Byron Dorgan

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, how much time am I allowed?

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, the Senate will vote this morning on the nomination by President Bush of Mr. John Bolton to be Under Secretary of State for Arms Control. This is a terrible nomination. I indicated yesterday that I don't know Mr. John Bolton. I have not met him. But I have read a great deal about what he said about a number of issues. To nominate Mr. John Bolton to be Under Secretary of State for Arms Control defies logic. Arms control is a very important subject. The question of whether this country is going to assume the responsibility to lead internationally in stopping the spread of nuclear weapons is a very important question. Are we going to be a world leader in stopping the spread of nuclear weapons or not? Are we going to be a leader in trying to make this a safer world? Are we going to be a leader in trying to reduce the number of nuclear weapons that exist in this world? The answer from the President, it seems to me, in sending this nomination to the Senate is no; we don't intend to lead on anything. We intend to do our own thing notwithstanding what anybody else thinks about it, and notwithstanding the consequences with respect to the reduction of additional nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Mr. Bolton has virtually no experience in the field of arms control. He has never served in an arms control position in any form. He is qualified perhaps for the dismantling of the systems of arms control as we know it. But he is not the person we would want consulting on arms control with our allies, and he is not the person we want negotiating treaties. Mr. Bolton has expressed disdain for arms control and those who promote it. Let me give you some examples. We had a debate on the floor of the Senate a year and a half ago on the subject of a comprehensive nuclear test-ban treaty. Our country has already decided to stop testing nuclear weapons. We decided that in the early 1990s. So the question wasn't for us. We had already decided to stop testing nuclear weapons. The question was whether we would join in a treaty with many other countries around the world--a treaty that has something like 150 different signatories. Would we join in that treaty to try to stop others from testing nuclear weapons? Regrettably, the answer by this Senate was no; we don't want to do that. I think it was a terrible mistake. What an awful day for the Senate to say no. We stopped nuclear testing, but we don't want to join in a treaty to try to promote others to stop nuclear testing. What an awful thing for the Senate to do. The Senate has a right to do that. Of course, I think it was an awful mistake. What happened when we turned down the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty? Mr. John Bolton says the supporters of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty are timid and neopacifists. That is the way he described those who support efforts to have an international treaty to stop nuclear testing. Then he states on the issue of treaties and arms control and so on that international law is not really law at all. Quoting him, ``While treaties may be politically or even morally binding, they are not legally obligatory. They are just not law as we apprehend the term.'' That is a statement by Mr. Bolton. He says with respect to our allies who try to put pressure on us to pass the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, that the Canadian Premier is ``moral posturing.'' The Sun calls Mr. Bolton one of ``Tony Blair's strongest critics.'' He says, ``The Europeans can be sure that America's days as a well-bred doormat for EU political and military protections are coming to an end.'' Then he gloated at the end of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty and its defeat, and said the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty is dead. He has been highly critical of the agreed-upon framework under which North Korea pledged to free its nuclear weapons program, and he says the United States suffers no downside if we never normalize relations with North Korea. Certainly South Korea and Japan, our friends, don't agree with him. He thinks the United States should not give Taiwan diplomatic recognition as an independent country, in contradiction of several decades of official American policy. He says we have no vital interest in Kosovo or the rest of the Balkans. Tell that to the Europeans and the U.S. troops whose presence there stopped the genocide and stopped the killing of thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of people. I think the world is going to see, if the Senate confirms this nomination, that Mr. Bolton's appointment is another sign of the President's hard line on these issues, as a unilateral policy to abandon ABM, or to get rid of the ABM Treaty, or ignore it, build a destabilizing national missile defense system, ignore the Kyoto treaty, abandon talks with North Korea, and oppose the international criminal court and the international landmine convention. I think the signal is going to be quite clear if this Senate agrees with this President and puts John Bolton in as Under Secretary for Arms Control. He comes to this position with very little experience, and with an attitude about these issues that is antithetical to the progress that we are making in these areas. I mentioned that we have tens of thousands of nuclear weapons in this world. Russia has somewhere perhaps between 20,000 and 30,000 strategic and theater nuclear weapons. We have tens of thousand of nuclear weapons. There are a handful of other countries that have joined the nuclear club and have access to nuclear weapons. Many other countries want to possess nuclear weapons and are achieving and aspiring to try to get nuclear weapons. Some terrorists want nuclear weapons. The question is, Will our country for our security and the security of the world provide a leadership role in trying to stop the spread of nuclear weapons? Will we be aggressive and vigilant? Will we be world leaders on this issue? Not if we decide to confirm the nomination of John Bolton. He is not someone who believes in arms control. He is not someone who believes in arms reduction. The fact is, we have reduced the number of nuclear weapons not nearly far enough, but we have reduced the number of nuclear weapons in this world through the arms control agreements we have had with the old Soviet Union and now Russia. The fact is, we have sawed the wings off Soviet bombers and long- range bombers. We have dismantled them. We have dismantled their submarines. We have dismantled their nuclear warheads? Why? Because we and the Russians have agreed upon a regimen of reducing nuclear weapons. Are we going to stop all of that? Are we going to make more and more determined efforts to continue it and do even more? In my judgment, we should continue this approach. In my judgment, this leads to a safer world. But we have now this nomination that comes to us today that is very distressful--having an administration put someone in a position whose job it is to deal with the issue of arms control who doesn't believe in arms control, who doesn't believe in treaties, who doesn't believe in a regimen of trying to stop nuclear testing, and believes that treaties and agreements have no legal impact at all and no effect. He believes that we should just go it alone, apparently, notwithstanding what others want or say. We are going to move into a very delicate and very difficult circumstance very soon. In addition to their being tens of thousands of nuclear weapons that now exist in this world and precious little effort to try to reduce them, and turning away from basic arms control agreements, including the ABM Treaty which has been the centerfold in attempts that have resulted in arms reduction--in addition to all of that--apparently we are deciding to build a national missile defense system to protect against a less likely threat: a rogue nation or a terrorist acquiring an ICBM, loading it with a nuclear tip and sending it to this country. They are much more likely to load a pick-up truck with a nuclear bomb and threaten this country. If we build a national missile defense and say it doesn't matter what others do, ignore nuclear arms treaties resulting in larger buildups and more weapons and delivery vehicles by the Russians, the Chinese and others, will we be safer, and will the world be safer with a national missile defense system to protect us against a Russian threat, or against a Chinese threat? The answer is clearly no. My feeling is that we are at a moment in time in this country that is very important. We have reached the moment in this world that is very important. We have seen an explosion of nuclear weapons by Pakistan and India--two countries that don't like each other. They are building nuclear weapons. We have seen circumstances with the Chinese and the Russians and the Europeans, and the others, who are concerned about us going it alone. As a columnist for the Washington Post said: Built to suit our interests and damn the other interests. It doesn't matter what the others think. That, in my judgment, is very troubling, to try to find a way to have world leadership to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and to provide world leadership to reduce the number of nuclear weapons. Mr. President, how much time is remaining?

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I have come to the floor repeatedly in recent years on the issue of violent offenders being released from prison early and in behalf of the people they have murdered while they have been on early release from incarceration for previous violent crimes. I noticed in the last couple of days, once again we had a case--I wanted to certainly give the judges here their due--the case of a fellow named Robert Lee Dyer, reported in the papers. He is from Suitland, MD, arrested almost a year ago, charged with being a principal in the first degree in the shooting death of a man trying to withdraw money from an ATM machine. He was arrested with Antwon Reid, who was charged with murder in the first. Reid plead guilty, and is now serving a life sentence. Mr. Dyer had two bond hearings to determine whether he would be released on bond. The first hearing was before Judge Patrice Lewis. She gave the defense attorney the authority to set up a property bond and come back in 1 week to see if it would be allowed. At the second bond hearing, Judge Thurmond Rhodes set the bond of $75,000. Mr. Robert Lee Dyer was released. So for $75,000, this fellow, who had been involved in a murder crime, allegedly, was released. The State's attorney vehemently opposed releasing him on bond. But Judge Thurman Rhodes nonetheless released him. The trial for that was scheduled to begin May 21 of this year. On May 2 of this year, this Mr. Dyer was arrested for killing Jamel Stephon Zimmerman. Dyer was the alleged shooter. It is said that there is a very strong case against him. A new bond hearing was scheduled for today at 1:15 in front of Judge Robert Heffron. There is something fundamentally wrong when time after time after time people are either released from prison or, in this case, released on bond when we know they are violent. And yet they are released back to the streets to kill again. I have spoken at great length about the case of Bettina Pruckmayer-- and six or eight other cases--a young woman aspiring to begin a new life in Washington, DC; a young attorney, public spirited, working for a nonprofit organization, who pulls up to an ATM machine only to meet Leon Gonzalez Wright to be stabbed over 30 times and killed. Leon Gonzalez Wright had committed murder before, was let out early, picked up for hard drugs while he was let out on probation, and nobody puts him back in jail. Instead, he was walking the streets to kill Bettina Pruckmayer. That and six or eight other cases I have described is going on all across this country. It is good time for good behavior, and release them early. In this case, don't keep them in jail. Let them post $75,000 where they are on America's streets, and the result is innocent men and women are being murdered. There is something wrong with the criminal justice system. I think what we ought to do is describe the differences that exist between those who commit violent crimes and those who commit nonviolent crimes. We ought to have people in this country understand that if they commit a violent crime, they are not going to have good time for good behavior. Whatever the judge says, their sentence is going to be that the jail cell number is going to be their address until the end of their sentence, and no good time off for good behavior. The average sentence served for murder in this country is just over 8 years. The fact is, people are released early for a range of reasons. We know they are violent and they are back on America's streets. A young woman from my State of North Dakota, who I have spoken about previously, was driving along a quiet road, Highway 2, from Williston, ND, to Minot, ND, one afternoon after attending a League of Cities meeting in Williston. She stopped at a rest stop, and she was unlucky enough that afternoon to be confronted at the rest stop by a violent felon from the State of Washington. He had been let out early and should have been in jail. But he wasn't. He slashed her throat. And while she lay there bleeding, people thought she would die. Someone came along that road that day, and it turned out they had a cell phone. The woman in the car knew something about nursing and she saved Julie's life. The fact is, that young woman, while her life was saved, is now going through years and years of therapy to be able to talk normally once again. Her throat was slashed very badly when she was assaulted by this felon. He was chased by the police and he committed suicide some miles down the road. But he should not have been on the roads and highways and should not have been threatening Julie Schultz. Yet he was. It is true of Mr. Robert Lee Dyer, except that if Judge Thurman Rhodes had not let him out on bail he would have been incarcerated. Instead, Jamel Stephon Zimmerman is now dead. I hope this criminal justice system, judges, prosecutors, and I hope finally this Senate and the House will find a way to pass legislation saying we are going to distinguish between those who commit nonviolent crimes and those who commit violent crimes. Everyone should understand this. Commit a violent crime, and you are going to spend your time in jail until the end of your term. You are not going to be released early to commit another violent crime against an innocent bystander. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, the issue before the Senate is the nomination of the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. The proposed nominee is Mr. John Bolton. I don't know John Bolton from a cord of wood, and I have no ill will toward him, but I come to the floor opposing this nomination in the most vigorous way possible. We have a circumstance in this world where there exist somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 to 40,000 nuclear weapons. They exist in relatively few countries. We have a large stockpile of nuclear weapons, Russia has an even larger stockpile of nuclear weapons, and a few other countries are members of the nuclear club. It was demonstrated about a year and a half ago, or so, that both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons. They don't like each other at all. Each tested nuclear weapons underneath the other's chin. One wonders about the wisdom of that. It demonstrated for all of the world the danger of so many nuclear weapons, the proliferation of nuclear weapons. So it is our job, it is incumbent upon us in this country, to be a world leader and to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and to be a world leader in trying to reduce the number of nuclear weapons on this Earth. This is our responsibility. The area of our Government in which leadership is required is that of Under Secretary of State for Arms Control. That is where one would expect to see leadership with respect to arms reductions, arms control talks, and stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons. President Bush nominated John Bolton for the job. He is exactly the wrong nominee. He is exactly the wrong person to put in this position. Again, I do not know him personally. But I know of his thinking and writings and how he has expressed himself in recent years about these subjects. I am going to use some of these expressions, quotes, and articles he has written to demonstrate why I think he should not be confirmed by the Senate. First, he does not have experience in arms control at all. He has never served in an arms control position. He has never been part of negotiating groups involved in arms control talks. He has not even written very much about the arms control subject. But he has expressed disdain for arms control and for those who promote it. I will relate a couple of those statements. He says: America rejects the illusionary protections of unenforceable treaties. With respect to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, the CTBT, that we debated in the Senate and defeated, regrettably, nearly 2 years ago, he says the supporters of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty are ``timid and neo-pacifists.'' Let me explain what the test ban treaty is. We do not test nuclear weapons in this country. We decided and announced 8 or 9 years ago that we were not going to test nuclear weapons, so we suspended nuclear testing. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty has been signed by about 150 countries, it tries to get all of the countries to commit to the position we have already taken: to prohibit nuclear testing; a treaty to stop nuclear testing. This Senate voted against that treaty. It is almost unthinkable. This Senate said no to that treaty. Mr. Bolton says the supporters of that treaty are ``timid and neo- pacifists.'' He, I guess, disagrees. He, I guess, thinks we should not be involved in a treaty with other countries to stop nuclear testing, despite the fact we have already stopped nuclear testing. What value is it for us to decide we will not be part of a treaty that stops others from doing what we have already decided not to do? It makes no sense to me. Mr. Bolton says international law is not really law: Treaties are ``law'' only for U.S. domestic purposes. In their international operation, treaties are simply ``political'' obligations. He says: While treaties may well be politically or even morally binding, they are not legally obligatory. They are just not ``law'' as we apprehend the term. We have been involved in many treaties in this country, most notably and most important to me are the arms control treaties we have negotiated with the old Soviet Union and the arms control treaties we now have with Russia. Mr. Bolton's position is they do not really mean very much; they are just political obligations; they do not mean anything; they have no force and effect in our law. The arms reduction treaties we have negotiated with the old Soviet Union and now Russia have accomplished a great deal, and someone who discards the notion of reaching these kinds of agreements with other countries, in my judgment, is not thinking very clearly about what our obligation ought to be with respect to stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and trying to reduce the number of nuclear weapons on this Earth. Mr. Bolton also expresses rather substantial disdain for the United Nations. He says: The Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories. If it lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference. He says: If I were redoing the Security Council today, I'd have one permanent member because that's the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world [and that member would be] the United States. Kind of an elitist attitude. He has expressed disdain for some of our allies for positions they have taken. He has accused Premier Chretien of Canada of ``moral posturing.'' The Sun, a British newspaper, says Bolton is ``one of Tony Blair's strongest critics.'' He says the proposed European defense force is a ``dagger pointed at NATO's heart.'' He says: Europeans can be sure that America's days as a well-bred doormat for EU political and military pretensions are coming to an end. Mr. Bolton gloated after the vote on the Comprehensive Nuclear Test- Ban Treaty in the Senate: The CTBT is dead. Mr. Bolton has been highly critical of the agreed framework under which North Korea pledged to freeze its nuclear weapons program. He says ``the United States suffers no down side'' if we never normalize relations with North Korea. South Korea and Japan, two friends of our country, certainly do not agree with that. His position that we should give diplomatic recognition to Taiwan contradicts several decades of official American policy. He says we have no vital interests in Kosovo or the rest of the Balkans. He says: The problem with Kosovo now is precisely that we do not have concrete national interests at stake, and we are off on a moral crusade. I think there's more than one moral principle in the world, and one moral principle I think we are ignoring in Kosovo is that the President should commit American forces to battle, and possibly to death, only when there is something that matters to us. The genocide that was occurring in that region was stopped by U.S. intervention. I was as uncomfortable as anyone in this Chamber when we committed troops for that purpose. I understand there is risk. The fact is the genocide was stopped. The killing was stopped and the tens of thousands of people whose lives were saved would not share Mr. Bolton's evaluation of our response to the difficulties in Kosovo. This President sends us Mr. Bolton's nomination at a time when he is proposing we abandon the ABM Treaty. He did not say it quite that way last week, but his previous statements suggest the ABM Treaty is really of no value and that it ought to be abandoned. And make no mistake, this administration is prepared to and on the road to abandoning the ABM Treaty. Its first priority is to build a national missile defense system, wants to abandon the Kyoto treaty, and wants to suspend missile talks with North Korea. It opposes the International Criminal Court and International Landmine Convention. If one listened to President Bush's presentation about a week ago at the National Defense University, one might wonder why he nominated John Bolton. He describes national security policy in moderate terms, talks of consultation and cooperation, and these are concepts that seem totally alien to all the work I have seen expressed by Mr. Bolton in quotes, articles, so on. Last Friday, an article in the Washington Post by the columnist Charles Krauthammer reveals, I think, the real agenda President Bush and also Mr. Bolton aspire to manage. As Mr. Krauthammer puts it, ``the Bush Doctrine abolishes arms control.'' These quotes from Mr. Krauthammer's article are instructive: The new Bush Doctrine holds that, when it comes to designing our nuclear forces, we build to suit. In other words, it does not matter what other countries think. It does not matter what our agreements are. It does not matter what circumstances exist in the rest of the world. It does not matter if what we do ignites a new arms race. What we do ought to suit ourselves, and it does not matter the consequences. Nor does the Bush administration fear an ``arms race.'' If the Russians react to our doctrine by wasting billions building nukes that will only make the rubble bounce, let them. That is saying let us stop this effort to reduce nuclear weapons. Let us build a national missile defense system, and if that ignites a new arms race and we see Russia and China building new offensive weapons, so be it; it does not matter at all. That is, in my judgment, a pretty thoughtless approach. It does matter. Those who want to see the United States be a leader in stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and reducing the number of nuclear weapons through arms control agreements do believe it matters what we do and believe it matters how others react. ``If others doesn't like it, too bad.'' This is a fascinating article by Mr. Krauthammer evaluating the approach of the administration and probably underlines why Mr. Bolton is the nominee. I don't accuse Mr. Bolton of being of bad faith or ill will. He is just wrong on these issues. This country is making a very big mistake by putting someone with his viewpoint over at State as Under Secretary of State for Arms Control. Now I will talk about the effect of some of these policies. I will not speak at great length about national missile defense, but we have a threat chart from the Department of Defense, and about the least likely threat we face is an ICBM with a nuclear warhead from a rogue nation or a terrorist. A far more likely threat is a pickup truck with a nuclear bomb. That is a far more likely threat. The national missile defense being proposed by the President, even if it abrogates and scraps the ABM Treaty, will be kind of a catcher's mitt, put in the sky to catch nuclear missiles that might be fired at us. However, people should understand they are only talking about catching a few missiles because any robust attack could not be defended against by this system. It is designed to defend against someone who will send one, two, three, four, or five missiles. But it will not defend against an accidental nuclear launch by a Russian submarine where they unload all the tubes. It will not defend this country against that. And it puts all our eggs in this basket and ignores the far more likely set of threats. It is far more likely, if we were to be terrorized by a rogue nation or terrorist state or terrorist group, they would find a delivery device as simple as a pickup truck or a rusty car or a small deadly vial of chemical or biological agents placed at a metro station somewhere. It is far more likely that would represent the terrorist threat using a weapon of mass destruction against the American people. Yet we are determined, absolutely determined, to build a system that will probably cost up to $100 billion and be a catcher's mitt only in circumstances where someone would launch a couple of missiles. This country, of course, has thousands of nuclear weapons, and this country would vaporize any terrorist group or any country that launched a nuclear attack against this country. That has always been the case. It is called mutually assured destruction. The new group that has taken power says that is old fashioned, that doesn't work, or, maybe it worked but it won't work in the future because we have new adversaries--presuming the adversaries are willing to attack us and then to be vaporized by a nuclear response from this country. Somehow, it seems to me that taking apart arms control treaties that have resulted in real reductions of nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles is a step in the wrong direction. It seems to me not caring whether what we do unilaterally will ignite a new arms race and have the Russians and Chinese building new, massive offensive weapon systems is not in this country's best interests. Yet that is where we are headed. It is what this administration talks about, and it seems to me to be part and parcel of the type of thing we will see with the John Bolton nomination. Let me talk for a moment about a former majority leader of the Senate, Howard Baker, a Republican leader in the Senate, who has done some interesting work on these issues. A bipartisan task force, led by Howard Baker and Lloyd Cutler, working on these issues, said the following: One of the first national security initiatives of the new President [should] be the formulation of a comprehensive, integrated strategic plan, done in cooperation with the Russian Federation, to secure and/or neutralize in the next eight to ten years all nuclear weapons-usable material located in Russia and to prevent the outflow from Russia of scientific expertise that could be used for nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction. Baker recently told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that: It really boggles my mind that there could be 40,000 nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union, poorly controlled and poorly stored, and that the world isn't in a near state of hysteria about the danger. According to the Baker-Cutler panel's report: In a worse case scenario, a nuclear engineer graduate with a grapefruit-sized lump of highly enriched uranium or an orange-sized lump of plutonium, together with material otherwise readily available in commercial markets, could fashion a nuclear device that would fit in a van like the one the terrorist Yosif parked in the World Trade Center 1993. The explosive effects of such a device would destroy every building in Wall Street financial area and would level lower Manhattan. The most urgent unmet national security threat to the United States today is the danger that weapons of mass destruction or weapons-usable material in Russia could be stolen and sold to terrorists or hostile nation states and used against American troops or citizens at home. The national security benefits to U.S. citizens from securing and/or neutralizing the equivalent of more than 80,000 nuclear weapons and potential nuclear weapons would constitute the highest return on investment in any current U.S. national security and defense program. If we decide, as the President suggests, that we will abrogate the Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Russia, Russia would respond by suspending their programs that Baker and Cutler say are so vital, and respond by increasing military cooperation with China, Iran, and others, and suspend plans to further reduce their own nuclear arsenal. Let me talk about what we have been doing that is successful and why I am so concerned about this nomination. This chart shows what has happened with long-range missile warheads, ICBMs and SS-20s. We have had strategic arms reduction talks that have resulted in a reduction in nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles. The INF and START talks resulted in a reduction of 6,000 warheads from long range missiles. Those 6,000 warheads represented the equivalent of 175,000 Hiroshimas; 175,000 equivalents of a Hiroshima bomb have been dismantled. Thousands still exist. The question is, Is it moving in the right direction to begin talks and arms reduction treaties and agreements with the Soviets and the Russians, now, that reduce nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles? It seems to me that makes a great deal of sense. This Congress, and previous Congresses, have funded the Nunn-Lugar program. We appropriate money in order to have the Russians reduce their nuclear warheads and their delivery vehicles according to the agreements we have with them. Because of Nunn-Lugar nearly 6,000 nuclear warheads are gone, 597 ICBMs are gone, 367 missile silos are gone, 18 ballistic missile submarines are gone, 81 heavy bombers are gone. Here is a picture of a submarine. This is a Typhoon-class Russian submarine. That submarine is now being dismantled by the Nunn-Lugar program. Soon it will not exist anymore. In fact, I have kept in my desk for some while a small container of copper. This is ground-up copper. This copper comes from wiring from a Delta-class ballistic missile submarine, a Russian submarine. I ask consent to demonstrate the two pieces I have as a result of these arms reduction programs.

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, on the John Bolton nomination, I understand that I am to be recognized for an hour.

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to give the final 15 minutes of my hour to Senator Wellstone.

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

Mr. DORGAN. This wiring is ground-up copper wiring from a Russian submarine. We didn't sink that submarine. We weren't at war with Russia. We didn't destroy it. Through our arms reductions program, that submarine is dismantled and now doesn't exist. So I now stand in Washington, DC, holding up ground-up copper wire from a submarine that is now dismantled, a submarine of a former adversary. Does that make sense? A submarine with warheads aimed at American cities now no longer exists. Or, this is a photograph of a Bear Bomber. This is a Russian heavy bomber. This is a piece of a wing strut from a Russian bomber. We didn't shoot down this bomber. I have this piece of wing strut from a bomber in Russia because we sawed the wings off. We helped pay for sawing the wings off and destroying those bombers. Why did they allow them to be destroyed? Because our arms control agreements with Russia required the reduction of both nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles: missiles, submarines, and long-range bombers. So I am able to hold up a part of a wing strut of a Russian bomber in Washington, DC. We didn't have to shoot it down. All we had to do was help buy some saws to saw the wing off and dismantle that plane piece by piece. That bomber that carried nuclear bombs that threatened our country no longer exists. Is that progress? I think it is. So we have what is called the Nunn-Lugar program that we have funded. Despite this success, as I indicated, we have something more than 30,000 to 40,000 nuclear weapons left in the world, the bulk of them in the United States and in Russia. They have a total yield, it is estimated, of somewhere around 6,000 megatons. That is 6 billion tons of TNT. That is the equivalent power of 400,000 Hiroshima-type bombs-- 400,000 Hiroshima bombs. The Hiroshima ``Little Boy'' bomb killed about 100,000 people. It was calculated the ``Little Boy'' bomb dropped on Hiroshima produced casualties 6,500 times more efficiently than the ordinary high- explosive bomb. So the question for us is: Is there more to do in arms control, arms reduction? Is there more to do in stopping the spread of nuclear weapons? Will this country be a leader in those areas? The answer for me, clearly, is yes. Yet today we consider the administration's nomination to be the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, Mr. John Bolton, who has little experience in the area. But more alarming in my judgment, is that the expressions he has made about this subject in recent years suggest that he does not care a whit about arms control. He seems to believe, as this administration does, that arms reductions are not part of a strategy that makes much sense for this country. Treaties, arms control talks, somehow represent a display of weakness, apparently, and that, if we could, we should just decide to go our own way, build national missile defense, not care what others do in reaction to it, and believe it doesn't matter how many nuclear weapons exist in the hands of the Russians, or how many nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles the Chinese might desire to consider in the coming years. It just doesn't matter, they say. I think that is a very serious mistake for this country to believe that. In my judgment, it is a very serious policy mistake. I think if ever there is a case of a fox in a chicken coop it is Mr. Bolton's nomination to be Under Secretary of State for Arms Control. He is the wrong person in the wrong place. Let me conclude as I started. I do not know Mr. Bolton personally, and I do not mean by my presentation to suggest he is not a perfectly good man, perhaps someone who is well educated--bright I am certain. I just feel very strongly, with respect to the consent requirement of the Senate, I want someone in the position of Under Secretary for Arms Control who believes in arms control. I would like someone who believes in a missionary need for this country to provide world leadership in stopping the spread of nuclear weapons. I want someone who has passion about trying to engage with those who have nuclear arms and delivery vehicles in treaties and talks and agreements to reduce the number of nuclear weapons. I do not suggest we do that from a position of weakness. We clearly do it from a position of strength. But those who suggest what happens in the rest of the world is irrelevant and the only thing that is relevant is what happens here are just plain wrong. So I will be voting against Mr. Bolton's nomination. I hope others will do so as well. I hope perhaps with that vote we can send a message from this Senate to this administration that this is not the direction the American people want. This is not the direction the American people expect in terms of trying to reduce the threat of nuclear war, trying to reduce the spread of nuclear weapons, and trying to increase the opportunity to reduce the nuclear weapons that exist. Madam President, I yield the floor. I make a point of order a quorum is not present.

Mr. DORGAN. I ask consent to speak in morning business for 5 minutes.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business for 5 minutes.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a news article by Benjamin Forgey from the Washington Post dated May 5, 2001, about the World War II memorial that is proposed to be built on The Mall between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.

Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I recall when Tom Brokaw wrote his book, ``The Greatest Generation,'' I picked it up in an airport and began reading and marveled once again at the dedication those young men, and some young women, in the 1940s, expressed to this country. They dedicated their lives to beating the fascism and nazism exhibited by Adolf Hitler. They kept the free world free. Many paid for it with the ultimate sacrifice--their lives. It has been proposed for some long while to build a memorial on The Mall of the U.S. Capital to those World War II veterans. That World War II memorial has been in the planning stages forever, and the National Capital Planning Commission is proposing to reverse previous approvals of the memorial and once again delay construction of this memorial. The people who sponsored this memorial have raised more than $100 million from private sources. The site has been dedicated. In addition to dealing with the pending lawsuit by opponents, they must now--these folks who have worked on this for so long--gird themselves to go through the contentious battle one more time. This year, more than 400,000 aging World War II veterans will die. Sixteen million American men--mostly men--and some women, served in uniform during World War II. Of those 16 million, about 5 million are now alive. In 2004, which is the earliest date the World War II memorial could be dedicated if everything proceeded smoothly, about 3.8 million veterans of that was will be left. As the article suggests, do the math. We need to move aggressively to see that the lasting contribution these men and women made for their country is recognized by building that World War II memorial. I have told my colleagues previously, of a discussion I had with a member of the European Parliament about 2 years ago, in which we were discussing some differences between the United States and the Europeans. He stopped me at one point and said, ``Mr. Senator, I want you to understand something about how I feel about your country.'' He said, ``In 1944, I was 14 years old and standing on a street corner in Paris, France, when the U.S. Liberation Army marched into Paris, France, and freed my country from the Nazis.'' He said, ``A young black American soldier reached out his hand and gave that 14-year-old boy an apple. I will go to my grave remembering that moment. We hadn't had much fruit under the nazi occupation for a long while. But I will remember that moment that young soldier handed me an apple.'' He said, ``You should understand what your country means to me, to us, to my country.'' I remember, again, the sacrifice that was made by so many Americans in World War II, the sacrifice made by what Tom Brokaw calls, appropriately, the ``greatest generation.'' It seems to me appropriate that we ask those involved in the planning of this memorial, who are once again trying to evaluate exactly the conditions under which it is built, to allow this to go forward, allow this for the people who have spent the time, planned this memorial, and raised the money to make this happen for the World War II veterans. We owe our veterans that, and we don't owe them further delay. Let's not have further delay. Let's get the memorial built.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I wish to speak for just a moment about the issue of education. We are turning now to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization. This is critically important legislation. The one thing I think it is important for us to say at the start of this debate is that education has worked in this country for a long time. There are some areas in which education has failed American children, but generally speaking, you cannot say that. We live in a country that is blessed with opportunities that most countries have never had. In my judgment, that has happened because we have had a public education system--since before the independence of our country--that said: We are going to allow all young children to be whatever their God-given talent can allow them to be. That is called universal education. Every child coming into this country's school system is allowed to be whatever his or her God-given talent allows. That has really provided remarkable dividends for our country. Think of where we have been and what we have done. It is quite a remarkable record. We survived a civil war. We survived a depression. We beat back the oppression of Naziism. In terms of technology, think of what we have done as a country. Both the spirit of Americans and our education combined have allowed us to split the atom. We have mapped the human genome. We have done so many things. We have spliced genes. We have invented plastics, the silicone chip, radar. We built airplanes and learned to fly them. We built rockets and flew to the Moon. We have cured small pox. We have cured polio. When you think of what we have done in our country--we have created telephones and television and the computers--it is quite remarkable. One could ask the question, it seems to me, how did all of that happen in our country? Why didn't all that happen somewhere in downtown Tegucigalpa? It happened in our country because we have made a lot of the right choices for a long period of time in this country. We have an education system in this country that has produced remarkable thinkers, that has allowed the genius of every young child in this country to become what it can become. Now we are poised in the first year of this new millennium to do even greater things. We come here debating education and trying to respond to the challenge of dealing with school systems that are failing because there are some that are not making the progress they should. But I think it is very important to point out that there are many school systems that are succeeding well beyond anyone's expectations. There are a lot of ways to succeed. Some say, if you make the right investments, you can have good schools that are well repaired, classrooms that are of sufficient size, and enough quality teachers. You can make this education system work well in every part of this country. There used to be a custom of building little red schoolhouses. When everyone thinks of schoolhouses, they think of a picture of the little red schoolhouse. I am told that the little red schoolhouse originated in the Northeastern States, and it originated for a particular reason. Schoolhouses originated as red because red paint was cheaper than any other color. So schoolhouses were painted red, I suppose, because the people at that time wanted to save money on those schools. There are ways to save money on schools, to be sure. But it is not necessarily in the best interests of children if you save money by withdrawing the opportunity for a good, full, and balanced education. My hope is that when we talk about this piece of legislation, we can emphasize the positive in areas where we agree--and there are plenty of them. President Bush has made a proposal that has, in my judgment, a lot of good things in it. He has also presented a proposal that is deficient and leaves out a lot of important things. So what we ought to do is start with this premise: No. 1, much of our education system in this country is working, and working well. Some schools are failing. Reading achievement is up. The National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that during the last decade, reading achievement has significantly improved in all grades tested. Is our reading achievement sufficient? Should it be better? Yes, it ought to be better. But testing shows we are on the right track. Mathematics and science achievement is up. Students are better prepared for college. In the 1990s, the scores on both the SAT and the ACT have climbed steadily. Students are taking tougher courses. Between 1992 and 1997, the number of high school students taking advanced placement courses in all subjects increased by two-thirds. Some will come to this debate--perhaps tomorrow morning--and say: We have this education recession. Woe is us. Our schools are failing. All across America, our schools are failing. I think that is a disservice to our teachers and our schools. The fact is, we have a lot of wonderful teachers in the classroom. They are who we leave our children with every day, all day. I have been in many classrooms, and I think in almost every circumstance I have left that classroom with great admiration for those teachers who are committed, impassioned, and want to do a good job for those students. But I have been in classrooms where teachers could not do a very good job because they had 35 children in the classroom--one teacher trying to keep track of 35 children and trying to provide some kind of individual educational opportunity. It is impossible with 35 children. We know it. You have to reduce class size to be more effective in educating children. I have been in classrooms where the students' desks are an inch apart and where the building is 95 years old and was long ago condemned, where children can't have access to computers or the Internet because they do not have the capability of wiring those classrooms, and where you have 150 students and one water fountain and two bathrooms. I have been in those schools. We know that is not an optimum way to teach children. So we ought to provide some assistance for the renovation of crumbling schools, for the renovation of those schools that are in disrepair. Over half a century ago, those brave soldiers who fought and won the Second World War came back to this country and they fell in love. They got married and had children. They built schools all across this Nation. Those schools are now 50 and 60 years old. Those schools are in disrepair in many cases and need to be modernized. We need to do something to help make sure we remedy that. Education is not some mysterious machine in which we pull some levers and turn some dials and we get it just right. Education has the element of three things, in my judgment, to work well: One, you have to have a teacher who knows how to teach; two, you have to have a student who really wants to learn; and, three, you have to have a parent involved in that student's education. If you do not have all three, it just does not work in almost all cases. We need to do things to try to encourage the retention of good teachers and the development of new teachers. Some States are woefully inadequate when it comes to compensating teachers, and it is a shame. Teachers spend all day with our children. I have children in sixth grade and eighth grade classes today. My children go to public schools, but I want them to go to good schools. Their public schools are good schools. They have wonderful, committed teachers. I want that to be the case in every part of our country. One of the specific interests I have in the bill that we are going to be debating is the issuance of school report cards. I am joining a number of my colleagues--Republicans and Democrats --to work on a school report card that will go to parents, so that parents know which schools are failing and which are succeeding. The fact is, we all get report cards on our kids. We know how our kids are doing in math, in science, civics. We know that because they go to school, they come back home, and then they get a report card every 6 weeks to 9 weeks. And that report card says: Here is how your son or daughter did in mathematics. And it is an A, B, C, D or, God forbid, an F, but it is an assessment of how that child is doing. There is no similar uniform requirement for American parents or taxpayers to get a grade on how well their school is doing. How is my school doing versus a school in the next county or another school in the same city, or how are the schools doing in my State versus school systems in another State. Don't we deserve the opportunity to see how well we are doing? Shouldn't we have an assessment of how well the schools are doing? How about a report card for schools? Some States have report cards, but their contents are wildly diverse. There is no consistency at all, and there is no capability for parents to get a good measurement. School report cards ought to include graduation and retention rates. That has something to do with evaluating whether schools are serving our kids well. Qualifications of teachers, average class size, school safety, parental involvement, those are some of the pieces of information we can give parents and taxpayers to provide them an understanding of what we are getting from this school system of ours. Are we getting what we want from the school system? Are children getting what they need from the school system? Our rural schools face some unique challenges that we need to help them address. Many of my colleagues come from areas where the need to reduce class size is crucial because there are so many children coming into the school system they can't handle them, but many rural schools have the opposite problem. Last week, I mentioned that my hometown is closing its high school. My hometown high school is closing. They had the last high school prom on April 7. When I graduated many years ago, I was in a high school class of nine. Now, of course, there are not enough students in those four grades in that high school to continue the school. Those kids will be going to neighboring towns to high school. They held their last prom and will hold those memories for many years, but the Regent High School will no longer exist. In rural counties, the issue is: how do you pay for a school in which you have nine students in a grade or in some cases two or three students in a grade. That is a separate issue, one we should be concerned about as well. There are many challenges. But in this debate, unlike some others, everyone will come to the floor wanting the same thing. We share exactly the same goal. We want to do well by our children and to have the finest school system in the world. Some will say: You can't throw money at it. I agree with that. But we can't expect to do what we want for our children without being willing to fund some of the needs as well. That is the other side of the coin. Some will say: The way to solve this issue is just to provide vouchers and let parents take their children to private schools if they want to do that. Of course, those who say that went to a school that taught arithmetic that was different than my arithmetic. The numbers just don't add up. If you give someone a $1,500 voucher and that is all, can a student show up at a private school and be welcomed with open arms. Does the private school say: Welcome, we can provide a really good education for $1,500. That just does not happen. Private schools are much more expensive than that. If we are truly going to decide to leave no child behind, how can we possibly suggest that the solution to a bad school is to take the few kids out of that school who are given a voucher and leave all the rest of the kids behind. That is not ``leave no child behind.'' That is just leaving whole schools behind. We can do a lot better than that. The country expects us to do better than that. Some will search for simple answers when, in fact, the answers are not always very simple. This requires our attention. It is time to address this issue. It is time for us to debate, offer amendments, and reach a consensus in the Senate about what direction we want the country to go with respect to the education of our children. I yield the floor. Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, tomorrow President Bush will make a speech on the subject of national missile defense. I want to comment briefly about that. A national missile defense sounds perfectly plausible to a good many people. In fact, we have colleagues in this Chamber who believe very strongly that we ought to begin deploying a national missile defense immediately, despite the fact, of course, that we don't have a national missile defense that works. The last time we did a test of the system was last summer. In that test, we sent up a missile with a target warhead. We knew what the target was, we knew where it was going to be, and we knew when it was going to be there. Despite that, we could not hit it with our interceptor. These are very simple, rudimentary tests, and we have not been able to demonstrate through those tests that we have a national missile defense system that works. Some say: Well, but shouldn't we have a national missile defense system in the event that someone launches missiles at this country? What they need to understand is that the national missile defense program that is being discussed by the administration, and that was discussed by past administrations, is not a national missile defense program that would safeguard this country against, for example, a nuclear missile attack by Russia or China. No. It is in fact a system that is very narrow, which, if it worked, would provide a kind of catcher's mitt against an attack by a rogue nation of one or two or three or four missiles. A rogue nation or a terrorist leader getting access to an ICBM, as improbable as that might be, and wanting to launch that ICBM would confront an American national missile defense program that would be able to go up and catch that missile as it came in and explode it. That is the theory. It has never been an approach that has been advertised to protect us against a more robust attack by just one submarine launching missiles from all of its tubes coming from Russia. It would not defend us against that. So people should understand what is being talked about here. Despite the fact that we don't have a system that works, we have people saying we ought to deploy it immediately. Deploy what? What kind of a system? The last test failed. Ought not we have a system that is demonstrated to have worked before we talk about deploying it? Second, there are other problems. In order to deploy a national missile defense program--some call it Star Wars, and others have other names for it--in order to deploy that with the time of deployment that is envisioned, we would have to violate the ABM Treaty. That ABM Treaty has been the centerpiece of our arms reduction efforts. Our arms reduction efforts with the old Soviet Union and now Russia have been quite successful. We have far fewer nuclear weapons than we used to--far too many, but far fewer than we used to have, and fewer delivery vehicles as well. The centerpiece of those reductions in nuclear arms has been the ABM Treaty. Some say this treaty is obsolete, let's get rid of it. If we do that, we will have, in my judgment, dealt a significant blow to the future of arms reductions. If we get rid of the ABM Treaty, as President Bush suggests and as some of my colleagues suggest, in my judgment, we will retreat back to a situation where Russia and China and other countries will build more offensive weapons even as we try to build this limited national missile defense system. In addition to the issue of the ABM Treaty and the violation of that treaty by building a national missile defense system, we also are encountering vigorous opposition from virtually all of our allies who are very concerned that if we build a new national missile defense program it will ignite a new arms race, especially with Russia and with the Chinese. That is a very real and valid concern. I would like to urge my colleagues and President Bush to try to develop a balanced view of all of this and understand that there are consequences to all of it. We have a range of threats. Yes, let's deal with that range of threats. I happen to support research and development for our national missile defense system. I do not support deployment of a system we have not yet demonstrated to be workable. The threat it is supposed to counter is one of the least likely threats this country faces. By far the most likely threat we face is for a terrorist or a rogue nation to get ahold of a suitcase-size nuclear bomb and put it in the trunk of an old rusty Desoto car and park it on a dock somewhere in New York or Chicago. That is by far a much more likely scenario of a terrorist act. Or instead of a suitcase bomb, perhaps someone will use a deadly vial of chemical or biological agents that can kill millions of people. That is a much more likely scenario--a much more likely weapon of mass destruction to be used by a rogue nation or a terrorist state. We ought to deal with all of those issues. We ought to be concerned about all of them. As a country that is as free and open as this country, we need to be very concerned about terrorism and about rogue nations. But we also need to be concerned about continuing the effort to reduce the number of nuclear weapons. I mentioned that we have done some of that. I would like to ask, by consent, to be able to show a couple of pieces that resulted from the efforts in the Senate. The Nunn-Lugar Program is the program that most people probably won't recognize. It is a program to spend money funding certain activities that reduce the threat to this country. One of those activities is to cut up Russian bombers. This piece in my hand is from a wing strut on a Backfire bomber. This bomber used to fly around carrying nuclear weapons that would have threatened this country. But now this is not a wing strut on a Russian bomber, it is a piece of metal that is in my desk here in the Senate. Do you know how I got this wing strut? No, we didn't shoot this bomber down. The wing was sawed off this bomber as a result of arms control reductions--arms reductions that were negotiated between the United States and the old Soviet Union, and which are continuing to be carried on by us and the Russians. We saw the wings off bombers, we dismantle nuclear submarines, and we take missiles out of their silos, separate them from their warheads. That way we reduce the number of nuclear weapons on their side and our side. It has happened, and it has worked. It is the reason I am able to hold up a piece of a Russian bomber that we didn't shoot down, but we paid money to destroy it. This is ground-up copper from a Russian submarine. We didn't sink that submarine. It was dismantled under terms of an arms control agreement with the Russians. Does it make sense for us to continue agreements by which we reduce the number of nuclear weapons on both sides? You bet it does. Does it make sense for us to say to the Russians: Look, the treaties under which we have reduced nuclear weapons are now no longer very important to us. We are going to violate the ABM Treaty. It doesn't matter what you think of it, we are going to produce a national missile defense system that has not yet been demonstrated to work--at the risk of backing away from the ABM Treaty, and having both Russia and China build more offensive weapons? That does not seem like much of a bargain to me. I hope, as President Bush discusses these issues tomorrow, he will understand that the Nunn-Lugar Program and the arms control agreements that we have had with Russia and the old Soviet Union have worked to reduce the number of nuclear weapons. His appreciation for those facts would be a step in the right direction, in my judgment.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Thank you. I would like to include for the Record a copy of the letter from the North Dakota and New Mexico delegations to Secretary Paige on this matter. I would also like included in the Record a letter from Dr. Jim Shanley, President of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, objecting to the Department's RFP that would open up the Section 117 program to the tribal colleges. Dr. Shanley notes that such an action would likely result in the closing of the doors of the tribally controlled postsecondary vocational institutions. The letters follow: Washington, DC, March 27, 2001. Hon. Rod Paige, Secretary of Education, U.S. Department of Education, Washington, DC. Dear Secretary Paige: We write to express serious concerns about the process used by the Department of Education in issuing the March 23, 2001, Federal Register grant announcement for Section 117 of the Carl Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act. Section 117 is specific to tribally controlled postsecondary vocational institutions, of which there are two: United Tribes Technical College (UTTC) and Crowpoint Institute of Technology (CIT). We understand that the March 23 notice has been withdrawn for technical reasons but that the Department intends to reissue the notice shortly. The March 23 notice makes drastic changes in Section 117 eligibility and uses of funds that are inconsistent with the existing program regulations in 34 CFR Part 410. The eligible applicant pool would be expanded to include tribally-controlled community colleges for the first time and the uses of the funds would be restricted. If put into place, these changes could result in closure of the two institutions that have depended on this funding for their core operations. The Perkins funds support the ongoing operations of UTTC and CIT, just as funding under the Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities Act supports the ongoing operations of tribal colleges. We ask that you not reissue the notice regarding Section 117 but rather engage in a formal rulemaking process. Pending that, the FY 2001 Perkins funds should be issued under the current regulations. We view the March 23 notice as an end-run around the regulatory process; it is, in effect, a set of new regulations without the benefit of any formal process or consultation with the affected parties. The 1998 amendments to the Perkins Act were signed into law on October 31, 1998-- almost two-and-a-half years ago--and no regulations have been issued. Now the Department asserts that the 1998 amendments ``substantially revised'' the tribally controlled postsecondary institutions program and wants to waive the regulatory process on the grounds that there is no time to issue regulations if the awards under Section 117 are to be made in a timely manner. This is disingenuous and certainly not in keeping with the federal government's policy of working with tribes on a government-to-government basis, including consultation with tribes and tribal organizations on policy matters that will affect them. Again, we urge you to direct that the March 23 grant announcement not be reissued but rather use the existing regulations for Tribally Controlled Postsecondary Vocational Institutions for this grant period. If the Department feels that new regulations are warranted for the 1998 Perkins Act Amendments, such regulations should be issued through the Administrative Procedures Act in consultation with the affected tribal parties. We appreciate your attention to this important matter. Sincerely, Kent Conrad, Pete Domenici, Byron L. Dorgan, Jeff Bingaman, U.S. Senate. Earl Pomeroy, Tom Udall, U.S. House of Representatives.

Mr. DORGAN. I would like to inquire of the junior Senator from New Mexico and a member of the HELP Committee, what difference, if any, was made in the eligibility for the Tribally Controlled Postsecondary Vocational Institutions funding in 1998?

Mr. DORGAN

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

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, we will be turning to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization bill soon. I want to speak a bit about the subject of education. This will be an interesting debate and one that is very important for our country. All of us come to the Senate from different backgrounds with different interests. I happen to come from a small town of about 300 people in the southwestern corner of North Dakota, down by the Montana and South Dakota border. I graduated in a high school class of nine. That little high school in Regent, ND, where I went to school, held its last prom this year because the high school is not going to be continuing any longer. In order to have a prom in a school that small, they have to gather a fair number of classes. That is the only way to have a prom in a school that size. I was saddened to read that, because of the challenges facing rural areas of North Dakota, schools are seeing fewer and fewer students coming into the school system. In my State, we had 16 counties that had fewer than 25 births in a year, and in almost all of those counties they have at least two school systems. Divide up those births 5 or 6 years from now and see how many children are going to enter first grade and see what the challenges are for those schools. They are very significant. Despite having gone to a small school, I always felt I got a very good education. It was not a fancy school. It was a school with a library no larger than a coat closet, but we had teachers who cared, and it was a school that provided an awfully good education. Even though all of us have different backgrounds, we also share common goals. All of us want the same thing for our country. We want our country to do well, our children to be well educated, our country's economy to grow and provide expanded opportunities for people. In this debate, we are going to talk a lot about what is wrong with education. That, I guess, is the nature of things in this country. We talk about what is wrong and how we will fix it. We almost never catch our breath to talk about what is right. In fact, when you listen to people talk about what is wrong with education in America, you wonder how on Earth this country became what it has become. Anyone who has done any traveling throughout the world understands there is not any other country like this. Go to Europe, Asia, South America, Africa--just travel and ask yourself: Have I visited a country with the same conditions that exist in the United States? Is there a country quite as free as this, as open as this, with an economy as strong as this, where every young child goes into a school system which allows him or her to become whatever his or her God-given talent allows? That is what our school system provides our children. This is not true in many other countries in the world. By the eighth grade, often other countries have moved kids into different tracks where only selected children have an opportunity for higher education. A lot of countries do that. Our country has said for a long while that we believe in universal education. All children in this country, no matter their background, ought to have the opportunity to be whatever their God-given talents allow them to be. Yet when hearing this debate, one wonders what has allowed this country to be as successful as it has been? This is the country, after all, that has split the atom and spliced genes. We have invented radar and the silicon chip. We have invented plastics. We learned to fly, and then we built airplanes. We flew those airplanes, and then we built rockets. We took those rockets to the Moon and walked on its surface. We cured smallpox and polio. We discovered how to create a telephone and then used it, invented radios, television, computers. One almost wonders how on Earth this happened in a country like this with an education system that some say has totally failed us. The reason all of this has happened is the education system has not failed this country at all. There are some significant challenges and some significant problems in certain areas of our education system, but by and large this education system has been the most productive in the world for a long period of time. If one wants to evaluate where the world-class universities are, by far 80 percent of them are in the United States of America. We house the world-class universities in this country. Let me talk a bit about the status of this country's educational system. Some say we have an educational recession. The President, during his campaign, said that, among others. Yet reading achievement is up in this country. The National Assessment for Educational Progress, called NAEP, says that during the last decade, reading achievement has significantly improved in all grades tested. Are there some challenges in some schools in this country with respect to reading skills? You bet your life there are, and we need to address them. But on the average, reading skills are up. Mathematics and science achievement is up. NAEP scores in mathematics have improved during the past decade, and in science NAEP reports scores have increased significantly for older children in the last decade. Students were better prepared for college throughout the 1990s. Scores on both the SAT and ACT climbed steadily. Mathematics SAT scores are at an all-time high. The average SAT math score increased from 509 in 1992 to 514 in 2000. Verbal SAT scores improved over the same period from 500 to 505. Some say if you compare the SAT scores in the United States to the same scores in other countries, the United States ranks well down the list or that our scores have decreased over time. But those people are not comparing apples and apples. Only the best students in other countries are taking the ACT and SAT, while in our country a majority take them. Thirty years ago, only the top 25 percent of U.S. students would take the SAT tests. Now, perhaps the top 60 or 70 percent of the universe of students take the same tests. Would you perhaps get a lower score on average by taking 70 percent of the universe instead of taking the top 25 percent? Yes. But compare the top 25 percent now to the top 25 percent 30 years ago? What do you find? Higher test scores. You need to compare like comparisons if you are going to make judgments. Our students are taking tougher courses. Between 1992 and 1997, the number of high school students taking advanced placement courses in all subjects increased by two-thirds, from 338,000 to 581,000. It is hard to make the case we are in an educational recession. I have two children in school. They study hard. They do their homework. They do not necessarily enjoy doing that every night, but they do their homework. They are in a good school with great teachers. The fact is that is true in much of this country. There is a very simple formula to determine whether education is going to work, and it is true in every neighborhood in every school in this country. To make education work, we need several things: One, a student who is interested in learning; two, a teacher who knows how to teach; and, three, a parent who is going to be involved in that student's education. When those three elements are present, education works and works well. When they are absent, we have great difficulties. I know from firsthand experience that there are some schools with significant challenges. I visited an inner-city school that had significant challenges. I knew that at the front door. I walked through metal detectors, saw security guards, watched teachers try to deal with a series of problems in the class. Those problems were identical to the problems of the neighborhood surrounding that school: poverty, dysfunctional families, a whole series of issues that those children then brought to that school. Some weeks after I visited that school, I read in the paper there was a shooting at that school. That was a few years ago. Some kid bumped another kid at a water fountain, and the other kid took out a pistol and shot him, despite the fact they had obviously gone through a metal detector as they walked into that school. If schools are not safe places of learning, they are not going to be good places of learning, so we must deal with that issue. We need good teachers, students willing to learn, parents involved in education, and a safe environment in which students can learn. In addition to that, in this debate, we are going to have to understand that we have a responsibility as a country to send children through classroom doors into classrooms of which we can be proud. Children cannot learn in classrooms that are not modern. I have toured schools, especially Indian schools attended by children for whom the Federal Government has a trust responsibility to educate. This is not an option. Yet these Indian schools where desks are 1 inch apart, classes are so crowded you just cringe when you see them pack these kids into those classrooms. These are schools where you cannot hook up a computer because the facilities are so old they do not have the capability of supporting a computer; schools where you would not want to send your child to school because it is in such disrepair. Is that a good safe place in which to learn? The answer clearly is no and we need to do better. We need to deal with the issue of school construction. We built schools all over this country just after the Second World War. The GIs came home, they married, had children, and we built schools all over this country. Many of those schools are now 50 and 60 years old and in desperate disrepair. None is in greater disrepair than the schools on Indian reservations. I talk about that a lot because we have so much to do in those areas. We have a responsibility to deal with these crumbling schools around the country. If we will have a first-class education, it ought to be in a first-rate classroom. Second, we also know from experience and from research that children learn best in classrooms of 15 to 18 students. I have had children of mine in classrooms in mobile trailers, the temporary classrooms with 32 and 34 kids. It doesn't work well. We know that. We know a teacher who is teaching 15 to 18 children has much more time to spend individually with those children and does a much better job. We have a responsibility to try to help and do something about that as well. At the Federal level, we only do niche financing for education. Our schools are financed, by and large, by State and local governments and especially by local school boards. No one is suggesting we change that. But we ought not brag in this country, as some are wont to do, that we don't have any national objectives for our school system. It is not a source of pride, in my judgment, to brag that we do not have or want national standards or objectives for our children to meet upon their graduation. We ought to aspire to meet certain objectives. Of course we ought to have national objectives we aspire to reach. In order to do that, some feel strongly we ought to improve our school buildings. This Congress can provide funding to help local school districts meet their construction and repair needs. We ought to reduce classroom size and provide funding to do that. We ought to do it in this legislation, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization. President Bush is correct when he talks about the need for testing. Many have stood for years on the floor of the Senate saying we need to have some testing. People also need to know what our schools are producing, how our schools are doing. I will offer an amendment dealing with the issue of school report cards. Many States have them. But there are no standards for school report cards and no parent can understand how their school is doing. They know how their child is doing because they get a report card every 6 to 9 weeks. But how is their school doing? Is this school doing a good job of educating that child? How does this school relate or compare to another school? How does our State compare to another State? What are we getting as taxpayers for the investment we are making in these schools? We have a right to know that. We have a right to get report cards on our schools. All parents have that right. All taxpayers have that right. I intend to offer an amendment on that during the consideration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. There is so much to say about education. Let me mention two stories that illustrate the value of education. I toured a refugee camp one day in an area near the border between Guatemala and Honduras. It was some while ago when Honduras was having a lot of terrorism and difficulties. At this refugee camp, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was running a refugee camp and had people living in tents. As I was going around the camp, viewing the conditions, there was a fellow, probably in his mid-sixties, who could not speak English but he knew I was a visitor to the camp. He beckoned to me and wanted me to come with him. I asked the guide from the United Nations what the fellow wanted and the guide said: I think he wants you to go into the tent area. So we did. He reached under his cot for some of his belongings, which is all he had. He had a cot and a couple of belongings stored under a cot in the refugee camp. He reached under the cot and pulled out a book. It was an education reading primer book in Spanish. It was the Spanish version of the ``See Dick Run'' book we would have had in first grade. He was, for the first time in his life, in his mid-sixties, being taught to read. He wanted to show me, a visitor, that he could begin to read. He pulled out the book and began to read in halting Spanish, ``See Dick Run.'' He had a huge smile on his face after he finished the first two lines, looked up at me with only two or three teeth, someone who was living in great difficulty, in a refugee camp, with perhaps not enough to eat, never having had an opportunity for education, and he was so enormously proud of being able to learn. Education, even at the later stage of his life, was so important to him that he wanted to show a visitor he was learning to read. Think of that. The second story is one I have told my colleagues about before, but I will tell it again because it also describes how important education is. It is the story of a woman who was a janitor at a tribal college, cleaning the bathrooms and the hallways of a tribal college. Her husband had left her. She had four children and was over 40, with no means of support except this job as a janitor. She wanted to go to the college somehow so she could earn a degree and find a better job. The day I showed up to give a graduation speech at the tribal college, this woman was a graduate of the college. She had pulled herself up by the proverbial bootstraps and gotten an education and was no longer the janitor of the school. She was wearing a cap and a gown and a huge smile because, despite it all, and through it all, with all the adversity in her life, she had become a college graduate. You could read ``pride'' all over her face. It is something she had done for her own future that no one will ever take away from her. She invested in herself against all the odds. Education means so much to people at every stage: When they are retired, when they are 40, when they are 20, when they are 10. We are talking about the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. There is not much that is more important for this country than to improve this law for America's kids. There is a lot on which we can agree, some we will disagree on in the coming days, but I hope at the end we can look at this bill and say we did something very important for this country's future. I will take the floor later in the debate and offer a couple of amendments I have described. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 15 minutes in morning business.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, today I had the privilege to meet with twelve accomplished students from Century Senior High School in Bismarck, ND, who are in town to compete in the national finals of the ``We the People. . .'' competition. This competition focuses on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and these students have worked hard to reach the national finals. These students are Adrienne Buckman, Nicole Elkin, Jessica Fritz, Nathan Grenz, Gwen Hobert, Chris Holzer, Reed Hushka, Whitney KreingKrairt, Rudie Martinson, Paul Nehring, Grant Neuharth, and Russel Pearson. They are ably led by their teacher, Jeff Aas, who also deserves credit for the success of the class. I am proud of this class and their dedication to this project. The Constitution is not just a historical document; it is the basis for our entire system of government. The brilliance of the Constitution lies in its flexibility which has allowed it to stand the test of time. The Bill of Rights is a fundamental part of our national culture and has been the basis of freedom principles that have been adopted in other countries around the world. The knowledge that these students have gained by studying the Constitution will serve them well for years to come. Congratulations to these outstanding students from my home State.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, last week we were all witnesses to headlines in the newspapers about a meeting held in Quebec City, Canada. The newspaper headlines talked about tear gas, chain link fences, police lines, demonstrators, 30,000 people marching down streets. It also discussed anarchists. What is this all about, 30,000 people demonstrating in the streets of a major city in our hemisphere? It is about international trade. The same sort of thing happened in Seattle a year and a half ago. The future WTO ministerial meeting will be held not in a major city but in a place called Qatar. Why? Because no city wanted to host it, as I understand it. They will have to even bring in cruise ships for hotel rooms. They feel if the ministers of trade from around the world can hold a meeting in an isolated place, no one will show up to protest their closed door meeting. Last week's demonstrations in Quebec City underscored again that world leaders are not going to hold trade talks without attention being paid to the issues concerns of the people and the problems related to global trade. It is not that global trade ought to be stopped. It is that global trade has marched relentlessly forward without the rules of trade keeping pace. There is a relentless accelerated march toward globalization. However our world leaders have not develop acceptable rules, so people demonstrate in the streets. I want to make two points this morning: One, trade is very positive for our country when it occurs in circumstances where it is fair. It makes sense for us to do that which we do best and trade with others who in their comparative advantage are doing what they do best. That makes sense on the world stage. Our country has been a leader in world trade, a leader in expanded trade, and it does make sense to expand our trade opportunities as long as doing so represents the values that this country considers important in the development of our economy and in the development of our international relationships. It is also the case that while all say that expanded trade is good for this country, it is also the case that we ought not allow the international corporations in this world to pole vault over all the issues that relate to labor, the environment and of production simply by saying: We are going to produce in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Bangladesh, or China, and we will ship back into the United States. So what if they hire 12-year-olds and pay them 12 cents an hour, working them 12 hours a day. So what. They would like us to think that is fair trade. It is not fair trade. That is why people are marching in the streets. It is not fair trade when corporations are able to become international citizens and decide to circle the globe in their airplanes and evaluate where they can produce the cheapest, where they can employ kids, where they can dump pollution in the water and the air, where they can have factories without the barriers and problems of making them safe and produce there, create a cheap product and send it to a department store in Pittsburgh or Los Angeles, or Butte, MT. The question is, Is it fair trade when that happens? This country has fought for a century over these issues. All of those fights were agonizing. Many occurred in this Chamber. The fight about whether we ought to be able to employ children, so we have child labor laws saying we don't want you to send 12-year-olds into coal mines. We don't want 12- and 14-year-olds put on a factory floor to work 12 hours a day. We have child labor laws. The question of safe workplace, demanding that those who employ people employ them in safe workplaces that are not going to pose risks to the life and safety of workers. We have fought, and made laws to protect our people. The issue of fair compensation, we have fought for a long while in this country about that issue. We have collective bargaining and the ability of employees to form and join unions. We have minimum wages. We fought about that and continue to fight about that from time to time in this country, but we have settled part of it. Now, some say that doesn't matter; we can go elsewhere. We can produce elsewhere, where people can't join a labor union, they are illegal. We can produce where we can hire a 12-year-old child and pay 16 cents an hour, and we can make a pair of shoes that has an hour and a quarter direct labor, with 20 cents labor costs in a pair of shoes, and ship that to New York City for a department store shelf because we are saying to the American consumer, this is better for you because it is cheaper for you. So people demonstrate in the streets because they say that is not fair trade. That is not what we mean by expanding the opportunities of trade. We have had some experience in this country recently with our trade issues and that is not a pleasant experience. This chart shows what has happened to this country's trade deficit. There has been a great deal of good news on the issue of deficits in this country. The fiscal policy and the budget deficits have diminished year after year, and we now have surpluses. Look what has happened to the trade deficits of this country. In 1993, we had merchandise trade deficits of $132 billion. It is now $449 billion and growing. This trade deficit is mushrooming. If there are people who think it doesn't matter, think again. This is like the runup of dot com companies in the stock market. Everybody thought NASDAQ would continue to increase forever. These values are perfectly understandable. We had people on Wall Street who made a lot of money that were justifying and explaining why the values made sense. They didn't make sense. This doesn't make sense. This ballooning, mushrooming trade deficit will cause serious problems to this country unless it is addressed. This country must repay these trade deficits. With a budget deficit, you can make the case that it is a deficit, you owe it to yourself. You cannot do that with trade deficits. This is a deficit we owe to others. Inevitably, they are repaid with a lower standard of living in this country. That is an action in economics that no one disputes. This is a very serious growing, abiding problem. With whom are our trade deficits? Our trade deficits are with Canada. We passed a U.S.-Canada trade agreement. We had a reasonably small trade deficit with Canada. We quickly doubled it, very quickly doubled our trade deficit with Canada. What an incompetent trade agreement. We ought to haul those negotiators to the well of the Senate to explain to us what they did in public and in secret to undercut this country's interests in the U.S.-Canada agreement. I could talk about some of those issues, but I don't have time today. China, the China trade deficit, the trade deficit we now have with China is an $83 billion merchandise trade deficit, and growing rapidly; the European Union, $55 billion trade deficit, and growing; Japan, $81 billion trade deficit, and growing. And we have had a trade deficit with Japan of $50 billion a year plus now for a long time. Mexico, by the way, prior to the U.S.-Canada and Mexico trade agreement, something called NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement, we had a surplus trade balance with Mexico. We had a surplus. It is now nearly a $25 billion deficit. Talk about colossal incompetence. The trade agreements we have negotiated in recent years have undercut this country's interests in fair trade. In every set of circumstance, our country bows to trade agreements that undercut our workers and our producers all in the name of free trade. Quebec City hosted a big meeting last week. The President went to Quebec City and talked about the desire for expanded trade agreements. He said Congress must give him what is called trade promotion authority. That is just new language for fast track. What the President is saying is: I want fast-track trade authority. To the extent I have the capability of involving myself in this, I will say to the President: You are not going to get fast-track trade authority. We wouldn't give it to President Clinton, and we won't give it to you. Your first job is not to create new trade agreements when every agreement in recent years has undercut this country's interests and resulted in larger and larger trade deficits. Your first job is to fix the problems that have been created in the last decade and a half. Fix these problems, then come to us. Then we can talk about trade promotion authority. Do you want to hear some problems? We have a huge, growing trade deficit with Japan. Do you know what the tariff is on a T-bone steak we send to Tokyo, American beef sent to Japan? There is nearly a 40- percent tariff on every single pound of American beef sent to Japan--40 percent. That would be declared a huge problem if the United States imposed a 40-percent tariff, but we will allow our allies to do that, our trading partners. Why? Because we are poor negotiators and we do not have backbone and we do not have the nerve and we do not have the will to stand up for this country's economic interests. So T-bones to Tokyo are just a small example, just one small example. How about going from T-bones to apples? Try sending apples to Japan. Do you know what Japan will tell apple growers in this country? They say the apples that are shipped in Japan must be shipped from trees in the United States that are separated by at least 500 meters from the other trees in the orchard. Does it sound goofy to you? It does to me. How do they get by with it? They get by with it because we negotiate incompetent agreements, incompetent bilateral agreements with these countries. China? Well, China has a huge and growing trade surplus with us--or we a deficit with them. They ship us their trousers and their shirts and their shoes and their trinkets--they flood our country with their goods. But try to get American wheat into China these days. Ask what China is buying from the United States. See whether our trade agreement with China is fair. Let me just give one example. We just sent negotiators to negotiate with China. When they finished--I will just talk about automobiles for a moment. China has 1.1 billion people. When our negotiators finished, just a year and a half ago, negotiating a bilateral agreement with China, here is what they said: China, it is all right for you, after a rather lengthy phase-in, to impose a 25-percent tariff on any automobiles the United States sends into China. And, by the way, for our part, we will impose a 2.5-percent tariff on any automobiles China would send to the United States. We sent negotiators to sit down with the Chinese to negotiate a bilateral agreement and said what we will agree to, with a country with 1.3 billion people that is going to need a lot of automobiles in the future, we will agree you can impose a 10-times higher tariff on automobiles that we would send to China versus the automobiles they might send to the United States. I would like to find the people who agreed to that on behalf of this country and ask them how do they justify their public service by such incompetence. It makes no sense to me that we engage with other countries on trade and are not hard-nosed and strong negotiators, saying we are all for trade so let's have reciprocal trade policies: We must say you treat us like we treat you, we treat you like you treat us. Let's treat each other fairly. But that is not the way our trade negotiators see it. Every single time they get involved in a negotiation, our farmer, ranchers, and small businesses lose. I talked about having our trade negotiators wear jerseys as they do in the Olympics. At least they could look down and see the initials on the jerseys and see for whom they are working. What is happening with trade with China, Canada, EU, Japan, and Mexico? There is now a merchandise trade deficit of over $450 billion a year, a deficit every single day of goods going into our country that exceeds goods going out, and this $450 billion in accumulated merchandise deficits is part of our account that has to be settled at some point, and it will weaken this country's economic strength when we do it. The question for this administration--and I have asked exactly the same question with the previous administrations--is: Are you going to stand up for this country's economic interests? President Bush went to Canada. He said at the outset that we have to recognize the issues of labor and the environment in trade agreements. Then later in the week he said: Trade agreements must be commercial--commercial interests, and, by the way, what I want is trade promotion authority--which, as I said, is a new term for fast track. For those who do not know what fast-track authority is, it means our negotiators shall go negotiate an agreement with another country, bring it back as a treaty to this Senate, and the provisions under fast track would be we can debate it but cannot amend it; no Senator has the right to offer any amendments at any time under any circumstances. It is fundamentally undemocratic. Had we had the opportunity to offer amendments to NAFTA, we would not be in this situation with Mexico and Canada, just as a example, with respect to our current trade agreement with our neighbors. The big study on Mexico and Canada was by Hufbauer and Schott study, which everybody used. The Chamber of Commerce and all our colleagues used it. They said if we do this trade agreement, we will have 350,000 new jobs in this country. And they said here are the imports and exports between the United States and Mexico that we expect after this agreement. It turns out they said the principal imports from Mexico would be imports of largely unskilled labor. What are the three largest imports from Mexico? The three largest imports are automobiles, automobiles parts, and electronics, all of which come from skilled labor, all of which mean the Hufbauer and Schott study missed its mark. We didn't gain jobs, we lost jobs with that trade agreement and turned a surplus into a fairly large trade deficit. Who is going to be called to account for that? Nobody. Because that is exactly what the international companies wanted. They do not get up in the morning and say the Pledge of Allegiance. They are international entrepreneurs, and they are interested in producing anywhere in the world where they can find the fewest impediments to production and the cheapest place to produce. They don't want to have to worry about the child labor laws, pollution and the standards that countries impose in preventing companies from dumping into the air and water. They don't want to have to worry about worker safety. They don't want to have to worry about fair compensation. They had those fights and lost them in this country, and now they want to go elsewhere and say: We want to be able to ignore that. The people in the streets are saying: Wait a second, there needs to be some basic set of standards. What does it mean when someone ships carpets to this country and the carpets are made by kids, 10- and 12- year-old kids, some of whom have had gunpowder put on their fingertips to have them burned off so they have permanent scarring, so 10- and 12- year-old kids can make carpets and run needles through the carpets, and when they stick the top of their fingers, it doesn't hurt them because they have already been scarred by burning. That is part of the testimony before Congress about child labor. It is happening in this world. Is it fair trade for those carpets to come into our country and be on our store shelves? Would anybody be proud to buy from countries where the circumstances of production are represented by that kind of behavior? The answer is no. What I want to say today is very simple. The example in Quebec City last week is an example that is going to continue. I do not support the anarchists and others who show up for those events to cause trouble, but I understand why protesters come to those events, peaceful protesters--and most of the 30,000 people who showed up were peaceful. I believe we should expand trade. I believe expanded trade is important for this country. But I also believe this country ought to be a world leader, promoting and standing up for the values for which we fought for over a century to protect. Those are the values of dealing thoughtfully with the rules of production dealing with the hiring of children, with safe workplaces, dealing with the environment and controlling the emission of pollutants. If this is, indeed, a global economy and if it matters little where people are producing, then you have to have some assurance, if they are going to close a plant in Toledo or Fargo and move to Guangzhou, they are not going to be able to do that because in Guangzhou they can hire kids and pollute the water and air and not have a safe workplace and produce a cheaper product and represent to the people of the world: We have done it all for you. That is not doing anybody a favor. That is a retreat from the standards for which we fought for a century in this country. People will demonstrate in the streets on trade issues because they want the rules to keep pace with the relentless march of globalization. I want globalization to continue, but I want it done under rules that are fair. Coming from a small State in the northern part of this country, North Dakota, that borders a friendly nation, Canada, I know full well what happens when we are sold out and undercut by our trade negotiators. It happened to us with the trade negotiations with Canada. We sent a trade ambassador to Canada. They negotiated a trade agreement, and they essentially said to family farmers: Your interests are unimportant to us, so we will sell those interests out in order to get concessions for other industries. And we have family farmers going broke in my State because we have an avalanche of unfairly traded durum wheat coming into this country. We produce 80 percent of that in the State of North Dakota. Durum wheat is used to produce semolina flour which makes pasta, so most everyone has eaten semolina which comes from the fields of North Dakota in the form of our pasta. But durum growers were severely undercut. Their interests were severely undercut by our former trade ambassador who not only made a bad agreement but then made a private side deal that he didn't disclose to Congress, and he pulled it right out from under our producers. That is not fair. Neither is it fair that we will negotiate with a country such as Canada that has a monopoly state trading enterprise and that sells their wheat on what is called the Canadian Wheat Board, which would be illegal in this country. They say: We will have a trade arrangement under which we will sell in the U.S. market at practically secret prices and refuse to disclose it to anyone. It is fundamentally unfair trade. We sent people to Canada to say we want to evaluate the prices at which you sell to determine whether you are dumping in the American marketplace. They thumb their noses, saying: We don't intend to show you one piece of paper about what we are doing in United States. To allow that to happen is unfair. It is unfair to farmers, it is unfair to producers, and it is unfair to workers. On a broader level, it is unfair to corporations that are doing business in this country and producing for our marketplace. I hope it is not lost on this administration--I have said the same thing to previous administrations--that they should not hold trade agreements or trade negotiations, or trade conferences for that matter, in cities around the world without, in my judgment, opening the discussion for a lot of people who want to raise questions about what the fair rules are for international trade. Globalization will continue, and should. But it must be attended by rules of fair trade, and people ought to understand that and know that. Second, finally, when we negotiate trade agreements, we ought not to be afraid to stand up for this country's economic interests. It is about time to be a bit hard nosed, and have a backbone that serves to stand up for this country's interests. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, on April 6 my colleagues and I introduced the Medicare and Medicaid Nursing Services Quality Improvement Act of 2001. This legislation is intended to help address a problem currently facing nursing homes in North Dakota and Wisconsin and potentially other nursing homes across the country. We all know that nursing homes nationwide are facing a looming staffing crisis that is expected to worsen as the baby boomers reach retirement. An American Health Care Association report, entitled ``Staffing of Nursing Services in Long Term Care,'' estimates that the need for registered nurses will grow 66 percent between 1991 and 2020 and the number of licensed practical nurses needed will grow by nearly 72 percent over the same time. Likewise, the number of nurse aides who will be necessary is projected to grow by 69 percent. In my State, nursing home administrators have a thousand open nurse aide positions that they have been unable to fill. A number of nursing home administrators in North Dakota have told me that they have had to refuse patients because they do not have adequate staff to care for them. Unfortunately, a problem has arisen in my State that will exacerbate this staffing shortage. By way of background, North Dakota nursing homes have been using trained resident assistants --called feeding assistants in North Dakota,--to help feed nursing home patients. This has been the practice for the last decade with positive results. The data in North Dakota indicates that our nursing home patients experience less weight loss and dehydration than patients nationally, and nursing home officials in North Dakota attribute this to the use of resident assistants. The problem, however, is that the Health Care Financing Administration has told North Dakota and other nursing homes that they can no longer continue to use these trained resident assistants because they lack certification. In North Dakota, this means that hundreds of resident assistants may need to be laid off later this year, even while my State's nursing homes are experiencing difficulty finding certified staff. The bill that I introduced along with Senators Kohl and Conrad would allow North Dakota and Wisconsin to continue using resident assistants for feeding and hydration, while a demonstration project is conducted in our states and others to evaluate what kind of impact the use of these staff has on the quality of feeding and hydration services provided to nursing home patients and on the recruitment and retention of nursing staff. If after the three-year demonstration project, the Secretary of Health and Human Services determines that the use of resident assistants does not result in a reduction in the quality of feeding and hydrating of nursing home residents or in a decrease in the recruitment and retention of nursing staff, other nursing homes around the country would be allowed to use resident assistants to help with feeding and hydration tasks. This legislation includes a number of safeguards designed to protect nursing home patients. For instance, nursing homes are prohibited from using resident assistants to replace existing nursing staff or to count these assistants toward minimum nursing staffing requirements. In addition, resident assistants would have to complete a state-approved training program related to the feeding and hydration tasks they would be performing. Of course, nursing homes would not be able to use resident assistants to administer medication, provide direct medical care, or perform other nursing tasks. I recognize that this bill is not the only answer or the whole answer for addressing the staffing crisis in nursing homes. I want to work with my colleagues in Congress, nursing homes, and advocates for nursing home residents to address this larger issue of the staffing shortage. The staffing shortage in nursing homes is not the only reason for malnutrition and dehydration of patients, but it certainly contributes to the problem. A June, 2000 Commonwealth Fund study estimated that 35 to 85 percent of nursing home patients are malnourished, in part because they do not receive enough assistance from aides while eating because the aides must assist as many as 15 to 20 patients at mealtime. According to a Los Angeles Times article earlier this week, a University of California-San Francisco professor who observed 100 nursing home residents with eating problems found that nursing home workers were often so rushed that they ``shoveled'' food into their patients' mouths, causing choking and coughing. The resident assistants in North Dakota provide compassionate care and often have more time to coax their patients into eating, something that overworked certified nurse aides generally don't have time for. I am convinced that if we reduce the number of staff in North Dakota nursing homes, which is what will happen if long-term care facilities can no longer use resident assistants, then patients in North Dakota will suffer. One resident assistant in North Dakota told me about a patient she feeds who has difficulty holding her head up when she eats. The resident assistant said that when she was on vacation, her patient lost seven pounds. Fortunately, after a few weeks back on the job, the resident assistant got her patient's weight back up to where it needed to be. However, if this resident assistant was forced to leave her post permanently, that weight loss may have been long-term and ultimately life-threatening. I believe the Medicare and Medicaid Nursing Services Quality Improvement Act is a step that Congress can take to address both the staffing shortage and the malnutrition of patients. This is not the only solution and it may not be the best solution, but I hope my colleagues will work with Senator Kohl, Senator Conrad and me to tackle these serious issues confronting long-term care facilities and their patients.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I rise today to pay tribute and restore honor to a Native American who contributed much to the expansion of our Nation and the development of what would later become my home State of North Dakota. After seeing an exhibit at the Library of Congress recently, I became interested in learning more about the Native Americans who are buried in the Congressional Cemetery. Through my research, I came across the name of Scarlet Crow. Scarlet Crow, a member of the Wahpeton Sisseton Sioux Tribe, died in Washington, DC., under mysterious circumstances in 1867, and was buried in the Congressional Cemetery east of Capitol Hill. I learned from further research that Scarlet Crow's death certificate reported his cause of death to be suicide. But the facts reveal a different, more tragic story. In February 1867, Scarlet Crow left a family that included eight children to undertake a long journey from the Dakota Territory to Washington, DC. He was a tribal chief who came here to renegotiate a treaty with the U.S. Government. He was, in fact, one of many Native Americans who came to the Nation's capital in those days to negotiate in good faith, only to discover that the United States continued to mistreat Native Americans by forging agreements the Government subsequently failed to honor. Before his work here was done, tragedy struck. Scarlet Crow was reported missing on February 24th that year. Two weeks later, his body was discovered near the Occoquan Bridge in Northern Virginia several miles outside Washington. At first, his death was reported to be a suicide. But investigators later described evidence that could not support that conclusion. The mystery of what really happened to Scarlet Crow still remains. We do know that criminal investigators pointed out that the cloth Scarlet Crow would have used to hang himself would not have supported a weight of more than 40 pounds. The branch from which he supposedly hung himself would have broken under the weight of a small child, they said. In addition, his blanket was folded neatly by his body, with no signs of a struggle. Despite this evidence, which might suggest that Scarlet Crow was murdered, there is no record that anyone followed up on the investigation. And today, Scarlet Crow's death certificate still lists suicide as the cause of death. There are no records to tell us when and how Scarlet Crow's family learned of his death, or what happened to his family afterward. Records do tell us, however, that he was an honorable and trustworthy man who devoted his efforts to a peaceful life with the settlers who came to tame the great Midwest. He is described in one Government letter as an industrious man who worked to promote agriculture among his fellow Native Americans. And at one time, it was reported that his ``laborious habits had made him a prosperous farmer,'' a prosperity that was later lost during hostilities in 1862. In 1916, Congress voted to provide a headstone for Scarlet Crow's grave, at the request of North Dakota Senator Asle J. Gronna. Since that action nearly a century ago, the memory of Scarlet Crow has been relegated to obscurity. The mysterious circumstances of Mr. Crow's death and the unusual story about his burial in the Congressional Cemetery led me to visit the cemetery recently to locate his tombstone. The cemetery has fallen into some disrepair over the years and it is in some ways a rather forlorn place. Perhaps as we move forward with our planning for this year, Congress can find the resources to restore dignity to our Congressional Cemetery. In the meantime, I urge my colleagues to find time to visit this cemetery. And while there, I hope you will pause a moment in tribute to this dedicated Native American, Scarlet Crow, whose life came to such a tragic and untimely end in our Nation's capital.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I want to congratulate Kari Warberg, a constituent of mine from New Town, ND, who was recently awarded the Regional Working Women's Excellence Award for 2001. Kari's farm-based business, Earthkind, Inc, was determined to have demonstrated the most outstanding entrepreneurial achievement for a woman-owned business in a region that covers eight States. Earthkind, Inc. sells potpourri, candles, air freshener, and other products using plants from her garden. Kari spent five years developing her products, and through self-discipline and perseverance, she has made her business a success. Currently these products are sold in 5,000 stores throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe. She also sells her wares over the Internet. This well-deserved award is a great honor for Kari Warberg, and I applaud her inventive spirit and her hard work. I hope that my colleagues will join me in sending her our congratulations.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. I ask unanimous consent the memorandum be printed in the Record.