it all relates. I want to show a picture of a building. I want to show you what is happening because this relates to taxes and jobs. This building is a little five-story building in the Cayman Islands. It is a white building. It is called the Ugland House. According to Bloomberg News, this building on Church Street in the Cayman Islands is the official address of 12,748 companies. Let me say that again because someone would say that is kind of crowded. That would be crowded if they were all there. They are not there, of course. This is just their address. 12,748 companies claim this little white building as their official address in the Cayman Islands on quiet Church Street. Why would that be the case? I will tell you why. Because companies these days want to do the following: They want to produce in China by paying people 30 cents an hour, working them 12 to 14 hours a day, 7 days a week; they want to ship the products to the store shelves of the United States of America to sell to American consumers because that is where the money is; and they want to run their income through the Ugland House in the Cayman Islands so they can avoid paying U.S. taxes on their profits. It is perfect symmetry, isn't it? Of course, it doesn't involve saying the Pledge of Allegiance. You can't really say the Pledge of Allegiance and do this: say, I want all America has to offer, all the protection of our country, the ability to be chartered in America as an American corporation, the ability to be protected by American military might, the ability to be protected by American laws and courts, but I also want this for my company: I want to be able to produce in China, sell in Cincinnati, and run my money through the Cayman Islands. I am telling you, you don't say the Pledge of Allegiance when you do that. You weaken this country. You pull the rug out from American workers. And you also weaken those who are not leaving this country and who are deciding to continue to manufacture here. There are some wonderful companies that do stay here and do manufacture here. I have told stories of a number of them. I will not do that today. This is not a broad-brush of all companies, but it is increasingly the activities we see in some very large companies that no longer think of themselves in any terms of economic nationalism. They are world enterprises, citizens of the world who want to produce where it is cheap, sell into an established marketplace in the United States, and run their income through a tax haven country. It does not work, in my judgment, in the long term. What do we do about all that? In addition to talking about the Ugland House, I wish to make sure people understand, from other speeches I have given, that these companies which are leaving America are real companies. This company, by the way, was a company in this country for over a century. For over 100 years, this company made little red wagons, and I guarantee most American kids have sat in a little red wagon called Radio Flyer. Radio Flyer wagons were originally created by a guy in Chicago, an immigrant. The ``Radio''? That was after Marconi. He was so enthused about Marconi. And the ``Flyer''? That is because he loved flying. So he built a little red wagon called Radio Flyer, and I bet every kid in this country at one time has seen it, and most of them have ridden in one. After 100 years in this country, the Radio Flyer is gone. This is gone. They don't make Radio Flyers in America anymore; they make them in parts of the world where you can pay 30 cents and 40 cents an hour for labor. So the company that makes Radio Flyers still aspired to sell them in the United States, it is just that they don't make them here anymore. I could go through a list of dozens and dozens of companies that represent exactly the same story. We have all seen these ads over many years, the guys who are dressed as grapes--you know, green grapes, red grapes. They dance and they sing. What a playful bunch of people. Who on Earth thought you could do a little television commercial with a bunch of people singing dressed like grapes? Fruit of the Loom underwear. Now Fruit of the Loom underwear is gone. It is all gone. They are in other parts of the world where you can produce shorts and t-shirts and underwear for much less cost. The people who used to work for Fruit of the Loom used to have good jobs, the same as the people who worked for Radio Flyer. They worked there for a lifetime, loved their jobs, but then they were told: You cannot compete with 30 cents an hour. So long. See you later. Yet the grapes still sing, and the workers weep for their jobs. I only point out Huffy bicycles because Huffy bicycles just announced it was becoming Chinese in nationality, which was, in fact, just a formality because they don't make Huffy bicycles here anymore; they have been making them in China. All the people in Ohio lost their jobs making Huffy bicycles. They lost their jobs because they were told they make $11 an hour plus benefits, and that is way too much money, and we are going to make Huffy bicycles at 33 cents an hour in China, for people who work 7 days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day. The last job, by the way, for the folks in Ohio was to put this decal on. This is a decal of the globe. This used to be a decal of the American flag, when Huffy bicycles were made by Americans here in America. They changed that because all the Huffy bicycles workers were fired. Huffy bicycles are made in China, and now the flag decal was the last job those workers performed before losing their jobs and having to drive out of that plant for the last time. They put the decal of the globe on it. So if you want to buy a Huffy bicycle at Wal-Mart, Kmart, or Sears, understand they used to be made by people in this country making $11 an hour. No longer. It is all in China. And incidentally, this company also decided it cannot pay the retirement benefits that were owed to the workers, so now the American taxpayer is going to pay that. The company declared bankruptcy. Now they have announced it is going to be a Chinese company, a Chinese brand and style of Huffy. It is still a Huffy, of course. One last thing: Lest some think this doesn't matter, the people at Huffy, I was told by someone who on the last day of work, when they left their parking space, those workers who lost their jobs making Huffy bicycles, on the last day in their jobs, those workers left a pair of shoes in the space where their cars used to park. It was their way of sending a message to the company that you can move our jobs to China but you are not going to fill our shoes. It is what those jobs meant to those people. It is going on all over this country. When you hear that Ford is going to lay off 30,000 workers, you don't think much; you think 30,000 jobs is not much; it is too big to understand. But the fact is think this country is losing jobs all over, and they are being replaced by jobs that pay less with fewer benefits. American workers are now discovering downward pressure on wages because this strategy doesn't pull American workers up. It pushes Americans workers down as it exploits foreign workers. We are in a situation where we have the largest trade deficit in history--$740 billion last year, we believe. That is $2 billion a day, 7 days a week above that which we export from other countries. We are selling America. Every single day, we sell $2 billion worth of this country to foreigners with this insidious trade strategy. The people who listen to me talk about this will say this is another protectionist, xenophobic, isolationist stooge who doesn't get it. What I get is the need to stand up for the economic interests of this country. I support trade, the more the better. But it must be fair trade. If it is not fair trade, and if this country doesn't have the guts to require other countries to pull their standards up, then all we are inevitably going to do is continue do push standards down in our country. That is not what we should aspire to in the long term in this country. It is my intention to offer an amendment that will once again deal with this perverse tax break that pays people to actually shut American plants down and move their jobs overseas. I hope to do that on this bill. Let me also say I have offered that amendment four times. Members of the House and Senate decided they wanted to continue a tax break for those companies that ship their American jobs overseas. I hope that one of these days there is a big, old klieg light that shines on all of these votes so people have to answer to those votes. At the very least, we ought to have some sort of neutrality. We ought not be giving tax breaks or benefits to those companies that decide to ship their jobs outside of this country. If I may make one final point, I talked a bit about these tax issues and running income through the Cayman Islands. We ought to shut that down. By the way, I have introduced a bill that says if your purpose for setting up operations in a tax-haven country is for the purpose of avoiding taxes, we are going to treat you for tax purposes as if you never left this country. You have a responsibility to pay taxes in this country. We can shut all of that down very quickly, if we have the guts to do it. If you can't take the first baby step in the right direction to shut down tax breaks for people who are getting rid of American jobs and shipping their jobs overseas, how can you do something more complex? We will have another vote on that. It will be the fifth vote on that. If some have not seen the light, they can perhaps feel the heat and change at some point. I have described all of this not in terms of Democrats or Republicans. All of us, I think, want this country to do well. I want the President to do well. I want this country to do well. I want there to be less partisanship. I want there to be more cooperation. But I also want us to take a look at public policy that is wrongheaded and change it. If we say we have a jobs creation act out there and we give $100 billion in tax breaks and we see fewer jobs as a result of it, something is wrong with that. We ought to understand it. I want to make one final point about the tax issue. One of the things hanging up the revenue side of the reconciliation bill is the issue of dividends and capital gains, and a 15-percent top tax rate for both dividends and capital gains income. There are some people who look at the issue of taxation and they think this: We have the opportunity to levy taxes on several different things. We can tax work. We all know what work is. That is when somebody gets up in the morning, puts on a pair of shoes, and clothes, and goes to work. We can tax work. We can tax investment, we can tax rents, and so on. We have people who have decided with respect to dividends and capital gains, that investment income, dividends and capital gains should have a much lower tax rate than tax on work. Ask the question: Where do you stand on taxation? Some of them say, Well, you know what I think we ought to do. We ought to tax work and exempt investment. Say you have two people living side by side. One is a multimillionaire who makes all of his or her money on dividends and capital gains. The other one lives next door and wears steel-toed boots and goes to work every day. He works hard, sweats, comes home and feels he has earned a good day's income. We have people in this Chamber who believe the way that ought to be taxed is the person who works should be taxed, the person who earns it only in capital gains and dividends should have no tax. I know. It is 15 percent. But there are a lot of people in here who would like it to be zero. We have a circumstance where we say let us tax work, and let us give a benefit to investment. I don't know, what value system is that? Is investment worthy? Of course it is, absolutely. There is no question that people who are investors are good people. They help run this economic engine. I understand that. What value system is it that says work ought to be taxed higher than investment? Work reflects the labor of the American people. I will not go through the list, but it was, I think, in 1943 when Stalin turned to Roosevelt when he was meeting with Roosevelt and Churchill, and he pointed out that we wouldn't have a chance to win this war without American manufacturing. He was talking about the productivity of the American worker. ``The Glory and The Dream'' by Manchester describes what this country did, what American manufacturing did to turn out massive products in the form of liberty ships, airplanes, tanks, and trucks; unbelievable. The American worker is an unbelievable force in this country. When we come to the side of taxation, tell me the value system that says, by the way, let us tax work but let us exempt investment. There is a fairness issue here that this Congress has a requirement to confront, in my judgment. I know this issue is actually hanging up this bill between the House and the Senate. The House is insisting no, no, no, you have to substantially extend this lower tax rate for investment income. I do not know. Who is standing up here on the floor of the Senate saying I am standing up for work, for the people who earn a wage? I am standing up for the person who has to shower after work, people who sweat, work hard, earn an honest day's pay? Finally, let me say this. Part of this is all about the noise of democracy, about debate, about coming to the same point from several different intersections and different perspectives. I feel passionately and strongly about my perspective about trade. Our trade is way off balance. It is going to injure this country. We are going to become a nation of sharecroppers. Warren Buffet makes that point. He is absolutely dead right. Our fiscal policy is way off track. People say the budget deficit is only $340 billion next year. Nonsense. We will borrow $650 billion in additional debt. That is what our obligation is to our kids. Trade is out of balance and our fiscal policy is way off track. I am not suggesting there has to be a Republican or Democratic way to fix it. I am just suggesting that we ought to look truth right in the eye, the President and the Congress, and say we have trouble here and we need to fix it. Let us find a way to come together to fix it, get together with what everybody has to offer, that works for each, but find a way to move this country forward. I am pleased we are having this discussion today about our fiscal policy, and I wanted to come over at least briefly today and weigh in on some thoughts that I think are very important on trade and fiscal policy, about the economic direction of this country, about the direction we are headed, about things we can do--we, the President and Congress--all of us together can do to fix them so we have a brighter future and a future of expansion, of opportunity not just for some but for all Americans. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I will be brief. I had thought I agreed to the unanimous consent request in exchange for 10 minutes to speak on this nomination, but if that time does not exist, I will truncate my remarks.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, in that case, let me compliment the chairman and ranking member, which I would have done in any event. Let me spend more time complimenting them for their work. The Banking Committee is very important in the Senate. It takes a very serious view of these issues and I know did a very thorough job in the hearings held late last year on this nomination for Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. I thank the chairman for his courtesy, and I thank the chairman and the ranking member for their work, not just on this nomination but on so many important issues. I don't come to the Chamber to oppose Mr. Bernanke's nomination. That is not my purpose. I wish him well. I want him to succeed. He is going to be confirmed almost unanimously today by the Senate. Chairman Greenspan and I have had very significant differences over a long period of time. But I wish him well. I want to thank him for his service to our country, even if we have different views about monetary policy. I know people will talk about big shoes to fill. Whenever someone leaves, there are big shoes to fill. I don't know if the shoes are big, little, Ferragamos or Payless--but they are shoes. We have someone else answering to the call of public service, in this case someone well qualified. Mr. Bernanke has served at the Federal Reserve Board dealing with monetary policy and at the White House dealing with fiscal policy for President Bush. The Senate will confirm him today, and he will go back to the Federal Reserve Board as Chairman. What I wanted to say today is that we have the twin issues of fiscal policy and monetary policy, and there needs to be some responsibility to understand how they work together to improve this country's future. I am very concerned about this country's economic future for reasons that Senator Sarbanes touched on a moment ago. I wish to describe it to my colleagues. I think the Federal Reserve Board for some long while--and, yes, it was under Chairman Greenspan's stewardship--has been providing green lights saying, It is OK, go right ahead, to a series of fiscal policy moves which has put us deep in debt. It is not just in budget policy where we have these deep and abiding long-term deficits and, therefore, increases in the Federal debt. We also have large trade deficits. In about a week and a half, we will have an announcement about last year's trade deficit. My expectation is it is going to be about $750 billion, the highest in history. That debt is devastating to this country. It is unsustainable. At the same time, in fiscal policy, the Federal debt will increase in this fiscal year somewhere around $650 billion. I wish to put up a chart that shows what is happening. This is the wall of debt in fiscal policy. You will see year after year after year, going from 2006 to 2011, up to $12 trillion in fiscal policy debt. Extend this another 5 years, and you get to $16 trillion. This is a relentless wave of bad news in fiscal policy that we cannot continue. This is just fiscal policy. The trade policy debt looks even worse. Its growth is even more dramatic. Of course, that relates to the issues of jobs. Last week, we heard Ford Motor say: Oh, by the way, we are going to cut 30,000 workers. Several months ago, it was General Motors saying: By the way, we are going to cut 20,000 to 30,000 workers. Four months before that, it was General Motors calling in the heads of the companies that provide the General Motors' parts, 300 people in a room, and the person in charge of parts for General Motors said this to them: You need, when making parts for General Motors cars, to outsource those jobs to China to get the costs down. Where is all this heading? Ford, General Motors, parts to China, $750 billion trade deficit in a year? It is headed in the wrong direction, and we are today selecting one person who is going to be in a position of very significant influence in our Government about the direction of this country. Mr. Bernanke will play a significant role in determining the amount of economic growth and opportunity that will exist in the future, what kind of good jobs we will have, and how many. Our fiscal policy, judged by anyone soberly looking at the facts, is seriously off track. I don't blame Mr. Bernanke for that, although he most recently worked at the White House in the fiscal policy arena. It is not a question of blame, it is a proposition that all of us, Republicans and Democrats, liberals, conservatives, moderates, must finally come together to say this is unsustainable. Our country is off track in fiscal policy and trade policy. This debt will have consequences. And in the construct of monetary policy, it is critically important that Mr. Bernanke understand these messages and not do as has been done in most recent years and put up a big old green light and say to friends in Congress: Oh, by the way, go ahead, it will all work out; be happy. Fine. That is exactly what has happened in recent years, with a couple of exceptions. The Federal Reserve Board is a strong central bank that is largely accountable to no one. I know, go back to the nineteen-teens when the Federal Reserve Board was created, and it was said on the floor of the Senate, we are not creating a central bank, we are not creating a strong central bank, and we are not for certain creating a strong central bank accountable to no one, but that's exactly what happened. You can make the case over a long period of time that things have gone pretty well with monetary policy here, fiscal policy there. My colleague from Maryland talks about economic stabilizers. You can talk about some successes. Our recessions have been less deep in recent years because of economic stabilizers and some thoughtful approaches to dealing with monetary policy and fiscal policy. But I believe it is very important for us to understand where we are. If you don't understand where you are at the moment, it is pretty hard to figure out where you are going. As we consider the nomination of one of the most important people in this country with respect to economic policy, a new Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, I call attention once again to the fact that we have very serious, abiding, long-term economic problems which, unless resolved, will injure this country's long-term opportunity to remain a world economic power. It is that serious. One final point. There is a little fund down at the Federal Reserve Board to which I also wish to call attention. I assume Mr. Bernanke knows of it. It is a fund in which $12.9 billion exists. It is a fund at the Federal Reserve Board which is called a surplus account. The Federal Reserve Board, I remind everyone, effectively creates money. It does not need a rainy-day fund because it will never lose money. It has not suffered an annual loss in some 90 years. And yet the Federal Reserve Board has a rainy-day fund, a surplus fund, which has grown now to $12.9 billion. I believe the Fed and the Congress ought to take a hard look at that and ask themselves, given the fact we are choking on debt these days, is there any reason that the Federal Reserve should continue to have a surplus fund of $12.9 billion? The Fed wants a fund apparently because it might lose money someday. The Fed makes money. The Fed creates money. The Fed does not need $12.9 billion in a surplus account. So as Mr. Bernanke receives his approval of the Senate today, my hope is he might, with Members of Congress, take a look at that issue. Senator Reid and I and others asked for a GAO report on that 10 years ago now--and the Fed blithely ignores the consequences of any of that and does what it wants to do. In fact, at that point, the reserve or surplus rainy-day fund was $4.5 billion. Not only did the criticism of that fund not deter them, it has grown now to nearly triple that amount, in a rainy-day fund in a climate where it never rains. I am sorry, but Mr. Bernanke should take a good, hard look at that, and so should the Congress. Having said all that, pointing out especially that we have very abiding and serious fiscal policy problems and trade policy problems, my hope is that Mr. Bernanke, in seizing the reins of our monetary policy in this country as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, has a successful tenure. I wish him well. I want him to do well. I want our country to do well. I come to the Chamber only to ask that all of us finally join together, including the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, to see where we are and where we must be if we want a strong America in the future, one that grows and finds opportunities for our children and grandchildren. I again thank my two colleagues for the time. I yield the floor. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. We work on many important issues here in the Congress, but none more important than choosing a Justice to serve on the Supreme Court. Providing a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court is a very serious matter for both the President and the U.S. Senate. Our choice will impact our country well beyond the term of office for the President and for most of the Senate. Those nominations are also very important to the citizens of our country and my State of North Dakota, many of whom--on both sides--have contacted my office and whose counsel I have heard and valued. This is the second nomination for the U.S. Supreme Court that has been sent to the Senate by President Bush in the span of a few short months. During consideration of the nomination of Judge John Roberts to become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, I studied his record carefully. I reviewed the hearing records of his appearance before the Senate Judiciary committee as well as his record as a Federal judge on the Circuit Court. And in the end, I voted to confirm Judge Roberts. I concluded that he was very well qualified, and I also felt after meeting with him that he would not bring an ideological agenda to his work of interpreting the U.S. Constitution. In short, I felt he would make a fine Chief Justice. The Supreme Court nomination we are now considering is that of Judge Samuel Alito. This has been a difficult decision for me. Judge Alito has substantial credentials. His education, work history, and his 15 years of service on the Circuit Court are significant. However, in evaluating Judge Alito's rulings, writings, and his responses during his nomination hearings, I have been troubled by several things. First, he has a clear record over many years of a tendency to favor the big interests over the small interests. That is, when an individual is seeking justice in the courts by taking on the government or a large corporation, Judge Alito's rulings are often at odds with the rulings of his colleagues on the Court and tend to overwhelmingly favor the government or the big interests. People who live in small States like North Dakota have, over many years, found it necessary to use the courts to take on the big economic interests. Whether it is taking on big corporations, the railroads, big financial interests, or the U.S. Government, as farmers have had to do in recent decades, I think it is important that a Supreme Court Justice be someone who will give the people a fair hearing. Judge Alito's rulings on the circuit court have, I believe, tilted heavily on the side of the big interests. One of the key questions for me about a new Justice for the Supreme Court is ``will this person interpret the Constitution in a manner that expands personal freedom and liberty, or will this person interpret it in a way that restricts personal freedom and liberty?'' I believe Judge Alito's record is one that leans in the direction of restricting the freedom and liberty of individual citizens. I am also concerned by Judge Alito's view of what is referred to as the unitary executive. This is an issue about Presidential power in our form of government. The judicial branch of Government is designed to be a check and balance on the expansion of Presidential powers. I believe Judge Alito's answers in the Judiciary Committee to questions about the unitary executive tilt toward showing deference toward expanded and unchecked Presidential authority. His views on this issue concern me. For all of these reasons, I have decided to cast my vote against the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito. I take no joy in opposing his nomination, but for the reasons I have mentioned above, I am not comfortable voting to confirm him for a lifetime appointment on our Nation's highest Court. Over the years, I have supported about 97 percent of the nominees for the Federal court sent to us by President Bush. My record has been one of substantial support for the President's nominees. But for me, a nomination to the Supreme Court carries much more weight and greater potential consequences for the country. Judge Alito is replacing Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the Court. Justice O'Connor has been a key swing vote on so many issues that have been decided by a 5-to-4 vote in recent years. I believe that Judge Alito's nomination, if approved by the Senate, would tilt that Court in a direction that will restrict personal freedoms, strengthen the role of government and corporations in our lives, and allow the expansion of power of the Presidency. For those reasons, I have decided to vote no on this nomination.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, the conference report on the Defense appropriations bill contains $29 billion in disaster relief funding related to hurricanes Katrina and Rita. As part of that emergency package, $49 million is being made available to the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to reimburse cleanup costs and facility repair and restoration costs arising from the hurricanes. As the ranking member of the Interior and Related Agencies Subcommittee, which has jurisdiction over these agencies, I fully support this appropriation. There are, however, two aspects of the funding provision which concern me. First, the $49 million being provided is less than a quarter of the $220 million in damages suffered by our gulf coast parks and refuges. But not funding these expenses does not make them go away. What I fear will end up happening is that every other park and every other refuge in the Nation is going to have its 2006 budget reduced as a way of making up the $170 million Congress is not providing. Every park superintendent and every refuge manager in this Nation is struggling to keep up with fixed costs and working to address the maintenance backlog. Taking more money away from them is simply not helpful. Secondly, I strongly disagree with the instructions that are being given to the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service with respect to how these funds are to be spent. The funding in this bill is provided through each Agency's construction account. Under Federal law, that is the only purpose for which those funds can be used. They cannot legally be spent on operational expenses, which are funded through different accounts. However, the Statement of Managers, which is the report that accompanies the bill and explains in detail how all of the appropriated dollars are to be spent, explicitly says that the money is available for ``un--reimbursed overtime [pay] and operational costs.'' I think it was a mistake for the administration to forgo asking for reimbursement of operational expenses. Both agencies have incurred substantial costs in that area that must be paid for. But the administration's error should not be compounded by having Congress encourage a Federal agency to violate the law. We could have very easily divided the funding between the operational accounts and the construction accounts, which would have allowed the agencies to properly and legally repay some of their operational costs. But that idea was soundly rejected by the majority in the House of Representatives. And so we are left with a situation where we are explicitly encouraging Federal agencies to use appropriated dollars for purposes other than what they were intended. That, Mr. President, is simply the wrong thing to do.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent under our allocation of time to speak until 2:15.

Mr. DORGAN. I ask unanimous consent that under our allocation of time I be allowed to speak until 2:15 p.m.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, there is a lot happening in the final days of this Congress. One might ask, What on Earth are we doing here days before Christmas? We are doing the work that should have been done in March, April, May, June, July, and August, work that wasn't done then for a number of reasons. But now we come to a number of important issues and this is reconciliation, budget cuts, and we have a tax cut bill ricocheting around. We have the PATRIOT Act that my colleague just described. We have the Defense appropriations bill. That has now been burdened with an amendment that calls for drilling in ANWR. It is an interesting time, but one that is frustrating for some of us in the Senate. I will give you a description of that frustration. On Sunday, we met at 12 o'clock--this past Sunday--on a conference, a very large conference dealing with the Defense appropriations bill. I was a conferee. We started at 12, and I left at 5 or 5:30 in the afternoon. We finished the work on that conference report. I opposed a number of things that happened on Sunday. The Defense appropriations bill was before us. They added drilling for oil in Alaska, the ANWR provision, having nothing to do with the bill. They added it because they thought they had the votes to add it. Well, we finished the conference, and I left here at 5:30 on Sunday, and I discovered they added another provision. There wasn't a conference still going on at that point. A bunch of folks got in a room and decided what they were going to stick in the conference report. I told my colleagues I grew up in a small town of about 350 people. When I was a kid, I used to go and watch the blacksmith. We had a blacksmith in my hometown. It was kind of fun to go and watch the blacksmith work. He would take a piece of metal, put it in a tong, stick it in heat, in hot coals until it turned white hot, and then he would put it on an anvil, take a big old hammer and beat it. That is how he shaped metal. Heat it and beat it with an old hammer. I watched that guy with dirty clothes, sweating all day long. He would heat that metal and beat that metal. Some people think apparently that is the way the Senate should work--heat it and beat it. Get hold of a big old hammer and pound ANWR through here. It doesn't matter the rules don't permit it; pound it through here. In fact, change the rules if they get in your way. It doesn't matter. Don't like the rules? Change them. I am usually an optimist. They say a pessimist is someone who smells flowers and looks around for a casket and a body, and an optimist is someone who sees a manure pile and looks for a pony. I am an optimist, usually, looking for good things in what we are doing and where we are heading. But this notion that we live in a special place on this Earth and somehow we don't have to care about nurturing it to make sure it remains special, that it will all work out is a notion devoid of leadership. The fact is, we are off track in this country. We are No. 1 in exports in waste paper. Did my colleagues know that? The largest volume of export in America is waste paper to China. Unbelievable. Yes, we are No. 1 in exporting waste paper. And, oh, by the way, in the last 4 years, we also sent about 3 to 4 million jobs to Asia, mostly to China. We have the largest trade deficit in the history of humankind. This past year on the budget deficit, we will borrow $550-plus billion, nearly $570 billion. So we have a budget deficit that is way out of control, a trade deficit that is way off the charts, and we are shipping jobs overseas. Our No. 1 export now is waste paper, and you think things are going great. Suck it up, they say, it is a great place, things are going fine. I don't think things are going fine. The question is where is the leadership here? David McCullough wrote a book about Adams. It is a wonderful book. He is a great historian. He wrote this book about Adams. I have told this story before. In this book, he described John Adams as representing this country's interests in Europe. Adams would write back to his wife Abigail as they were trying to put this new country together, and he would say: Where will the leadership emerge to help frame and start this new country of ours? Then he would say: There is really only us. There is me and there is Thomas Jefferson and there is George Washington and there is Ben Franklin and there is Madison and there is Mason. There is only us. Now, of course, we know in the rearview mirror of history that the ``only us'' is some of the greatest human talent ever assembled, and they built a very extraordinary place, a very special country, with a Constitution that says ``We the People.'' The first 3 words, we the people. But the current leadership in the White House and Congress says we don't have to worry too much about deficits. We are going to cut some spending but, oh, by the way, even though we are up to our neck in deficits, we want to cut taxes, and, oh, by the way, we still want to cut taxes mostly for upper income people. The second part of this reconciliation document is still in the House of Representatives, the tax side. It is very important to say that capital gains and dividends, normally called unearned income, capital and dividends--be given preferential tax rates. That is the most important thing. Warren Buffett, the world's second richest man, said when all this is phased in, he will pay a lower tax rate than his receptionist in his office. Tax work, they say, tax work but exempt investment. That is the mantra around here. What is the most important thing? Drive down the taxes on dividends and capital gains; drive them down. It doesn't matter, we don't need the revenue. Deficits don't matter, Vice President Cheney said. Deficits don't matter. They now come to the floor of the Senate with a proposal that says, by the way, let's cut some spending. Guess whose spending is going to get cut. Is it a surprise that the most vulnerable among us get cut? Is it a surprise the proposal is to decide there should not be enough money in Medicaid, that which delivers health care to America's poor, to provide the kind of funding that is necessary in Medicaid? It is said by some, and I believe it, that budgets are moral documents as well. Someone once asked the question: If you were required to write an obituary for someone you had never met and the only information you had was that person's check register, what would it tell you about the obituary you would write? What if all you knew about this country was its Federal budget and that is all the information you had as a moral document, but what was important? What mattered to this country? What did this country believe represented the most important areas of investment, expenditure to build on the successes of this country? Would it be, for example, that you decided tax cuts for wealthy Americans are the most important? Let me show you a picture. I showed it yesterday, but I think it is important. This is a picture of a five-story building on Church Street in the Cayman Islands. Some people would just as soon you didn't this picture. But On Church Street in the Cayman Islands, there is a five- story building called the Ugland House. Do you know what is inside this building? This building is the official address for 12,748 corporations. Impossible, you say? No, it is not impossible. It is not impossible. We are running an economy now and, by the way, with the advice and consent of those in the Congress and in the Senate who voted for it--we are running one that says to businesses: Go ahead, get rid of your American jobs, move them to China, ship the products back to this country to sell them, and run your business through a mailbox in the Grand Cayman Islands so you don't have to pay taxes. That is what this building is about. And, oh, by the way, many of the companies that have this building as their address in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying U.S. taxes got a gift from this Congress--not with my vote--that is the equivalent of a $60 billion tax break--a $60 billion tax break. In the past year and a half, a bill was passed called the JOBS Act to create new jobs. Of course, it didn't. It cost jobs. It gave a very fat tax break to the largest corporations in our country that do business here and overseas. It said, if you repatriate your income from overseas, because some day you are going to and when you do, you have to pay the 35-percent corporate rate, if you do it now, we will give you a special deal that we won't give to any other Americans: You pay a 5.25-percent tax rate. There is not one American living in Ohio, North Dakota, Oklahoma, or any other State represented in this Chamber who is told in law that they get to pay an income tax of 5.25 percent. This Congress told the largest companies in this country, we will give you a 5.25-percent tax rate. That was a priority. My colleague who sat in this desk behind me, Senator Fritz Hollings, offered the amendment to strip it. I voted for it. I spoke for it. But, no, we could not strip that out because too many Members of this Congress believed it was important, a priority, to provide a big fat $60 billion tax break to the largest corporations in this country, with a 5.25-percent tax rate. Compare that to the proposition we are offered today by people who come to the floor breathlessly saying we have to cut spending to reduce the deficit. Did they care about reducing the deficit when they gift- wrapped a $60 billion tax cut package for the biggest companies by giving them a 5.25-percent tax rate? No. It did not matter. It did not matter then. They just promised that it would create new jobs. Interestingly enough, the very companies repatriating income to take advantage of this bargain basement tax rate are cutting jobs. This is not just me saying it. This is from the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers that describe exactly what is happening. So today we have the breathless chant about let us cut funds for the Child Support Enforcement Program, which, it is estimated by the Congressional Budget Office, will result in $2.9 billion in child support going uncollected. Let us cut funding $12.7 billion for the student loan programs. Let us cut funding from family farmers--by the way, many of whom faced some disaster this year; the worst drought since 1895 in Illinois, Missouri, Iowa. One million acres could not be planted in North Dakota. Those farmers are not going to get disaster help, but the leadership had no reservations about allowing a situation where 12,748 corporations establish their address in one five-story building in the Cayman Islands, for the purpose of not paying taxes in this country. It is all perfectly legal because this Congress believes it ought to continue to happen. We have had vote after vote on my amendment to try to shut this down. Cannot do it. So in terms of priorities I think it is important to ask the question, on whose behalf are we legislating? I happen to believe we ought to cut the deficit. In fact, in January and February I am going to be offering a very specific set of plans on how you cut spending in a real way. We have very large agencies in our Government, and unlike businesses that have overhead expenditures and then direct expenditures there is no distinction between our overhead expenditures. In fact, they cannot even separate out overhead expenditures. The first thing one should cut back on is overhead and travel and those kinds of things, but it cannot even be separated out in these agencies. We ought to take a whack at that. I am going to propose that. I support some of these issues, but let me mention a number of issues that are attendant to this as well. There is a provision buried in this huge reconciliation bill, as is always the case in these things that come to our desk--my colleagues can see the size of this legislation. There is a provision repealing something called the Byrd law that I want to talk about just for a moment. When American enterprises, American companies, are the victims of unfair trade--and there is a lot of it--our government sometimes imposes antidumping and countervailing duties. The Byrd amendment, which I supported, says that U.S. producers who have been injured by unfair trade should receive those duty revenues. But the WTO stepped in and said: Well, it is not right that you would recompense your victims of trade who have been injured by unfair trade. So the WTO ruled against us, and we have our colleagues in the Senate and in the House who have been very anxious to overturn the Byrd rule. Sure enough, they do it in this bill. They cannot run to the bank fast enough, in my judgment. Those who want to do this sort of damage to us cannot run to the bank fast enough to deal with all of these issues. We have the biggest trade deficit in history. We have jobs flowing out of this country. We have a country that does not have the spine, the backbone, the will to stand up for our producers on unfair trade. Those who have been victimized, those who have been hurt by unfair trade, ought to receive the benefits of the tariffs. Now the majority says that is not true; we are going to take it away. I do not understand that. I do not have the foggiest idea where the Senate's priorities are. We are right at the end of the session, a couple of days left, and the Defense appropriations bill was not passed this year. Now it is about to be passed, except they load on one of the most controversial issues called drilling for oil in ANWR. Under any other circumstance, one would be laughed out of the Chamber for that. Yet we have people come here--I heard a colleague of mine yesterday say: Well, let us all be bipartisan. I am all for being bipartisan. Let us also be fair and let us legislate the right way. Let us not stick these unrelated issues on this legislation and then say: By the way, it does violate the rules, but we will change the rules and we will change it only for this purpose and change it right back, and never mind. Do they think that we cannot see, hear, or think? Is that what this arrogance is born of? I do not understand it. We are close enough to the end of this session, and this country is in deep enough trouble with trade and budget deficits and a range of other issues that we ought to find a way to work together. This is not about bending steel. This is about compromise, working together to do the right thing for this country. There is no Republican or Democrat way to go off track on trade or on the budget. It just hurts our country. Together, we ought to be able to do better for America. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask the Senator from Oklahoma if he would mind if I take a minute and half off our side to respond, at which point the Senator from Oklahoma will be recognized.