Jim DeMint

Mr. DeMINT

Mr. DeMINT. Mr. President, in that case, I move to waive the Budget Act and ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. DeMINT. Parliamentary inquiry: Mr. President, if this point of order is waived and the amendment is adopted, would it cause the budget resolution to lose its privilege at this time?

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

Mr. DeMINT. Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 4340 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. DeMINT

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

Mr. DeMINT. Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 4232 and ask for its immediate consideration.

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

Mr. DeMINT

Mr. DeMINT. About 20 minutes or so.

Mr. DeMINT. Exactly.

Mr. DeMINT. Thank you, Mr. President. I rise this morning to speak on an amendment I will offer to the 2009 budget resolution on behalf of myself and a bipartisan group of reformers in the Senate. This amendment creates a 1-year moratorium on all earmarks. It does so by establishing a 67-vote point of order against bills, joint resolutions, conference reports, and messages between Houses that contain congressional earmarks for the fiscal year 2009. This is very important to the budget debate. As we look at this budget, with planned spending over the next 10 years, we have clearly-- both parties--helped to wreck the budget at the Federal level, while every month we expect families across this country to balance their budget. I would like to start with a little background. Before I came to Congress, one of my jobs was training quality development people in organizations. We worked on quality improvement--quality process improvement--for a number of years. One of the great consultants in that field, Tom Peters, wrote a book ``In Search of Excellence.'' One of the examples he gave in the book, related to improving quality, was a person who got on an airplane and pulled down their tray and saw a coffee stain there. People could say a coffee stain on a tray in an airplane is not a big deal. But many times we get our cues about quality, or about whom we can trust and why, from things that are different than the real substance. But his point was, if you see a coffee stain, you not only are concerned about how the cleaning service does in that airplane, you wonder: If they are not able to clean up a coffee stain, are they maintaining the engines? Is this a safe plane to fly in? For us in Congress, our coffee stain is earmarks. Earmarks tell Americans we cannot be trusted to spend their money in a way that is efficient and for the good of our country. Americans know if we continue to throw their tax dollars at bridges to nowhere or hippie museums--or a number of things I will talk about today--that if we cannot be trusted to do those things, certainly how can we be trusted to do the big things in this country. We have lost our moral authority. We have undermined the trust of the American people. A lot of that goes right back to our coffee stain, which is earmarks. In 2006, many in this body, particularly my friends on the other side, promised to clean up earmarks in Washington. But after 1 year, things have gone back to business as usual. The number of earmarks had fallen to 2,600 in 2007 because we were able to stop this huge omnibus spending bill that was going through. But now earmarks are back up to all-time highs. This year, there are 11,612 earmarks, costing $17.2 billion, according to Citizens Against Government Waste. It is the highest level of earmarks in history. It came through in this Omnibus appropriations bill, which we were given less than 48 hours to review. No one read it. It was full of earmarks, full of wasteful earmarks and wasteful Government spending. We still expect the American family to balance their budget while we continue to wreck the budget at the Federal level. Last year, we worked together to pass earmark reforms, but, unfortunately, many of these reforms have been gutted or ignored. As many of my colleagues know, the earmark rule we passed 98 to 0 was watered down behind closed doors and then passed despite our objections. Those in this body who oppose change insisted on continuing business as usual. I would like to review a little bit the history of the debate so everyone knows how we got to this place. For Americans who may be looking in and still wondering what earmarks are--and I, frankly, confess when I came to Congress I did not know what an earmark was--it is when every Member of Congress and the Senate feel like it is their responsibility to take a piece of taxpayer money and designate it to a particular favorite project or cause or organization back in their congressional district or State. Instead of doing what is good for the country, we do what is good for our next election, and we use taxpayer dollars to enhance our image back home. Mr. President, 2007 started off with a pretty hopeful note. I actually offered Speaker Pelosi's earmark transparency measure as an amendment to the Senate ethics bill. But, unfortunately, the leadership on the other side tried to kill the Pelosi transparency language which would have required disclosure of all earmarks instead of 5 percent, as we had on the Senate side. But the effort to kill my amendment failed, and we won the day. Republicans voted with me and a few brave Democrats--Claire McCaskill and some others--joined us in saying: Enough is enough; America needs to know what we are spending. We were able to pass that transparency bill. But the original Pelosi-DeMint transparency rule that was part of Senate bill No. 1 last year, and agreed to unanimously, said authorization earmarks could not be added or airdropped into conference reports with the House. But that provision has been gutted and ignored. The original Pelosi-DeMint transparency rule gave Senators the right to force a vote on individual earmarks that were added into conference reports in the dark of night. But that provision was secretly gutted. The original Pelosi-DeMint transparency rule said bills containing earmarks could not be brought to the floor until we had at least 48 hours to read the bill online in an easily searchable format. That was not easily searchable with this bill you are looking at on the table. But that provision, too, has been gutted and ignored. In fact, in less than 24 hours we brought this bill to the Senate floor--the largest appropriations bill in our history--that contained over 11,000 earmarks, and it passed in less than 48 hours. No one read that bill. We are wrecking the Federal budget, and we still expect Americans to balance their family budget. The original Pelosi-DeMint transparency rule said neither the Senator nor his or her family could financially benefit from an earmark, but that provision has been changed to the point where it is almost meaningless. The original Pelosi-DeMint transparency rule said the Parliamentarian, who is nonpartisan and whose job is to make impartial rulings, would be responsible for determining if bills brought to the floor complied with earmark transparency rules. That was a good rule, but that has been gutted. The provision has been changed so that now the majority leader and the chairman of Appropriations verify if it has met the rules. The list goes on and on. The Senate also passed legislation last year to ban the practice of what we call phone-marking or letter-marking, which occurs when Senators secretly request earmarks by pressuring agencies with phone calls or letters without complying with the earmark disclosure rules. That provision has been gutted. Last year, the majority promised to cut the number of earmarks in half. But they did not. Instead, we passed the second highest level of earmarks in history. You can see from this chart, Republicans did a lousy job containing the number of earmarks, but we were able--by stopping an Omnibus appropriations bill before we left the majority--to reduce the number to 2,600. But last year it went back up to the second highest level in history--a lot of broken promises. I also wish to review some things about the earmark system and why it is broken. In the last 20 years, porkbarrel earmarks have exploded. In 1987, Ronald Reagan vetoed a bill that had only 121 earmarks. Here is what he said: I haven't seen this much lard since I handed out blue ribbons at the Iowa State Fair. Mr. President, 121 earmarks. We are dealing with tens of thousands of earmarks now every year. By 2005, earmarks had skyrocketed to about 14,000 wasteful earmarks into our spending bills. In fact, since 2000, Congress has spent more than $188 billion of Americans' taxpayer dollars on over 77,000 porkbarrel projects. Americans are outraged about a system that hands out their tax dollars based on political influence and congressional seniority instead of on the merit of the projects. Here are a few examples of the results of the earmark favor factory over the last several years. Keep in mind as I read these earmarks, this is hard-working American tax dollars coming to us. We are expecting the family to use their money responsibly to balance their checkbook. Here is what we are doing with their tax dollars: The International Fund for Ireland, funding the World Toilet Summit, $13.5 million; Richard Steele Boxing Club, $100,000--this is at a time we are creating debt and waste every year--animal waste research and management, $4.75 million; a study to determine if poultry litter can generate electricity, $225,000; the Tiger Woods Foundation--he is hurting for money--$100,000; golf charity, $3 million taken out of the Department of Defense budget for a golf charity; Museum of Glass, $550,000; a fake prison museum, $100,000; the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame--a clear national priority--$200,000; The Historic Coal Library, $800,000; wine research, $11 million; Baseball Hall of Fame, $750,000; the National Wild Turkey Federation, $500,000; grasshopper research, $775,000; bike paths, $6.8 million; Montana Sheep Institute, $400,000; National Peanut Festival, $200,000; ornamental fish research, $600,000; Grammy Institute, $800,000; the American Film Institute, $90,000; DNA study of bears, $1 million; study to analyze bear fur, $300,000; wood research, $9.5 million; Cowgirl Hall of Fame, $90,000; Indoor Rain Forest, $50 million; water-free men's urinals, $2 million; Charlie Rangel Monument, $2 million; Teapot Museum, $500,000; an 85-foot speedboat the Navy didn't want and refused to use, $4.5 million; Woodstock Hippie Museum, $1 million; Coconut Road highway project that was unwanted by the city it was sent to, $10 million; shirts for the U.S. Marine Corps that were found to melt in battle and caused severe disfiguring burns, $2 million; National Drug Intelligence Center that duplicates work already done by 19 other Federal agencies and which the OMB asked to be shut down--we still gave them $400 million; and, of course, the Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska, $320 million. Folks, there are people who come to this floor during this debate and cite earmarks that they say are good, and certainly we can find some. But for every one earmark that could be justified, we could find hundreds that sound just like the ones I read today. At a time when our country is in severe deficit, when we are at war and the American family is straining every month in their budget, we are throwing their money away--coffee stain after coffee stain, demonstrating to the American people that we don't have the commitment to do what is best for this country. This is just scratching the surface. Did I read a couple of dozen? There are almost 12,000 right here that Americans will never know how their money is spent. Besides the waste, earmarks have also led to corruption. Let me say that I have spent enough time working with my colleagues to know that most are not corrupt. They love their country, and they want to make it a better place. But the system of earmarking has taken our energy and diverted it away from solving national problems and wasted it on the task of steering tax dollars back home. This perversion of purpose has undoubtedly led to real corruption scandals that have caused the American people to lose trust in Congress. In 2006, former Congressman Duke Cunningham was sentenced to 8 years in prison for trading earmarks for over $2.4 million in personal bribes. As reported by ABC News at the time, Cunningham actually kept a bribe menu where he listed what payments he demanded in return for earmarks from Government. This card here shows an escalating scale for bribes, starting at $140,000 and a luxury yacht for a $16 million Defense Department contract. Each additional $1 million in contract value required $50,000 in bribes. The rate dropped to $25,000 per additional million once the contract went over $20 million. Also in 2006, former lobbyist Jack Abramoff was sentenced to nearly 6 years in prison for corruption and fraud. Abramoff pleaded guilty to defrauding numerous Indian tribes for which he helped secure earmarks. It was Jack Abramoff who called the congressional appropriations process the ``earmark favor factory'' for his ability to secure millions in taxpayer funds for his clients. There are thousands of lobbyists who are sent here by towns and universities, small colleges, organizations that are up here trying to get a piece of these Federal handouts that we call earmarks. It is corrupting the whole process. Why is it so easy for this earmarking system to lead to corruption? It is because there is so little oversight. Rather than being funded based on merit, they are chosen based on political influence and congressional seniority. Is a sewer or a highway project in West Virginia more worthy than one in Wyoming simply because the State's Senator holds a high-ranking appropriations seat? I don't think so. Americans are frustrated with Congress. Congressional approval is at alltime historic lows. Voters threw out the Republicans in 2006 hoping for a change, but not much has changed. Wasteful Washington spending hasn't stopped. We continue to wreck the Federal budget as Americans are struggling to balance theirs. The congressional favor factory hasn't been closed; it is just under new management. When Members of Congress are sworn into office, we take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. This Constitution prescribes a limited role for the Federal Government, whose purpose is to ``form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the blessings of Liberty.'' This purpose statement should give Congress a clear focus on national priorities and the good of the Nation as a whole. Unfortunately, many in Congress have forgotten that oath and lost sight of our congressional purpose. I did not raise my hand and swear allegiance to the State of South Carolina and promise to get them as much Federal money as I could. Those who say it is a constitutional responsibility to earmark are not using quotes from this document, the Constitution. In fact, everything in here suggests a national priority. It suggests a uniform way in collecting taxes. It says: No preference should be given to a State when money is appropriated, and it says this, which is key: that no money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of appropriation made by law. Over 95 percent of the earmarks we produce here in this Congress are not law, they are not constitutional, and there is no excuse for them at all. We can't hide behind this Constitution. It does not give us the authority, explicitly or implicitly, to take on a local and State role, decide where water and sewer plants go, where bike paths go, which local museum should be funded. That is not our job, but that is a reason we are not dealing with a broken Tax Code, a broken Social Security system, a broken Medicare system, how we deal with keeping jobs in this country, because we are spending most of our time trying to figure out what needs to be done back in our local communities. The primary culprit of most of the problems we are dealing with here is the addictive power of congressional earmarks that we are trying to stop today. My objection to earmarks is not to specific Members. The requirement that earmarks now have names on them makes them more personal, but it is really the earmarking system that is the problem. When Members of Congress invest their time in securing Federal funds for sewer plants and bike paths, as I have mentioned, they are doing more than assuming a Federal role for a local responsibility; they are locking themselves into voting for whatever bill contains their projects. That is how leadership here in Congress gets us to vote for bills that are billions over budget and contain lots of bad policy-- they cram in their projects that make it very difficult for us to vote against. For this reason, Congress has repeatedly, regardless of which party is in charge, demonstrated an inability to curb out-of-control spending. Members who may otherwise vote against a massive, wasteful spending bill end up voting aye because it contains a project for a special interest back home. In January, the first baby boomer received her first Social Security check. In just 3 years, she will qualify for Medicare. With 77 million Americans in line right now behind her, now is the time for Congress to address the long-term fiscal crisis that lies ahead. Social Security and Medicare are trillions of dollars underfunded. Yet we are focused on using earmarks to deal with local issues such as determining the location of local parks and community centers, and we are failing to address these serious national problems. We are wrecking the Federal budget while Americans are struggling to meet their family budget. I didn't come to Washington to fight against earmarks. I didn't even know what they were when I got here. I came here to work on tax reform and fixing Social Security and Medicare. But the culture of earmarks is distracting the attention of Congress from much needed national reforms. So I have made eliminating earmarks an urgent and immediate goal. One of the things I found out in trying to improve the quality culture in organizations is you have to understand the root causes of problems and not spend your time treating symptoms. The root cause of many of the problems, particularly the wasteful spending in this Congress, is earmarks. Already in this new Congress, which promised to be more transparent and to cut earmarks in half, we have seen many shameless requests for pork projects, including taxpayer-funded monuments to individual Members of Congress. Worse, Members of Congress insist on hiding these wasteful pork projects behind some of our Nation's most important priorities. We have held hostage health care for poor children, veterans benefits, and funding for our troops in order to sneak through porkbarrel projects. We have basically made human shields of our most vulnerable Americans, giving Members of Congress two bad choices: Either we vote for bloated bills that are billions over budget and full of wasteful earmarks or we vote against national priorities and needy constituents. This is no way to run the most important Government in the world. So we ended another year with a lot more debt and a lot more broken promises. We have not helped Americans buy health insurance; in fact, we have made it harder. We haven't cut spending; we have raised it. Our antiquated Tax Code continues to chase jobs overseas, and we have not addressed the huge entitlement crisis. Meanwhile, we increased the number of special interests and wasteful earmarks from last year, and both parties are bragging that we did better than expected. Instead of keeping promises, we have let the earmarking system pervert our purpose as Members of Congress. The purpose of the amendment that I have with the budget is to take a timeout. When you have a problem, when you have an addiction, you have to agree you have a problem and you have to get into rehab. Congress needs to get into rehab. We need to stop earmarking this year, take a timeout, and figure out how to reform the system. Those who continue to give excuses, who say: No, we don't need a timeout, we will fix it, I have been listening to for 8 years. They keep saying there is a problem we need to fix, but they never do. It is time to take this issue seriously, to get earmarks off the table so that we can look at it objectively. I would encourage all of my colleagues to join me, the Republican nominee for President, John McCain; the two Democratic possibilities for President, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton; and Claire McCaskill and vote for this amendment and show America we can be trusted. I thank you, Mr. President, and I yield the floor.

Mr. DeMINT. Thank you, Mr. President. I wish to make sure my time is counted against the resolution and not the amendment that was just brought up.

Mr. DeMINT

Mr. DeMINT. Madam President, I thank the Senator from North Carolina and the Senator from Alabama for their leadership on this immigration issue. Thanks for a few moments to speak on a bill that I will be offering related to the immigration debate that is called the Complete Fence Act. Last year, I think we took on a noble task of trying to solve the immigration problem with one grand bill, but what we have learned in the Senate is that it is very difficult to focus on one issue and get a bill through without a lot of add-ons for special interests. We are certainly seeing it with the consumer product safety bill that we are debating now. The House passed a bill that was bipartisan and unanimous and was supported by consumer groups as well as industry groups. It was a bill that was ready for us to take and pass and send to the President. But we in the Senate needed to add in a number of special interest provisions that have nothing to do with consumer product safety. We even discovered last night, as the bill was put into a managers' amendment, they had added some new things that apply to one State and things that have nothing to do--no germaneness--with consumer product safety that we have to deal with. Certainly, that is what we ran into on the immigration issue. So much was added to the bill, it was like trying to swallow an apple when that apple needs to be eaten with a number of different bites. That is what we are trying to do with this series of immigration bills which recognize that in order to have a real solution to the immigration problem in the country, we need to build a platform for reform one plank at a time. Even those who were pushing the comprehensive bill now realize we need to begin with border control and enforcement, the type of enforcement internally that the Senator from North Carolina was talking about: a worker verification program so employers know who is legal and who is not. If we build this system that way, in a way the American people can trust, we can get to the point where America will trust us to develop new immigration policies, how to deal with those who are already here, and how to accept immigrants in the future who are needed for our economy. But the very first step, as all of us have recognized, is to have border control. This body has passed several times legislation that would build a 700-mile fence along the border that would support our Border Patrol in stopping illegal immigrants. It is not just an issue of illegal immigrants themselves; it also involves drug trafficking, it involves human trafficking, and it also involves security from terrorists who might be smuggling weapons into this country. It is essential that we control our borders. In 2006, Congress passed the Secure Fence Act which required 700 miles of fencing, and this is metal fencing--this is not virtual fencing; this is metal pedestrian fencing along the southwest border-- and a deadline for 370 miles of this to be completed by the end of this year. At this point, only 167 miles of real metal fencing has been completed, but we have been assured by the Department of Homeland Security that they will meet their goal of 370 miles of fencing before the end of this year. The bill I am introducing would set a deadline for 2010 for all 700 miles of pedestrian metal fencing to be completed. This is essential to move ahead with the immigration reform process so the American people will know we are serious about protecting the border and having a workable immigration system. So I urge all of my colleagues to urge the Department of Homeland Security and comfort the American people with the fact that we are serious about completing this fence and to support the Complete Fence Act of 2008. Madam President, I yield the floor.

Mr. DeMINT

Mr. DeMINT. Madam President, I appreciate the Senator's comments. I do wish to make it clear that while Congress has set many safety standards, it is very unusual for us to select and prescribe the technology that will be used to achieve those standards. For instance, a bicycle helmet has to take a certain amount of impact, but we do not prescribe what that helmet is to be made of. We do the same with automobiles and impact. We need to tell the safety labs, the manufacturers, what standards they have to achieve, but when we start picking the technology, we get way out of bounds. I have the UL standards in front of me. I just need to clarify what my colleague from Arkansas said because the standard does require a primary reversing system as well as a secondary reversing system. So currently, most garage doors are going to have a system in the motor, and if it senses resistance, it will reverse, and there needs to be a secondary system. The way that is done today is either by some photo type of mechanism where if something crosses the path between the door and the bottom, it stops and reverses. That is one way. The other way is pressure sensitivity along the bottom of the door itself. But what the underlying bill does--the UL standard is it has to be an equivalent secondary safety measure; it has to be the photo type of system or the touch system. But this bill says it has to be the photo system. Frankly, from what we understand from talking with some consumers, there is not necessarily a lot of satisfaction with just the photo system because a door that goes down can be opened by a leaf blowing underneath it. But the touch system has been deemed just as safe by the Underwriters Lab, but it does not have the same inconvenience. What we are asking is that we stick to the standards that are here, that we have a primary and a secondary reversing system but we allow the industry to pick whether it is a photo type of reversing system or a touch system, and let the UL system we have set up, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, determine which is safe and which is not. This bill says that only one way is safe for the secondary reversing system. Actually, the industry has already proven that there are other safe ways to do it which we need to continue to allow. Again, I thank my colleagues for the opportunity to debate. I appreciate the intent of this amendment, which is to make garage doors safer, but I think we can leave the technology to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Mr. DeMINT. Madam President, I would like to clarify some of the facts my colleague is talking about because there is nothing in my amendment to strike or prohibit the use of this phototechnology. If that is deemed the safest by the manufacturer, then certainly it can be used. But the secondary reversing device that uses touch technology has had no injuries. It has been deemed safe as well. In the future there are likely to be even better and safer and maybe even more economical ways to make garage doors safe. The reason we need to strike this provision is because it limits consumer safety to one idea--one idea that exists today. It prescribes for the UL laboratories that it has to be done this particular way instead of us saying, as a Congress, it has to be safe. If we want to prescribe those standards, that is fine, but I am afraid we are distorting the information. We need to allow the opportunity for innovation in safety in all areas. There is nothing that says this phototechnology is any safer than the touch technology we have talked about, which is another option being used by garage door companies today. So the argument to keep this in is totally parochial. It is not about safety for children, which has been spoken about today. We believe the current standards that have a primary and secondary reversing system are important and that we need to encourage manufacturers to innovate on the safest ways to make that happen and that the labs we have put in charge of determining safety can look at these different ways to make garage doors safe and tell us which ones are the safest and tell consumers which ones are the safest. It makes absolutely no sense, and it is a terrible precedent for us as a Senate to come in and say: This is the technology that always has to be used in order to be safe, and we have no standard associated with it. We say, this is the technology. Our job is to set the safety standards and say products should be safe, not to act on behalf of companies that happen to be in our States and say you use their technology or you don't use any at all. That is not what my amendment says. My amendment says: Find the very best technology, make it as safe as possible, but don't prescribe how that has to be done. Madam President, I yield back.

Mr. DeMINT. I yield the floor.

Mr. DeMINT. Mr. President, I have an agreement with the chairman and the next speaker to bring up an amendment and then yield the floor. I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and send an amendment to the desk.

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

Mr. DeMINT. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. DeMINT. Madam President, I want to speak for a few moments on my amendment No. 4124, which focuses on section 31 of the underlying bill, the Consumer Product Safety Commission Reform Act. This section deals with garage door openers. It is important, obviously, as the bill that addresses safety, to look at issues such as garage doors. I remind my colleagues that the whole reason for the Consumer Product Safety Commission is to evaluate the safety of various products. When we as a Senate or as a Congress as a whole take it upon ourselves to determine what is safe and what is not, we basically violate the principle of what we are trying to do-- particularly when we get into even more detail, where we attempt to prescribe the particular technology that has to be used on certain projects before it is deemed safe. That totally goes around the idea of an expert panel on this commission, with the testing lab that we are going to fund, using their expertise and resources to determine the safety of a product. This particular section, I am afraid, takes one particular technology that is only used in one product in one State and says that has to be the technology used on all garage door openers. This is something that, as a Senate, we all need to stop at this point. The precedent that it establishes for us to prescribe a particular technology violates everything we are trying to do here. Let me talk specifically about it for a few minutes. Section 31 mandates that all garage doors in the United States include a device that doesn't require contact with an item or person, using photosensors, while prohibiting the sale of other technologies, namely the touch technology, in the United States. Most new garage doors in this country--automatic garage doors--use a technology where if it touches something on the way down, it stops. It generally uses the pressure of about 15 pounds. Specifically, the section states: Notwithstanding section 203(b) of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 1990 . . . or any amendment by the American National Standards Institute and Underwriters Laboratories, Inc. of its Standards for Safety-UL 325, all automatic garage door openers that directly drive the door in the closing direction that are manufactured more than 6 months after the date of enactment of this Act shall include an external secondary entrapment protection device that does not require contact with a person or object for the garage door to reverse. Keep in mind that it has been deemed safe to use the technology that is being eliminated by this bill. The language explicitly says ignore the experts at the Underwriters Laboratories. This effectively requires all garage doors to include a photosensor at the bottom of the door that reverses the door direction. Why is this a problem? This provision puts Congress in the position of picking and choosing winners and losers in a highly technical area of safety regulation. No Senator has the expertise to determine what is a safe garage door technology. Most of the Members of this body are lawyers or businessmen, physicians and veterinarians, and we should not substitute the judgment of Senators who, by and large, have no technical background for the expertise of the engineers at the Underwriters Laboratories. By legislatively mandating that only one technology is safe, we are doing just that--requiring garage door manufacturers who sell garage doors to include these devices, increasing the cost to consumers, and it discourages innovation in the future. If we say this is the technology that has to be used, then the chances of new technology which improves safety and convenience in the future are diminished. Legislatively mandating that only one type of technology is safe enough for us in the United States will also help certain companies at the expense of others and discourage innovation in one of the areas where innovation is most important and should be encouraged, which is consumer product safety. This will mandate away free market competition. It will boost the sales of companies that sell this required technology while hurting the sales of those that do not. The Door and Access Systems Manufacturers Association, which is an association representing garage door manufacturers, recently voted on whether they would support this provision. They voted 14 to 1 to oppose the provision. I will let you guess who the one vote was that voted against it. It was Chamberlain, the company that makes the technology that is required in this legislation. The inclusion of this provision in the Consumer Product Safety Commission Reform Act represents why the American people do not trust Congress. It represents Washington politics as its very worst. After the experts approved a competing technology for sale in the United States, this one company, Chamberlain, retained a high-powered lobbying shop in Washington and paid them in excess of $140,000 to secure inclusion in this provision. Because of the connections to the lobbying firm, it was able to secure proposed Federal legislation that would protect its company from competition. Is the technology that the bill mandates the only safe technology? Not at all. According to the experts at Underwriters Laboratories, the technology the bill mandates is safe, but it is not the only safe technology. The Underwriters Laboratories, through its standard product certification process, has certified another technology as safe, which does not use a photosensor but uses approximately 15 pounds of resistance to trigger a reverse on the door. For example, according to the Architect of the Capitol, the doors of the Senate subway that we all ride on, which carries thousands or maybe millions of people per year from the Dirksen to the Hart Senate office buildings, uses touch technology. If it touches an object that provides more than 30 pounds of resistance, the doors will pop back open. The Senate daycare also uses the same technology on its doors, which reopen if they touch an object with 8 to 15 pounds of resistance. Thus, the technology that the Underwriters Laboratories found safe, which this bill deems unsafe, requires less resistance than the Senate subway doors and approximately the same resistance as the Senate daycare doors to reverse the course. The fact is that touch resistance technology is being used all over our country today very successfully and safely. This bill prohibits its use in the future. The reason it prohibits it is one of the reasons people don't trust us here--because it is clearly not there to make America and American products safer, but to do a specific favor for a constituent with a lobbying firm that puts pressure here on Congress. Why do my colleagues need to support striking section 31? As I have said several times, I think it represents the worst of the legislative process here, and we all know better. Congress should not use its power to override the opinions of congressionally designated experts, unless we have proof they are wrong. We should not promote legislation that would pick winners and losers in the marketplace. We should not pass legislation that would discourage innovation, especially when it comes to ensuring we have the safest technology possible to protect our children. By striking section 31 of the Consumer Product Safety Reform Act, this amendment would give the experts at Underwriters Laboratories the final say in determining what technologies are safe for sale in the United States. The amendment would not give a competitive advantage to any company, and it does not strike any safety provisions. It simply restores the law to where it is today. It would only require that the experts decide what technologies are safe in the United States, which is the purpose of the whole bill. We give more funding to the Commission. We give them a more sophisticated testing lab to use. We are empowering the best experts in the country. It is not our job to come in and try to give one company an advantage because it happens to be in the State we represent. Mr. President, I hope all of my colleagues will support the amendment to strike section 31 from the underlying bill. I yield the floor.

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

Mr. DeMINT

Mr. DeMINT. No. They are at the desk. I wanted to call them up and speak about them later.

Mr. DeMINT. Yes.

Mr. DeMINT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and call up two amendments I have at the desk. They are amendments Nos. 4095 and 4096.

Mr. DeMINT. If I can respond to the chairman, two amendments--one is the House bill, which is 4095, and the other relates to the whistleblower provision, which is 4096.

Mr. DeMINT

Mr. DeMINT. Mr. President, I agree with a number of points the Senator from Alaska just said, particularly the importance of working in a bipartisan fashion on a bill as important as consumer product safety. That is exactly what I am proposing with this amendment because this is something that not only had bipartisan support in the House, it had unanimous support in the House. The Senator from Alaska also mentioned the importance of moving quickly. He suggested that my amendment might actually slow this bill down. In fact, the opposite is true. If we were to adopt this amendment, the consumer product safety bill could go to the President tonight. This is a bill that has been thoroughly vetted and includes a lot of good provisions about which I would like to speak. But even my colleagues who would like to vote for the final Senate bill--I don't know whether my amendment will be adopted or not tonight--can still vote for the Senate bill even if they vote for the House bill. Voting for this amendment is voting for a good, clean, bipartisan consumer product safety bill that we might not have at the end of this process. As all of us know, the longer this debate goes on, the more nongermane amendments will be added to the bill, and the possibility of this bill being passed and going to conference and actually coming out with a bill we can all support--we don't know what the odds of that are. But we do know if we pass the House version of the bill tonight, we will have a new consumer product safety bill that does a number of the things all of us want. I will mention a few of those. One of the items we talked about is not just to count on companies to test their own product safety but to have a third-party testing, particularly of children's products, for lead and other hazards. The House bill sets that up. We also require manufacturers to put distinguishing marks on their products so that in the event of a recall, we would know how to identify the products that are out in the marketplace that need to come back. Consumers would know which ones are safe and which ones are not. It also replaces the aging testing labs the Commission uses now and installs a state-of-the-art testing system that will help us determine more quickly which products are safe and those that are not. We create a new system of advising the public when we have found a safety problem through using the Internet, radio, and television, and we preserve the strong relationship between industry and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, so we get the information from them on a constant basis if there are any safety problems or even improvements in safety in different product categories. And we restore the full panel of Commissioners to the Commission, which is not in place right now. The House bill had support from a total range of Members. From the most conservative Republican to the most liberal Democrat, they agreed to come together without further delay and pass a bill that we need. The groups from the outside that look at these issues, particularly the manufacturer groups, such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce, that represent millions of jobs across this country--and that is really what we are talking about here. The Senate bill would actually put an additional burden on American-based manufacturers that our foreign competitors do not have. If there is one thing we do not need to do as a Congress, it is to make it even more difficult to do business in this country, to put our workers at a further disadvantage to workers from overseas by adding an unnecessary burden to this consumer product safety bill, provisions that do not necessarily improve safety but do make it increasingly difficult to be competitive as an American manufacturer. We need not do that. The Senate bill has some problems, and we have a number of amendments we can add. Right now, my amendment has the support of the National Association of Manufacturers, chamber groups; business journals, such as the Wall Street Journal, are supportive of this amendment, and they are not supportive of the Senate version, frankly. So we have a better alternative tonight. I encourage my colleagues to set aside partisanship, to set aside maybe particular special interests we may want to do some favors for in the Senate bill. The House set that aside, and they did the right thing. That is really what I am encouraging my colleagues to do tonight: Do the right thing. This is not a bill I created. This is a bill which is supported by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Chairman Dingell, as well as the Republicans on the House side. We probably will not have another opportunity this year as a Senate to vote for a bill that has unanimous support in the House. Yet we have it on the floor tonight. I encourage my colleagues: Do the right thing. Let's practice what we preach for once and be bipartisan and support an amendment that will get a consumer product safety bill to the President right away so we can start the implementation process. Mr. President, I appreciate the time. I know my colleague, the chairman, wishes to speak before the vote. I yield the remainder of my time. He can have the rest of that time. I yield back my time.