Byron Dorgan

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, may I ask the majority and minority leaders, who are in the Chamber, a question about another scheduling item? I understand there is no unanimous consent request pending with respect to this bill, and I understand the desire to finish this appropriations bill. I am a member of the committee and know we have a lot to do, so I am fully supportive of moving ahead and finishing this bill. As the leaders know, there is a privileged resolution on the calendar dealing with the Federal Communications Commission rules and the resolution of disapproval. I filed that with a discharge petition with 35 signatures. It is bipartisan. We will need time to have a Senate vote on that. This is attendant to a 10-hour period for debate and then a vote on the resolution of disapproval on the rules that the FCC has now developed dealing with broadcast ownership. These are very controversial. This is a very important issue. I have spoken with both the majority and minority leaders previously about this. I ask the majority and minority leaders if we can expect at some point in the next day or so to set a time so the Senate will know when we will vote on the resolution of disapproval.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, it is my intention to be cooperative, and I want to finish the appropriations bill as well. I think we can work in a way that gives the Senate an opportunity to know when the vote will occur. We can find a way to do the debate and give us an opportunity to weigh in on this issue. Incidentally, it is the Dorgan-Lott proposal. It is bipartisan, with many Members of the Senate from both sides of the political aisle. What I hear correctly is we probably could get some final arrangements for a vote next Monday evening. That makes great sense to me. Then we can have the debate between now and that period. I am only interested in nailing this down so Senators understand exactly what will happen. I thank the majority leader for his response.

Mr. DORGAN

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, last evening President Bush addressed the Nation about the situation in Iraq. I wish to comment briefly about his request for $87 billion in supplemental appropriations for fiscal year 2004 request that he will soon send to Congress. I believe every single penny requested to support the troops who are now serving in Iraq ought to be appropriated by the Congress. When America sends its sons and daughters to war, it should provide all that is necessary for them to do their job, to protect themselves, and to carry out their missions. So speaking for myself, I believe every single penny requested and necessary for the soldiers who represent this country in the Iraqi theater and in Afghanistan and other areas must be made available. There are not a lot of good choices in Iraq. We understand that. This is a difficult situation. But this country cannot now leave Iraq. We are opening mass graves, football-field-size graves with 10 to 12,000 skeletons in them. We know that what happened in Iraq was genocide. We also know that if we leave today, there will immediately be massive numbers of murders and revenge killings. We simply cannot allow that to happen. We are faced with a circumstance in which there are not a lot of good choices, but we must be there at this point. That said, it seems to me that the Administration ought to aggressively seek assistance from the United Nations, from NATO, and from other countries and get them to supply the troops and resources to help us carry out this mission. The U.S. military is stretched too thin to stabilize Iraq by themselves. Part of the $87 billion that the President is going to request from Congress will be for the reconstruction of Iraq. There need to be some significant questions asked about that. It is not that I question the need for reconstruction in Iraq. It is a precondition for the development of a new democracy in that country. But Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world next to Saudi Arabia. One question is, What kind of support shall these oil reserves provide in the future for reconstruction? How will the Iraqi oil now under the sands--again, the second largest oil reserves in the world--contribute to the reconstruction? And what kind of support will other countries provide for reconstruction? Who will provide what resources? Who will make what contributions? I ask all of those questions on behalf of the American taxpayer because I don't believe Americans should have the sole responsibility for paying to reconstruct Iraq. This in fact is a situation that affects not only our country but the entire world. Again, we need to seek aggressively the assistance of the United Nations, NATO, and other countries in meeting these obligations. It is important for us to ask the administration for detailed plans and an aggressive approach to address the issues with respect to future reconstruction of Iraq. Then the final question with respect to all of this is, how do we reconcile the President's request for $87 billion in additional spending for Iraq with last week's announcements that the President would like additional tax cuts? We know this year the Federal deficit will be somewhere around $475 billion, and next year it is expected to grow to over $500 billion. If we are talking, on the one hand, with this President, about additional tax cuts and, on the other hand, about additional spending, $87 billion at a time when we have the highest deficits in the history of our country, it is important to ask: How does this add up? How do we find this money? Where does it come from? What do we do to achieve the resources to do the job in Iraq? Again, stating the obvious, we must spend every penny requested to support the troops. Those men and women who have been called to serve our country do so willingly. They protect our liberty and our freedom, and this country can do no less than provide all that is necessary for their support. But, it is important for the people of America to ask the larger questions about what is the economic plan that provides the resources and the strength for the economic engine that makes all of this possible. What is happening in this country? How do we produce the revenue, restart the economic engine in order to make all of this possible? I noticed this weekend, on Saturday in the New York Times, ``Job Losses Mount for the Second Straight Month,'' 93,000 fewer jobs in this month than in the previous month. We have roughly 11 million people looking for work; some say 9 million. There are a couple million more at least who have been part of the unemployment rolls who have actually stopped actively searching, having not found a job for some long while. The question is, How do they find work? How do we employ those in this country who need employment? This headline suggests, once again, that while the economy seems to be growing, perhaps slowly--more slowly than we would like--it may also be the case that this is a ``jobless'' recovery. If that is the case, that is very troublesome. Paul Gregg Roberts, who was a Reagan economist in the 1980s, has written about the prospect of a jobless economy, and he said, in fact, that this economy is growing some and it is producing jobs--it is just that the jobs are not being produced in the U.S. There is something called ``offshoring.'' That means companies are deciding increasingly to move jobs offshore--jobs that used to be American jobs, used to be jobs inside this country, which provided a living for a family with decent pay, decent benefits, working in a safe workplace, all of those things the American people have come to expect if you work hard and play by the rules. The fact is, too many jobs are now being sent offshore because you can perform these jobs much less expensively offshore. If offshoring is a way to export American jobs, even as the American economy expands some, the question is, What kind of an economy do you have in the future? Jobless recoveries do not solve the problem we face in this country. The reason it relates to the question that I think the President has raised last evening and last week of $87 billion in additional spending, at the same time that we increase the tax cuts or provide additional tax cuts at the request of the President, the question is, How does this add up? The fact is, our economy has a cycle called the business cycle. No one--no economist can repeal the business cycle. The business cycle means you have an expansionary phase of the economy and a contractionary phase. That is just as inevitable as the tides. What causes that? Is it because there are a bunch of economists who talk about monetary and fiscal policy and this ship of state of ours is somehow moving on the high seas and there is someone in the engine room and they are fine-tuning this, that, and the other thing-- dials, levers, gauges, M(1)(b) investment tax credit, accelerated depreciation, monetary and fiscal policy? No, that is not what causes the ship of state to move forward. There is, in my judgment, an overblown sense of self-importance among economists who talk about what they know or don't know--mostly about what they think they know. Our economy moves forward when the American people are confident in the future. The expansion side is people being confident about the future. When they are confident, they do things that manifest that confidence--buy a house, buy a car, take a trip. That is the expansion side of the economy. When they are not confident about the future, they do the exact opposite. They decide not to buy the car, not to buy the house, not to take a trip because they are not certain about the future. That is the contraction side of the economy. As it is now, they see an economy with very large deficits--the biggest deficits in the history of our country by far. They see an economy that 3 years ago had very large surpluses that were predicted to exist for the next 12 years. In fact, the Federal Reserve Board--God bless them, they always have a great sense of humor--the Federal Reserve Board worried that the surpluses were going to be far too large and that would create a drag on the economy. I guess they are not so much worried about that these days because in 3 years the largest surpluses in the history of this country have turned into the largest deficits for as far as the eye could see. There is nothing in the next 10-year projections that show us reaching a balanced budget. The reason this is important is, the people need to be confident about the future of this economy to expand, and this expansion of the economy must not be just in numbers, it must be in jobs as well. This offshoring must be abated somehow so that the expansion of jobs is also an expansion of jobs in this country. That is the only way this great economy of ours--the strongest on the face of the Earth--is going to provide the resources to sustain and provide that which we need to do what the President talked about last evening. So I just think it is very important for us at this point to begin thinking seriously about the larger questions of fiscal policy and confidence as well. In conclusion, I am going to support every single dollar requested that will support the troops we have sent abroad to fight for this country. However, that does not mean I am going to support every dollar the President requests for the Pentagon. For example, I expect we will soon have the opportunity to offer some amendments to save money by cancelling some new nuclear weapons that the administration has proposed in the budget. Let me describe a couple of them. These are things I will not support and hope to cut funding for. We have some people downtown in the administration who believe nuclear weapons should be treated like any other weapon and that we should have a policy to use them in certain circumstances. That is a very dangerous way of thinking. We have never used nuclear weapons, with the exception of at the end of the Second World War. Up to now, American policy has been to have nuclear weapons in order to prevent nuclear weapons from ever being used. That is called the mutually assured destruction concept, which we have lived with for 40 to 50 years. Now we have people who see them as any other weapon. They talk about using them, and they are suggesting we might need to use them first. Some would like to begin testing nuclear weapons again. We have not tested nuclear weapons for over a decade. The President's budget requests research and development money for the development of new earth penetrator, bunker buster nuclear weapons. The President has requested money for what are called low-yield nuclear weapons. Apparently, they are designer nuclear weapons that can be used more easily on the battlefield. I think this is horribly dangerous for this country. What kind of a signal do we send to other countries that have or want to acquire nuclear weapons? That nuclear weapons can be usable if you just design them in a different way? That if you want to find somebody holed up in a cave, you should just build a designer bunker buster nuclear weapon--not so little really--that you can lob in to destroy the cave. This is terribly destructive to this country's public policy. I think it is hard for me to find the adjectives to describe how shortsighted and dangerous I think this is. I intend to offer an amendment--and I know some of my colleagues will as well--to take some of that money out that would produce these designer nuclear weapons. We don't need them. After all, there are around 30,000 nuclear weapons on the face of this earth. A couple of years ago, there was a flurry of anxiety in the government when there was a rumor that terrorists had stolen one nuclear weapon. One stolen weapon would cause a seizure, and there are roughly 30,000 strategic and tactical nuclear weapons on the face of the Earth. We don't need to build more nuclear weapons. And, as the leader in the world, we ought to be striving to use our prestige to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and to reduce the number of nuclear weapons. The last thing we ought to do is undermine nonproliferation efforts by saying that we need to build nuclear weapons to bust bunkers and for other uses. I think that is horribly dangerous and destructive. That is one area where we might save a little money and begin ratcheting down this deficit that we and the President have to come to grips with. Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I have an observation in the form of a question. Would it be a good incentive for those who take seriously and come to the floor with amendments to offer them quickly and do so in rather short order, as Senator Inhofe and I have done, especially when it is an amendment of great merit? Would it set an example for it to be accepted by the chairman of the subcommittee? That probably is a rhetorical question. Let me ask further, if I might: What point of order does the Senator intend to make against amendment?

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, what reward does the Senator from Pennsylvania suggest for that good behavior?

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

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

Mr. DORGAN. I send an amendment to the desk and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I offer this amendment, along with my colleague Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma. We do so on behalf of our other cosponsors: Senators Lautenberg, Conrad, Kerry, Murray, Daschle, Ben Nelson, Johnson, Allen, Hagel, Corzine, Akaka and Clinton. I will yield to my colleague, Senator Inhofe, to make his statement, following which I will make a statement about the amendment we just offered.

Mr. DORGAN. I am pleased to work with my friend from Oklahoma, Senator Inhofe. As he indicated, this is an issue that brings support from a bipartisan group of Senators. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a letter sent on April 14, 2003, to Senator Specter and Senator Harkin, signed by a wide variety of Members of the Senate from virtually every political persuasion and every corner of the philosophical structure around here. It shows the widespread support for the Impact Aid Program and for the funding for this program that was originally promised.

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, my colleague has well described this issue. This is not some extraordinary grant program, some program that will deliver something for nothing to some school district in the country. This is keeping a promise. What is the promise? The promise was made in 1950 that when the Federal Government comes in and takes land or has property that is tax exempt, the Federal Government will make a payment to local school districts in lieu of local property taxes. That is what the impact aid is about. We have other similar programs--PILT, or payments in lieu of taxes--but essentially Impact Aid is a promise to our local schools who still have to educate children despite their smaller tax base. Impact Aid says where we have property, and that property is tax-exempt because it belongs to the Federal Government--in most cases, for example, a military base--we will provide impact aid to offset those costs. That is what this is, impact aid. In 1950, both President Truman and the Congress said let's do this. It is not fair for the Federal Government's actions to adversely impact a local school district's financial situation. So they created the Impact Aid Program to directly reimburse school districts for the loss of revenue caused by the Federal Government. There are 1,400 school districts nationwide eligible for impact aid payments serving 15 million children. Let me describe just one of them. I toured a school one day in North Dakota some few years ago. It was a school on the edge of an Indian reservation, a public school district but a school district whose property base was largely tax exempt. So it had very little property on its tax rolls, and therefore it could not bond because it had such a small property base. It could not raise a great amount of tax revenue, as well. This is a school district that was in great difficulty. It had roughly 150 children, two toilets, one water fountain. In the classroom you saw children sitting 30 in a classroom with desks an inch apart. Many were Native-American children. And one little girl named Rosie Two Bears looked up at me and asked: Mr. Senator, are you going to build us a new school? Regrettably, I could not build a new school for them, but it was an impact aid school. And the question of impact aid funding bears directly on how many children are in a classroom, how many lavatories exist, what the condition of the building is in which they are going to school. In this particular building, they were holding classes in the lower level of the building, but some days they could not hold the classes because sewer gas was backing up on that level. Part of the building was already condemned. The question for us is, When a young child walks through that classroom door, are they disadvantaged by having to go to a school that is not in good repair? Having to go to a school where classrooms are crowded? The answer is yes, of course. I wish I could have told this little third grader, Rosie Two Bears, Yes, I am going to build you a new school, but I couldn't do that. I don't build schools. But I do come here with my colleague from Oklahoma to fight for adequate funding for the impact aid program, to say this Government has a responsibility to keep its promise--yes, to Rosie Two Bears, but to other young children across this country. I indicated we have 15 million children in these schools that are eligible for impact aid. My colleague just told the Senate that if we pass the amendment we have offered we will still only be providing two- thirds of the money we had originally promised years ago as a Federal Government to make up for the lost revenue in these local school districts. Some say it is a matter of choice. Yes, it is a matter of choice. There are unlimited needs and limited resources. I understand all that. We propose an amendment that adds $187 million. Let me mention one other fact. The President proposed a cut to Impact Aid that was very significant, as all of us know. The cut was restored back to level funding by my colleagues, Senator Specter and Senator Harkin. But just restoring to level funding means these schools still fall behind because more children are affected in these impact aid schools. So what Senator Inhofe and I propose is to increase Impact Aid to at least two-thirds of the funding that was promised by adding the $187 million. Our amendment is offset in 2004 by moving the fiscal year 2004 advance-funding back to fiscal year 2003, which is exactly the same method used by the leadership to increase funding for the underlying bill by $2.2 billion. Some say nothing really is happening out in the impact aid schools that would cause us to have to do this. Let me describe what is happening. Medical Lake Washington State School District has scaled back its afterschool and summer programs and is not replacing the four elementary schoolteachers who retired. Why? It doesn't have the money. It is an impact aid school. The Saint Ignatius Montana School District eliminated four teachers, resulting in larger class sizes, and was not able to give raises to its teachers. The Suttons Bay Michigan School District has reduced the number of teaching positions and initiated a pay-to-play policy for participating in athletics and extracurricular activities, and reduced spending on textbooks. Oceanside, CA, a big school district, has had to eliminate transportation for 5,000 students in grades 7 through 12, and 139 teachers have been let go. Grand Forks North Dakota School District reduced staff, delayed textbook purchases, and delayed capital expenditures for technology and facility needs. These are real examples of what is happening in real schools that has an effect on real kids entering classroom doors expecting to be able to learn. We have an obligation, it seems to me, to keep our promise. I said this yesterday, and let me make the point again because it is not an unfair point, it seems to me. We are told that the money does not exist to do everything we want to do. I fully understand and accept that. So if the money does not exist to do everything, then the question is how do we prioritize that which we believe must be done? The question for us is where do children rank? Where do you put kids? At the top? In the middle? At the bottom? Where do our kids fall in our priorities? I mentioned this yesterday and someone said maybe it was unfair that just a matter of months ago Mr. Wolfowitz went to Turkey and said: If you let our troops go through Turkey, we will give you $26 billion, $6 billion in grants and $20 billion in loans. I supported that. The next day I called to find out where did the $26 billion come from, $6 billion of which was direct spending. They said that will come out of our priorities. So if we had the money for Turkey and didn't spend it, maybe we could use the money that we didn't spend on Turkey to spend on American kids going to classrooms that ought to be better classrooms, going to teachers who have to pay for their own textbooks, going to schools that are in disrepair, that need fixing, going to Rosie Two Bears' school to make that a school we are proud of instead of having it be a school where you walk through a classroom door and discover that young children do not have quite the same opportunity because they are crowded into a room and do not have the same capabilities as other children in other schools. My point is that this is all a matter of priorities and choices. We make the choices. Not our uncles, not our kids, not our grandpas and grandmas. We make the choices. I said when I started, and I want to say it again because my colleague from Pennsylvania is on his feet, that I think the Senators from Pennsylvania and Iowa did exactly the right thing in restoring the money that was cut in the President's budget for impact aid. It brought us back to where we should be, at level funding, if the goal is only level funding. But the Senator from Oklahoma and I said, and we believe very strongly, that getting us to just two-thirds of what we had promised we were going to offer to these school districts that are in such desperate financial trouble because they have lost their property tax base--just getting back to two-thirds is not an unreasonable goal. Doing it by adding the money we propose in this amendment is an investment in kids and an investment in this country that will be well worth it. Again, I say as I close, if you establish priorities in this Senate, it seems to me the first priority is America's future, and America's future is its kids. It is the kids. And education is about preparing those kids for opportunity. I hope very much my colleagues will accept this amendment. It is a modest amendment. It is bipartisan. It has broad support. My hope and expectation would be that with those who signed the letter in April to the subcommittee, with those who have cosponsored our amendment today, that we will be able to have a vote and be successful in adding this money for the impact aid districts and the impact aid schools around this country. I know this will be a long and tortured trail on the floor of the Senate for this particular bill. This bill is a very important appropriations subcommittee bill. I serve on the Appropriations Committee and I am deeply honored to do it for a very important reason. It is one of the few committees these days in Congress that is truly, truly bipartisan. We work in a way that respects each other and work together in conferences on appropriations. These are really conferences, not conferences in name in which one side never gets invited, but real conferences. So this is a great committee. The opportunity on the floor of the Senate to talk about priorities and adjustments in the appropriations process is an opportunity that I do not want to miss. My colleague from Oklahoma would say the same. This is one we do not want to miss. We thank very much the Senators from Pennsylvania and Iowa for building back that funding which the President cut. We then ask for their support for the proposition that we reach at least a two-thirds funding level of that which was promise to the impact aid schools in this country. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, will the Senator from Pennsylvania yield for a question?

Mr. DORGAN. I was just asking what reward he would suggest for that good behavior. I suggest perhaps a good lesson for others might be to see this meritorious amendment accepted by the chairman. There would a rush here in droves to offer them very quickly. But the Senator could think about that for a moment. I wish to ask this question about the point of order. The amendment Senator Inhofe and I have offered is an amendment that dutifully increases part of this bill that we think is critically important, one that still falls far short on the promise that has been made over the years in the funding mechanism we use. It is the funding mechanism, I believe, that in part is used in the underlying bill itself. I guess I am a bit confused about a point of order lying only against our amendment or against some broader construct of what is happening here in the Senate.

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, let me make an observation. I do not criticize the defect in the underlying bill. My hope is that the Senator will not criticize the identical defect in the amendment. What I have done, along with my colleague, Senator Inhofe, is offer an amendment that embraces exactly the same approach that is used by the Senator from Pennsylvania and the Senator from Iowa in funding the underlying bill. I take no exception to that at all. I am fully in support of that. Based on that, I hope the Senator from Pennsylvania will not raise a point of order against the amendment.

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, let the Senator from Pennsylvania and me and others discuss that off the floor. The only reason I raise the question is that offering an amendment which uses an identical funding source or the mechanism that is identical to the funding source offered by the subcommittee is one that I thought would not engender a point of order. At any rate, we do not intend to vote on that at this moment. My understanding from the Senator from Pennsylvania is that this will probably be dealt with later this afternoon. If that is the case, perhaps we can discuss this between now and then. My hope is that the Senator from Pennsylvania will not raise a point of order and give us an opportunity for an up-or-down vote on the merits of the amendment inasmuch as the same funding mechanism used in the underlying bill and the same defect would occur in both.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, today I have submitted the requisite number of signatures in order to discharge S.J. Res. 17 in accordance with the requirements of the Congressional Review Act. The discharge is as follows: We the undersigned Senators, in accordance with chapter 8 of title 5, U.S. Code, hereby direct that the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation be discharged of S.J. Res. 17, a resolution on providing for congressional disapproval of the rule submitted by the Federal Communications Commission relating to media ownership, and, further, that the resolution be immediately placed upon the Legislative Calendar under General Orders. Byron L. Dorgan, Ted Kennedy, Kent Conrad, Ernest F. Hollings, Mark Pryor, Jon Corzine, Frank R. Lautenberg, Russell D. Feingold, Harry Reid, Patty Murray, Barbara Boxer, Ron Wyden, Richard J. Durbin, Debbie Stabenow, Blanche L. Lincoln, Dianne Feinstein, Susan Collins, H. R. Clinton, Bill Nelson, Charles E. Schumer, Tom Carper, Olympia Snowe, Wayne Allard, Olympia Snowe, Saxby Chambliss, Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Tom Daschle, Max Baucus, Paul Sarbanes, Jack Reed, Trent Lott, Joe Lieberman, Mary Landrieu, Kay Bailey Hutchison, John Kerry, and Jay Rockefeller IV.

Mr. DORGAN. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN. Was it in order to have 1 minute of debate prior to the rollcall vote?

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, the manager of the bill, the Senator from Pennsylvania, has made a point of order against my amendment, which I think is curious. I made the point that the same point of order, I expect, would lie against the entire bill. The Senator from Pennsylvania asked the Chair that question, and the Chair said yes, both my amendment and the underlying bill have the identical defect. I think it is interesting that then a point of order is made against this amendment. The amendment I am offering is a bipartisan amendment with Senator Inhofe from Oklahoma. It provides $187 million in restoration of funding to the impact aid program. This is about kids. It is about helping kids and helping schools educate kids. This is money that is owed to these school districts. Even with this amendment, we will fund only two-thirds of what we promised we would do back in 1950. Again, I make the curious point that a point of order has been made against this amendment, so we will have a vote on waiving the point of order. It is exactly the same point of order that I understand exists against the underlying bill, because Senator Inhofe and I used exactly the same mechanism to pay for this amendment as did the folks who constructed this subcommittee bill. I ask that my colleagues join me in waiving the point of order.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I believe the opposition has spoken previously. I yield back all time and ask for the recorded vote to proceed.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. The point is not just a one-room school or one teacher teaching four kids. The point is, for example, a school of the type I described with four grades and 50 students and four teachers. Those four teachers are having to teach outside of their major. They are teaching in their minor and major, several different classes, and in many cases are wonderful teachers who produce great students. They know their subjects, and the demonstration of being good teachers is that they turn kids out of that classroom having completed their course, and these kids know the subject as well. In those circumstances, a school like that couldn't possibly hire another four teachers because they wouldn't have the money. The question is, are you still going to continue to keep those schools open and allow those teachers to teach in their major and minor provided they are good teachers? Unfortunately, I believe we are headed toward a time when the definition of who is highly qualified will exclude many of those great teachers.

Mr. DORGAN. But the point I was trying to make is, if we do not have flexibility and therefore describe wonderful teachers as not highly qualified, and you have to hire additional teachers in small schools so they are all teaching in their major, then the question is: Who is going to come up with the money for that? First of all, I do not think it would be smart to do that because you are telling some wonderful teachers they are not qualified. But second, if you do embark on that strategy, it is going to cost all of these school districts more money, and that becomes the mandate. And the question is: Who is going to fund the mandate? Those are the questions I raised that are related to both funding and also flexibility. I hope an abundance of common sense might well be applied to all aspects of this legislation.

Mr. DORGAN. Might I ask the Senator from Pennsylvania to yield?

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