Byron Dorgan

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I say to the Senator from Nevada, he is absolutely correct. This rush here seems to me to be inappropriate if, in fact, they bring a bill to the floor tomorrow at 10 a.m. that has not yet been written--it is now 20 minutes to 7 here in Washington, DC--the bill has not yet been completed, and there are 100 and some amendments remaining. They are over in the Hart Building finishing it. It will be brought over to the Senate. I guarantee it will not be printed. They will have one copy at the desk. Someone may have made some copies, some Xerox copies, and hope they don't lose a couple pages this time. A couple weeks ago they lost a couple pages and held things up. But that is not the way to legislate. It seems to me the thoughtful way to do this would be to move this through the Finance Committee, have it printed, bring it to the floor, lay it over at least 1 day--it should be more than that--give people an opportunity to study it, and determine what is in it and how they might wish to amend it. There is an old saying I mentioned before in this Senate Chamber: Never buy something from somebody who is out of breath. There is a kind of breathless quality to this rush: We must rush; We must get this done immediately; We must bring this bill to the floor immediately. That is not fair. It is not fair in terms of those who come to this Senate wanting to represent their constituents, wanting to know what is in it for various income groups, various occupations. How will it affect their constituents? How will it affect the people living in their State? In order to do that, they will need to see how the bill is written and be able to evaluate it with their legislative assistants. Just making a final point to the Senator from Nevada, I did serve in the other body, in the House, and served for 10 years on the Ways and Means Committee. We wrote tax law. We had done this many times, where we would write a rather complicated piece of legislation. But it has generally been the case that when you write tax law, and write legislation that is complicated--and tax law by definition is always complicated--you give people an opportunity to evaluate it, to think through it, to try to understand what kind of changes they would like to make; and then have the body work its will. There is, as I said, a kind of breathless quality around here to rushing this thing through. I am not quite sure I understand why. As I indicated, this will affect our country for a decade. This is big stakes. It will have significant impacts on our economy, on the condition of the American economy, the rates of economic growth. I am not sure how. I am not sure anybody understands how. But we ought to all be given the opportunity to think through and evaluate what is in it, what it means to our country, what it means for the American people in general, and what it means for income groups and occupations, and so on. The only way we can do that is to have the time. So I urge the majority leader, do not try to do that tomorrow. Do not bring a bill up tomorrow that has not yet been printed and ask the Senate, under 20 hours of time, to begin debating and trying to amend a piece of legislation that has not yet been printed. That is not fair to the Senate and that is not a thoughtful way to legislate.

Mr. DORGAN. I will be happy to yield.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, the Senator from Nevada makes a critically important point. It is important for all of us to think through this process and this strategy. We are blessed with a wonderful country that has had an economy that has produced jobs and expansion and opportunity in the last years. We want to make sure we do not create a fiscal policy that turns that around and moves us back into big Federal budget deficits and economic contraction rather than expansion. The Congress is now, in a new day, set to provide some tax breaks because we are at this point experiencing some budget surpluses. I support tax cuts. They need to be thoughtful and reasonable. They need to be fair to all the American people. But what I worry about is we are told that the Finance Committee is now writing a tax bill. It is now 6:30 in the evening. I understand there are over 120 amendments to that bill that have been filed. They are sitting over in, I believe, 216 of the Hart Building going through amendments. If they do finish tonight, I expect they will work until the wee hours of the morning. We are told--I do not know if this is the case--we are told that at 10 o'clock tomorrow morning the Senate will be confronted with the reconciliation bill, the tax bill that is being written this evening. If that is brought before the full Senate for consideration at 10 o'clock in the morning, I ask who in the Senate, A, has read it; B, knows what is in it; and C, has studied it enough to evaluate what kind of amendments they may or may not offer. The answer to that question--I will answer it myself--is nobody. Not one Member of the Senate will have the foggiest notion of what is in that bill. So bringing that bill up tomorrow at 10 o'clock in the morning will be a disservice to this body and a disservice, in my judgment, to good sound fiscal policy for this country. We are talking, after all, about a proposal that will affect Federal revenues for well over a decade. We are talking about affecting Federal revenues for over 10 years. This tax bill is put together with the prospect that we will always have budget surpluses in our future, something I hope we will have, but there is no guarantee that will be the case. There is still such a thing as a business cycle, and there is still a contraction phase in the business cycle. I worry very much we may not experience the surpluses, and if we put in a very large tax cut that some are proposing to do, the bulk of which, by the way, will go to the largest income earners in the country, if we do that in a way that is thoughtless rather than thoughtful, we will throw this country into very significant trouble. I implore the majority leader and those involved in scheduling not to tell us that the Finance Committee will finish at midnight tonight and, oh, by the way, we will bring that before the Senate at 10 a.m. tomorrow knowing we have not read it, knowing we have not studied it, and knowing we would not have an opportunity to figure out what amendments might be necessary. We will do it and do it under a reconciliation proposal, which is a complete fraud as we know--it was never intended for this purpose--and it will be limited to 20 hours of debate on a bill that is worth trillions of dollars that will affect this country's revenues for the next decade. Is that a thoughtful or a thoughtless way to legislate? My hope is that we can persuade those in charge to understand the best way to do this would be to go through this committee, the Finance Committee, report a bill to the floor, have it printed--God forbid, that should be a radical thought, to have a bill printed--have it on the desks of Members of the Senate, have people study the bill, evaluate what its consequences might be for the country, figure out who gets what, whether it is a fair tax cut, and then come back and debate it after having a couple of days of study and evaluation, offer amendments, and proceed to decide exactly how the Senate wants to work its will on this important issue. I ask the Senator from Nevada, does the Senator from Nevada think if they bring this to the floor at 10 o'clock in the morning that there is anyone in the Senate, save for those who serve on the Finance Committee, who will know what is in that piece of legislation?

Mr. DORGAN. The Senator from Nevada yields, and I appreciate that. I only have this to say. The people of America don't care, I am sure, whether you or I or anyone else has the opportunity to speak as long as we might want to speak on anything. They could not care less. Nobody is going to walk around with a bad attitude because somebody here doesn't have enough time to talk on the floor of the Senate. What is important, if we are going to cut benefits, is who gets the benefit of those tax cuts? I wondered in school whether fractions would ever come in handy. We studied them in the lower grades. Let me give a couple of simple fractions. From a briefing, I understand, over in the Finance Committee right now the chairman's mark--which is going to pass and be brought to the floor and apparently going to be brought here at 10 o'clock in the morning--does the following: The top 1 percent of the American income earners pay about a quarter of the taxes. They are going to get about a third of the tax cuts. Let me say that again because I think it is important. The top 1 percent of the income earners in America pay about a quarter of the taxes, one-fourth of the taxes. But the tax bill that is going to come here at 10 in the morning gives them a third of the tax cuts. I did take fractions. I didn't go way beyond fractions in my little school, but I understand fractions enough to understand that is not fair. Why not take some of that tax cut back, which is above that which should go to the top 1 percent, and give it back to the folks in the rest of the 99 percent and say: If we are going to give taxes back, let's make sure everybody is treated fairly. Wouldn't everybody at every tax bracket like to have a little more back than they pay in? The top 1 percent do. They get it under this bill. As we take a look at all this and ask ourselves are we going to have a chance to dig into this, offer amendments, understand it, make changes, the answer is: If the bill is not written, except that provision, of course, is already in the chairman's mark and we know he has the votes to get that out--if this bill isn't written, they have 120 or so additional amendments they are going to consider this evening. Now we are told they want to bring it to the floor at 10 o'clock in the morning? I just ask the question, not so much on my behalf but on behalf of the American people who are not going to get the benefit of getting a bigger tax cut than the proportion of that which they paid in in taxes, would it be fair to have everybody take a look at this and see if maybe there is not a little better way to cut this pie? There are only so many pieces when you cut these pies up. It seems to me there is kind of this hog-in-the-corn-crib approach to some of these things around here. The same people always get the biggest slice. Did you ever notice that? The same interests always seem to end up with the biggest slice. That is what I fear is going to happen here. It is not that I oppose a tax cut. I do not oppose a tax cut. In fact, I support a tax cut. We have a surplus. Some of that ought to go back to the American people in the form of a tax cut. But it ought to be fair. It ought to be a circumstance where a lot of people who do not have lobbyists walking around this building or haven't been able to afford people to represent their interests, those people, somewhere on the floor of the Senate, ought to have people to dissect this, take it apart and evaluate who is getting a fair piece. Whose slice of this tax cut is appropriate? Whose slice is too large?

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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

Mr. DORGAN. If you remember a couple of years ago, they created a 13th month--sort of the same tactic, perhaps by the same people.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, this amendment is a sense-of-the-Senate amendment calling for the creation of the House-Senate select committee to investigate energy prices. I would like to speak just for a few minutes about the issue. Energy prices, as all Americans understand, have been skyrocketing through price spikes and other devices in recent months. The price of gasoline in many parts of the country is now over $2 a gallon. Some say it is going to go much higher. The price of natural gas has doubled in much of the country over what it was a year ago. Those who, in the first 2 months of this past winter, suffered the coldest 2 months on record discovered that the cost of heating with natural gas put quite a hole in their budget because natural gas prices were doubled at a time when we had a very significant cold spell. Natural gas prices are still much higher than they have been previously. Electricity prices are up. In some parts of the country they are way up. As all of us know, energy is not some option that people have the ability to decide to take or not take. Every morning virtually ever American has a requirement to use energy. So this is not some optional commodity that people can use or not use as they see fit. Some say, the reason for these price spikes is because that is just the market system working. It is not the market system working. The fact is, the market system is broken. In many of these areas, we have had merger after merger of big oil companies, with oil companies getting much larger and, therefore, exhibiting much greater control over markets. We see spot markets developing with a new class of energy traders. It is a very large enterprise where they are able to trade back and forth, often at prices that are not disclosed or not transparent. Let me, for a minute, discuss what is happening on the West Coast as part of this price problem. Two years ago, the cost of power in California was $7 billion. This year it is estimated it will be $70 billion--a tenfold increase. How does all that happen? Well, the price of natural gas moving into plants that produce electricity goes from an unregulated market into a regulated market; it goes from one seller to a trader; then traded on the spot market; and an MCF that cost a certain amount in the morning could be double or triple or quadruple that value in the afternoon because it is in someone else's hands, and now it is being traded again for a second time on the spot market. So those folks in California who are paying dramatically higher prices for electricity are being hurt very badly. Some say that is just the market working. It is not. As I said before, the market is broken. We are supposed to have, in a circumstance where you have markets with great concentration of power, a referee of sorts. In this area of California, power would have been FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. But FERC, for 2 or 3 years, has done its best imitation of a potted plant. It essentially has been unwilling to take any action in any set of circumstances. So we have the opportunity and the possibility--in fact, in my judgment, the very real circumstance--of market manipulation and price manipulation in California and on the West Coast. Gasoline prices, as I indicated, are up, way up. Contrary to the views of the administration, and some others, these price spikes are not due to environmental regulations for reformulated gasoline and more. In fact, reformulated gasoline contributed only 1 to 3 cents of the cost of making gasoline that we witnessed last summer. Even in California, environmental regulations are contributing about 5 to 8 cents of gasoline production costs. A March 2001 Federal Trade Commission investigation shows that individual refiners made deliberate decisions not to modify or expand refining capacity so they could tighten market supply and therefore drive up gasoline prices. For example, the Federal Trade Commission found that three refiners only modified facilities to produce reformulated gasoline for their own branded stations so the independent stations--the mom-and-pop stations--could not get reformulated gasoline. It created a spot market which drove up prices. One company even admitted to withholding supplies of reformulated gasoline at the most critical time to maximize profits. All of this is going on, and the American people suffer because of it. I had once followed a car at an intersection in rural North Dakota one time. It was a 20-year-old car with a broken back bumper that had a bumper sticker that said: We fought the gas war, and gas won. That bumper sticker would fit a lot of cars these days. Senior citizens, with declining income years, have to pay substantially higher energy bills. Farmers, trying to buy anhydrous ammonia these days--80 percent of the cost of which is natural gas--are discovering a horrible price for anhydrous ammonia. In addition to that, the price of the fuel they must put in their tractors in order to do spring's work has been driven up dramatically. Truckers moving across this country back and forth have discovered they hardly make it these days with the price of gasoline and diesel fuel. And manufacturers are struggling with the cost of these increased energy spikes in price. So if the market isn't working, what should happen? I think we should have a select House-Senate committee to investigate energy prices. Let me hasten to say quickly that there are some legitimate reasons we have had some price changes. We have had a tightening of supply in a number of areas. I will explain why. When the price of oil went to $10 a barrel, people stopped looking for oil and natural gas because it was not very productive or was not very rewarding to do so. The price of oil spiked then to $35 a barrel-- from $10 a barrel--and more people were looking for it. So there will be more supply coming on line. There is that element of price spikes. And there is that element of supply and prices. And that is very real. I do not discount that. But you cannot attribute what is happening with energy prices just to that circumstance. We now have larger enterprises. We have bigger economic concentrations in this country that have the ability to control prices and manipulate supply. And this Congress, in my judgment, ought to convene an investigative body to evaluate when and where that is happening. Congress has been very anxious to investigate almost anything in the last 10 years or so. It seems to me it ought to be anxious to investigate, on behalf of the American consumer, what has happened, and why, with respect to the cost of energy in this country. A century ago Teddy Roosevelt carried a big stick and said that Mr. Rockefeller could not control the price of gasoline and took effective steps to make that happen. It is time for us to do a thorough investigation with a select House-Senate committee to investigate energy pricing. I know at 4 o'clock the Presiding Officer is to recognize the Senator from Georgia. Is this an appropriate time to seek the yeas and nays on my amendment?

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, Senator Sessions has asked to be recognized for 2 minutes, I believe to call up an amendment. It would be fine with me if I could be recognized by consent following Senator Sessions' statement.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside so I can call up amendment No. 640.

Mr. DORGAN. I call up the amendment.

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

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, will the Senator from Wisconsin yield for a question? Mr. President, I ask consent to be recognized following the remarks of the Senator from Wisconsin.

Mr. DORGAN. I ask for the yeas and nays on the amendment.

Mr. DORGAN. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Further asking a question, that gross debt, the debt that is owed to the trust funds, the debt that is a debt that represents a liability by Government agencies, is that real debt or is that just a number someplace? We hear people saying: We can have very large tax cuts; that is not a problem; and we are also paying down the debt. I look at this and I see gross debt is increasing by $1.1 trillion. I just heard a statement a few minutes ago by a Senator who said: Here is what we are going to give the taxpayers, referring to tax cuts. Are we also in this budget going to give the taxpayers $1.1 trillion in an increase in gross indebtedness in this country during the 10 years?

Mr. DORGAN. That is correct.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask how much time remains.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I appreciate the answers to the questions I have raised. They are very important questions. I think it suggests that there is false advertising involved here. In the commercial sector, we have the Federal Trade Commission that regulates that kind of thing, but in politics it cannot be regulated. It seems clear to me that you have a $1 trillion increase in gross indebtedness. If anybody comes to the floor of the Senate--and if they would, I would love to spend time with them, and I will be available--to talk about indebtedness and whether the liabilities incurred by Federal agencies and programs that we must meet--whether those are real liabilities--and I think they are--then we have an increase in gross indebtedness by $1.1 trillion in the next 10 years. At the same time, we have people advertising that there is so much money that we need to create a huge tax cut, the bulk of which will go to the top 1 percent of the taxpayers, and that is fine because we are paying down the debt at the same time. That is fundamentally untrue. Gross debt will increase by over a trillion dollars. That is the bottom line. Let's talk about that. I will be here if someone wants to talk about it. Let me talk about this general budget. Here is a budget written in a conference by the majority party, telling the minority party: You are not welcome. See you later. We are going to write this. It is true that you have 50 percent of the membership on the Budget Committee, but you are not welcome as part of the conference. That is the way it was written. The way it was brought to us is kind of a virtual budget, in the sense that it suggests certain things that exist that don't exist. I was thinking about the story about raccoons and something raccoons do that is quite unusual. They apparently have a tendency--and I watched this as a kid--when they get their food, to take it to a stream and begin to wash it meticulously with their hands. They wash it and wash it. But if raccoons find something to eat and there is no water around, they still walk away and pretend there is water, and they do the same actions with their hands, pretending they are washing. Somehow it makes them feel they have done the right thing. We have kind of a pantomime activity in this budget like the raccoons, I guess. We believe if we pantomime it, somehow people will believe it. Let me talk about what this pantomime is about. Education. We have replaced the Elementary and Secondary Education Act on the floor of the Senate--that is what we were debating--with this budget conference report. In the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, we have made commitments as a Senate. We have said we commit ourselves to education. We, by the way, are going to require accountability. We are going to insist on accountability, and we have a whole series of things to do that. We want better schools and we also say, by the way, we are willing to authorize funding to pay for those schools--at least to pay for the improvement of those schools. We know most of the funding for schools comes from State and local governments and school boards. We know that, but we provide some important niche funding. We have said we insist on accountability and we want to improve this country's schools and we commit ourselves to authorizing the funding to do it. Then we bring a budget conference report to the floor of the Senate and say, no; I know we committed ourselves, but we are not going to pay for it. We are going to require these things, but we will not pay for it. Talk about unfunded mandates. I have been around here year after year when we have had people standing on the ceiling talking about unfunded mandates, how awful that is. Well, the fact is, we are, in the underlying bill--the Elementary and Secondary Education Act--going to make certain representations about what we expect of schools and what we are going to do to help them; and then in this budget we say, by the way, we didn't mean that. That was kind of a virtual argument we made. That is kind of the raccoon washing without water--a pantomime. We didn't really mean that. This budget would have been a much better budget had that conference been able to get the best ideas that everyone had to offer. We work better, it seems to me, when we take the ideas from all sides and try to find out what works and what doesn't, who has a good idea and who doesn't, gather all the ideas, make it a competition of ideas. That is not what happened. The reason it didn't happen that way is because we had a mission at the start by the President and majority party--I should say the majority party, Republican Party, which has 50 votes in the Senate. They said: We want a $1.6 trillion tax cut, which got shaved a little bit. We insist on that and we are going to try to make everything else fit in that format. Well, it doesn't fit. They know it; we know it; everybody knows it. In fact, the gross debt is going to go up $1.1 trillion, even as we shortchange schools and give a blank check to defense. Can you imagine a city council doing this? Voters would run them out of town. Can you imagine a family making these choices? It doesn't make any sense. It is the wrong way to do business. It is the wrong result. It is not giving anything to the American taxpayers except a future in which we underfund the most important things that exist in this country's future--educating our children. We underfund a range of areas that are very important to this country, including agriculture, which is critically important to my State. At the same time, we provide substantial room for a very large tax cut, at the very time that our economy is softening, and the tax cut is going to spend surpluses that don't yet exist. It anticipates 10 years of straight surpluses at a time when our economy is beginning to have significant troubles, when yesterday productivity was down for the first time in some long while, and we know and everybody should know that we will not likely have 10 straight years of surpluses. I hope we do. I wish we would. But we may not. If we don't, this $1.1 trillion in increased gross debt in the budget will balloon and grow, and we will find ourselves back in the same circumstance we were in during the late 1980s and early 1990s, with a mushrooming budget deficit strangling the economy of this country and driving up interest rates and causing economic havoc. We worked long and hard to get back to a point where we had a balanced budget. That wasn't easy to do. We ought to have a budget that comes to the floor of this Senate that represents the priorities of a 50/50 Senate and priorities of the American people, and one that doesn't undercut the opportunity for this economy to grow and expand and produce new jobs and new economic opportunity. Now, this budget was not prepared the right way and it didn't come out with the right answer for this country's future. It is a partisan document, produced by people who excluded half of the committee from the room, and then said to us: We are going to be true to the President's mission by bringing a document to the floor of the Senate that you didn't help write on the other side of the aisle because we would not let you. Now we insist that you accept our representations of what it contains. We don't accept that. My colleague, Senator Conrad, describes it very accurately. This issue about added money for education is a mirage, just a myth. I will give you one example. We have a huge energy problem in this country and we have folks cutting research for renewable energy by 40, 50 percent. That is a small example but an important one. It represents all of the wrong priorities. We can do much better than this. I hope we will turn this conference report down and say, look, we have a Budget Committee that has half Democrats, half Republicans. Let's get the best ideas that each has to offer. Politics doesn't have to produce the worst of both. You can get the best of each, and it seems to me that we could go back and do this in a week or 2 and come up with an approach that, yes, has a tax cut--I support a tax cut--but not one that crowds out all other opportunities for investing in matters of importance to the country; one that makes the right investments in education; one that says schools for our children are important and we intend to hold them accountable. But we also do intend to help them and to meet our promises to those kids. We need one that says let's fix our energy problem but not cut back on renewable energy research, for example to contribute to solving our energy problem. We have a whole series of opportunities. We ought not to be wringing our hands and gnashing our teeth and wiping our brow about this. This represents an opportunity. We live in a time and place that is a blessing. We have an opportunity to do the right thing. I fear at this point that if this Senate passes this conference report, it moves this country in the wrong direction. Let's do it over and do it right. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I further ask the Senator, isn't it the case that at the start of this year we heard all of this talk about, ``this is a new day, a new approach; we are all going to work together, have a great deal of bipartisanship; we are not going to do things like we used to do them''? Isn't it the case that when you have a 50/50 Senate and you have a Budget Committee that is 50/50, equal membership on each side, and then you have a conference but only one side is invited to the conference, that that somehow sounds like the old way, sounds like the partisanship we used to see? Would the Senator from North Dakota agree with that?

Mr. DORGAN. I thank Senator Conrad. What I would like to do at the beginning is to ask a few questions and see if I can get some information from Senator Conrad. It is interesting to me, we now have this budget agreement on the floor of the Senate. We have a Senate that is divided 50/50--50 Democrats, 50 Republicans, elected by the American people to come and serve. We have a Budget Committee, and that Budget Committee worked and produced a budget. We had a vote on the floor. Then we had a conference between the Senate and the House. I ask Senator Conrad whether, as the ranking Democrat on the Budget Committee of the Senate, he was part of the conference. Was he, along with the other Democrats, part of the budget conference which produced this conference report?

Mr. DORGAN. Without using all of my time, let me further propound a question on the subject of debt. I have here the conference report, and it says the following with respect to (5), under title I, recommended levels and amounts: (5), public debt, the appropriate levels of public debt are as follows: Fiscal year 2001, $5.660 trillion; 10 years later, $6.720 trillion. It looks to me as if we have gross Federal debt increasing by $1.1 trillion with this conference report. Would that be accurate?

Mr. DORGAN. The reason I ask the question is I think most people would be very surprised by that. They see a Senate that is 50/50, a Budget Committee that has 50 percent of its membership Democrats, 50 percent Republican. Then you go to a conference, and the Democrats are told they are not welcome. The American people would be mighty surprised by that. Let me ask a couple other questions because this is a very important area. I want to try to understand it. I heard the chairman of the Budget Committee talk about this conference report with respect to defense. He said: This is not a blank check with respect to defense. He said: What we have done is we have created a circumstance where whatever number the President would ask us for will be ``subject to appropriation.'' In other words, we don't have the right number in here. Whatever it is the President wants, he is going to get, subject to appropriation. I ask Senator Conrad, is there any other area of this budget that is treated quite that way? For example, have they decided that for education we won't put the right number in, whatever somebody else wants at some point, subject to appropriation? Is there any other area that is treated quite that generously?

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I know others wish to speak today, and I spoke at some length yesterday about this issue. But I want to end by saying the following: All I know about this nominee is what he has said, what he has established as a public record. It is, in my judgment, antithetical to what we ought to aspire to be and what we ought to aspire to see from someone in the position we expect to provide leadership on arms control. He, in fact, in my judgment, will not and cannot because he does not believe in arms control. He does not believe in doing this on the basis of reaching out with others to try to reduce the number of nuclear weapons with treaties and arms control agreements. He does not believe in trying to stop the testing through treaties of nuclear weapons, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. In my judgment, if this Senate sees fit today to vote positively on this nomination, we will have taken a significant step backwards. We will have impeded the efforts of this country to be a world leader in areas that really matter. I hope the Senate will think long and hard about this and decide to tell the President this nomination is not appropriate for the position of Under Secretary of State for Arms Control. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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