Byron Dorgan

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. On this amendment, how much time remains?

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. I ask the question of the Senator: Why is that the case? And I would simply say this: As soon as Mr. Estrada answers the questions and provides the information, I believe there ought to be 100 votes for cloture and we ought to have an up-or-down vote on Mr. Estrada. Until that time, no one who aspires to a lifetime on the Federal bench ought to be able to say to this Senate we are going to withhold information that has been requested. I do not think the Senator from Utah should want that. I do not want it, and at least speaking as one Senator, I will not allow it. I will not vote for cloture until Mr. Estrada provides the information that has been requested of him. I am happy to yield on the time of the Senator.

Mr. DORGAN. Reclaiming my time, a fishing expedition is not at all what this is about. The Senator from Utah knows that. I have listened to him at great length and voted with him on almost all judgeships. The Senator from Utah ought to demand what I demand and others demand: Candidates who aspire to a lifetime appointment to the bench ought to respond to the request for information from this Congress. That has not happened in the case. You can assert it until you are blue in the face. It is not the case that the information has been made available. Other candidates made it available. Mr. Estrada has not. When he does, I believe he ought to get his vote. Until he does, he should not get that vote. I am weary that those who support this President's nominees almost universally are told we are somehow obstructing. That is not the case. Especially in circumstances where there were a good many fine people in this country who were nominated for the Federal judgeships, including circuit courts, who never got a hearing before the committee, I didn't hear anyone on the floor of the Senate, especially from that side, talking about it at great length. These are good men and women. They never got a hearing. This is not payback as far as I am concerned. Mr. Estrada should get his vote as soon as he complies with the request for information from the Senate, which he has not done. He can do it this afternoon, and we can have a vote tomorrow, as far as I am concerned.

Mr. DORGAN. Well, I say--

Mr. DORGAN. I am happy to yield to the Senator on his time. The Senator from Utah has had a generous amount of time on the floor of the Senate to make his case on many occasions, and he makes his case in a very persuasive way for those on his side of the aisle, perhaps. But having voted for all but one of the nominees sent by this President, I am a little weary of hearing anybody stand up and say those of us who vote against cloture are somehow obstructing at this point because the Senator knows full well why cloture has not been achieved. The answer is very simple. We have asked for only two things of this nominee: One, answer the questions that were put to him in that hearing.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that during the 20 minutes I be notified when I have consumed 5, after which the Senator from Nebraska will be recognized for 5 minutes, following which the Senator from South Dakota, Mr. Johnson, for 5 minutes, following that Senator Brownback from Kansas for 5 minutes.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, at a time when there is so much discussion about partisanship, let me describe legislation introduced in the Senate yesterday now called S. 602, which is truly bipartisan. We call it the New Homestead Act. Senator Hagel, Senator Johnson, Senator Brownback, I, and many others, Republicans and Democrats, have introduced legislation to address a very serious problem in the heartland of our country. I will describe this problem by something a Lutheran minister from New England, ND, told me. She said: In this small town in southwestern North Dakota, in my church I officiate at four funerals for every wedding. What does that describe? It describes a small town in a rural State where the population is getting older, where they have few young people, few marriages and few births, and where they are suffering from the out-migration of people. I will describe what is happening in the heartland of America with this chart. The red on this chart shows the rural counties across America that have experienced greater than 10-percent net out-migration over the last 20 years. There is a relentless engine of depopulation in the heartland of our country. It is from North Dakota to Texas in an eggshell shaped form. My home county is right in the southwestern corner of North Dakota. It is slightly larger than the State of Rhode Island. When I left it, there were 5,000 citizens living in that wonderful county. Now there are 2,700 citizens, and the demographers say by the year 2020 it will have 1,800 citizens. Trying to do business in that county and so many others in the heartland is like doing business in a deep recession. Nearly a century and a half after we populated the heartland of America by something called the Homestead Act, which said, move here, become a part of this land, and we will give you the land, we are seeing this relentless depopulation. In these areas, we have communities that are wonderful places in which to live. In fact, people aspire to recreate what we have in other parts of the country--strong schools, a great place to raise kids, safe streets, and wonderful communities. Yet, these rural areas are being ravaged by the out- migration of people. It is ruining their economy. The question is: Should we care? Do we care? Well, when our cities were decaying and America's cities were in trouble, as a national policy we rushed to say, let's save America's cities with the Model Cities Program, an urban renewal program. We pumped significant resources into those cities to save them. The question now is: Will we save the heartland in our country? Does it matter? S. 602, bipartisan legislation called the New Homestead Act, says it matters. What the heartland contributes to America is very important. We need to give people the tools to help rebuild their economies in the heartland. That is what our legislation does. We do not have land to give away anymore. But we say to individuals and businesses, if you stay there, if you come there, if you build there, if you invest there, here are financial incentives for you. We can turn this around. That is what S. 602 is about. S. 602 says to people, it is in your interest to help us rebuild the economies of the States in the heartland. The New Homestead Act offers tax and other financial rewards for individuals who commit to live and work in high out-migration rural areas. It provides help paying college loans, offers tax credits for home purchases, protects home values, and establishes Individual Homestead Accounts, the economic equivalent of giving them free land as we did a century ago. S. 602 provides tax incentives for businesses to expand or locate in high out-migration areas. Investment tax credits. Micro-enterprise tax credits. Accelerated depreciation. Finally, a new homestead venture capital fund will help ensure that entrepreneurs and companies in these areas get the capital they need to start and grow their businesses. We can do one of two things with respect to this problem in the heartland of America. We can sit here and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and say, this is awful. We can watch this depopulation continue for the next 20 or 50 years, and lose a significant and important part of our country's economy, or we can decide we are not going to let this happen, we are not going to be the frog in the pan of water on the stove only to find at this time it is too late to get out. That is what this is all about. I am proud to work with my colleagues, Republicans and Democrats alike, to offer this legislation.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, my colleague from Illinois has been talking about foreign policy and, more specifically, about Iraq and the use of force. He touched on the issue of North Korea and terrorism. We do need to have more debate, aggressive and thoughtful debate, about all of these issues. There is no question that North Korea, in my judgment, and in the judgment of many in this country, is an urgent, serious threat to our country. They kicked out the inspectors. And they do have nuclear weapons, at least according to our intelligence officials. They believe North Korea does have nuclear weapons. The threat of terrorism continues in this country. Homeland security is a top priority. And all of these issues are very important. But I want to speak about an issue here at home; that is, domestic policy, especially this country's economy. We wake up every morning--for months in this country--hearing the lead story on the news being war with Iraq. It is the lead story every morning, bar none. It is an important story, no question about that. But there are a lot of folks who wake up in this country these days who are out of jobs. Some 8 million people--perhaps more than that, we are told--do not have work. Madam President, 308,000 additional people lost their jobs last month alone--308,000 people. Do you know who loses their jobs first? Oh, it is not Members of Congress and it is not people who drive big cars. It is the people who know the definition of ``secondhand,'' ``second shift,'' ``second jobs.'' It is the people who struggle at the bottom of the economic ladder. They are the last to be hired and the first to go. This economy of ours is in trouble. It is time to stop tiptoeing around and pretending about it. We have two Budget Committees meeting now in this Congress. We have a budget submitted by this President that is completely, in my judgment, irresponsible. That is not a partisan criticism, it is just a criticism of a budget that completely ignores what is happening in this country. It is a budget that pretends everything is just fine and all we need to do is keep doing what we have been doing and this country will see its economy come out of the doldrums. That is patently untrue, in my judgment. It is time for us to say that. Let me talk a bit about this plan and about where we are. There is not a Democrat or Republican way to fix what is wrong with this ship of state with respect to its economy. But there are right ways and wrong ways to do it. And I know that the moment we dare criticize the administration, we have all of these strident voices from the extreme of the political system who say: Well, how dare you criticize the administration or the President. Look, I think both parties have done plenty wrong in this country's past. But we face an intersection now that is unlike any intersection America has come to in a long time. This intersection is one where we confront both serious, urgent foreign policy problems--Iraq, North Korea, terrorism, and more--and, at the same time, confront very serious problems here at home--an economy that is languishing, without growth, an economy that, last month, saw 308,000 people lose their jobs. Now just think of one of those. I am not asking you to think about 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 or 300,000--just one, who comes home and says to his or her family: Something happened at work today. I lost my job. It wasn't my fault. I have done the best I could. I am a good worker, but I have lost my job because the economy is not working well. It's soft. So what happens here in Washington, DC? Well, we act as if none of this is going on. This is a cheering section, to say: Well, things are going to be better. This is not a problem. What are you complaining about? Let me talk, just a little, about where we are with this economy of ours. We have a $10 trillion economy in this country. This is the biggest, the best economy in the world. None of us would want to live elsewhere. We are lucky to be Americans, lucky to be Americans alive now. But our responsibility, as Americans, is to nurture, protect, and foster the development of this great country of ours, and that means protecting this economic engine that produces the jobs and the opportunities for the American people. Now, in May of 2001, we had an economy that economists told us would produce budget surpluses at the Federal level as far as the eye could see. They said: I tell you, we're walking in tall clover here. There are going to be budget surpluses for 10 years, so you all ought to get about the business of providing big, big tax cuts. President Bush came to town and said: My heavy lifting is to ask the American people to accept big tax cuts. That is the easiest lift in American politics, I guarantee you. I would like to see one politician who works up a sweat asking people to accept tax cuts. So the President said: $1.7 trillion in tax cuts; that's my plan. I stood at this desk then, and I said: I think we ought be a little conservative. What if something happens? What if we are giving away money we don't get? What if we don't have these surpluses? What if something that we can't predict at this point occurs and these surpluses don't exist? What you are going to do is run into big deficits and have our children shoulder the consequences of this mistake. Well, I lost that debate. And so a $1.7 trillion tax cut proposed by the President was pushed through this Congress. And guess what. In a matter of months--just a matter of months--we discovered our economy was in a recession. Months after that, September 11, the most devastating terrorist attack against this country in its history; months after that, a series of corporate scandals unlike any we have ever seen in this country; during all of that time, the bursting of the technology bubble and the collapsing and pancaking of the stock market; and during all of that time, the prosecution of a war against terrorism. You think about that, all of those consequences--a recession, the bursting of the technology bubble, the pancaking of the stock market, corporate scandals, a war against terrorism. All of that combined to create a dramatic difference in this economy. We have far less revenue coming in. And the result is, big deficits. Here is what we found: In May of 2001, Mr. Daniels, the head of OMB, said: We are going to have a $5.6 trillion surplus. We had better get about the business of having big tax cuts, he and the President said. Well, in 2 years, we went from a $5.6 trillion estimated surplus to a $2.1 trillion deficit. That is nearly an $8 trillion change in the economic fortunes of this country. And yet we have people acting as if it is not happening. None of this is happening, according to them. What is the antidote to this? What do we do? Well, let's ratchet up some more tax cuts. Short of money? Well, then, reduce your revenue stream. So the President proposes more large tax cuts. I suppose if you don't care about fiscal responsibility, about budget deficits, then you can do that. But the fact is, we have seen this calculation before. I come from a high school of nine. We didn't have higher math, but there is only one way to add one and one that equals two. That is the math book I studied. The fact is, this administration's budget does not add up. They say increase defense spending, increase homeland security spending, have less revenue, and have a few budget cuts in domestic discretionary programs, and it will all add up. It doesn't add up. They want to pretend that it adds up. The American people know it doesn't add up. On the domestic discretionary piece, they say let's increase these two big areas of spending: Defense, homeland security. Let's cut taxes. And incidentally, let's cut taxes on average for someone with $1 million a year in income, let's cut their taxes on average nearly $90,000 a year. We can afford that, they say. But, they say, what we will do is take it out of domestic discretionary spending, nondefense. What does that mean? That means what we will do is cut back on title I spending. That is what they talked about in one of the budget resolutions today. I toured a school about 2 weeks ago. At the library there was a third grader, a young boy, great-looking young kid, looking at a book and pictures. I met him and said hi to him. I came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder. The principal of the school, after we got out of earshot of the young boy, said: Do you know something about that boy? You can't tell it right now, but that young boy almost died. He was subject to the most severe abuse I have ever seen in a family. He was beaten badly, taken away from his mother because of the beatings. You know he is doing very well now. This little kid has kind of gotten through all of this. He is doing well. This kid is part of the program for the school, the title I funds for disadvantaged kids. That is the kind of investment we make in these kids. And this little boy needed some of that investment. That is what we do with title I, with Head Start. We give these tiny kids who don't have it so good an opportunity to get a head start in education. With Pell grants, kids who couldn't go to college get an opportunity to go to college. I had a young Native American stand up in a meeting once and say: Mr. Senator, I am an American Indian. I am the first in my family ever to go to college. I am able to be here because I have Pell grants, because we don't have any money. I will graduate from this college, and I will go back to teach school on the Indian reservation which I came from. He did. That is the value of investing in some of these programs such as education programs for some of these kids. We can just talk about it as if it is some amorphous program that does not mean anything with no names attached, but that is not the case. All of these investments in the lives of young children make a difference. So when we talk about fiscal policy and plans and budgets, it is just too easy for some people who don't understand that there is a constituency out there. They don't have lobbyists in the hallway. There are no 5-year-olds or 6-year-olds or 3-year-olds waiting as we leave the Chamber to say: Please, Mr. Senator, will you help us. They don't have the voices here. The fact is, just taking one example of what we do that makes a difference in people's lives, in education of children, especially children who haven't had it so good, we have people who just blithely walk around here these days and say: This is not a difficult circumstance to get out of. Give the wealthy some very big tax cuts, spend $675 billion that we don't have, charge it to the kids, cut back on education programs, and cut back on many of the other programs that help people who don't have it so good and call it a day. Have a good night's sleep. Those who can sleep with those priorities, in my judgment, have a misplaced priority of public service. The priority in this country ought to be, first of all, to have a fiscal plan that adds up so this country's economy has a chance to grow and provide opportunities and jobs for people. There is no social program we work on that is as important for working people as a good job that pays well. So making this economy work, giving it the opportunity to work, having it add up so people have confidence in the future is critically important. And then at the same time preserving the opportunity for some very important things, whether it is helping family farmers during a disaster, helping young kids get a chance to start in school through the Head Start program-- all of those are so important. We are doing a shadow dance in this Chamber. Everybody here knows this nonsense does not add up, and no one is willing to say it because the minute you say it, people start screaming that you are somehow disloyal to this administration. I want this administration to succeed. I want this President to succeed. I want him to succeed so this country does well. I want our economy to grow. I want our foreign policy challenges with Iraq and North Korea and others to work out in the right way. I don't come here wanting us to fail. But if we don't stand up and point out the obvious, that we are headed down a path toward deeper and deeper Federal budget deficits with which we will saddle our children, if we don't change course, this country is not going to grow and will not provide opportunities. I suppose there will be many who will continue this shadow dance that goes on to pretend everything is just fine, but we know better than that. If we were headed towards these deficits with the previous administration, I guarantee you there would be 20 people in this Chamber every night putting blue smoke out the Chamber; they would be so upset about it. But somehow in the shadow of 9/11, we have moved to a circumstance where the most irresponsible fiscal policy I have ever seen proposed is judged to be a yawn by this Chamber. We have the two Budget Committees meeting, and they are saying: We can fit all this in. We can fit in big tax cuts. In fact, now they say--those so-called conservatives--deficits don't even matter. It is not a big thing to be worried about. I don't understand what has happened with respect to the relative positions of politicians these days. Conservatives say deficits don't matter? That is a different kind of conservative than I am familiar with. Deficits, of course, matter. Someone has to repay them. I don't mean to belabor this point, but on top of this fiscal policy that has us now headed towards the largest deficits in the history of our country, take Social Security out of the calculation, and you should. The Social Security surpluses should not be used to reduce the budget deficit. They are trust funds. The President proposes taking all the trust fund and using it, but they ought not. So if you take that out, you have a budget deficit this year of nearly $450 billion. But add to that a trade deficit of over $460 billion this year alone--the highest in human history. This economy is off course. We need to fix it. We need to stand up for the economic interests of America in trade and begin reducing that trade deficit, because we have to pay that with a lower standard of living in our future. That is not an option. That trade deficit is owed to other countries. You can make an argument as an economist that the budget deficit we owe to ourselves. Nonetheless, we will still have to bear that burden. But our children will likely bear the burden of a 10-year deficit that is put on their shoulders by a fiscal policy that is irresponsible. We will have a budget debate next week. I will offer amendments. My colleagues will offer amendments. I don't have any interest in deciding that Republicans have the wrong answer and Democrats have the right answer. There are good answers that come from all parts of the Chamber. But the construct of this fiscal policy is just fundamentally wrong and everybody in this Chamber who knows how to add and subtract ought to know that. It is time for us to start speaking about it. I am perfectly interested in providing tax cuts to the American people when we have budget surpluses. But the tax cuts should be to working families and should be distributed fairly. But at a time when we have the highest deficits, to say let's ignore them and let's have a political construct that increases spending in the largest areas of spending in the Federal budget and decreases taxes with very large tax cuts and then pulls the rest out of it out of some very important things that invest in people in this country, including veterans and Indian health and education, and a whole series of things, that is wrong. We need to stand up and talk about it. I will speak about it at greater length next week. I wish I could come to the floor and say this is a wonderful fiscal policy. I just cannot. I feel obligated to say this is wrong; we are headed in the wrong direction. We need to fix it as a country. Our children's future depends on it. I will make one final point. On September 11, when this country was attacked, we were one country. I was proud of President Bush, and one of the best speeches I ever heard he gave to a joint session of Congress. This country responded as one. But this country does not do a service to its future by believing now--a year and a half following that period of time--that voices still, because they don't want to engage in debate over issues that are important to our future, are somehow disadvantageous to our country. We need a robust debate about the right fiscal policy. We disserve our constituencies if we don't bring this debate to the floor in an aggressive way. What works? What will restore economic health to the country? What do we do to improve economic growth, to provide jobs, to get people back to work, and get the economy moving again? Those are the questions we have to ask as we construct a budget and put this fiscal policy together. I regret I come to say this fiscal policy makes no sense at all and must be changed. I wish that were not the case, but it is. The result of that is I will be here with amendments, as will others, hoping we can improve this fiscal policy for our country's future. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. The point is this: I hold in my hand a piece of metal that belonged to a bomber that presumably carried nuclear weapons that threatened every American. Did we shoot this bomber down? No, we did not. We sawed the wings off and destroyed the fuselage. How did we do that? Because we had a program called Nunn-Lugar, or Lugar-Nunn, that actually recognized it is a whole lot better to reach an agreement for arms reduction and then help pay for the destruction of a Soviet bomber or a Russian bomber, or the dismantlement of a missile or a submarine and the destruction of a warhead, than it is to exchange them or to try to shoot it down or to sink the submarine. So we appropriated taxpayers' money for this purpose. This is called peace. This is another item I showed yesterday: Ground-up copper from a dismantled Soviet submarine that carried missiles with warheads aimed at American cities. This is called progress. This submarine does not exist any longer. Why? Because we had the foresight, particularly by Senator Lugar and Senator Nunn, to say if we can have verifiable reductions in both delivery systems and nuclear weapons, and even help pay for that destruction, it is far better than having this continued standoff and actually having to fight at some point to try to knock down a Soviet bomber or destroy a Russian submarine. We are destroying them, all right, but peacefully, through a program that works. Because I think that is very important to understand, I made the point yesterday that there are thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons in this world. The bulk of them are contained in arsenals by Russia and the United States. Many of them are called theater nuclear weapons, lower yield, smaller nuclear weapons. Then there are strategic nuclear weapons, the larger nuclear weapons. There are thousands of each, and over time, through arms control agreements, we have reached some understanding that we want to reduce the number of warheads, the number of delivery systems. We have moved back and forth about exactly how we do that. In some cases, there has been great emphasis on dismantling or limiting the number of delivery systems, the missiles themselves, or the bombers or the submarines. They are mere delivery systems for a weapon of mass destruction. In some cases, we paid great attention to that. In other cases, we have paid attention to the number of warheads themselves. All of that is important. But I must say a treaty is not, at the end of the day, very important to us if it discontinues the effort to actually reduce the threat of war through dismantling weapons and delivery systems. We have made some progress in arms control, progress that I think is very important to the American people, but there is so much more to be done. A rumor that someone had stolen one nuclear weapon some many months ago caused great concern in this country. The loss of one nuclear weapon to a terrorist could hold hostage an entire American city or, for that matter, much of a country, and there are thousands and thousands of these weapons. It seems to me, if we wish to make this a safer world for our children and grandchildren, it is our job to aggressively stop the spread of nuclear weapons. God forbid other countries will become part of the nuclear club or that terrorists and terrorist organizations will acquire weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons. We will stop the spread of nuclear weapons. And we must be the leader to do that. This country must be in the lead. It is our job. This responsibility falls on our shoulders at this time. No. 2, in addition to stopping the spread, we must systematically, over a period of time, begin reducing the stockpiles. We must do that. I have been disappointed for some long while on arms control issues. I don't believe we should disarm. I don't want our country to be weak. But I believe it is in our country's best interests to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and to have a mutually agreed upon reduction in the number of nuclear weapons. In October of 1999, this Senate rejected the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. That was a terrible disappointment, certainly for me and for many around the world. We have not tested nuclear weapons for nearly a decade, yet we send a message to the rest of the world that we do not want a Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, one that much of the world has already embraced. That was a terrible setback. Since that time, by the way, the reports by former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Shalikashvili and the National Academy of Sciences have endorsed the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty and concluded that the treaty can be verified adequately, adversaries cannot significantly advance their nuclear weapons by cheating, and the United States can maintain confidence in its nuclear stockpile without testing. We made a horrible mistake in rejecting that treaty. This country, in December 2001, announced it would unilaterally withdraw from the ABM Treaty with Russia. In my judgment, that was a significant mistake. That treaty was the center pole of nuclear arms reduction agreements, talks, and discussions. In January 2002, the administration released its Nuclear Posture Review, and it said the United States needs to keep a very substantial nuclear force for 20 years. It set out what that nuclear force would be. But that Nuclear Posture Review blurred the lines between conventional and nuclear weapons, calling for a new generation of smaller, easy-to-use nuclear weapons, including smaller bunker buster weapons--the wrong thing for our country if we are going to be a leader in trying to say to another nation, let's never see a nuclear weapon used again anywhere in this world. And yet we are talking about perhaps designing new bunker buster nuclear weapons--moving exactly in the opposite direction, in my judgment. The Nuclear Posture Review called for increasing our readiness to resume testing of nuclear weapons. I don't understand that. All of these, together, represent movement in exactly the wrong direction for this country. We have very serious challenges in the world that require our leadership. India and Pakistan don't like each other. They are shooting at each other at the border, over Kashmir. They both have nuclear weapons. It was not too many months ago we had a very serious, very tense time with respect to India and Pakistan. The message we send as the world leader, the strongest military power in the world, is critically important. Our message ought to be that we want to make this a safer world by beginning the long process of reducing the stockpile of nuclear weapons, not by putting them in warehouses someplace. We should be really reducing the number of nuclear weapons and making sure that our efforts as the United States of America are used to try to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to any other country in the world, any other group in the world--that is our responsibility. It is what we must be about. If that mantle of world leadership is not borne by us, that leadership will not exist. I fear our future will not be a particularly good future with more and more countries becoming a part of the nuclear club. As I indicated, the Moscow Treaty does not require a single missile silo, submarine, bomber, missile, or bomb, for that matter, to be eliminated. Compare this with previous treaties. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty required the destruction of an entire class of ballistic missiles with ranges from 2,000 to 3,000 miles. I had a picture in the Senate one day of a few acres of sunflowers. This few acres of sunflowers were sunflowers planted on a piece of ground that used to house missiles in the Ukraine with a warhead aimed at the United States of America. It is not a warhead. It is not a missile. It is gone. It is destroyed. And now where a missile was once buried, there grows a field of sunflowers. What a wonderful thing. The fact is, these agreements, these treaties that we have had, have worked. The treaties require irreversible action by requiring the destruction of delivery vehicles and warheads. As I indicated, the Moscow Treaty does not require a single nuclear warhead to be destroyed. It limits the number of strategic nuclear weapons that each side can deploy, from 1,700 to 2,200. Admittedly, previous arms treaties did not require the destruction of warheads, but at the Helsinki summit Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin agreed to a framework of SALT III negotiations for destruction of warheads. During treaty negotiations, Russia insisted that it require the elimination of nondeployed warheads, but our country resisted because we wanted to keep warheads removed from deployment in storage. So now we have a Moscow Treaty that says we are going to keep these warheads in storage but we will count them as a reduction in warheads because they are no longer active with respect to the ability to put them on an airplane or submarine or on the tip of a missile. Frankly, it does not reduce the number of nuclear warheads in a significant way, and in my judgment, we ought to be doing that. We have the START treaty. We have a whole series of efforts that have occurred over a long period of time that give us a roadmap on how to succeed with respect to what I think our obligation is in these areas. There is nothing particularly objectionable about this treaty, but it does not really provide any progress for us. One can hardly object to something that does not do anything, except that my wish would be that we would engage in a manner that would allow us to make some progress. I intended to offer an amendment. I say to my colleague from Indiana that I am not going to offer an amendment. I have the amendment, but I will not offer it because my understanding is that the ranking member would be obligated to vote against it based on an agreement the chairman and the ranking member have reached. But let me read my amendment and state what I hope this country will do at some point. My amendment would have added a section (7): Further Negotiations.--The Senate urges the President to build upon the foundation of the Treaty by negotiating a new treaty with the Russian Federation that would enter into force upon the termination of the Treaty on Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, with Annexes, Protocols, and Memorandum of Understanding, signed at Moscow on July 31, 1991 (START Treaty), and would require deep, verifiable, and irreversible reductions in the stockpiles of strategic and non-strategic nuclear warheads of the United States and the Russian Federation. The purpose of this would be to say that future negotiations which should occur, and should occur now, should have as an objective to reduce the stockpile of nuclear weapons contained both in Russia and the United States. I do not propose disarmament. I do propose that in circumstances where each of us has thousands and thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons--perhaps as many as 25 to 30,000 between both countries, if you include both theater and strategic nuclear weapons--I do propose we find a way to reduce the stockpiles on both sides in an irreversible way. Then, as I indicated previously, my fervent hope and prayer is that the leadership of this country will exert itself to try to do everything it can to be a world leader to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. This country's future depends on it. Let me conclude by saying I have great admiration for Senator Biden, who has had a world of experience in these areas, and for Senator Lugar. I have already spoken of Senator Lugar. I will not go on at great length. But his work has been extraordinary. Senator Biden's work, as well, contributes a great deal to this Senate and to this country. I know he believes, as I do, that we have seen many missed opportunities in recent years to don the mantle of world leadership that we must assume dealing with these areas. While I will vote for this treaty, I am confident that Senator Lugar and Senator Biden understand, perhaps even if this administration does not, based on their past actions and based on the things they have supported previously, this is a step, even if a baby step, that must be followed by very large strides, vigorous, aggressive approaches to do what we know needs to be done: A real reduction in the stockpile of nuclear weapons and a major effort on behalf of America to stop the spread of nuclear weapons in the rest of the world. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I will speak briefly today about the treaty we are considering. I spoke about it in brief yesterday and said while I would vote for it, I think it is not much better than nothing with respect to arms control. I will explain a little bit about where I think we are and where I hope we might go on some of these issues. I note that Senator Lugar is in the Chamber, the chairman of the committee. He might or might not know that yesterday when I spoke on these issues, I spoke about the general issue of threat reduction. I spoke about the Nunn-Lugar, or Lugar-Nunn, programs by which we were actually using taxpayer money in this country to dismantle delivery systems and weapons in the old Soviet Union and in Russia, the very success of those programs, and how much I thought those programs have contributed to moving in the right direction. We may not agree. I do not know. I suspect there are some who think this Moscow Treaty actually advances our interests. I think it probably does not, but I do not think it hurts anything. It is an agreement by which the United States and Russia decide that a number of nuclear weapons will be taken off the active delivery systems and put in storage, but at the end of the time during which this transition takes place, in 2012, we will have exactly the same number of nuclear weapons in Russia and in the United States as we have today, at least as a result of this treaty. This treaty does not propose that any nuclear weapons be disassembled or destroyed. It is simply putting nuclear weapons in storage facilities somewhere. Are they at the ready? Are they in storage? I think it is not a great distinction, or at least it is a distinction without much of a difference. While Senator Lugar is present, I want to mention, as I did yesterday, I have here a piece of a strut from a wing of a Soviet bomber. Some of my colleagues have been given pieces of this as a commemorative of a very successful effort we have made and continue to make with respect to arms reductions. I stress the word ``reductions'' of both nuclear weapons and delivery systems. I ask unanimous consent to use this old strut of a Soviet bomber to make the point.

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

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I am pleased my colleague from South Dakota, Senator Tim Johnson, is joining me today in introducing this Missouri River Enhancement and Monitoring Act of 2003, and I thank him for his efforts in working with me on this legislation. This bill will establish a program to conduct research on, and monitor the health of, the Missouri River to help recover threatened and endangered species, such as the pallid sturgeon and piping plover. This bill will enable those who are active in the Missouri River Basin to collect and analyze baseline data, so that we can monitor changes in the health of the river and in species recovery in future years, as river operations change. The program would also provide an analysis of the social and economic impacts along the river. And it would establish a stakeholder group to make recommendations on the recovery of the Missouri River ecosystem. The bill establishes a cooperative working arrangement between State, regional, Federal, tribal entities that are active in the Missouri River Basin. I look forward to working with all of the stakeholders in the basin to implement this important legislation. I am especially pleased that this legislation is supported by a broad range of stakeholders, including the North Dakota State Water Commission; the North Dakota Game and Fish Department; the Missouri River Natural Resources Committee; the Missouri River Basin Association; the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks; American Rivers; and Environmental Defense. I am confident this legislation will enjoy bipartisan support because of its significance in helping to monitor and restore the health of this historic river. Lewis and Clark traveled on this river. This river also contributes to $80 million in recreation, fishing, and tourism benefits in the basin. I look forward to participating in hearings on this bill and hope we will be able to pass it into law in the near future. I ask unanimous consent that this bill be inserted in the Record.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I am pleased my colleague from South Dakota, Senator Tim Johnson, is joining me today in introducing this Missouri River Enhancement and Monitoring Act of 2003, and I thank him for his efforts in working with me on this legislation. This bill will establish a program to conduct research on, and monitor the health of, the Missouri River to help recover threatened and endangered species, such as the pallid sturgeon and piping plover. This bill will enable those who are active in the Missouri River Basin to collect and analyze baseline data, so that we can monitor changes in the health of the river and in species recovery in future years, as river operations change. The program would also provide an analysis of the social and economic impacts along the river. And it would establish a stakeholder group to make recommendations on the recovery of the Missouri River ecosystem. The bill establishes a cooperative working arrangement between State, regional, Federal, tribal entities that are active in the Missouri River Basin. I look forward to working with all of the stakeholders in the basin to implement this important legislation. I am especially pleased that this legislation is supported by a broad range of stakeholders, including the North Dakota State Water Commission; the North Dakota Game and Fish Department; the Missouri River Natural Resources Committee; the Missouri River Basin Association; the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks; American Rivers; and Environmental Defense. I am confident this legislation will enjoy bipartisan support because of its significance in helping to monitor and restore the health of this historic river. Lewis and Clark traveled on this river. This river also contributes to $80 million in recreation, fishing, and tourism benefits in the basin. I look forward to participating in hearings on this bill and hope we will be able to pass it into law in the near future. I ask unanimous consent that this bill be inserted in the Record.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. This piece of metal belonged to a Soviet bomber. This was part of a wing strut on a Soviet bomber. Presumably, this bomber, belonging to the Soviet Union, carried nuclear weapons that could have been dropped on a target here in the United States of America. How is it that a Senator on the floor of the Senate has a metal piece from a Soviet bomber? Well, simple. This bomber had its wings sawed off and its fuselage destroyed. How? The U.S. paid for it. We did not shoot the bomber down. This was not the result of hostilities. This was the result of an agreement between our country and the old Soviet Union, now Russia, to actually reduce delivery vehicles, bombers, missiles, submarines, and to actually reduce the number of nuclear weapons. So that is how I come to hold in my hand a piece of metal that belonged to a Soviet bomber, and then Russian bomber, that would carry nuclear weapons that would have threatened this country. Mr. President, I show you this little tube of ground copper. This used to be in a submarine that carried nuclear weapons on behalf of the old Soviet Union and then Russia. Those nuclear weapons were all aimed at this country, thousands of them. Well, this submarine does not carry nuclear weapons anymore. It was dismantled and destroyed. And I have here, on the floor of the Senate, a piece of ground up copper from the wiring of an old Soviet submarine. That makes a lot of sense to me. We are actually reducing the threat by reducing the number of delivery vehicles, bombers, submarines, missiles, and dismantling the number of warheads. We have been engaged in that for the last 10 years or so. And I would like to especially say my colleagues, Senator Lugar and Senator Nunn, proposed a program by which we did not have to sink a Soviet submarine and we did not have to shoot down a Soviet bomber in order to destroy weapons of mass destruction and their delivery vehicles. We paid for their destruction with large circular saws and with devices in shipyards that destroyed their submarine by agreement. By contrast, the agreement that comes to the floor of the Senate this week is kind of a marshmallow. It does not do anything. It is full of air. It says: Oh, let's have each side put more of their nuclear weapons in storage and then pretend we have reduced the number of nuclear weapons. Well, I thought pretend was all about children's books; it is not about the serious business of nuclear arms control. There was a rumor, some long while ago, that a terrorist organization had stolen a nuclear weapon and was set to detonate it in a U.S. city. The interesting thing about that rumor was that the intelligence community did not view it as incredible that a nuclear weapon could have been stolen. After all, there where thousands and thousands and thousands in the world, most possessed by two countries--ours and also now Russia. So our intelligence community did not believe it was an incredible threat. They believed it was entirely possible someone could have stolen a weapon, particularly from the Russian arsenal that does not have great command and control, I have heard and I have been told. And secondly, it was not something beyond the bounds of reality that, having stolen a nuclear weapon, a terrorist organization would know how to detonate it or could detonate it. If ever there needed to be a sober moment, that was it. For us to think that the potential stealing of one nuclear weapon, and put in the wrong hands--the hands of terrorists--would threaten this country, or any city in this country, ought to lead us to understand that if we are worried about one nuclear weapon, we ought to be worried about thousands and thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons. With both strategic and theater nuclear weapons, there are perhaps as many as 25,000 to 30,000 nuclear weapons in this world. And what are we going to do this week? We are going to come and talk about how we shuffle the inventory of nuclear weapons from one place to another, destroying none of them, and then saying: We have an agreement. What a great agreement. By the year 2012, we will have moved nuclear weapons into storage facilities. And the world is safer. Oh, really? How? At the same time all of this is occurring, there is a fundamental shift occurring, in addition, with respect to the discussion about nuclear weapons. This administration says: We do not want to continue the antiballistic missile treaty--which has been the center pole of the tent of arms control. Instead, this administration says: We want to talk about and consider the possibility of developing new designer nuclear weapons; for example, bunker buster nuclear weapons. This administration, and many in this Congress--too many in this Senate--said: We do not support the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty--despite the fact that we have not tested a nuclear weapon for well over a decade. There is a fundamental shift going on. This administration has said: We have not ruled out the use of nuclear weapons in certain circumstances. I will not go into them, but they have been in the newspapers. I think our responsibility--of all countries in the world--is to be a leader in trying to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in this world, and to try to convince everyone and anyone that no one shall ever again explode a nuclear weapon in anger. Pakistan and India both have nuclear weapons. They do not like each other. They have been exchanging weapons fire across the border with respect to Kashmir. Both have nuclear weapons. Do we want, in any way, to signal that the use of nuclear weapons, in any circumstance, is appropriate? Do we want to signal that we actually have a desire to begin producing new types of nuclear weapons, such as bunker buster nuclear weapons? I think this country has chosen the wrong path with respect to these policies. We ought to be debating on the floor of the Senate something that has grip to it, something that says: Look, as a world leader, it is our determination to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, and to stop the spread now. And we are going to do that. We ought to be saying: It is our judgment that we want to reduce the stockpile of nuclear weapons in this world. And we want to be a leader in doing that. We just have to assume that leadership responsibility.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I understand that perhaps today or tomorrow we will have a so-called Moscow Treaty brought to the floor of the Senate for debate. It is a treaty that has its origin in some discussions between our Presidents and the leader of Russia about the issue of nuclear arms and the reduction of nuclear arms. I want to say I will vote for this treaty, although I must say it is not much of an agreement and not much of a treaty at all. I don't see any reason someone would vote against it. But I make the point that this is an agreement between two countries--both of which have large stocks of nuclear weapons--to reduce their number of nuclear weapons by taking some and putting them in warehouses and storage facilities and at the end of the process both countries can keep the same number of nuclear weapons they had when they started. No nuclear weapons under this agreement will be destroyed, dismantled, or defused. And This treaty deals with only strategic nuclear weapons, not theater nuclear weapons. There are thousands and thousands of theater nuclear weapons, such as the nuclear weapons that go on the tips of artillery shells. That is not part of this agreement. It has nothing to do with this agreement. Strategic nuclear weapons are the very large warheads that one would put on the tip of an ICBM, for example, or to have in the belly of a bomber, or perhaps on the tip of a missile that is in a submarine. Those are the strategic nuclear weapons. Between our country and Russia, there are perhaps 10,000, maybe 11,000, strategic nuclear weapons. So you have thousands on each side. Should we be reducing them? Of course. Absolutely. But we have a circumstance now where there is a treaty, or an agreement, with Moscow in which, between now and the year 2012, we all the US and Russia have to do is take nuclear weapons and put them in storage. So each side, in the year 2012, can keep if it wants exactly the same number of nuclear weapons. Not one nuclear weapon that exists today needs to be destroyed in the next 9 years--none. I do not understand that. I guess it is fine to have agreements just for the sake of having agreements, but of what value? We have had examples of effective reductions of nuclear weapons and also delivery vehicles. I have mentioned them in the Chamber on many occasions. Let me do so again. There is a program called the Nunn-Lugar Program, which is named after former Senator Sam Nunn and our current distinguished colleague, Senator Lugar. It is a program that I very strongly support. It makes a great deal of sense. That program actually destroys nuclear warheads and delivery systems that are made excess through the various arms control treaties. For example, in my desk I have a piece of metal which I would like to show by unanimous consent.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, having said that, I want to mention two additional quick items. We have had a discussion, and will have a discussion, about the subject of Medicare. It will be a significant issue in this Congress, and should be. We have been talking, for a long while, about the health needs of senior citizens who do not have access to prescription drugs because they are too expensive. Too many senior citizens are told: You must take prescription drugs for these ailments you have; and they discover: Well, I can't take prescription drugs. I don't have the money. Republicans and Democrats have been debating how to add a prescription drug benefit to the Medicare plan. Today I see the President is going to send us a proposal that says we would like to give everybody a discount card who would qualify under Medicare, and then say to others, if they want to get some real help for real prescription drug coverage, they have to join an HMO or a managed care organization. That doesn't make any sense to me as a matter of public policy. We need to put downward pressure on prescription drug prices first and foremost. Second, I believe we ought to provide a prescription drug benefit in the Medicare Program. If we were writing that program today, we would do that. I don't think we ought to hinge that on the requirement that someone join an HMO. I have been in the Chamber telling stories for 3, 4 years about what is happening to HMOs. Some of them are wonderful. But the construct of an HMO says to a senior citizen: By the way, here is your doctor. We will choose your doctor. You don't get to go to the doctor of your choice. Here is the doctor available for you. By the way, in too many circumstances, we have seen that in many of those organizations, major health care is a function of profit and loss. I told the story, when we debated a Patients' Bill of Rights, about an HMO. A woman fell off a cliff in the Shenandoah Mountains. She was injured badly, had a long fall, broke many bones, had internal injuries. She was taken to a hospital in a coma. As she was wheeled into the hospital room on a gurney, there was a question whether she would survive. She did survive. It took a long while. Month after month, she finally convalesced and survived. Her HMO told her: We will not pay for your emergency room treatment because you didn't have prior approval for emergency room use. This is a woman hauled into the emergency room in a coma and was told: You don't get paid for the emergency room because you didn't get prior approval. Is that nuts? Of course it is. That is exactly what happened to this woman because somebody was looking at her in terms of profit and loss. That is not the way someone's person or body should be presented in the medical system. This is not profit and loss. It is about saving lives. To say to senior citizens we will help them with the cost of prescription drugs but only if they go into an HMO or a managed care organization does not make much sense to me. This Congress can do better than that. We must do better.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I also want to mention something I talked about yesterday. That is on the subject of the trade deficit. My colleagues know that we face a fiscal policy budget deficit of well over $400 billion this year, and we also face at the same time the largest trade deficit in American history, $470 billion; over $400 billion in our budget deficit and $470 billion in our merchandise trade deficit in the past year. That is nearing $1 trillion in combined deficits for our country. I don't know. I thought that we were about to enter a period of fiscal responsibility. Two years ago we had what was alleged to be surpluses as far as the eye could see. It was good times; following the 1990s, budget surpluses nearly forever. The fact is, now we see budget deficits that exhaust all of our patience as far as the eye can see; spending money we don't have, in some cases on things we don't need, year after year after year. It won't go away because we ignore it. We ignore it at our peril. We ought to deal with both. We are preparing for armed conflict. Our thoughts and prayers go with those who wear this country's uniform. We face severe and stiff challenges in foreign policy with North Korea, Iraq, the threat of terrorism against our homeland, and the war against terrorism abroad. At the same time that exists, we have an economy that is stuttering and in trouble. Then we are told that on top of fiscal policy, budget deficits of over $400 billion in this year, at a time when we increased defense spending by $45 billion, increased homeland security spending by over $30 billion, we are told at the same time by the President that he wants a tax cut of $675 billion over the next 10 years on a permanent basis. I don't understand how that adds up. Then, in addition to that fiscal policy dealing with the Federal budget, we have these abiding trade deficits. Those deficits at their root are about jobs. It is about jobs that used to be here that are no longer. Millions of people are out of work and their jobs are elsewhere. We have a large trade deficit with China. Most people don't know that our trade deficit with China is now over $100 billion a year. China sends us all their trinkets, trousers, shirts, shoes. They flood our market with Chinese goods. Then we try to get goods into China, and their markets are not very open to ours. Our trade negotiators negotiated an agreement with China and everybody said we have a bilateral agreement with China. I don't know who negotiated it. I would love to get names and pictures so I could give them credit. They apparently, in a room with the Chinese, negotiated a circumstance that said, in the future, when we have trade with automobiles from the United States and China--and incidentally this is a country with 1.3 billion people who will need a lot of cars-- when we have an agreement with China on the trade of automobiles, we will agree, our negotiators said, to allow China to have a tariff that is 10 times higher in China on automobiles than we will have on Chinese cars coming to the U.S. Our Government said: We will agree to have a tariff on U.S. cars being sold in the country of China that is 10 times higher than the tariff that would be imposed on a Chinese car sold in the United States. Does that make sense? It doesn't. My point is, the root of all of this is about jobs, about economic opportunity. Our economy is not going to get well unless it has some resurrection of strength in the manufacturing sector. We are, every day in every way, trading away manufacturing jobs. The trade ambassador said: We are losing manufacturing jobs, but we have cable television. I don't understand that at all. Where does a statement like that come from? We lose some manufacturing plant and pick up some cable television signals? Good for cable television. But the fact is, it is not a replacement for manufacturing. No country will remain a strong international economic competitor if its sector dissipates. That has been happening. I talked yesterday about the workers abroad with whom American workers are required to compete: Those who make 14 cents an hour--and, yes, they do--at age 14, working 14 hours a day--yes, they do employ those people in some parts of the world. Then the product of their labor is sent to Pittsburgh, Denver, Los Angeles, Fargo, Topeka. It goes on the store shelf, and it is all about profit. People say: Isn't that wonderful for the consumer to have a lower priced product? It is not such a lower priced product. It is just that the people who used to have the income to buy it lost their job when the plant went overseas. I also made a mistake yesterday. I mentioned the companies that renounced their American citizenship to save on taxes. They not only moved their plant overseas, but they renounced their American citizenship so they could save on taxes. I talked about them becoming Bahamian citizens. I should have said Bermuda. I guess some of them become citizens of the Bahamas, but it is more typical that they became citizens of Bermuda. The Bahamas has a navy with 26 people--I guess that is the Bermuda Navy. I want to correct that. The Bermuda Navy has 26 people. So if an American company that wants to become a citizen in Bermuda and renounce its citizenship runs into trouble someplace, and some disparate country out there decides to expropriate the assets of this company that used to be American, but is now Bermudan, my feeling is, when they say let's call out the navy, I think they should call Bermuda and say call out your 26-member navy. One of these companies actually had one ship grounded on a sand bar near Cuba. Would you please call out the navy to help? That is what we ought to tell them to do the next time they need assistance. We have public policies both in fiscal policy dealing with the Federal budget and in trade policies that are in desperate need of attention. There is no attention paid to it at all at this moment, except for some of us in the Congress who want to see if we can do a U- turn on some of these policies and put us back on track towards more economic growth and more jobs for this country. The sooner we get to that real debate, the better. This economy of ours can't run on paper. It can't run on promises. This economy needs a shot in the arm by a Congress that is willing to stand up to these issues and say: Our fiscal policy doesn't add up. I come from a very small school. My senior class was 9; 40 kids in all four grades of high school in a town of 350 people that I came from. But there is only one way they teach math. They taught math the same way in that small school they teach it in the biggest and best school in the United States. That is, 1 and 1 equals 2, not 3. I studied hard and I learned that. Some in this town with advanced degrees have decided that 1 plus 1 is 3. In fact, you can find it in the budget documents. The fact is, the American people all understand it is a mirage. None of this adds up. This is a tough time and it requires tough choices. I wish it weren't. I wish it was a time when we had unparalleled economic growth, when the economy was rebounding, the stock market was moving up, and everybody was employed. But the fact is that is not the case. We face serious, abiding economic challenges. This President needs to send a program to this Congress and this Congress has a requirement, it seems to me--if this President won't act, the Congress has a requirement to act to say we need to put this country back on track. The current circumstances simply do not add up. I used to teach economics in college for a couple years. Everyone talks about the business cycle. We have been hit with things in this economy that are pretty unparalleled. Some of us warned about this 2 years ago when the President proposed a $1.7 trillion tax cut. Some of us said maybe we ought to be a little conservative here. What if the bottom falls out and we run into tough times, or turbulence, or get some bad economic news? They said not to worry. We have blue skies as far as you can see, straight ahead--budget surpluses forever, the President said. We passed that--not with my vote--long-term permanent tax cut, and then immediately we found out we were in a recession. We got hit with the terrorist attack of 9/11, and we were at a war with terrorists; and we now have the largest budget deficits we have seen. We had the largest corporate scandals in history. All of this is coming together at the same time, at the same intersection, and the budget surpluses turned into deficits, and the deficits got bigger and bigger. The President says the antidote is to give more tax cuts and make them permanent. It seems to me he requires all of us to say we all like tax cuts. It would be nice if nobody had to pay any taxes. Count me in. I expect my constituents would appreciate the fact they would not have to pay taxes. Part of the cost of what we do together as citizens in building roads, schools, and providing for the common defense--part of the cost of that is the taxes we must pay. What the President is proposing in his budget is, by the way, let's be a bit short next year--about $400 billion short--and we will charge it over to the kids. We will let the kids assume that role of paying for it. We will consume more than we are willing to raise, and we will let the kids pay it off some time later. That doesn't add up, either. By the way, the President also says, well, the economy is fundamentally sound, we don't need to do much right now in terms of stimulus. The fact is, when we teach about the contraction and expansion side of the economy in the business cycle, you teach about confidence. The expansion and contraction side of the business cycle is all about confidence. If people are confident in the future, they do the following: Buy a house, buy a car, take a trip. They do the things that manifest their confidence in the future because they have a job and they feel good about the future. And that confluence of individual acts around the country creates the expansion side of the business cycle. But when they are not confident about the future, they do the opposite. They defer the purchase of that appliance for their home, or that automobile they were looking to purchase, or the home, or the trip. When they defer that purchase, the economy contracts. It is all about the confidence with which the people view the future. At the moment, the people are not confident about the future. There is not a lot we can do about the mechanics of the economy, because now the lead stories are about war, so there will never be confidence until we get through this period. We cannot ignore what is happening in our country with fiscal policy, trade policy, and a whole series of issues that some apparently feel we should pretend are all right but, in fact, are not all right--are seriously amiss. That brings me back to the point I started with. The agreement that will be on the floor of the Senate this week dealing with the Moscow Treaty is just another piece of pretend policy. Everybody will vote for it. Why wouldn't you? What is wrong with it? But it does nothing. It says the U.S. and Russia are going to reduce the number of nuclear weapons, not by getting rid of them, but by putting them into storage. So what does that do to make the world safer? The answer is nothing. Most people know it. There is the other piece of responsibility that is required--yes, of this President and of this Congress--and that is to provide world leadership and reduce the number of nuclear weapons, reduce the threat of nuclear war; and stop the spread of nuclear weapons around the world. It is the President's and our responsibility here in Congress. We ought not to pretend that we are taking action that really has very little impact with respect to fiscal policy, trade policy, nuclear arms control policy, because that will not ensure the future of this country and will not give our children confidence about the future of this country or this world. So, Mr. President, my hope and expectation is that we can make tough decisions and come together and decide, yes, if it is heavy lifting, it requires all of us to do it together. I am tired of ``let's pretend.'' That is what is happening all too often both at the White House and also here in the Congress. Let's pretend on nuclear arms policy. Let's pretend on fiscal policy and trade policy. That, in my judgment, is a foolish approach. We need to do better. I yield the floor.

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 have voted for over 100 judges nominated by President Bush. In North Dakota, we have had vacancies in both the west and east district judgeships. President Bush nominated two Republicans for those judgeships. I was happy to support them, and to work with President Bush to make sure that their confirmation went smoothly. One has been confirmed, the other I am convinced will be confirmed, and both will make us proud as Federal judges. I make that point only to say that I expect to be supportive of most, if not all, of the President's nominees. And I wish that we could have a vote on Mr. Estrada. Mr. Estrada's nomination is problematic, however, in that he has refused to answer some basic questions. My colleagues, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee and the minority leader, have indicated by letter that Mr. Estrada needs to be forthcoming, and answer provide some basic information about his judicial philosophy and temperament. Considering that Mr. Estrada is seeking a lifetime appointment to the bench, one would expect that he would be eager to provide that information. Judge Hovland, whom the President nominated to the Western District of North Dakota, answered the very questions that Mr. Estrada would not. I was happy to support Judge Hovland. I wish Mr. Estrada would be forthcoming. When and if he does that, I hope we proceed to vote. And then we can move on to any number of pressing matters.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, today, I am joined by Senators Breaux, Durbin, Leahy, Harkin and Johnson in introducing legislation to extend the current federal wind energy production tax credit, PTC, for an additional five years. This tax credit is scheduled to expire at the end of the year. A long-term extension of the credit will give wind energy developers the certainty they need to grow this important domestic industry with its seemingly limitless energy potential. One of the most promising alternative energy sources on this country's horizon comes from one of nature's most abundant assets: the wind. Over 2,000 megawatts of new wind energy capacity has been added to the nation's electricity grid in just the last 2 years. This new wind generation has pumped over $2 billion into the struggling economy. Congress has helped promote wind energy by making significant financial investments in Federal research and private-sector development over the last decade. Among other things, Congress has provided a Federal income tax credit for facilities that produce electricity from wind, which allows them to bring state-of-the-art wind turbines to the marketplace at a competitive rate. More and more utilities that have produced electricity from traditional fossil fuels are now looking to wind energy and other alternative energy sources to meet a larger share of this country's future energy demands. Soaring oil and natural gas prices also remind us of the importance of reducing our reliance on foreign energy sources and keeping a diverse energy supply here at home. However, despite broad bipartisan congressional support for the wind energy production tax credit, its fate remains cloudy. As I mentioned, the wind energy tax credit is scheduled to expire at the end of the year. Congress will surely extend the credit. But we can't wait until the last day of the session--or even later--to do so. Unfortunately, this is not merely polemics. Congress has twice allowed the PTC to expire. First, Congress allowed it to expire in July 1999 and failed to reinstate it until December 1999. As a result, wind energy investments plummeted from 661 megawatts installed in 1999 to only 53 megawatts in 2000. Inexplicably, the Congress let the PTC expire a second time--at the end of 2001--and did not reinstate the credit until March of the following year. This failure contributed to another major drop in wind investments dropping from 1696 megawatts installed in 2001 to just 410 megawatts in 2002. Today, wind energy industry officials tell me that if we do not extend the production tax credit by mid-year, thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in economic activity would be lost. And this shouldn't come as a surprise to my Senate colleagues. For many years, wind energy developers have told us that one of the major stumbling blocks to greater deployment of new wind technologies is the continued uncertainty surrounding the availability of the wind energy production tax credit. Even so, we still provided for just another short-term extension of the tax credit last March. A few short months from now, financial lenders will stop providing needed capital to new wind initiatives. As a result, projects already underway will quickly come to a halt, while new projects will be shelved. Many developers will simply be unable to build and purchase equipment and secure the financing that is needed to bring wind turbine generators on-line by year's end. When the tax credit last expired, I heard from manufacturers in my state and across the nation about impending layoffs, because of the lack of certainty at that time. A tower developer in my state of North Dakota has again laid off 17 workers, because of the uncertainty this industry still faces, due to the soon-to-expire tax credit. We can help eliminate this uncertainty by extending the production tax credit for a longer term. If we fail to act promptly to extend the tax credit this time around, North Dakota's wind energy industry would suffer another serious economic blow. I am told that DMI Industries, a major producer of wind turbine towers in North Dakota, would experience a 40-percent drop in business activity, resulting in some $15 million in lost revenue. The company's plan to expand its operation by 75 employees in 2004 would also be derailed. Delay in extending the production tax credit would mean that 100-125 new jobs would not be created in the coming year by LM Glasfiber, which is a major blade manufacturer in Grand Forks. There is a great deal of discussion in Washington, D.C. about passing a stimulus package to provide a needed boost to our ailing economy. This very effort would be needlessly undermined if we fail to extend the wind energy production tax credit in a timely manner and make it available over the long term. In North Dakota, we put up several wind turbines last year and launched an 80-megawatt project for North Dakota and South Dakota. At a time when this industry is just beginning to ramp up in the Great Plains, it would be foolish to thwart these efforts by failing to extend this wind energy production tax credit for sufficient time to get substantial new projects off the design boards and up and running. Again, the bill I'm introducing today would extend the current production tax credit for qualifying wind facilities that are placed in service on or before December 31, 2008. The wind energy production tax credit has enjoyed strong bipartisan support in both the Senate and the House of Representatives in previous years, so we should be able to pass this legislation quickly this year. I urge my Senate colleagues to cosponsor this legislation and work with me to get it enacted into law as soon as possible. If we fail to act promptly, many new wind energy initiatives will come to a halt at a time when this country can least afford it.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, today, I am joined by Senators Breaux, Durbin, Leahy, Harkin and Johnson in introducing legislation to extend the current federal wind energy production tax credit, PTC, for an additional five years. This tax credit is scheduled to expire at the end of the year. A long-term extension of the credit will give wind energy developers the certainty they need to grow this important domestic industry with its seemingly limitless energy potential. One of the most promising alternative energy sources on this country's horizon comes from one of nature's most abundant assets: the wind. Over 2,000 megawatts of new wind energy capacity has been added to the nation's electricity grid in just the last 2 years. This new wind generation has pumped over $2 billion into the struggling economy. Congress has helped promote wind energy by making significant financial investments in Federal research and private-sector development over the last decade. Among other things, Congress has provided a Federal income tax credit for facilities that produce electricity from wind, which allows them to bring state-of-the-art wind turbines to the marketplace at a competitive rate. More and more utilities that have produced electricity from traditional fossil fuels are now looking to wind energy and other alternative energy sources to meet a larger share of this country's future energy demands. Soaring oil and natural gas prices also remind us of the importance of reducing our reliance on foreign energy sources and keeping a diverse energy supply here at home. However, despite broad bipartisan congressional support for the wind energy production tax credit, its fate remains cloudy. As I mentioned, the wind energy tax credit is scheduled to expire at the end of the year. Congress will surely extend the credit. But we can't wait until the last day of the session--or even later--to do so. Unfortunately, this is not merely polemics. Congress has twice allowed the PTC to expire. First, Congress allowed it to expire in July 1999 and failed to reinstate it until December 1999. As a result, wind energy investments plummeted from 661 megawatts installed in 1999 to only 53 megawatts in 2000. Inexplicably, the Congress let the PTC expire a second time--at the end of 2001--and did not reinstate the credit until March of the following year. This failure contributed to another major drop in wind investments dropping from 1696 megawatts installed in 2001 to just 410 megawatts in 2002. Today, wind energy industry officials tell me that if we do not extend the production tax credit by mid-year, thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in economic activity would be lost. And this shouldn't come as a surprise to my Senate colleagues. For many years, wind energy developers have told us that one of the major stumbling blocks to greater deployment of new wind technologies is the continued uncertainty surrounding the availability of the wind energy production tax credit. Even so, we still provided for just another short-term extension of the tax credit last March. A few short months from now, financial lenders will stop providing needed capital to new wind initiatives. As a result, projects already underway will quickly come to a halt, while new projects will be shelved. Many developers will simply be unable to build and purchase equipment and secure the financing that is needed to bring wind turbine generators on-line by year's end. When the tax credit last expired, I heard from manufacturers in my state and across the nation about impending layoffs, because of the lack of certainty at that time. A tower developer in my state of North Dakota has again laid off 17 workers, because of the uncertainty this industry still faces, due to the soon-to-expire tax credit. We can help eliminate this uncertainty by extending the production tax credit for a longer term. If we fail to act promptly to extend the tax credit this time around, North Dakota's wind energy industry would suffer another serious economic blow. I am told that DMI Industries, a major producer of wind turbine towers in North Dakota, would experience a 40-percent drop in business activity, resulting in some $15 million in lost revenue. The company's plan to expand its operation by 75 employees in 2004 would also be derailed. Delay in extending the production tax credit would mean that 100-125 new jobs would not be created in the coming year by LM Glasfiber, which is a major blade manufacturer in Grand Forks. There is a great deal of discussion in Washington, D.C. about passing a stimulus package to provide a needed boost to our ailing economy. This very effort would be needlessly undermined if we fail to extend the wind energy production tax credit in a timely manner and make it available over the long term. In North Dakota, we put up several wind turbines last year and launched an 80-megawatt project for North Dakota and South Dakota. At a time when this industry is just beginning to ramp up in the Great Plains, it would be foolish to thwart these efforts by failing to extend this wind energy production tax credit for sufficient time to get substantial new projects off the design boards and up and running. Again, the bill I'm introducing today would extend the current production tax credit for qualifying wind facilities that are placed in service on or before December 31, 2008. The wind energy production tax credit has enjoyed strong bipartisan support in both the Senate and the House of Representatives in previous years, so we should be able to pass this legislation quickly this year. I urge my Senate colleagues to cosponsor this legislation and work with me to get it enacted into law as soon as possible. If we fail to act promptly, many new wind energy initiatives will come to a halt at a time when this country can least afford it.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I hope I perhaps am one of those clear thinkers and ``reasonable'' people the Senator from Utah was referring to. I suspect there are a good many in this Chamber who are self- proclaimed clear thinkers and reasonable people. I am not out here as a member of the Judiciary Committee. I do not spend a lot of time on judicial issues, on a point of nomination. And on judicial nominations, I want to work with President Bush. We have had two Republican nominees for judges in the east and west districts of North Dakota in the last year and a half. I have been pleased to work with President Bush on their nominations. We now have investiture of a Republican judge in the western district of North Dakota, someone I supported--a Republican but someone I strongly supported. He will be a fine Federal judge. I know I am going to be proud of him. There is a nominee before the Judiciary Committee for the east district in Fargo. I likewise have strong support for that nominee of President Bush. I think he will be a fine Federal judge. He is a Republican. But the fact is he will, I think, make us proud of the Federal bench. I am very pleased to say that the President chose well. He consulted with us. And I was very supportive of the two judges who will now assume the bench in the Federal districts of North Dakota. So I am not someone who comes to this saying I am a Democrat with respect to this process and the process should be political. That is not the way I come to this. But I do believe this Congress has a responsibility to advise and consent, and it is not a responsibility to have a huge rubberstamp, where the President sends us a nomination and we say, yes, sir; yes, sir, count us in. That is not the responsibility of advise and consent. The constitutional responsibility for Congress is equal to the President's. He proposes and we make a judgment on his proposal. He sends us a nomination. We make a judgment. Now this is not some ordinary decision on the floor of the Senate. This is a lifetime appointment. When we decide to confirm a nominee sent to us by the White House, this is not for 2 years or 5 years or 15 years or 25 years; it is for a lifetime. And we ought to take that seriously. I know most Members of the Senate do. So if we are going to be passing judgment on a nominee who is going to be there for a lifetime, let's know a little about the nominee. I was proud to support Dan Hovland, who is now the confirmed Federal judge in the west district of North Dakota. President Bush nominated him, and I was proud to support him. But unlike Miguel Estrada, Mr. Hovland cooperated with the Judiciary Committee. He was asked during his confirmation process, ``Can you list three Supreme Court cases that you disagree with?'' And unlike Mr. Estrada, Mr. Hovland had no difficulty answering that simple question. Why would one ask a nominee that question? To get a sense of how they think and reason. Mr. Hovland didn't object to that. Judge Hovland readily identified a couple of recent cases--Thompson v. Western States Medical Center, Behrens v. Peltier. He cited a case that most would cite, Korematsu v. the United States, the case in which the Supreme Court affirmed the conviction of a person of Japanese ancestry for the violation of a curfew order solely because of the individual's ancestry. So Mr. Hovelnd was asked a simple question and was happy to give us a glimpse of how he was thinking about things, and how he viewed some of these decisions. He didn't object to answering that question. He was asked a simple question, and he gave a straightforward answer that was helpful to my colleagues and me. Other nominees have been asked the same kinds of questions. Mr. Estrada, however, has not been willing to answer those questions. He apparently thinks there is some inherent right to be confirmed by the Senate. There is no inherent right for a confirmation. We have a responsibility to understand who these nominees are and then to pass judgment on them as to whether or not we think they deserve a lifetime appointment to the bench. As I have indicated, on at least two Federal judgeships in North Dakota, I was proud to support Republicans. I think President Bush chose well. I don't have the information about Mr. Estrada with which to make that judgment. Some say, well, look, you don't need the information, you don't deserve the information, and we don't want you to get the information. So belly up here and vote. If you don't like it, it doesn't matter, just vote. Really, how would you vote if you don't have basic information? We have sent Mr. Estrada a letter saying you have not answered basic questions; you have not allowed to have released the basic information. Provide all of that and let's have a vote. I am for that. For me, this isn't about a filibuster. It is about saying we ought to have nominees provide the basic information to Members of the Senate before there is a vote. Mr. Estrada has not done that. It is simple. He hasn't done that. Perhaps when he does it, he will get a big vote in the Senate. I don't know. But I think it is a terrible precedent for the Senate to allow a nominee to say, I am not going to answer your questions; I will show up and give you my name and tell you where I went to school, but I don't intend to talk about much else at all. Mr. Estrada has never been a judge. We don't have judicial record to examine. We don't have any information about that. That is the reason we have asked him the same kinds of questions we have asked others. The difference is he has not responded. I don't understand that. Let me also say something else. I have listened to my colleague from Utah, and he is one of the more capable Members of the Senate. He talked about delay and how terrible it was to delay this, that, and the other thing. Let me tell you something. We understand what it feels like to be faced with delay on judicial nominations. We have been on the receiving end of it for a long time. Notwithstanding that fact, I don't believe we ought to delay anybody just for the sake of delay. I think we get the information and we move forward. If we don't get the information requested of a nominee, there is no inherent right for a nominee to go to a vote, to receive a lifetime appointment. We know a little about facing delay. I find it interesting that those who were the architects of delay for so long now come to the floor-- many of them--and say it is terrible what has happened here. I will give you examples of what has happened. James Beatty was nominated by President Clinton to the Fourth Circuit, rated well qualified by the ABA. He had no hearing and no vote. Do you know how long his nomination languished up here? Three years. Do you suppose he knows a little something about delay? Robert Cindrich, nominated to the Third Circuit, found well qualified by the ABA; he didn't get a hearing and certainly no vote. Not a hearing and not a vote. He would know something about delay, I guess. H. Alston Johnson, nominated to the Fifth Circuit by the previous administration, was rated well qualified by the ABA. He never got a hearing or a vote. His nomination was up here 696 days. He never got a hearing, never got a vote. The question is, Why? It was the previous administration that sent them up, and those who controlled the Judiciary Committee at that point didn't want to provide a hearing or a vote. I suppose that is a filibuster in its effect, isn't it? James Duffy, a Ninth Circuit Court nominee, was up here for 640 days. Well qualified by the ABA, no hearing, no vote. The list is fairly lengthy. I shall not go through it all. Kathleen Lewis, nominated by the Sixth Circuit, found well qualified by the ABA; no hearing, no vote. These are just a few nominations that came from the President, the previous administration. Those on the other side who want to push Mr. Estrada through without our getting the information we have asked of him, those are the same Senators who blocked all of these other nominees. They didn't get to the floor or get a hearing, let alone a vote in the committee. Not even a hearing, for gosh sakes. So we understand a little about facing delay. Some of these delays, as you know, stretched to 4 full years, with not even a hearing. I find it interesting that people here who talk about delay are those who took nominations from the previous administration and said: They are irrelevant as far as we are concerned. We don't even intend to hold a hearing. Well, Mr. Estrada got a hearing. I think Mr. Estrada would get a vote on the floor of the Senate, as soon as he provided the information he has been requested to provide. The ranking member of the Judiciary Committee and the minority leader have sent a letter and said here is what he has not provided. It is a lifetime appointment. Provide the information and let us move forward. I think that is what we ought to do. I am not part of a filibuster. I have only spoken one time previously on the floor about Mr. Estrada. It is not a filibuster, as far as I am concerned. I just don't think the Senate ought to vote on a nominee for a lifetime appointment to the Federal bench--whether it is a circuit court or any court--if the nominee says: I am sorry, I don't intend to answer your questions. Here is a question posed to Miguel Estrada: What are several Supreme Court rulings over a good many years with which you disagree, and why? Is that a reasonable thing to ask somebody who aspires to serve on the Federal bench? I think so, and most other nominees have answered that question. The nominee I was proud to support for the western district judgeship in North Dakota didn't object to that. I thought he answered that question easily and with good judgment, which gave me some comfort about that nominee. Mr. Estrada won't answer that question. I just don't think there is an inherent right--certainly there is no inherent requirement in the Constitution--that we move forward and cast a vote on a nominee that has not yet provided the information that has been requested of him. This nomination should not yet be on the floor of the Senate. It ought to be in the Judiciary Committee, and the nominee ought to not have his name brought to the floor until he has satisfied the members of the Judiciary Committee with respect to the information they are requesting. The information they are requesting is not unusual, not extraordinary. It is information that has been requested of others and provided by others. And with respect to this lifetime appointment, my feeling is the country will be best served if we decide as a Senate not to treat lifetime appointments to the Federal bench in a trifling way. It is a trifling way if we say to people, by the way, if your nomination comes before this Senate, you can just get by with saying: I don't intend to answer your questions. I don't have answers to your questions. We don't need to have that dialogue. You have a responsibility to vote because the President sent the nomination down to the Senate. Well, as I have described, those who ran the Judiciary Committee during the last administration felt no such obligation. They created a special ``jail'' for nominees, and nominations went into that jail and the door was locked forever. A good many of them were very well- qualified men and women, and they didn't even get a hearing, let alone a vote. So I don't think we ought to be lectured by anybody about delays and about tactics that somehow injure a nominee. Plenty of nominees have been derailed unjustifiably, in my judgment. It is not my intention in any way to derail the nomination of Mr. Estrada. It is my intention as one Member of the Senate to insist--yes, to demand--that a nominee who expects a Senate to consider his or her nomination provide the information requested by the Senate. The minute this nominee complies with the request of the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, the former chairman of the committee, for information that was requested on behalf of the members of the minority on the committee and on behalf of dozens of Members in the Senate, I think that nomination should be on the floor of the Senate, and we should have a vote. Until then, I do not think we ought to. I have voted now for, I believe, well over 100 Federal judges submitted to this Senate by President Bush. I believe I have voted against only one. With respect to the two Republicans nominated in North Dakota, I have been a strong supporter. I have spoken in the committee and on the floor in support of their nominations. I do not think anyone can take a look at me and say I am trying to obstruct anything. I am not. I think I am pretty clear-headed on these matters. But I do not feel an obligation to vote on anybody until we get the information requested of them, especially for a lifetime appointment. That is clear-headed. That is common sense. And the Senate will rue the day it decides it is all right for nominees to come to the Senate and simply say: I am going to stonewall; I do not provide information; I do not answer questions. That will not, and should not, be the rule of the day with respect to considering lifetime appointments.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I began talking about the Estrada nomination, about how we wish we could resolve that, and turn to other important issues. I think this issue of fuel-cell vehicles and a hydrogen economy is something we will deal with in an energy bill. I visited with Senator Domenici, who is now chairman of the Energy Committee, and my colleague Senator Bingaman as well, the ranking member, about this issue. Now, I want to show my colleagues that this fuel cell technology is not pie in the sky. Here is a fuel-cell vehicle--a Ford Focus production-ready prototype introduced in the autumn of 2002. And this is a fuel-cell vehicle at the hydrogen fueling station. PowerTech Laboratories created this infrastructure for fueling, which, of course, you have to have if you are going to have these kinds of vehicles. This next chart shows a Nissan X-Terra fueled by compressed hydrogen and tested on public roads in California in the year 2001. Finally, this is the General Motors Hy-Wire Fuel Concept Car unveiled in August 2002. The fact is we can do this and should do this as a country, but it won't happen unless we make it happen. That is the point of my legislation. The Director of Environmental Affairs at Daimler Chrysler has said that political support is vital for the car industry to make inroads in fuel cell technology. They can do a lot themselves, but at a certain point they need legislative and financial support to stimulate this important sector. For that, they need the Government. The European Union has already earmarked 2 billion euros for research over the next 5 years. The central focus will be hydrogen fuel cells. This is a big idea. This is something our country needs to do. It is the equivalent of going to the Moon by the end of the decade, as John F. Kennedy proposed. President Bush is right to propose an initiative in this area. I was pleased to support him. I was working with him a year ago. We had in the energy bill goals that I had set. I am convinced we will make much more progress this year. At a recent hearing, I asked officials from the Department of Energy what kind of vision we have for the year 2025 or 2050 about the type of fuel we are going to use in American vehicles. The answer was they didn't have a guess. I said: That is interesting. We project out 25 to 50 years and talk about what kind of financial circumstances will exist for Social Security or Medicare. But we have no such goals with respect to the energy? The answer was: No, we don't really have that kind of planning. It is long past time to start that kind of planning. This country needs a big idea. The President has proposed an approach that I support. It is something I have worked on for the last couple of years. I think by working together--Republicans and Democrats--we can embrace a big idea and move in a very significant way to improve America's energy future to make our country less dependent--less dangerously dependent--on foreign sources of energy. That is my goal. It is not my goal to turn my back on coal, oil, and natural gas. The fact is the leaders in this effort in this hydrogen economy and in the move to this hydrogen economy will be many of the utility companies and the energy companies of today. They are the ones in the forefront--United Technologies, Shell, BP. I could go on and name at great length the companies that are involved in this right now at the front end. They are going to be the leaders. I just think this is the right thing to do. It is important for our country to establish goals. If ever we needed to think about the fragile nature of this American economy, it is now. With the threat of terrorism, with the problems in the Middle East, and with the potential war against Iraq, we ought to be thinking: do we want to depend for over half of our oil from areas of the world that are troubled areas? If not, let us do something about it, and do it now, and let us do it together. That is why I am introducing my bill, setting forth $6.5 billion over a 10-year period, so that we will establish and reach ambitious goals, in partnership with the private sector, and with the support, I hope, of the President of the United States. I think we can do this, and I think if we do it, it will be extraordinarily helpful to this country. The Trade Deficit Mr. President, one of the other issues I wanted to come to the floor and talk about is the issue of the trade deficit. I think this is a vitally important issue, and I wish my colleagues and I were debating this at length, rather than continuing to dwell on the Estrada matter. On Thursday last, the Commerce Department announced that our trade deficit was at a record for the year 2002. Our country's deficit in goods last year was $470 billion. That means we sold $470 billion less to other countries than we purchased from other countries. What does all that mean? This chart shows that our trade deficit has exploded since 1991, a little over a decade ago--and our merchandise trade deficit is now $470 billion. When the Washington Post reported that on the day it was announced, they finally said, it will put a significant damper on U.S. economic growth. Now, the Washington Post is not in the habit of sounding the alarm about the trade deficit. You cannot get them to print an op-ed on that subject. They have a rosy view of trade, and view everyone who raises these questions as some sort of isolationist xenophobes. But here is the Washington Post, in its report last week, saying that the record deficit will put a significant damper on economic growth. They noted that a combination of increasing imports and falling exports clipped a half of a percentage point off the increase in GDP last year. The Post further reported that nearly one-fourth of the year's trade deficit was with China, which sold $103 billion more in goods to the United States than we were able to sell there. I will speak about China in a couple of moments, but China is by no means the only country with which we have a trade deficit. This chart shows we have a trade deficit with nearly every country with whom we do business. One notable exception is Australia, but I think that is going to get remedied because our trade negotiators are now negotiating a free trade agreement with Australia, and our trade negotiators are able to lose almost immediately when they negotiate trade agreements. Will Rogers once said the United States of America has never lost a war and has never won a conference. He surely must have been talking about our trade negotiators. So every time we have a new trade agreement, it ends up hurting us and helping those with whom we reach the agreement. I guess we are fixing to do an agreement with Australia so perhaps our positive trade balance with Australia will be gone soon. This chart, sourced from the Department of Commerce, shows that with virtually every major trading partner we have a very large trade deficit. Our deficit with Canada now is $50 billion; deficits with Mexico, $37 billion. Before our negotiators went to negotiate with Canada and Mexico and created this trade agreement, which I thought was a terrible agreement and sold out certain American interests in exchange for other benefits, we had a reasonably modest trade deficit with Canada and a small trade surplus with Mexico. We have managed to turn that into a huge deficit with Canada and a very large deficit with Mexico. We have deficits with every major Asian country except Singapore. We have deficits with the major economies of Latin America. Not only do we have deficits with virtually all of our major trading partners, we also have deficits in about every major sector of goods trade. A $110 billion deficit in vehicle trade--vehicles, mind you--a $47 billion deficit in consumer electronics; a $58 billion deficit in clothing, for example. Some might say agriculture is a bright spot, isn't it, because we are a net exporter of agricultural goods? But even our modest surplus on agricultural products has now been reduced by 30 percent, just over the last year, from $14.2 billion to $10.9 billion in 2002. Our surplus in meats declined by $1 billion. Our deficit in livestock trade reached $1.5 billion. Our deficit in vegetables and fruits reached $2.5 billion. I mentioned trade with China. We have a deficit with China of $103 billion. One innocent sounding sector in which we have a trade deficit with China is toys. We have a trade deficit of $14 billion with China in the area of toys. Now, let me describe a news report that I read last year, about conditions in a Chinese toy factory. The story is entitled ``Worked Till They Drop. Few Protections For China's New Laborers.'' On the night she died, Li Chunmei must have been exhausted. Co-workers said she had been on her feet for nearly 16 hours, running back and forth inside the toy factory, carrying toy parts from machine to machine. This was the busy season before Christmas. The factory food was so bad, she said, she felt as if she had not eaten at all. Long hours were mandatory, and at least 2 months had passed since Li and other workers had enjoyed even a Sunday off. ``I want to quit,'' one of her roommates remembered her saying. ``I want to go home.'' Her roommates had fallen asleep when Li started coughing up blood. They found her in the bathroom a few hours later, curled up on the floor, moaning softly in the dark, bleeding from her nose and mouth. She died before she could arrive at a hospital. The exact cause of her death remains unknown, they say. What happened to her last November is described by family and friends and coworkers as an example of what China's more daring newspapers have actually given a name. They call it ``guolaosi.'' The phrase means ``overwork death.'' They actually have a name for it in China. It usually applies to young workers who suddenly collapse and die after working exceedingly long hours day after day. Think of it. Think of working 16-hour days with no day off, inadequate food, in unsafe factories, working children to death in a country where they do it often enough so there is actually a name for it. Is this the sort of playing field that our manufacturers should be competing in? With children working long hours, for months on end, for virtually no money? There is another reason, of course, for our trade deficit with China, and that is our markets are open to virtually all of their products, and their markets are not open to ours. The Washington Times ran an article documenting many of the trade barriers that China puts up to our products, particularly the agricultural products. It quotes the American Farm Bureau, which says the Chinese market is no more open today than it was when China entered the WTO. At the end of the WTO negotiations, China was a $2 billion market. We expected substantial growth, the Farm Bureau says, but we have not seen that growth because China has not done what it was supposed to do. Trade barriers are as numerous as they are creative. Import regulations are nearly impossible to figure out. Health inspection standards have changed one month to the next, and it goes on and on. The bottom line is our agricultural products are not getting into China. China is a country of 1.3 billion people, and they have a $103 billion trade surplus with us, or we a deficit with them. That story in the Washington Times tells us another reason why. One does not have to travel as far as China to find closed markets for U.S. products. We have a $50 billion trade deficit with Canada. In 2002, for example, our deficit with Canada was $90 million in durum wheat, $160 million in spring wheat. It is pretty easy to calculate that. Do you want to know why? Because our exports to Canada in these areas in wheat are zero. You cannot get it in. I know that personally because I have been on a truck trying to get through the border into Canada with 200 bushels of durum wheat, watching all the Canadian durum ship south on the trip north, and we were stopped at the border. On February 15 of last year, the USTR found that Canada was guilty of unfair trade, but they said: We will not impose tariff rate quotas. In the absence of tariff rate quotas, one recent study says, U.S. wheat producers lost $124 million in sales in the last crop year. On April 19, I held a hearing in the Commerce subcommittee I then chaired and talked to agriculture negotiator Ambassador Allen Johnson and said: We need to take action now. I showed him an article in the Bismarck Tribune where the Canadian Wheat Board president was gloating saying USTR had not imposed tariff rate quotas on Canadian wheat. Therefore, they have won. Since the USTR's decision on February 15, last year, enough wheat has come in from Canada to fill 50,000 18-wheel trucks, and the Canadians have not changed their practices at all. Are farmers upset about that? You are darn right they are. They do not think anybody stands up for them or speaks out for them, and they are sick and tired of it. We also have a trade deficit with the European Union of $82 billion. One area that is a chronic problem is beef. They will not allow American beef into the European Union. They claim that our beef is made with dangerous growth hormones, even though there is no evidence that such beef is bad for people. So they have decided that this is what livestock in America looks like: a two-headed cow. Therefore, $100 million in U.S. beef is banned from the EU each year. Now, we go to the WTO and we get a ruling against the Europeans. What does that mean? Nothing. It does not mean a thing. So then our country takes action against the Europeans. Do you know what we do to the Europeans? We take action against European truffles, goose liver, and Roquefort cheese. Now, my God, that is enough to scare the devil out of any country. Truffles, goose liver, and Roquefort cheese. Let's talk about Korea. The year 2001, the last year for which I have figures, Korea sent 618,000 automobiles into our country; we were able to get 2,800 cars into Korea. I repeat that because people think that cannot be right. Korea shipped us 618,000 automobiles made in Korea and we were able to get 2,800 U.S. vehicles into the Korean marketplace. Why? Because Korea does not want American vehicles in their marketplace. End of story. We have a $13 billion trade deficit with Korea. If you do not like to talk automobiles, let's talk about potato flakes, the ingredient they use for snack food, and on which they impose a 300-percent tariff. The list goes on and on. I have not even talked about Japan. We have had a deficit with them forever. It has gone on and on and on. We had a deficit with them when the dollar was strong, when the dollar was weak, when we were growing, when we were in recession, it does not matter. All of these countries have decided they will use the American marketplace for their benefit and keep American goods out of their marketplace for their benefit. The result is the American consumers pay the price. Some say it is good for consumers that we have all of this trade deficit because this means cheap foreign goods coming in. But our consumers are also people who work. And when you lose your job, which is the result of a trade deficit that is $470 billion, when you lose your job, your time as a consumer is just about over. One can make a case, I suppose, that the Federal budget deficit is money we owe to ourselves. Some economists make that case. You cannot make that case with respect to the trade deficit. That is money we owe to others outside of this country and will be repaid, inevitably will be repaid, with a lower standard of living someday in this country. Just once I want our trade negotiators and want this administration and future administrations to stand up for this country's interests. No, not to put a wall around this country. But I would like for this country to believe that its trade policies are in this country's best interests. And they have not been. NAFTA has not been. The United States-Canada FTA was not. The WTO is not. Just look at the bilateral we did with China--do you know what our negotiators did with China 2 years ago? They sat down, always in secret, and then the door opened, and they trumpeted this new agreement. Do you know what they agreed to with the Chinese? After a phase-in period, we will agree that we will have a tariff on Chinese automobiles that come to the United States that is only one-tenth of the tariff we allow the Chinese to allow on U.S. vehicles that go to China. Our negotiators agreed that we would allow the Chinese to have ten times larger tariffs against U.S. automobiles going to China. I don't know who agreed to that. I would love to get a name. But these are amorphous groups of people who go over and meet in secret and they lose a trade agreement the minute they sit down with another country. Harry Truman used to say, I want a one-armed economist because they always say on the one hand this, on the other hand that. I want one economist who supported all the trade agreements we have had to come forward and make a case that this has worked. It is not working. It is hurting this country. No country will long remain a world power without a strong manufacturing sector. And our manufacturing sector is being sucked out of the middle of this country. When they talked about NAFTA, with U.S. and Mexican trade, they said U.S.-Mexican trade will all be the product of low-skilled labor coming from Mexico to the United States. That is what we will get from Mexico. Not true. Not true at all. The three largest imports from Mexico, including the maquiladora area, are automobiles, automobile parts, and electronics, the product of high-skilled labor. You can see what is happening in this country as a result of these trade agreements. Just once I would like to see somebody stand up for this country's producers and its interests. I know a lot of companies that you think of as American companies like these trade agreements. And the chambers of commerce and others that support them support these agreements. Why? Because they are really multinational, international companies. They think this is just fine. Take a jet, fly around the world, look down on the ground and see where you can produce for 14 cents, hire 14-year- olds and work them 14 hours a day. Where can you do that? And then ship the product back to Toledo, Bismarck, Los Angeles, or Denver? Where can you do that? It is about profit, not about strengthening our country. It is about international profit. I care about this country's long-term economic interests. A $470 billion trade deficit, especially given the circumstances that exist with those with whom we have that deficit--Japan, Europe, Korea, China, Canada, Mexico--shame on us for deciding this is acceptable. It is not acceptable. In the long term it will hurt every child in this country who grows up and experiences a lower standard of living because we did not have the guts to decide we would demand fair trade with other countries. Fair trade means if we cannot compete, that is our fault. But fair trade insists that the rules be fair. And no American worker and no American company ought to have to compete against someone that wants to hire 14-year-olds and work them 14 hours a day. You say it does not happen? I will give you names. Of course it happens. It happens all the time, all over the world. No American should have to compete against a company that decided to renounce its citizenship, moved its headquarters on paper to Bermuda to avoid paying U.S. corporate income tax, and then moved its production to yet a third country, somewhere where they can dump chemicals into the water and chemicals into the area and run a factory that is unsafe, where they hire kids. No American should have to compete against that. It is not fair competition, and at some point, in some way, some day, someone will say this is not in our interest. It is in our interest to encourage expanded trade; that clearly is in our interest. On behalf of those who produce in this country and who work in production in this country, it is in our interest to demand fair trade rules. Globalization has galloped far ahead of the rules of trade and no one is willing to admit it or do anything about it. And it is injuring this country, inevitably injuring this country. The question is, When will we have a real debate about it? You can put on a blindfold and listen. You can listen to Democratic Presidents and Republican Presidents and you will not hear a bit of difference on international trade. For 20 years, we have had the same mindless mantra about this trade. And when I finish this speech, some will say that I am a protectionist, a xenophobic isolationist protectionist, someone who just does not get it. Well, I get it. What I get is I have seen the unfairness that is undermining American farmers, American manufacturers, American businesses, and it ought to stop. The only way it will stop is if we have someone, someplace, somewhere who has the guts to stand up and stop it. We had a vote in this Chamber recently on something called fast track. They called it trade promotion authority, which is just a goofy way of putting some new clothing on a old, bad deal--fast track. I voted against it. I would not give it to President Clinton. I would not give it to President George H.W. Bush. I did not think either of them should have it. President George W. Bush now has fast-track authority. What does that mean? That trade agreements are being negotiated in secret somewhere around the world, and when they are done negotiating, they will be brought back to this Chamber for a straight up-or-down vote. Fast track means that no one in this Chamber, under any circumstances, at any time, will ever be able to offer an amendment to strike out an offending provision, to strike out something we think inherently injures this country. Nobody will be able to offer the amendment. Why? Because we decided to handcuff ourselves. I have no idea why Members of the Senate think we ought to be doing that. And it is exactly what we have done. So this, unfortunately, is not going to get better. It is going to get worse, unless enough of us decide in this country that American jobs are important, that yes, globalism is here, but the rules of globalism must keep pace, and we must insist and demand fair trade. We must demand that other countries open their markets in exchange for an admission to the American marketplace. All of these things are conditions that are inherent to the well-being and stability of this country's future. I am obviously frustrated, from time to time, about trade issues because no one seems to care. There is a sense that there are only two sides: There are the expansionists and the protectionists. That is fundamentally wrong. There are people like me who believe in expanded trade, but believe, on behalf of the things we fought for for a century in this country, that such expanded trade needs to be done with fair rules. We fought for a century, I would say, for people to have the right to go into a factory that is safe, to have a safe workplace. We fought for a long while about preventing people from dumping chemicals into streams and the air. People lost their lives demonstrating on the streets for the right to be able to collectively bargain. And now we decide that did not matter much, just skip all that, and pole-vault over it all and move your plant, in fact, renounce your citizenship while you are at it, become a Bermuda paper company so you do not even pay your taxes. Bermuda has a navy that has 26 people. Maybe the next time a U.S. company that decides to become a Bermuda paper company, and they are in trouble, and someone wants to expropriate their assets, maybe they ought to call on the Bermudan Navy. Maybe that is where they ought to get their protection. I am going to come back and speak at some greater length on trade. This is such an important issue. I represent a State that produces agricultural products, for which we must find a foreign home for a sizable portion of it. I am not anti- trade. I very strongly support expanded trade. But I am sick and tired of this country being taken advantage of. I am sick and tired of seeing wheat farmers being injured by bad agreements and by bad practices that you can't stop. And the same is true with the textile workers. And the same is true for those who manufacture aircraft. It just goes on and on. We have a responsibility to stop it. We should be a world leader and say we support globalization and world trade, providing the rules are fair. The rules are not fair. We ought to say, we, by God, are going to change them. We have to be the leader that changes those rules to make sure we have a fair chance at a world trade regime that is beneficial not just to those with whom we trade, but beneficial to this country as well. So I will continue this at a later time. I did tell my colleague that I would be finished at about this time. I thank him for his patience. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN. Certainly, I will yield for a question.