Byron Dorgan

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, it has been more than a year since the Columbine tragedy, but still this Republican Congress refuses to act on sensible gun legislation. Since Columbine, thousands of Americans have been killed by gunfire. Until we act, Democrats in the Senate will read the names of some of those who have lost their lives to gun violence in the past year, and we will continue to do so every day that the Senate is in session. In the name of those who died, we will continue this fight. Following are the names of some of the people who were killed by gunfire one year ago today. September 11, 1999: Terry Baines, 21, Houston, TX; Rodrigo Barrera, 23, Chicago, IL; Armida Enriquez-Sotelo, 30, Denver, CO; Kris Frazier, 26, Oakland, CA; Jose Frezzia, 44, Miami, FL; Anthony Harris, 25, Chicago, IL; Camiela Hinds, 36, Nashville, TN; Rendell Hamilton, 23, Detroit, MI; Jose McDuffie, 34, Philadelphia, PA; Joseph Mendoza, 17, Houston, TX; Mickey Peace, Dallas, TX; Maurice Jackson, 24, Oklahoma City, OK; Jose Monge-Rodriguez, 31, Denver, CO; James K. Nelson, 56, Seattle, WA; Hugh Rollins, San Francisco, CA; James Thorne, 46, Philadelphia, PA; Unidentified Male, 25, Newark, NJ; Unidentified Male, Newark, NJ; Unidentified Male, San Francisco, CA; Unidentified Male, 45, York, PA. One of the gun violence victims I mentioned, 56-year-old James Nelson of Seattle, was shot in the chest and killed one year ago today when he went into his kitchen to investigate a noise he heard outside. James was shot through his kitchen window and died on the floor while trying to call for help. Another victim, 30-year-old Armida Enriquez-Sotelo of Denver, was shot and killed one year ago today by her estranged husband during an argument before he turned the gun on himself. Following are other victims of gun violence who died one year ago this weekend. September 9, 2000: Carlos Amador, 33, Dallas, TX; Lionel Glover, 23, Chicago, IL; Annie Goodman, 73, Miami, FL; Marlys Harper, 28, Elkhart, IN; Michael Hooten, 34, Atlanta, GA; Michael L. Murphy, Jr., 19, Chicago, IL; Courtney Smith, 45, Houston, TX; Harold Waytus, 79, St. Louis, MO; Richard Williams, 43, Chicago, IL; Robert Young, 32, Baltimore, MD; Unidentified Male, 16, San Jose, CA. September 10, 2000: Donald Burford, 51, Dallas, TX; Daniel Delarge, 21, Philadelphia, PA; Curly Faulkner, 22, Memphis, TN; Mardio House, 26, Baltimore, MD; Evon Morgan, 48, Dallas, TX; Brian Robinson, 32, New Orleans, LA; Anthony Sanders, 24, Chicago, IL; Gholam Sohelinia, 48, Nashville, TN; Frank Walsh, 41, Philadelphia, PA; Cory L. Ward, 23, Gary, IN; Tavaris Williams, 22, Baltimore, MD; Unidentified Male, 42, Nashville, TN. We cannot sit back and allow such senseless gun violence to continue. The deaths of these people are a reminder to all of us that we need to enact sensible gun legislation now.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Yes, the Senator's understanding is correct. The Center for New Growth and Economic Development will work with Turtle Mountain Community College to develop a curriculum on ``windsmithing'' so that others can learn the trade of wind energy. The Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation is located in the middle of a natural wind tunnel so this is a natural place to develop expertise relating to wind energy.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I would like to commend the chairman and ranking minority member of the Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee for including $43.617 million for Solar and Renewable Energy activities, and to discuss briefly a renewable energy project in my home state of North Dakota. One of the most abundant sources of energy in the Upper Great Plains region is wind. My State of North Dakota ranks first in wind power production potential, and the Department of Energy has said that North Dakota alone could capture enough wind energy to supply 36 percent of the power needs of the lower 48 States. Not only does wind offer a clean and inexpensive form of energy, it also could provide our rural residents with an important source of income. DOE estimates that a 1,000-acre farm could earn as much as $80,000 per year in wind royalties. One wind energy initiative of particular interest to me is being conducted on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation by the Center for New Growth and Economic Development at the Turtle Mountain Community College. I had hoped that the Committee would have designated $1 million for this project, but the Subcommittee's current allocation was not at a level to accommodate funding for new start-up projects in the renewable energy accounts. I recognize that it is difficult to speculate about what the final budget allocation for this bill might allow, but I would ask the chairman and the ranking minority member to consider designating $1 million for this project in conference should additional funds for the programs under the Subcommittee's jurisdiction become available.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, on amendment 4115, rollcall vote 235, I vote ``no.'' My intention was to vote ``aye.'' I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to change my vote which in no way would change the outcome of the vote.

Mr. DORGAN. Will the minority leader yield for a moment? I would like to say I am very interested in the lockbox. I am also interested in making sure there is something in the box before it is locked. We have $1.3 trillion in tax cut proposals around here for surpluses that don't yet exist. So when these are offered, I think some of us would like the opportunity to offer amendments. That is the point the Senator from South Dakota makes, and a very appropriate point.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, yesterday I spoke briefly about the agenda that confronts this Congress in the next 5 weeks. This is literally a sprint to the finish. Much of what we will discuss and debate are the most important issues people worry about and are talking about around the supper table. They talk about the issues that affect them every day: Are our kids going to good schools? Are we proud of the schools we send our kids to? Do I have a good job? Does it provide retirement benefits, insurance, security? Will grandma and grandpa have adequate health care when they have serious health problems? Is our neighborhood a safe one in which to live? Can we afford the prescription drugs that the doctor prescribes and says we need to maintain a healthy lifestyle and to control a disease we may have? All of these things are the things that interest families who discuss what their lives are like these days and how they can be improved. I want to talk about the agenda and the issues with which we have to deal before this Congress adjourns. Before I do, as a way of introducing that, let me tell you about a television story that appeared on KFYR Television in Bismarck, ND, about 2 to 3 weeks ago. KFYR Television News did a piece about my Uncle Harold. My Uncle Harold, from Dickinson, ND, is now 80 years old, and he is a runner. There are not very many 80-year-old runners, so the television news did a story about him. The story showed him running down the street, with the gold medals he has won, and doing various things. Here is the story about my uncle. About 6 or 7 years ago, he and my aunt went to the Prairie Rose Games in Fargo, ND, where they have events for everybody in different age brackets. They decided to enter the bowling event because they bowl. Harold also saw that they had races for people who are 70 and above, so he decided to enter one at about age 71. He had never run before, but he decided to enter three races at the Prairie Rose Games, and he won all three easily. He said, ``You know, I never knew I could run like that.'' So he started running. He went to Minnesota to run, and then to South Dakota, and Arizona. Pretty soon, Uncle Harold started specializing. Now he runs in the 400 meter and 800 meter events. So I have this uncle who just turned 80 running in races all over the country. He now has 45 gold medals. My aunt thinks he has had a stroke. She thinks it is as goofy as the devil that this 80-year-old man is running. Yet he discovered he is the fastest around in his age bracket. He is going to try out for the Senior Olympics and go one more time. He took fifth out of 200-some runners the last time. Now that he is 80 and at the bottom of a new age bracket, he thinks he will get a gold medal in the Olympics. My uncle is a fisherman, so I don't know whether this is true, but he said he runs the 400 meter race in 79 seconds. I run a little as well. One of these days I will figure out whether I can run it in 79 seconds. I should mention one other thing about Uncle Harold. He also golfs, and he is the strangest golfer I have ever golfed with. I went golfing with my uncle a couple of years ago. He takes a bag and only takes four or five clubs. He hits the ball and, because he is always in training for the Senior Olympics, he sprints on a dead run to the ball. It is a strange looking thing to see a guy who was 78 years old at the time hit a ball and go on a dead run to find out where it rested and then hit it again. In the meantime, my wife and I were driving a cart, and this 78- year-old man is sprinting on the golf course. I have since decided I should never drive a cart when golfing with my uncle. The point is, here is this 80-year-old guy jogging 3 miles a day, getting ready to try to qualify to go again to the National Senior Olympics. That is pretty remarkable when you think about it. Thirty years ago, that would not have happened. Usually, when you are 80, you find a chair someplace and relax. But these days people are living longer, healthier lives. My uncle, for example, is training for the Olympics. That is the result of a lot of things: lifestyle changes, nutrition changes, cultural changes, better health care, Medicare. A whole series of things are happening in this country that are pretty remarkable. That really all relates to the agenda that we have in the next 5 weeks in this Congress. Americans are living longer, living better, at a time when we are so blessed in this country. We have an agenda in the Congress that will have an impact on people's lives. Yes, for my uncle, but for everybody's aunts, uncles, brothers, and sisters--the agenda of health care and education and other things that mean so much to people's lives. Let me talk for a minute about what we need to do and why. First of all, one of the advancements that allows people to live longer and healthier lives is the increase in the use of prescription drugs. There are so many illnesses and diseases for which, 35 years ago when Medicare was developed by this Congress, there were no medicines. But now there are miracle drugs, prescription medicines. We have decided that it is important to add a prescription drug benefit to the Medicare program. Why? Because being able to afford the right prescription drugs can allow people to lead healthier lives and treat illnesses and stay out of a hospital, which is horribly expensive. It is, in the long run, a bargain for the American people to say let's have a prescription drug benefit in the Medicare program. Now, some say, well, we cannot afford it. The fact is that it will cost a lot more if we don't have it. People will get sick and go to hospitals and it will cost more. The issue of affordability applies more to senior citizens than to the Government. The reason we need this benefit is that too many senior citizens know they need a medicine, but they can't afford to buy it. A doctor in Dickinson, ND, testified at a hearing I held in Dickinson. He said he prescribed a drug to a senior citizen who had a mastectomy in order to treat her breast cancer. The doctor said to his patient: This is the drug I am going to prescribe for you because it will reduce the chances of a recurrence of your cancer. She said: What does it cost? He told her and she said: Doctor, I can't afford to take that drug. I will just have to take my chances. At every hearing I have held, I have heard testimony from people who say: We go to the back of the grocery store where the pharmacy is first because we have to buy our prescription drugs first; only then, will we know how much money we have left over to buy food. Spending on prescription drugs increased 16 percent last year in this country. Sixteen percent. Some of that is increased utilization and some is increased prices. But too many senior citizens know they need a prescription drug, and they can't afford it. We need to do two things: put on pressure to bring drug prices down and, No. 2, add an affordable, universal, voluntary prescription drug benefit to the Medicare program. Mr. President, with your permission, I want to show a couple of pill bottles. I ask unanimous consent to be allowed to do that.

Mr. DORGAN. I will speak about the prices charged for prescription drugs in this country versus the prices charged elsewhere in the world for the identical medicine. These two bottles are slightly different but they contain the same pill. Both bottles are for a wonderful drug called Zocor, which is used to lower cholesterol in patients. It is a medication that a lot of people use. I commend all those who did the research to create these kind of drugs. But to those who decided the prices that ought to be charged for these medications to various citizens around the world, I don't say good job. Let me describe what has happened. In both bottles are the same pill, in the same dosage, made by the same company, perhaps made in the same manufacturing plant, approved by the FDA. Once the medicine is approved by the FDA, the FDA approves the manufacturing plants, and the company produces the drug for sale. This bottle they sent to Canada. They say to the Canadians: Do you want to buy some Zocor? It will lower your cholesterol. It is $1.82 per tablet. This other bottle they sent to Grand Forks or Minot, ND, or anywhere else in the U.S. To Americans they say: Do you want to buy some Zocor? Well, you will have to pay $3.82 per tablet. $1.82 and $3.82, why the difference? That is something we ought to ask the drug companies. I have taken a group of senior citizens to Canada to a little drugstore in Emerson, Manitoba. I stood in that one-room pharmacy, and I saw the prices charged there. I have seen the prices charged for the same medications in North Dakota. I know the drugstores on Main Streets in North Dakota are not charging higher prices because they want to overcharge. They are simply having to pay the drug companies an inflated price far above that which is charged in Canada, England, Germany, Italy, France, and in virtually every other country in the world because the pharmaceutical manufacturers impose that charge on them. This is not the fault of Main Street drugstores. Again, I ask the question--I have asked this many times--is there anyone in the Senate who wants to stand up and say: Count me in on supporting these prices; I really believe it is fair and right to charge the American consumer $3.82 for the exact same pill for which a Canadian is charged $1.82? Is there one Senator willing to say this? There hasn't been one in the last six weeks that I have asked this question. If there is not any Senator willing to stand up and say this, then will all of them join us to try to change this situation so that the American consumer who needs to purchase prescription drugs receives a fair price? The amendment that we passed in the Senate is now in conference. I am one of the conferees. What we are saying with this legislation is that pharmacists and drug wholesalers have the same right to reimport prescription drugs into this country that the drug companies already have, provided that the imported medications are FDA-approved and made in FDA-approved plants. It is very simple. We need to do that before this session of Congress ends. The prescription drug companies are working overtime, of course, to kill this provision. They say the issue is safety. It is not. It is profits. That is what the issue is--profits, not safety. These are pills made in FDA-approved plants. These are medicines approved by the FDA with a chain of custody that can be traced from the manufacturing plant to the drugstores. There is no safety issue at all. Adding a prescription drug benefit to the Medicare Program and enacting legislation that we passed on the floor with the bipartisan support of Senator Jeffords, Senator Gorton, myself, and many others who have worked on this are two things Congress must do before adjourning this year. The other thing we need to do is pass a Patients' Bill of Rights. I want to talk a few minutes about that today because we have Patients' Bill of Rights legislation that is in conference. What is the Patients' Bill of Rights? This legislation says let's even up the odds a little bit between people who are sick and their insurance companies. Let's even up the odds a little bit. In some cases what has been happening is that a person's medical care has become a function of their insurance company's profit. All too often doctors are not the ones making the decision about what kind of care is provided to a patient. It is an accountant in some insurance office thousands of miles away. Yesterday, I mentioned a young boy in Nevada. I want to mention him again because it seems to me that he illustrates, as with so many others, the problem. A young man named Christopher Roe died October 12 last year. His mother came to a hearing that Senator Reid and I co-chaired in Nevada. He died on October 12, 1999, on his 16th birthday. The official cause of his death was leukemia. But his mother tells us that the real reason he died was that his health care plan denied him the investigational chemotherapy drug that he needed. He needed a shot, a chance, and the bureaucracy of the managed care organization never gave him that chance. They just took forever to get to that point. Christopher Roe died, and Christopher Roe's mother came to our hearing. She held up a large picture of Christopher. She wept as she told us about her son who from his sickbed looked up at her, and said, ``Mom, I just don't understand how they could do this to a kid?'' Good question? Christopher died. Or let me share another example. A woman fell off a cliff in the Shenandoah mountains. She was hauled into an emergency room unconscious with broken bones. She was treated. After a difficult period, she survived, and was then told by her managed care organization that they wouldn't cover her emergency room treatment because she didn't get prior approval. She was hauled in on a gurney unconscious, but the managed care organization said: You did not get prior approval for emergency room treatment. That is the kind of thing that is happening all too often in this country. Or, perhaps a better way to describe it is with the story of Ethan Bedrick, a young boy born with cerebral palsy resulting from a complicated delivery who was told that he had only a 50-percent chance of being able to walk by age 5. The managed care organization denied him the therapy he needed because they said a 50-percent chance of a young boy being able to walk by age 5 was insignificant. They considered it insignificant that a young boy had a 50-percent chance of being able to walk with the right kind of therapy. Is there a reason to question those who are making health care decisions in the sterile offices of managed care organizations 1,000 miles away from where the doctor is seeing the patient and describing the medical treatment that is necessary for the patient's care? Yes. That is why I wanted to make this point. We had a debate on patients' care in the Senate a while back. We lost by one vote, effectively, because there were some Members missing. We may have turned the tide in the Senate based on that vote, in which case the Presiding Officer may very well have broken the tie. But a substitute Patients' Bill of Rights was offered by our colleague, Senator Nickles, when we offered the Patients' Bill of Rights. Dr. Greg Ganske, a Republican Member of the U.S. House, wrote a letter to all of us about that substitute. In fact, the local papers described the substitute that the Senate passed as the Patients' Bill of Rights. It was not a Patients' Bill of Rights. It was a ``patients' bill of goods.'' But the Senate passed it, and the papers wrote exactly what those who supported it had hoped they would: The Senate passed a Patients' Bill of Rights. Dr. Ganske, a Republican Member of Congress, said this Senate legislation virtually eliminates any meaningful remedy for most working Americans and their families against death and injury caused by HMOs. That is not a Democrat speaking. That is a Republican Member of the U.S. House, Dr. Ganske. Let me describe the legal analysis he sent around to every Member of the Senate: . . . The measure would appear to undo State law remedies for medical injuries caused by managed care companies treatment decisions and delays. . . . In the name of patient protection the Senate legislation appears to eliminate virtually any meaningful remedy for most working Americans and their families. . . . A vehicle for protecting managed care companies from various forms of legal liability under current law. Viewed in this light, the congressional passage of the Senate bill would be worse than were Congress to enact no measure at all. I raise this because this is not a Democrat being critical of a Republican proposal. It is a Republican Member of Congress saying that the proposal passed by the Senate was worthless, just worthless. This is not partisan criticism, it is Dr. Ganske, a Republican Member of Congress, saying what the majority of the Senate claimed was a real Patients' Bill of Rights was worthless. Now we could, and should, and I hope will pass a real Patients' Bill of Rights. There is a commercial being run in a northeastern State on behalf of a Member of the Senate who voted for our Patients' Bill of Rights, the Norwood-Dingell Patients' Bill of Rights that was passed on a bipartisan basis by the House. A Member of the Senate who voted for that--a Republican; there were only a very few--is running a commercial paid for by the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee that says this Senator voted for a real Patients' Bill of Rights--meaning ours. It is fascinating to me that we now have a circumstance where the Republican Campaign Committee is saying that the Patients' Bill of Rights we proposed was the ``real one.'' We will have more to say about that and have a more aggressive debate about that in the days ahead. My expectation is that there will be a tie vote when another vote occurs--and it will happen again; we fully intend it to happen again. Fortunately, we will have a Vice President to break that tie. The Patients' Bill of Rights issue is very important. Let me mention a couple of other issues, and then I will conclude. We also have a responsibility to deal with the farm crisis and we have not done so very well. We have a farm bill that doesn't work. The Freedom to Farm bill does not work. It has been a failure since it was enacted in 1996. The promise was: Produce what you want; we will sell it overseas and get rid of the farm program and things will be better off. Since that time, prices have collapsed and family farmers have had an awful time trying to make ends meet. In most cases, they are receiving far less now in real terms than they received during the Great Depression for their product. These are not people who are slothful. These are not people who aren't being productive. They are economic all-stars. They produce in prodigious quantity the food the world needs so desperately. Yet the market says: By the way, your food has no value. While people climb trees to pick leaves to eat in countries around the world where there is not enough food, family farmers driving a 2- ton truck to a country elevator are told by the grain trader: Your food has no value. Something is wrong with that. What really has no value is the current farm program. It doesn't work. It is long past time to fix it. We are within three or four votes of doing that. I encourage help from the other side to give us the votes needed to pass a farm program that provides real assistance for family farmers. While we are on the subject of freedom, those who wrote the Freedom to Farm bill--I didn't, and I voted against it--should understand there is something called the freedom to sell. The freedom to sell means if you want to give family farmers the freedom to produce whatever, let's also give them the freedom to sell their products in markets such as Iran, Iraq, Cuba, North Korea, and others that have been off limits to them because this country has imposed economic sanctions against countries whose behavior we don't like. I am fine with economic sanctions. Slap them with sanctions. But don't ever include food as a part of those sanctions. Using food as a weapon is unbecoming to this country. A country as big and as good and as powerful and as important as this country ought never use food as a weapon. The freedom to sell is a pretty important principle which we ought to care a bit about. There is an amendment that I put in the appropriations bill now in conference, and I know there are a couple of House leaders who are intending to try to kill that as we get to conference. I am hoping with the bipartisan support we received in the Senate that we will prevail on this issue. Finally, one of the other important issues we face as we wrap up this Congress is trying to do something to strengthen the education system in our country. We have the opportunity to do that. It is just that we have all of this bickering back and forth. We have things that we know need to be done. Everybody here understands that if you are in a classroom of 15 people, there is more learning going on than if there is a classroom with 1 teacher and 30 kids. Class size matters. We have proposals to reduce class size which will dramatically improve education. We also understand you cannot learn in schools that are in functional disrepair. No wonder there is disrepair in the schools. They were built 50 or 60 years ago, after World War II, when we had soldiers coming back, having families, and building schools for their children all across the country. Many of these schools are still in use today and are in desperate need of repair and remodeling. If anyone doubts that, take a trip to the Ojibwa school on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation or the Cannon Ball Elementary School, south of Bismarck, ND. Take a look at those schools and ask yourself whether those schools need help. The third grader who walks through the classroom door in the Cannon Ball School ought to be able to expect the same opportunity for a good education as all kids in this country. Yet these children don't have the same opportunity. We know that. Yet legislation to improve and modernize our schools languish in this Senate because some people don't believe it is important, or some people believe they cannot do it because if they did, somebody would declare victory for a public policy that makes sense. Let's declare victory for a little common sense in all of these areas: Education, health care, agriculture. There are so many areas. The agenda in this Congress is the agenda we establish. If we are a Congress of underachievers, that is our fault, not something we blame on anybody else. I wish I were in the majority here, but I am not. The majority establishes a schedule; we don't. I accept that. We have a right, and insist on the right, between now and the 5 weeks when this Congress wraps up its business, to try to bring to the floor of the Senate once again a real Patients' Bill of Rights and have another vote. We have a right to try to push these policies to get them done. We have a right to try to push education policies that we think will enhance and improve education in this country. We have a right to try to push policies that say we want to add a prescription drug benefit to the Medicare program. We have a right to insist that the American consumer pay prices for prescription drugs that are fair--not the highest prices of anyone in the entire world. We have a right to address all of those issues, and we should. There is time. It is just a matter of will. Will the Members of the Senate who do the scheduling, who plan the agenda, exhibit the will to do what is right in the final 5 weeks and pass this kind of legislation? As I said when I started, when people sit down at the dinner table and talk about their lives, they are talking about things that matter to them. All of the things I have talked about are things that matter to them: Are our kids going to good schools? Do grandpa and grandma have the opportunity to get decent health care when they are sick? Are the neighborhoods safe? Do I have a decent job? Does it pay well? Does it have security? All of those are things that are important to the American people. All of those are things they should expect this Congress to address in the coming 5 weeks. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I may speak as in morning business.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, some long while ago I was at a meeting in North Dakota, and I was talking about senior citizen issues and health care, and a range of things, and I used a statistic. I told the senior citizens who were at the meeting that there are two men for every woman over the age of 80 in the United States. And an older fellow rose from his chair and leaned forward on his cane and said to me: Young man, that is one of the most useless statistics I have ever heard. I thought about that for a while. There are a lot of useless statistics used in all kinds of different venues. In this discussion about trade, there will certainly be plenty of statistics used. Perhaps plenty of them will be useless. But I do want to talk about some trade statistics today because we are now debating the motion to proceed to the bill that would make normal trade relations with China permanent. I think there are a lot of wonderful things going on in this country. All of us should count our blessings that we live in a country that is doing so well. The economy is growing, growing rapidly; we have unprecedented economic growth and opportunity. It is a great time. Unemployment is down, way down. Inflation is down, way down. Crime is down. Home ownership is up. You could look at all of the data. Productivity is up, up, way up. All of the data shows that this country is doing very well. All of us need to be thankful for that. But there are some storm clouds on the horizon in one area, and that is in the area of international trade. And we should not ignore them. This is not about Republicans and Democrats. It is about a public policy area this country must address. If we don't address it in a thoughtful way, we will not continue this kind of economic opportunity and growth. Here is a chart that describes what is happening in trade. This is the merchandise trade deficit for this country; that is, the trade in goods. I have not included the trade in services, only the trade in merchandise goods. This is essentially manufacturing. We eliminated the red ink in the budget. The budget deficits are gone. But the trade deficits are going up, way up. This year especially. In June, the monthly merchandise trade deficit increased to $36.8 billion. The deficit for the first half of this year was $216 billion. That means that at the end of this year we will probably have a $430 billion merchandise trade deficit. We are buying from abroad $1.2 billion a day in goods more than we are selling abroad, and that can't continue forever. With whom are these deficits? Well, for the first half of the year 2000, the merchandise deficit that we have with Mexico is nearly $12 billion; with Canada, $22.6 billion and increasing dramatically. With the European Union, it is a dramatic increase from $16 billion for the first half of last year to $26 billion this year. With China, it has increased from $29 billion to $36 billion. These are not yearly figures. These are 6-month figures, January through June. So this is equal to a $72 billion annual trade deficit with the country of China. With Japan, this is almost unforgivable, year after year, forever, we have had these huge budget deficits with Japan. Now they are totaling nearly $80 billion a year. What is happening is wrong. I am not a classic ``protectionist,'' as the press would describe some of those involved in this debate. I believe we need to expand international trade. I believe we ought to be open for competition and be required to compete. But I also believe the trade ought to be fair; the rules of trade ought to be fair. Globalization attends to it some requirement that we have global rules, not only global markets. What is happening here, with Japan and China and, yes, others, is they are selling into our marketplace at a record pace in a whole range of areas, yet we are not able to access opportunities in their marketplace. I wonder how many Americans know what the tariff would be on a pound of U.S. beef that is shipped to Japan today? Do you want to ship a T-bone steak that comes from a ranch in North Dakota to Tokyo? What do you think the tariff would be on a T-bone steak going to Tokyo? I will tell you what it is. It is over 40 percent, a tariff of over 40 percent on American beef going into Japan. That is after we have negotiated an agreement with Japan. That shows the failure of our negotiations. A country that has an $80 billion trade surplus with us is allowed to have a greater than 40-percent tariff on American beef going to them. Obviously, there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we negotiate trade agreements. We recently negotiated a trade agreement with China, a big, old country with 1.2 billion people. One can't help but stand on the Great Wall of China and look at those mountains, at the country, and express wonder at who they are and where they have been, their rich history, and what they will be tomorrow. What an interesting country. But we have a $72 billion merchandise trade deficit with China. We just negotiated an agreement that is a bad agreement. Let's take automobiles as one example: China has 1.2 billion potential drivers, as soon as they all reach driving age, and we want to sell American cars to some of them. So here is what we said when we negotiated the agreement: This is what we will do. You have a $72 billion trade surplus with us, or we have a big deficit with you. So we will negotiate a bilateral agreement with you where we will have a 2.5-percent tariff on any Chinese automobiles you want to send to us, and we will have a 25- percent tariff on any automobiles we send into China. In other words, after the negotiation is done, we will agree that we will accept a tariff imposed by China that is 10 times higher on U.S. automobiles than will be imposed by the United States on vehicles from China. Ask somebody, how on Earth can that happen? Was somebody drinking heavily while they negotiated? How can one possibly agree to something that is that unfair? I could go on and on. It will serve no purpose, except to say that these numbers ought to demonstrate that while things are doing well in this country and while we are blessed with a wonderful economy, these storm clouds with respect to the trade imbalance need to be attended to. We need better trade agreements, and we need more attention to trade agreements that require elements of fair trade between our country and Japan, between us and the Chinese, between us and Europe, and between us and Canada. Last month, The Wall Street Journal had a piece ``Will the Trade Gap Lower the Boom?'' It notes that our trade gap is now about 4.2 percent of our overall economy, and it goes on to say that: A percentage that high would scare the green eyeshades right off the analysts in many industrialized nations. We don't hear a whisper about it--not here, not around the country, very seldom in the press. This is a very unusual story. It also says: But there is a disaster scenario that . . . gets more likely with each breath that fills the trade deficit balloon. . . . On average, the current account gap hits its limit at 4.2 percent of GDP, exactly where the U.S. finds itself today. . . . Confidence in our economy could collapse before the rest of the world is firmly back on its feet. The point is there is something wrong here, and Congress cannot ignore it. That is why Senator Stevens, Senator Byrd, and I created in legislation a trade deficit review commission. It has finished its meetings and is now developing recommendations to policymakers both in the administration and Congress, on how to deal with this issue. I have supported normal trade relations with China in the past. But, the issue for me isn't shall we make it permanent or not. Shall we have NTR with China? Of course, we should. The issue is: Are we going to do something about these deficits? Does anybody think having a $72 billion deficit with China is normal? Is that a normal trade relationship? Of course, it is not. It is abnormal. It is a perversion. How about Japan? Is this a normal trade relationship, having an $80 billion deficit with the country of Japan? That is not normal. It is abnormal. We, as a country, need to understand and say to China and Japan and others, the European Union, that we are all for expanded trade. We have been the leader in expanding trade. But we are also going to be the leader in standing up for our economic interests and demanding that the rules of trade be fair rules. The first 25 years after the Second World War we could compete with anybody around the world with one hand tied behind our back. It was no problem at all. That was when our trade policy was just flat out foreign policy. The second 25 years, we have seen tougher economic competitors. Countries have developed with strong economies. They have become shrewd economic competitors. Every one of these countries have a managed trade economy in which they say: We will not allow what the United States allows. We will not ever allow the kind of run up of a trade deficit that the United States will allow. We do it because we don't pay attention to it. We have this philosophy that somehow it will all right itself at some point in the future. It will not right itself without action by the Congress and the administration to say we are the leaders in free, expanded and fair trade, and we insist the rules of trade be fair. I come to the floor during this discussion about China PNTR to say that there are other elements, in many ways bigger issues, to this trade debate that we must be attentive to and we must do so soon. While there is a lot of good news--and we will hear a great deal of it during the campaigns by Republicans and Democrats, claiming credit for this, that, and the other thing--but I hope we will all claim credit for the responsibility to begin solving these problems. During good times, it seems to me, is the opportunity to look down the road and see where the storm clouds develop and figure out how to respond to them. We must, it seems to me, decide that it is a significant issue and it is in the interest of all citizens in this country that Congress begin to tackle this issue in a way that reduces these trade deficits, continues to expand our trade opportunities, but puts us on a better footing with our trading partners.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, am I recognized for 30 minutes by previous consent in postcloture debate?

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senator from New Jersey be recognized for 10 minutes, following which I will be recognized.

Mr. DORGAN

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

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, my colleague, the Senator from Wyoming, said we have a lot to do. He is certainly correct, we have a lot to do in about a 5-week sprint to the end of this 106th Congress. I think all of us aspired to come to this Chamber because we want to get things done for the American people. We want this country to be successful and to grow and prosper. We want to address real problems. My hope is that we can find ways, between the political aisles, where Republicans and Democrats can agree that there are things that need to be done in this country and that we can do them together. I think that would be a refreshing thing for the American people to see. In the final 5 or 6 weeks of this Congress, we could probably take some advice from the Robert Frost poem, ``Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening,'' where Robert Frost says: The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. We have miles to go before we put this 106th Congress to bed. What are these issues that we must deal with before we finally adjourn this Congress? A Patients' Bill of Rights. We have had so much discussion about the Patients' Bill of Rights in this Congress, and yet the Patients' Bill of Rights languishes in a conference. Month after month after month, nothing gets done. I know people have come to the floor of the Senate and have said: Gee, we are making progress. But I say the difference between this conference committee and a glacier is at least a glacier moves an inch or so every decade. This conference committee is not able to make progress on a Patients' Bill of Rights. It seems to me, in the Senate and the House we must say to this conference: We want to have a real Patients' Bill of Rights brought to the floor of the Senate and the House and passed. I have told stories in relation to this on the floor of the Senate. It is probably useful to recount at least one story again as an example of why we need a Patients' Bill of Rights. A woman fell off a cliff in the Shenandoah mountains. After having fallen off the cliff, she was rendered unconscious, with broken bones, with a concussion. Being unconscious, she was taken by ambulance to an emergency room in a hospital. She was rolled in on a gurney, unconscious. She survived. She had very significant injuries, but she survived. Following that ordeal, she was released from the hospital to be told that her emergency room expenses would not be covered by the managed care organization because she did not have prior approval for emergency room treatment. This is someone who was hauled into the emergency room on a gurney, unconscious. She was in a coma. She was told by the insurance company: You did not have prior approval for emergency room treatment. The Patients' Bill of Rights is very simple. It says: A patient ought to have the right to know all of their medical options for treatment, not just the cheapest. A patient ought to have the right to emergency room treatment when they have an emergency. There are a whole series of rights that patients ought to have when dealing with their managed care organization. There was the woman who cried one day at a hearing that I held with my colleague from Nevada as she held up a picture of her 16-year-old son who had died. She told us that on her son's deathbed he said to her: Mom, how can they do this to a kid like me? Through tears, she held up the picture of her young son who had died who had said: Mom, how can they do this to a kid like me? That situation had forced this kid and his family to fight the insurance company to get the treatment he needed. They failed. He died. This was a kid who was told to fight cancer and fight the insurance company at the same time. That is unfair. That is not a fair fight. You ought not have to fight cancer and your managed care organization to get the treatment you need. That is the point. We need to pass a real Patients' Bill of Rights. We have not done that. There are lots of excuses for it, but we need to get it done. We need to get it done now. We need to add a prescription drug benefit for senior citizens on the Medicare program. We all know that. If we were to write the Medicare program today, there is no question we would have a prescription drug benefit in the program. But 30 years ago, 40 years ago when the Medicare program was created, most of the lifesaving drugs we have today did not exist. They do now. Each senior citizen needs access to those drugs. Last year, the cost of prescription drugs increased 16 percent in this country. All too often the prescription drugs--the miracle drugs-- they need are out of their reach because of their inability to pay for them. We need to add a prescription drug benefit to the Medicare program. We can do that, and should do that. We ought to raise the minimum wage. The folks at the bottom of the economic ladder in this country have not kept up. We need to help them as well. Increasingly, they are women trying to raise families in single-parent households. We need to increase the minimum wage. We should do that. We can do that. We ought to write a new farm bill. Everybody understands the current farm bill has failed. My feeling is, if we have the opportunity--and we should have the opportunity--in this Congress to write a new farm bill, we ought to be able to provide a decent safety net for those out there on America's farms who are struggling to make a living. These issues and others--school modernization, fixing what is wrong in education--all of these things we can do, and should do. We only have 5 or 6 weeks remaining. I hope all of us, in the spirit of bipartisanship, can decide these are the issues, these are the things that are important to the American people, these are the things that will strengthen our country. Yes, we have miles to go before we sleep, but we have the opportunity, in this setting, in this democracy, to make these decisions for the benefit of the American people.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I have spoken many times about the need for an emergency outlet for Devils Lake. An article from the Fargo Forum reaffirms the need to act expediently to build an emergency outlet for Devils Lake before a catastrophic natural spill occurs. Mr. President, I ask that the article be printed in the Record. [From the Fargo Forum, Aug. 22, 2000] USGS Adds Evidence for Outlet A little-noticed report from the U.S. Geological Survey adds more to the vast body of evidence that the Devils Lake, N.D., area is in a wet cycle and will remain in a wet cycle for some time to come. And that means Devils Lake, which rose 25 feet from February 1993 to August 1999, likely will continue to rise. The lake's elevation today is about 1446.3 feet, or slightly down from last year's 130-year high. The lake naturally discharges into Stump Lake to the east at level 1447 feet, and into the Tolna Coulee and Sheyenne River at elevation 1459 feet. Given the USGS conclusions that the wet conditions which have dominated the region since 1977 will continue for at least another decade, it is not unreasonable to assume the lake will rise to the breakout level of 1459 feet. What happens then? USGS research suggests a spill into the Sheyenne River would be catastrophic downstream. A discharge would erode sediments in the natural drainage pathways and dump up to 2 million acre feet of water into the river, or about four times the volume of the 1997 flood at Lisbon, N.D. That incredible flood of water would be in addition to normal flows in the Sheyenne. Opponents of a Devils Lake outlet refuse to recognize the potential of a lake breakout. Like blissful Pollyannas, they don't believe the worst can happen. It can. If wet conditions persist and nothing is done to control the lake's level, it will. USGS also says a properly managed outlet would moderate the effects of a catastrophic natural lake breakout. An outlet might not prevent a natural spill into the Sheyenne, but USGS believes chances of a damaging spill would be reduced. Spill volumes and durations would be reduced, thus reducing downstream damage. An outlet remains the best option for managing the lake's level and protecting downstream interests on the Sheyenne River. The USGS report is the latest evidence supporting an outlet. Flood prevention is better than reacting to a disaster. The permanent flood at Devils Lake has caused more than its share of personal heartache and property damage. As the lake rises--it will--the potential for disaster will rise with it. Building an outlet now at least will put in place a tool to moderate the effects of the rising water.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I take a few moments following this cloture vote to talk about the appropriations bill and a couple of related matters to that bill that are to be brought to the Senate floor. We are completing the last week of the legislative session before the August break. When we come back following the August break, we will have a number of weeks in September and a couple of weeks in October, perhaps, at which time the 106th Congress will be history. We will have an election in early November, something that the late Congressman Claude Pepper, a wonderful public servant, used to call one of the miracles of democracy. He said: Every even numbered year, our Constitution provides that the American people grab the steering wheel and decide in which direction this country moves. He said it was one of the miracles of democracy. Indeed it is. We are headed toward an election. That will affect the Senate schedule. That means it is likely the Senate will complete its work, the Congress will complete its work, in the 106th Congress by the middle of October. As we look to that moment, we have a lot of work to do between now and then. We have appropriations bills to complete. After all that, one of the fundamental responsibilities we have is to provide for the funding of things we do together in government. We build our roads together. It doesn't make sense for each family to build their own road to the supermarket. It is called government. We come together and build a system of roads. We come together to build schools and maintain and operate schools in which the American people can send their children. It doesn't make sense for each and every person to build their own school. So we have roads and schools. Then we hire a police force. We hire folks who will serve in the Armed Forces to defend our liberty and freedom. All of these things we do, and much more, as a part of our governing process. I am proud of much of what we do. Much of what we have accomplished in this country is a result of the ingenuity of people in the private sector, in the market system, competing, the genius of those who are willing to take risks and use ideas to build new products and create new markets; on the other side, in the public sector, the vision that has been exhibited by some who have served this country for many years to do the right things in the public sector, to do together what we should do to provide for our common defense and build our schools, build roads, and do those things that we know also make this a better country. One of the pieces of legislation we are intending to bring to the floor very soon is the Treasury-Postal appropriations subcommittee bill. That is through the full Appropriations Committee in the Senate. It is legislation that will be, I hope, debated next on the Senate floor. The bill is through the full Appropriations Committee and includes funding for a wide range of things we do in this country. One of the larger portions of the bill is the funding for the Customs Service. The Customs Service is a very important element. Given the expanding nature of world trade, with the amount of commerce and goods and services moving in and out of our country and across our borders, the Customs Service provides an ever increasing important service to our country. We fund the Internal Revenue Service which collects the revenue by which we fund most of the government services we have in this country. One of the areas of this legislation is the national youth antidrug media campaign. That campaign in the drug czar's office is now about 3 years old, and the Congress has been working on that diligently, as well. We have a number of issues in this legislation that are very important, that are timely, and that we need to get to the floor of the Senate to debate and try to make some decisions about them. Let me comment for a moment about a couple of issues that no doubt will be brought to the Senate floor on this bill. I will talk about why these issues are important and what I think will happen with these issues. In the House of Representatives, when they wrote the legislation dealing with Treasury and general government in that subcommittee, that legislation included some amendments dealing with the subject of Cuba and the sanctions with respect to food and medicine that exist with respect to Cuba. I want to talk just a bit about that because those provisions are included in the House bill. We will undoubtedly have amendments on that same subject in the Senate bill. There will be a defense of germaneness on those amendments. I will offer one of those amendments. I believe my colleagues Senator Dodd, Senator Roberts, perhaps Senator Baucus, and others will offer similar amendments. I want to describe why this is an important issue and why the Senate should consider these amendments, especially inasmuch as these types of amendments are in the House bill coming over for consideration in conference. There are some bad actors internationally who run governments in a way that is well outside the norm of international behavior. We understand that. Saddam Hussein is one of those leaders. There are others. We have watched the behavior and the activities of countries such as Cuba, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and others, and view with alarm some of the things that are happening. Cuba is a country that is run, with a Communist government, by Fidel Castro. North Korea is a relatively closed society run by a Communist government, a Communist dictator. Iran is a different kind of country, run by a group of folks who seem to operate--at least they have for some while--outside the norms of international behavior, engaged in an attempt to acquire sophisticated missile technology. I suspect they and others on the list would love to acquire nuclear weapons. These are countries that have demonstrated by their behavior, by their actions, that they are operating outside the norms of what we consider acceptable behavior. I am talking now about the international community, the community of nations. So what do we do? What we do is we say to Saddam Hussein: We are going to impose economic sanctions on your country. These sanctions, in the form of either sanctions or an embargo, are an attempt to choke your economy and cause you economic pain. They cause you to understand when you operate outside the norms of international behavior, when you are attempting to acquire nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, and biological weapons with which you can threaten your neighbors, we care about that and we intend to do something about that. We and other countries have imposed sanctions against the country of Iraq. We have had an embargo against the country of Cuba for some 40 years. It is a small country 90 miles off the tip of Florida. We have had an embargo for some 40 years against the country of Cuba, preventing goods from being shipped to Cuba, preventing Cuban goods from coming into our country, essentially trying to shut down their economy with that embargo. We have had similar sanctions against North Korea and Iran. One of the mistakes this country has made--and a very serious mistake--is deciding we will include food and medicine as a part of our economic sanctions. We should not have done that. This country should never have done that. This country is bigger and better than that. We should never use food as a weapon. We produce food in such abundant quality--the best quality food in the world. We have farmers today who are out driving a tractor in some field somewhere, planting a seed and raising crops with great hope they will be able to make a living on their family farm. We produce such wonderful quality food in such abundance, and then we say to countries whose behavior we don't like: By the way, we are going to slap you with economic sanctions. We are going to put our fist around your economic throat, and included in that, we are going to prevent the movement of food in and out of your country. I am all for economic sanctions. There is not any reason to make life better for Saddam Hussein. He ought to pay a price for his behavior. But this country is shortsighted to believe that using food as a weapon is an advancement in public policy for us. It is not. First, it hurts our farmers who are prevented from moving food through the international markets. Second, it takes aim at a dictator and ends up hitting hungry people. That is not the best of what this country has to offer. So we have a very simple proposition--those of us who care about this issue. We say let's stop using food as a weapon; let us, as Americans, decide we shall never use food as a mechanism to try to punish others. We understand that Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro have never missed a meal. They have never missed breakfast, they have never missed dinner, never missed supper. They eat well. When we use food as a weapon, it is only poor people, sick people, and hungry people who pay a price; and of course, our farmers here in America also pay a price. So last year we had a debate about this. My colleague Senator Ashcroft, I, Senators Dodd, Roberts, Baucus--a range of people--have offered amendments. Last year we had a vote, and 70 Senators said: No, we shall not any longer ever use food as a weapon. Let us lift the sanctions on food and medicine; 70 percent of the Senate said let's stop it. I cannot speak for all 70, but I will speak for myself to say it is immoral to have a public policy that uses food as a weapon. It is immoral to punish hungry, sick, and poor people around the world because we are angry at dictators. Seventy percent of the Senate said: Let's stop. Let's change the sanctions. We can continue some of the economic sanctions. We are not making a judgment about using economic sanctions to punish dictators or punish countries whose behavior is outside the international norm. We are saying, however, we should not any longer use food or medicine as a weapon or as part of the sanctions. So 70 percent of the Senate voted. It was on the Senate agricultural appropriations bill, and off we marched to conference. I was one of the conferees. One of the first acts of conference between the House and Senate was my offering an amendment insisting that the Senate retain its position. In other words, we were saying as a group of Senators who were conferees: We insist on our provision, lifting the sanctions on food and medicine. I offered the amendment in the conference. We had a vote of the Senate conferees, and my amendment carried. Therefore, the Senators at this conference with the House Members said: We insist on the provision. We insist on our policy of removing food and medicine as part of our economic sanctions. Guess what. A Member of the House moved that the conference adjourn. We adjourned. It was late one morning, and we never, ever returned to conference. Do you know why? Because the House leaders, the House leadership, did not like that provision and they intended to kill it. They knew they could not kill it with their conferees. If there were a vote on it in the conference, they would lose. If there were a vote on it on the floor of the House, they would lose. So the only way they could win was to hijack that conference, adjourn it, never come back into session, and throw the ingredients of that bill into a broader bill, and we never saw the light of day on our policy. The result is we are back on the floor right now and this country still has in place a policy of using food and medicine as part of our economic sanctions. It is wrong. It is wrong. Following that conference last year, I had the opportunity to go to Cuba. I have traveled some, in various parts of the world, and have seen that what we produce in such abundance, the world needs so desperately. The winds of hunger blow every minute, every hour, and every day all across this world. So many people die of hunger, malnutrition, and hunger-related causes, and so many of them are children--every single day. I went to Cuba. What I saw was a country in collapse. It is a beautiful country with wonderful people. The city of Havana is a beautiful city, but in utter collapse. There are gorgeous buildings designed in the 1940s and 1950s by some of the best architects-- beautiful architecture, in total disrepair. The city is collapsing. The Cuban economy is in collapse. There is no question about that. I visited a hospital, and I saw a young boy lying in a coma. His mother was seated by his bedside holding his hand. This was in an intensive care ward of a Cuban hospital. This young boy in intensive care was not hooked up to any wires. There was no fancy gadgetry, no fancy equipment, no beeping that you hear in intensive care--the beeping of equipment--no, none of that. He was lying on his bed with his mother holding his hand. I asked the doctor, Do you not have equipment with which to monitor this young boy? He had a head injury and was in a coma. He said, Oh, no; they didn't have any of that equipment. They didn't even have any rudimentary equipment with which to make a diagnosis. Intensive care was to lay this boy in a room. They told me they were out of 250 different kinds of medicine in that hospital. My point is this. The Cuban people do not deserve Fidel Castro--that is for sure. They deserve a free and open country, a free and open economy; they deserve the liberties we have and the freedom we have. But 40 years of an embargo, and especially 40 years preventing the movement of food and medicine back and forth, surely makes no sense. It has not hurt Mr. Castro. It has hurt the poor people of Cuba and the hungry people of Cuba. It is time to change that policy. A year ago we tried it. Seventy percent of the Senate voted for it, and it has not happened. This is what we have done this year: I offered an amendment, with Senator Gorton from the State of Washington, on the Agriculture appropriations bill that lifts the sanctions on food and medicine and also let's us do one other thing. It prevents any future President from ever including food and medicine as part of economic sanctions unless they come to the Senate and get a vote and the Senate says: Yes, we ought to do that. We do two things: We lift the sanctions on food and medicine that exist with those countries that are subject to our economic sanctions, and we prevent future Presidents from imposing sanctions and using food as a weapon. That is in the Agriculture appropriations bill which came to the floor of the Senate. The Senate passed that bill. My amendment is in it. We will go to conference. The only way we can lose that issue is if the House leaders hijack it once again. There is a member of the leadership of the House, whom I shall not name, who makes it his cause to derail us. He believes we ought to use food as a weapon, especially with respect to Cuba. He believes we ought not change the policy and will do everything he can to stop us. My colleague in the House who has been working on this passed some legislation that was negotiated with the House leadership, but it turns out the legislation, when one looks at the language, is a step backward, not a step forward. We will go to conference on the Agriculture appropriations bill with my amendment in it, and I say to those who might pay attention to the Senate record from the House side, if the House leaders expect to hijack this once again this year, they are in for a long session because there is a group of us--Republicans and Democrats--who insist this country change its policy. This policy is wrongheaded and it must change. Yes, we have some people in the Senate who are still fighting the cold war. We have people in the Senate--not very many, I admit--but we have a few people in the Senate who do not want this changed, but 70 percent of the Senate want this changed. At some point, if they get a full vote in the House and we have a full vote in the Senate, 70 percent of the Congress will say: Let's change this foolish policy. This policy is not the best of this country. This policy is wrong, and we aim to change it. Now we bring this bill to the floor of the Senate. We had a cloture vote on the motion to proceed today, and the Treasury-Postal bill will come to the floor at some point. As I indicated, in addition to the description of the amendment I offered to the Agriculture appropriations bill on the floor of the Senate dealing with sanctions on Cuba, a couple Members of the House applied some amendments, which were successful, to the Treasury-general government bill which means when our bill comes to the floor of the Senate, it will also attract these amendments. That is fine with me. Having them in two places is better than having them in one place. Perhaps one conference will be successful in changing this policy. My colleagues in the House added a piece of legislation, for example, dealing with travel in Cuba saying that no funds will be used to enforce the restrictions on travel to Cuba. I prefer to do it a different way. Who is going to believe it makes sense to travel to Cuba if it is still illegal but they just will not enforce it? If we change travel, let's change travel. Let's not say you shall not enforce something that remains illegal. Let's say the travel restrictions are lifted. Period. End of story. I hope my colleague who intends to offer that amendment in the Senate will consider doing that. We have other amendments as well, and I intend to offer an amendment dealing with food and medicine sanctions on Cuba on the Treasury-Postal bill when it is brought to the floor of the Senate. There is another issue I wish to talk about briefly that relates in some measure to this bill, but especially to the issue of the Customs Service and our borders and the issue of international trade. I am going to talk in a bit about our trade problem because we have the largest trade deficit in the history of humankind. There is a lot right with this country. There is a lot going on to give us reason to say thanks and hosanna. We have a wonderful economy. It is producing new jobs and new opportunity. All of the indices are right: unemployment is down; home ownership is up; inflation is way down. All the things one expects to happen in a good economy have been happening. Some parts of the country are left behind, such as rural areas. We have a farm program that is a debacle, and we cannot get anybody to even hold a hearing to change the farm program, but that is another story. There are some areas that have not kept pace with the prosperity. We need to continue to fight to write a better farm program and make sure those rural areas share in the full economic prosperity of America. There is a lot right in this country. This is a good economy. It is producing unprecedented opportunities. The one set of storm clouds above the horizon, however, is in international trade. We have a huge trade deficit. Our merchandise trade deficit was nearly $350 billion in 1999, and is projected to exceed $400 billion this year. Put another way: We are buying $1 billion more in goods from overseas than we are selling each and every day, 7 days a week. Some say: Does that matter? Is it important? Gee, our economy is doing well. How on Earth can you make the case we should care about this? You can live in a suburb someplace and have a wonderful home with a huge Cadillac in the driveway and have all the evidence of affluence, but if it is all borrowed, you are in trouble. On the borrowing side, we have made a lot of progress dealing with Federal budget deficits. In fact, we have eliminated the Federal budget deficits, and good for us, but the deficits on the trade side have continued to mushroom, and we must get a handle on that as well and deal with our trade imbalance. What causes the trade imbalance, and what relevance does it have to this bill? In this bill, we fund the Customs Service, and the Customs Service evaluates what comes in, what goes out, and they try to assist in the flow of goods moving back and forth across our borders. The fact is, they have an old, antiquated computer system to take care of all of that and it is melting down. With expanded trade coming in and going out, we need a new system. The Customs Service has proposed a new system to accommodate and facilitate their needs. We need to fund it. It is very important we fund this system. It is called the Automated Commercial Environment or ACE system. We need to keep it operational, and we need to build it and make it work. In 1 day, the Customs Service processes $8.8 billion in exports and imports. They have to keep track of it all: $8.8 billion in daily exports and imports; and 1.3 million passengers and 350,000 vehicles moving back and forth across our borders. Think of that. This is the agency that has the responsibility of keeping track of all of it--whose vehicle, when did it come in, when did it go out, who is coming in, who is leaving our country, what are the goods coming in, what kind of tariffs exists on those goods, who is sending them, who is receiving them. All of that is part of what we have to keep track of in terms of movement across our border. The current system that keeps track of all of that is nearly two decades old, and running at near capacity. It is the single most important resource in collecting duties and enforcing Customs laws and regulations. This system has been experiencing brownouts over the past months that have brought the Customs operation at these border ports, in some cases, to a dead halt. Over 40 percent of the Customs stations are using work stations that are unreliable, are obsolete operating systems, and are no longer supported by a vendor. Trade volume has doubled in 10 years. The rate of growth in trade is astronomical. The Customs Service anticipates an increase of over 50 percent in the number of entries by 2005. That means the current system just can't and will not handle it. So we have a responsibility to do something about that. If anybody wonders whether all this trade is important, and keeping track of it is important, as I said, look at the trade deficit and look at what is happening in this country. From the standpoint of policy--I was talking about the system that keeps track of it--but from the standpoint of policy, we also have to make significant changes. We will not make them in this bill because this isn't where we do that, but you can't help but look at what is happening in our country and understand that our own trade policy does not work. It just does not work. We have a huge and growing trade deficit with China--growing rapidly--of nearly $70 billion a year. We have a large abiding trade deficit with Japan that has gone on forever--$50 to $70 billion a year. This Congress, without my vote--because I voted against it--passed something called NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. It was billed as a nirvana. What a wonderful thing, we were told, if we can do a trade agreement with Mexico and Canada. What a great hemispheric trade agreement, and how wonderful it would be for our country. In fact, a couple of economists teamed together and said: If you just pass NAFTA, you will get 300,000 new jobs in the United States. The problem is, there is never accountability for economists. Economists say anything, any time, to anybody, and nobody ever goes back to check. The field of economics is psychology pumped up with helium and portrayed as a profession. I say that having taught economics a couple years in college, but I have overcome that to do other things. But economists told us, if we pass NAFTA, it will be a wonderful thing for our country. Well, this Congress passed NAFTA. I didn't vote for it. Guess what. We had a trade surplus with Mexico. We have now turned a trade surplus with Mexico into a significant deficit with the country of Mexico. They said, by the way, if we pass NAFTA, the products that will come in from Mexico will be products produced by low-skilled labor. Not true. The products that are coming in from Mexico are the product of higher-skilled labor, principally automobiles, automobile parts, and electronics. Those are the three largest imports into the United States from Mexico. So the economists were wrong. I would love to have them come back and parade around, and say: I said NAFTA would work, but I apologize. We had a trade surplus with Mexico. Now it is a fairly large deficit. We had a trade deficit with Canada, and we doubled the deficit. I want one person to stand up in the Senate and say: This is real progress. Doubling the deficit with Canada, and turning a surplus into a deficit with Mexico--hooray for us. That is real progress. I want just one inebriated soul to tell me here in Washington, DC, that this makes sense. Of course it does not make sense. It did not work. So we have trade policy challenges dealing with Mexico, Canada, and NAFTA. We have policy differences dealing with our big trade deficit with China. We are going to have other struggles and challenges dealing with the recurring deficit that goes on forever with Japan. It might be useful--I know people get tired of me talking about this--but it might be useful to describe our diminished expectations in this county and why we are in such trouble on trade. About 10 years ago--we have always had a struggle with Japan--we were having, at that time, an agreement negotiated on the issue of American beef going to Japan. We were not getting enough beef into Japan. At that point, it cost about $30 a pound to buy a T-bone steak in Tokyo. Why? Because there was not enough beef. So you keep the supply low, the demand and price go up, and a T-bone steak costs a lot of money in Tokyo. We wanted to get American beef into Japan. After all, we buy all their cars, VCRs and television sets. Maybe they should buy American beef. So we sent our best negotiators, and they negotiated. Our negotiators were hard nosed. It only took them a couple of days to lose. They sat at the table, and they negotiated and negotiated. And guess what they negotiated? They had a press conference and said: We have a victory. We have a beef agreement with Japan. What a wonderful deal. You would have thought they had just won the Olympics because they celebrated. And everybody said: Gosh, what a great deal. Here is the agreement. You get more American beef into Japan. Yes, you do. And we did. Ten or 11 years after the beef agreement with Japan, the tariff on American steak or American ground beef or American beef going to Japan today is 40 percent on a pound of beef. Can you imagine that? What would people think if you told them: In the United States, we only have a 40 percent tariff on your product coming into our country? They would say: What kind of nonsense is that? That is not free trade. Yet we celebrated the fact that we had an agreement with Japan that takes us to a 50 percent tariff, which is reduced over time, but snaps back up if we get more beef into Japan. We celebrated that. This is the goofiest set of priorities I have ever heard. We ought to learn to negotiate trade agreements that are in this country's interests. I have threatened, from time to time, to introduce a piece of legislation in Congress that says: When our trade negotiators go to negotiate, they must wear a jersey that says ``USA,'' just so that they can look down, from time to time, and see who they are negotiating for. ``I am from the United States. I have the United States's best interests at heart. When we negotiate with you, Japan, China, Mexico, Canada, or others, we insist on fair trade.'' Yes, our producers will compete. We are not afraid of competition. But we are not going to compete with one hand tied behind our back. Our negotiators negotiated GATT with Europe, and they said to the Europeans: You know what--my colleague, Senator Conrad, talks about this a lot--we will have a deal with you. You can have 6, 8, or 10 times greater subsidies on your sales of grain to other countries than we will have. And we will have a deal where we will agree to limit our support payments to family farmers to a fraction of what yours are. So once we have done that, we have tied both of our hands behind our back, and then said let's go ahead and compete. That is what our negotiators have done virtually every time they have negotiated a trade agreement. They did it in GATT to family farmers and did it with Japan to our ranchers. I should say, our ranchers were pleased with the agreement with Japan. I would say to them: How can you be pleased? How can you call that success? It is because they have such low expectations in our trade negotiations. We give away everything. We expect little, get almost nothing, and then we are so pleased. When you have roughly $1 billion a day in the merchandise trade imbalance, it is time to wonder whether your policy is working. When you have a $1-billion-a-day deficit--every single day--in merchandise trade, it is time to ask whether this is a policy that works. The answer is no. I think it would behoove this Congress to say: Good for all the wonderful things that are happening in this country. Everybody deserves a little credit for all of that. Good for all the good things happening in our economy. But it is important for all of us to look at the storm clouds as well, and evaluate what is wrong, and try to fix that. If we did that, it would behoove us to bring to the floor of the Senate a debate and full discussion about America's trade policy. Every time I come and talk about this issue, there is someone watching or someone listening, or somebody later will say: That guy sounds like a protectionist. There is this caricature: You are either for free trade or you are some isolationist, xenophobic stooge. You are either for free trade or you don't get it. You either see the horizon or you are nearsighted. That is the way it all works. Even the largest newspapers do that. Try to get an op-ed piece in the Washington Post on trade issues. If you happen to believe we ought to stand up for our economic interests in trade, you can't do it. It is not my intention to say this country should not be a leader in expanding trade. This country ought to be a leader in promoting an expanded free and fair opportunity for international trade. This country ought to be a leader. We ought to expect that other countries would be involved in saying the things that we fought for for 75 to 100 years. This country will be part of the discussions about trade. We had people dying in the streets in this country, fighting for the right to organize in labor unions, fighting for the right to create labor unions. We had people die on the streets of America. Some will say: We can avoid all that, having labor unions, having to worry about dumping chemicals into the water and the air, having to have a safe workplace, having to be prohibited from hiring kids; we can avoid all of that. We have debated it for 75 or 100 years in this country. We have made a lot of progress. We can avoid it all by moving our plant to some other Third World country where they don't have those inconveniences, where you can hire 12-year-old kids and work them 12 hours a day and pay them 12 cents an hour and everybody calls it free trade. This country has a responsibility also to lead on the issues of what are the fair rules for international trade--not protectionism, what are the fair rules for trade that establish fair competition. That is something this country has a responsibility to be involved with as well. Talking about trade in the context of the Customs Service and our responsibility to keep track of what is happening around the world, it is true that my frustration from time to time boils over on the issue. I come to the floor and talk about it without much effect because there are not sufficient votes in the Senate to require a very robust debate on trade policy. It is coming. We ought to make it happen. If I can digress--because I have the time this morning, and I don't see anyone else waiting to speak--I want to mention something that happened some years ago that made a profound impact on me. I mentioned a moment ago that we struggled in this country to establish the right to form labor unions and establish collective bargaining. There are plenty of countries where, if you try to form labor unions, try to get workers together to see if they can't get a better deal, they can be thrown in jail. As I said, we had people who died in the streets in this country fighting for that opportunity. We now understand the consequences of that. We have labor unions, and we have management and labor, collective bargaining. It is a better country because of that. There are some areas of the world where we don't have the opportunity to do that. People who try to demonstrate for those rights are thrown in jail. Let me describe something that happened in Congress a long while ago related to that point. We had a fellow who spoke to a joint session of Congress. Normally, a speaker to a joint session of Congress is a President. The pageantry is quite wonderful when there is a joint session. It is normally in the House Chamber because that is the larger Chamber. The Senators come in and are seated in the House Chamber, Cabinet officials come in, the Supreme Court comes in. The American people see this. That is when the network television cameras come on. Then the Doorkeeper says: Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States. And the President marches in and gives a State of the Union speech. We occasionally have other speakers who are invited to give an address to a joint session of Congress. On rare occasions, it has been a head of state. Many will remember other circumstances: General Douglas MacArthur coming back from Korea, when he was relieved of his command by President Truman, was invited to address a joint session of Congress; Winston Churchill addressed a joint session of Congress. One day about 10 or 12 years ago, I was a Member of the U.S. House, it was a joint session of Congress. In the back of the room, the Doorkeeper announced the visitor. The Doorkeeper said: Mr. Speaker, Lech Walesa from Poland. And this fellow walked in, a rather short man with a mustache. He had red cheeks and probably a few extra pounds, an ordinary looking fellow who walked into the Chamber of the House, walked up to the microphone. The joint session stood and applauded and didn't stop. This applause continued to create waves, and it went on for some minutes. Then this man began to speak. Most of us, of course, knew the history. But in a very powerful way this ordinary man told an extraordinary tale. He said 10 years before, he was in a shipyard in Gdansk, Poland on a Saturday leading a strike for workers to be able to chart their own destiny, leading a strike for a free labor movement in Poland against a Communist government. On that day, he had already been fired from his job as an electrician at a shipyard for his activities to fight for a free labor movement in Poland. The Communist government had him fired from his shipyard. So this unemployed electrician, on a Saturday morning, was leading a strike, leading a parade inside this shipyard for a free labor movement. He was grabbed by some Communist thugs and beaten and beaten badly. As they beat him, they took him to the edge of the shipyard, hoisted him up and unceremoniously dumped him over the barbed-wire fence outside the shipyard face down in the dirt. He lay there bleeding, wondering what to do next. Of course, we know what he did next. Ten years later, he was introduced to a joint session of Congress as the President of the country of Poland. This man went to the microphone and said the following to us: We didn't have any guns; the Communists had all the guns. We didn't have any bullets; the Communists had all the bullets. We were armed only with an idea. What he did next that Saturday morning, from lying on the ground bleeding from the beating he had received from the Communist agents of that Government of Poland, the history books record. He pulled himself back up and climbed back over the fence and climbed back into the shipyard. This unemployed electrician showed up in the Chamber of the U.S. House to speak to a joint session of Congress 10 years later as the President of his country--not a diplomat, not a politician, not an intellectual, not a scholar, an unemployed electrician who showed up in this country 10 years later as the President of his country. He said: We didn't break a windowpane in Poland. We didn't have guns. We didn't have bullets. We were armed with an idea and that idea simply was that free people ought to be free to choose their own destiny. I have never forgotten that moment, understanding the power of ideas and understanding that common people can do uncommon things. Ordinary people can do extraordinary things. Wondering where did Lech Walesa get the courage to pull himself up that Saturday morning in a shipyard in Gdansk, an unemployed electrician, believing so strongly in the need to provoke change in this Communist country that this man and his followers toppled a Communist government and lit the fuse, caused a spark that lit the fuse that began to topple Communist governments all through Eastern Europe. That is the power of an idea. What are the ideas that exist in this country that will make a better America and create a better future? We know from our history that in two centuries, a series of ideas by some remarkable men and women have created the best country in the world. It is the freest. I know there are a lot of blemishes, but there is no country that has freedoms like ours. There is no country that has accomplished what we have accomplished in every area. Find an area where we have had difficulty, we have confronted it. We have had difficult times, but we have solved the issues. We survived a civil war. We survived a great depression. When you think of what this country has done, it is quite remarkable. We stand today at the edge of a new century, the year 2000, with a lot of challenges in front of us. Some say we are just sort of content to be where we are and to kind of nick around the edges. No person, no country, no organization ever does well by resting. There are challenges in front of us. We have talked about some of them. Some of them will be in this legislation when we bring it to the floor. Some will be in other legislation. I was on the floor yesterday and Senator Durbin, who is on the floor at the moment, talked about the challenge of making our health care system work; the challenge of passing a Patients' Bill of Rights, and one that is a real Patients' Bill of Rights; the challenge of putting a prescription drug benefit in the Medicare program. Those are ideas--ideas with power and resonance, ideas which ought to relate to the public policy this Congress embraces. I talked, a little bit ago, about trade policy, the idea that we need to change trade policy to make it a policy that is effective for our country, to reduce the trade deficits and continue to expand markets, and to have fair rules of trade. There are so many things we need to do. Yesterday, I showed some of the challenges that we ought to address now in the coming weeks. For instance, gun safety. This is a wonderful country, but when you read the newspapers and read of the killings, and then you understand that we have a right to own weapons--and nobody is changing that right; it is a constitutional right. But we have said it makes sense for us to keep guns out of the hands of convicted felons. How do we do that? We have a computer base with the names of felons on it. When you want to buy a gun, your name has to be run against the computer base. At the gun store, they run your name to find out if you are a convicted felon. If you are, you don't get a gun. But guess what. You can go to a gun show on a Saturday someplace and buy a gun or a weapon, and nobody is going to run your name through an instant check. We say let's close that loophole. Are those who don't want to close it saying they don't want to keep guns out of their hands? I hope not. So join us in fixing this problem. That is an idea. That has some power. How many Americans will that save? How many children will it save by keeping the gun out of the hands of a convicted felon? We are not talking about law-abiding citizens. We are not going to disadvantage them. Let's keep guns out of the hands of convicted felons. Close the gun show loophole. It is a simple idea; yet one we can't get through the Congress because people are blocking the door on this issue. The Patients' Bill of Rights: We talked about that yesterday. We talked about putting a drug benefit in the Medicare program. We talked about school modernization. I will conclude by talking for a moment about school modernization. Our future is education. I have told my colleagues many times about walking into the late-Congressman Claude Pepper's office and seeing two pictures, both autographed, behind his chair. One was a picture of Orville and Wilbur Wright making the first airplane flight. It was autographed by Orville Wright, saying, ``To Congressman Pepper, with deep admiration, Orville Wright.'' Then, the first person to stand on the Moon, Neil Armstrong, gave him an autographed picture. I thought to myself, this is really something. Here is a living American who has an autographed picture of the first person to leave the ground in powered flight, and also the person who flew all the way to the Moon. What was the in between? What was the difference between just leaving the ground and arriving on the Moon? Education, schools, learning; it is our future--allowing every young boy and girl in this country to become the very best they can be; universal education, saying that every young boy or girl, no matter what their background or circumstances are, can walk through a schoolroom door and be whatever they want to be in life, universal opportunity in education. In the middle part of this past century, those who came back fighting for liberty in the Second World War, fighting for freedom, built schools all across our country as they went to school on the GI bill, got married, and had children. They built schools all across America. Now those schools, in many cases, are 45, 50 years old and in desperate need of repair and renovation. This country, as good as it is, can send our kids to the schoolroom doors of the best schools in the world. And we should. That ought to be our policy. So before this Congress ends, let's embrace our ideas and policies of saying let's modernize our schools, renovate our schools, and connect our schools to the Internet. Let's reduce the size of classes and make sure every student has the opportunity to go through a schoolroom door that we as parents are proud of. Let's make sure we keep the finest teachers, the best teachers in our classrooms and pay them a fair wage. These are ideas that we have that we can't get through this Congress. It doesn't make any sense to me. So we are prepared to bring the Treasury-general government appropriations bill to the floor. In that legislation there will be several of the ideas I have talked about, and other appropriations bills, and other pieces of legislation. We will continue to pound away at this Congress to say: Accept some of these ideas. Accept some progress. Join us. This isn't partisan. Our kids and our schools don't represent a partisan issue. Keeping guns out of the hands of felons surely can't be a Republican or Democratic issue. Surely, every American should embrace that goal. Putting the prescription drug benefit in the Medicare program so senior citizens who have reached their declining income years have the opportunity and can afford to buy life-saving drugs surely can't be a Republican or Democratic approach. There can't be differences here in terms of goals. So let's resolve to join together to meet these goals, to do our work and embrace ideas-- yes, big ideas--that recognize, yes, this country is doing very well in a lot of areas, but we are at the first stage of a new century, and we need to embrace new ideas to advance this country's interests and prepare for this country's future. Nowhere is that preparation more necessary than with our children and our schools. Mr. President, I have spoken at some length. I know others on the floor have comments about these and other issues. I yield the floor.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I shall not ask to extend morning business. But I ask consent I be recognized at 2:15 for 20 minutes of morning business.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I am wondering, the Senate reconvenes at 2 o'clock by previous order today, is that correct?

Mr. DORGAN. Parliamentary inquiry, Mr. President?

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I was listening to some of the discussion this morning before the Senate broke for the party lunches. I was especially interested in a couple of presentations about the progress some think the Senate has made in this Congress, and about why they believe the Senate is not making progress today or this week. It reminds me of the story of the fly that landed on the nose of an ox. The ox, with the fly on its nose, went out for the entire day and plowed in the field. They came back to the village at night, and the villagers began applauding. The fly, still on the nose of the ox, took a deep bow and said to the villagers: We've been plowing. That is sort of what I heard this morning--we've been plowing--when, in fact, this Senate, as all of us know, has not done the work we should have been doing for the American people. I thought it would be interesting to describe what the agenda should have been and what we have done. I will talk about some of the issues with which most Americans believe the Congress should be dealing: Common sense gun safety. For those who might be listening, I'm not talking about gun control; this is not in any way going to abridge people's Second Amendment right to own guns. This legislation will, however, close a loophole in the law that allows people to purchase guns at gun shows without having to get an instant check. If you buy a gun in this country in a gun store, you must have your name run through an instant check system to find out whether you are a felon. That makes good sense. We should not sell guns to felons. The instant check system helps identify if someone trying to buy a gun at a gun store has been previously convicted of a felony and therefore should not be sold a weapon. But guess what? Go to a gun show on a Saturday somewhere and you can buy a gun without an instant check being done. This does not make any sense. We want to close that loophole. We do not want to be selling guns at a gun show to a convicted felon. Yet we cannot get this common sense piece of legislation enacted in this Congress because it is considered radical or extreme by some. It is a very simple proposition: Close the gun show loophole to prevent felons from buying guns. We should get that done. Or what about the Patients' Bill of Rights? Every day 14,000 patients are denied needed medicines; 10,000 are denied needed tests and procedures in this country. But we cannot pass a decent Patients' Bill of Rights because, in this Congress, we have people who stand with the big insurance companies rather than standing with patients. I know it is inconvenient to some to hear about specific patients who have been denied needed care by their HMOs. I have talked about these patients at great length in the past because these folks are what the Patients' Bill of Rights is all about. It is about the woman who fell off a 40-foot cliff while she was hiking in the Shenandoah Mountains. She fell 40 feet, broke several bones and was hauled unconscious into a hospital emergency room on a gurney. After surviving her life- threatening injuries, she was told by her managed care organization that it would not cover her medical care in the emergency room because she didn't have prior approval to go to the emergency room. This is a woman who was hauled into the emergency room unconscious. That is the sort of thing people are confronting these days. Senator Reid and I had a hearing in Nevada on this subject. At that hearing, a woman stood up and talked about her son. Her son is dead now. He died last October at 16 years of age. He was battling cancer and needed a special kind of chemotherapy to give him a chance to save his life. Unfortunately, his insurance company denied him this care. He not only had to battle cancer, but he also had to battle the insurance company that wouldn't cover the care he needed. His mother held up a very large picture of her son at the hearing and, with tears in her eyes, she cried as she told us: As my son lay dying, he looked up at me and said, Mom, I just don't understand how they could do this to a kid. Kids who are battling cancer ought not have to battle the insurance companies or HMOs. Yet that is what is happening too often in this country. We propose to pass a Patients' Bill of Rights that is very simple. It says every patient in this country has a right to know all of his or her options for medical treatment, not just the cheapest option. It says that if you have an emergency and go to an emergency room, you have a right to care in that emergency room. It says that if you have cancer and your employer or your spouse's employer changes health plans, you have a right to continue seeing the oncologist who has been helping you to fight that cancer. But we can't get a Patients' Bill of Rights enacted because when it comes time to say who you stand with--the patients who ought to have certain rights or the big insurance companies that in too many cases have denied those rights-- too many Senators say: We stand with the insurance companies. The last time we debated this issue on the floor, about a month ago, my colleague from Oklahoma, Senator Nickles, offered an amendment that he called a Patients' Bill of Rights. He accomplished his purpose, I suspect, because the next day the paper said the Senate passed a Patients' Bill of Rights. However, what the Senate really passed was a ``patients' bill of goods,'' not a Patients' Bill of Rights. I thought it interesting that Dr. Ganske, a Republican Congressman, wrote this letter: Heaven forbid that any member of Congress would ever vote on a bill they haven't had time to read! Heaven really forbid that a member would vote on a bill that their staff hasn't seen! Yet, that is exactly what happened two weeks ago on the floor of the Senate when the Nickles HMO amendment was brought up for a vote. People are just now beginning to realize what was in that legislation. To help you understand the fundamental flaws of the Nickles bill, I am including a copy of an analysis of the Senate's patient's bill of rights that was added to the FY 2001 Labor/HHS legislation. This Senate legislation eliminates virtually any meaningful remedy for most working Americans and their families against death and injury caused by HMOs. This is Dr. Ganske, a Republican Congressman, making this reference to the Nickles bill. He then includes a rather lengthy analysis. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to print Dr. Ganske's letter and the analysis in the Record.

Mr. DORGAN. We cannot get a real Patients' Bill of Rights passed. How about a Medicare prescription drug benefit? Well, we are not able to get that done either. We have been busy providing tax cuts, an estate tax repeal and a change in the marriage tax penalty. The head of OMB said yesterday that, under the recent tax proposals passed by the majority party, the top 1 percent of the income earners in this country will get more tax cuts than the bottom 80 percent combined. This explains why the upper income folks, those with the largest estates and the highest incomes, rally around these tax cut proposals. There should really be no difference between the parties on the estate tax. Those of us in the minority believe we ought to repeal the estate tax for family farms and small businesses and allow a reasonable accumulation of wealth for a family. We said if you have up to $4 million, you should pay no estate tax. For a family farmer or small business, you can have assets up to $8 million and pay no estate tax at all. But that wasn't good enough for the majority. The majority party said, we must also fight to eliminate the tax burden on the estates of the Donald Trumps of America who will die with half a billion or a billion or several billion dollars. At what price? What else could we do with the money that the majority wants to use to relieve the tax burden on the wealthiest estates in America? Perhaps we could use it to reduce the Federal debt. It seems to me that is probably a better priority than providing a tax cut for the estates of billionaires. Or we could use the money for a prescription drug benefit for Medicare, perhaps for school modernization, or to hire more teachers to lower class sizes. There are a whole series of proposals that might represent a better alternative than deciding we must use this revenue to relieve the tax burden on the largest estates in this country. Is a prescription drug benefit in the Medicare program important? It is quite clear that if we were creating the Medicare program today, we would provide coverage for prescription drugs through Medicare. Senior citizens make up twelve percent of our population, but they consume one-third of all the prescription drugs used in this country. They reach a period in their life where they need to maintain their health, and miracle drugs that did not exist 30 years ago now exist to extend their lives. In the 20th century, we increased the life expectancy in America by 30 years. A part of the reason for that is better nutrition, better living conditions, better education about healthy living, but part of the reason is also miracle drugs. It is not unusual for a senior citizen to be taking two, four, five, and in some cases, ten or twelve different prescription drugs to deal with their health challenges. Those prescription drugs are enormously costly. The price is increasing every year. Last year, spending on prescription drugs in America increased 16 percent in 1 year. The year before the increase was about the same. Many senior citizens just can't afford these expenses. I have held hearings through the Democratic Policy Committee in five or six States on this subject. I have had senior citizen after senior citizen tell me that, when going shopping, they first must go to the pharmacy in the back of the grocery store to purchase their prescription drugs. Only after they have bought their medications do they know how much money they have left to purchase food. It is a common story all across the country. So should we add a prescription drug benefit to the Medicare program? Of course, we should. Will we? We won't do it unless we get some cooperation from a majority party that believes this is not a priority for the country. We believe it is. We have a plan that will provide a prescription drug benefit to Medicare beneficiaries in a way that is cost-effective, in a way that will tend to push down the prices of prescription drugs and provide an opportunity for coverage for senior citizens who elect to have this benefit. That ought to be part of the agenda in this Congress, but we can't get it done. Or what about school modernization? This country has had such a wonderful 20th century, especially the last half of the century following the Second World War. Those who fought for America's freedom in World War II came back to this country, and began careers, got married, had children. They built schools all over America 50 years ago. Many of those schools are now in disrepair. These schools need renovation or replacement. Not only are many of these schools desperately in need of modernization and renovation, but there is also a need to reduce class sizes from 28 or more, in some classes, down to 18 kids or fewer. We know the quality of education is better when there are smaller class sizes. We know it is better for kids' education when they are going through the door of a modern schoolroom that all of us can be proud of. As I have said many times--and if it is tiresome to people, it doesn't matter to me--it is hard to go to the Cannon Ball Elementary School in North Dakota and have a third grader such as Rosie Two Bears say: Mr. Senator, will you build us a new school? That school has 150 students, one water fountain, and two bathrooms. Some of the classrooms have to be evacuated periodically because of raw sewage seeping up through the floors. Part of the building is 90 years old and has largely been condemned. Are we proud of sending that young girl through that classroom door? I don't think so. We can do better. Perhaps that is more important than providing relief from the estate tax burden of somebody who dies with $1 billion. Instead of being able to leave only $600 million to their heirs, they get to leave all of the $1 billion because the majority party says that is their priority. Their priority is to give tax cuts to the top 1 percent of the American income earners that are more than the tax cuts we are going to give to all of the bottom 80 percent. That is their priority. My point is that we ought to be focusing on other priorities. So this morning when we had people shuffle over to the floor of the Senate and talk about what a wonderful job this Congress has done and how we are stalled now because the Democrats somehow don't want to do anything, I just had to come over here and correct the record. One of the things hanging up work today is that there are people who have been nominated as Federal judges whose nominations have been before the Senate for 3 years without having been brought to the floor for a vote. We would like that to happen. That is considered unreasonable. I say to those who think this Congress has a wonderful record that this is a Congress of underachievers. We have a little time left. We have this week and September and the first week of October. This is what we have to do. We have a Patients' Bill of Rights that we ought to pass. We have gun safety legislation that we ought to pass. We ought to close the gun show loophole. We ought to pass an increase in the minimum wage. The fact is, those working at the bottom rung of the economic ladder in this country have lost ground. Everybody here is so worried about providing tax breaks to the top income earners. What about providing some help to those at the bottom of the economic scale? These people get up and get dressed and have breakfast in the morning and go out and work hard, and they are trying to raise a family on a minimum wage that has not kept pace with inflation. We ought to do something about that. We ought to provide a Medicare drug benefit. We can do that to address the needs of our senior citizens who are now struggling with health problems and just to make ends meet, only to discover that, in their twilight years, the medicines they need to make life better are financially out of reach for them. Last week, we passed a piece of legislation that says maybe we ought to be able to access the more reasonable prescription drug prices on exactly the same prescription drugs that exist in Canada and elsewhere. The same companies produce the same pill, put it in the same bottle, and they sell it for a third of the price up in Winnipeg, Canada, or, for that matter, in virtually any other country in which they sell these drugs. Last week, I suggested that I would like to see just one Senator stand up--in fact, I renew the challenge to anybody who wants to come to the floor--on the floor of the Senate and say that it is fair for American consumers to pay significantly more for the same exact drug than consumers in other countries. I will give any Senator who wants to do this the pill bottles; I held up several last week. The bottle of the prescription drug sold in the U.S. costs $3.82 a pill and the same drug in the same bottle, made by the same company, in the same manufacturing plant, sold in Canada costs only $1.82 a pill. The U.S. consumer pays $3.82 and the Canadian consumer pays $1.82. I want to see a Senator, just one Senator, stand up and hold these bottles and say, yes, this is fair to my constituents and, yes, this price inequity is something we ought to support. Of course, no one will because nobody believes that is fair. That is another issue that we have to address. We were able to get some legislation through the Senate and, of course, the pharmaceutical industry has indicated that it fully intends to kill that in conference. We will see. So there is a lot left for this Senate to do. We have, at the end of this week, a break for the two national conventions, and then in September and October we will see the end of the 106th Congress. All legislation introduced between January of last year and now will eventually die, unless it is passed by this Congress, and we will have to start over again next year. So the questions of whether this is an effective Congress and whether this Congress creates a record any of us can be proud of are going to be answered in the next few months. Are we able to address the issues that the American people care about? Will the majority party stop obstructing on these issues? Will they decide a Patients' Bill of Rights should be passed by Congress? If so, let's do it soon. Will we be able to address the issue of reasonable gun safety measures, increasing the minimum wage, adding a drug benefit for Medicare, and school modernization? Those and other issues, it seems to me, are central to an agenda that will strengthen and improve this country. We will see in the coming days exactly what the 106th Congress decides it wants to leave as its legacy. One of the great things about this democracy of ours is that the majority rules. That is certainly true in the Senate. They control the schedule. That is why we are now in morning business in the afternoon. Only in the Senate can you be in morning business in the afternoon, I guess. But we are not debating an appropriations bill, and we should be. There aren't enough people wanting to bring judges to the floor for confirmation and so on. The point is this: The majority party has a choice to decide which of these issues and how many of them they want this Congress to adopt. I hope it will decide very soon that it chooses to join us and say these are the issues that matter to the American people, and these are the issues the 106th Congress shall embrace in the final weeks of this Congress. Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, by previous order, I am recognized for the next 20 minutes. The Senator from Idaho wishes to deal with the 20 minutes following that; is that correct?

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, the amendment I will be sending to the desk is on behalf of myself and Senators Conrad, Wellstone, Grams of Minnesota, Torricelli, Schumer, Levin, Leahy, Kennedy, Reed, Sarbanes, Dodd, Lieberman, Mikulski, Hollings, Baucus, and Breaux. The amendment would provide some emergency financial assistance for family farmers that have incurred disaster losses. Amendment No. 3963 (Purpose: To make emergency financial assistance available to producers on a farm that have incurred losses in a 2000 crop due to a disaster and to producers of specialty crops that incurred losses during the 1999 crop year due to a disaster)

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, does that allow debate to continue?

Mr. DORGAN

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, yesterday the Senate passed by a margin of 74-21 the Jeffords-Dorgan amendment to allow for importation of FDA- approved prescription medicines by licensed pharmacists and drug wholesalers. This amendment addresses a very important issue for American consumers, especially for senior citizens who must pay for their medicines out of their own pockets. The same medications sold in the United States are also sold in Canada and other countries, often at substantially lower prices. This amendment has the potential to save American consumers millions of dollars by giving them access to their medicines at these lower prices at their local pharmacies. I am pleased that this amendment has the support of the National Community Pharmacists Association, and I ask unanimous consent that a letter of support from the NCPA be printed in the Record.

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I rise to discuss the Agriculture Diversity Project, which is administered by the Red River Trade Council through the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service. The Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee has funded this program in the past, and I want to thank the Chairman and the Ranking Minority of the Agriculture Appropriations Committee for their support. As my colleagues know, one of the areas of economy that has not shared in the current economic boom is agriculture. The farmers and those who live and operate businesses in rural America are struggling financially to maintain not only a reasonable standard of living, but also the preservation of a rural lifestyle. They are desperate to find ways that will allow them to stay and to make a living in rural America. The Agriculture Diversification Project now underway seeks to add value to existing crop production, establish high value crop alternatives to those crops traditionally grown in the region, develop processing facilities, and create markets for both new crops and the value added products. One added dimension to the program in Fiscal Year 2001 will be an Internet-based information resource for farmers and other rural residents intended for those who are interested in a sustainable rural economy through entrepreneurship, product development, and marketing. This new aspect of the project will demand additional resources above what the Subcommittee provided in this bill. I hope that we might be able to provide at least $500,000 for this project--which is the level of funding that the House provided in its bill.