John Ensign

Mr. ENSIGN

Mr. ENSIGN. I yield back the remaining time.

Mr. ENSIGN. Mr. President, I think the case has been made that Fannie and Freddie are too big. There is no question they are too big. We have also had almost 2 years to deal with it, but we haven't done anything.

Mr. ENSIGN. We have not reformed the GSEs the way we needed to. We haven't done what needs to be done on the GSEs. This is one large step to doing that, and I believe we should. They are too big and they can take this entire economy down, and that is why we have to limit the size of them. I would encourage my colleagues to support this amendment.

Mr. ENSIGN

Mr. ENSIGN. Mr. President, the American people are tired. They are tired of the government spending money that it does not have while they are forced to make tough decisions about their own family's budgets. But more importantly, the American people are tired of the government stepping in, blank check in hand, to bail out giant Wall Street firms that were irresponsible with their money. The American people are sick and tired of seeing their hard-earned taxpayer dollars squandered in the name of too big to fail. One of the most important lessons that we learned from this financial crisis, hopefully we learned, is that the bailouts were unfair. They allowed the government to manipulate the market by picking winners and losers, and they used taxpayer dollars to do so. Republicans have made this point repeatedly during this debate. Those on the other side of the aisle have accused us of trying to hold up reform. But what we have been trying to do is to listen to the American people when they demand no more bailouts. This bill does not address the concerns of the American people. Despite the enormous size of this bill, and its complexity--and believe me, it is truly complex--I do not believe anybody in this Chamber--as a matter of fact, I do not believe anybody on Capitol Hill fully understands this bill. This bill makes more explicit the ability of the government to continue to pick winners and losers when bailing out irresponsible Wall Street firms. I come from a State where gambling is a big part of our economy. Yet a Las Vegas casino could not get away with half of the gambling that Wall Street does. When people walk into a casino to gamble, they do so knowing that the odds are against them. But Wall Street takes gambling to a whole new level. They do it because they actually manipulate the odds while someone is playing the game. What is more, Wall Street then asks the government to cover their bets when they can no longer afford to do so on their own. Can you imagine a casino booking a bad bet and losing money, and then asking the government to bail them out? That is basically what Wall Street did. And this bill continues that ability. The proof of this is self-evident because we are now debating an amendment that tries to fix that, the Boxer amendment. If this bill did what it claimed to do, we wouldn't be here debating this amendment which, although this amendment sounds very nice, it actually does very little to address the problem of preventing future bailouts. This bill still creates a new government bureaucracy for the purpose of managing bailed-out banks and their creditors. The language of this amendment does nothing to prevent taxpayer money from being used to pay off debts of failed financial institutions. For example, billions of dollars in taxpayer money were used to pay AIG's obligations to Goldman Sachs after the insurance giant collapsed. This amendment does nothing to stop the Federal Reserve from risking even more taxpayer money on these firms in the future. The language of this amendment does not even prevent the government from imposing fees on companies that can be spent to bail out firms. I regret this flawed bill is on the floor now instead of a bipartisan piece of legislation the American people have been asking for and, quite frankly, deserve. I hope in the process of debate, we can offer amendments that will fix this legislation, that will finally end this too-big-to-fail concept. Instead, the American people are left dealing with the reality that another partisan bill has come to the floor and will probably become law. Another government bureaucracy will be created as a result of this legislation with little regard to the will of the people. Here we go again. Unfortunately, too much partisanship has gone on in this body. There are several of us working on bipartisan amendments. I hope we can dramatically improve this bill. Both sides have the same objectives. We want to clean up Wall Street. We don't want to do that while hurting Main Street. We want to hold Wall Street accountable, but we don't want to do it in a way that harms people who had nothing to do with the financial crisis. I hope we actually can end up with a system that ends too big to fail. We already have several financial institutions that are already too big to fail. What to do about those firms is very difficult, very complex, and we have to do it in a way that doesn't mess up our entire financial system and system of credit. I believe we need to take our time, because the expertise to get this right is difficult to get. I don't believe necessarily the Senate or the House has that kind of expertise. We need to take our time on this bill to get it right, to make sure we are doing what we are intending to do. I yield the floor.

Mr. ENSIGN

Mr. ENSIGN. Mr. President, I thank Senator Carper. I appreciate him and his staff. Wendy was absolutely terrific in setting up this trip and all the various briefings and places where we traveled in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. I thought we had a great team put together among the Senator from Delaware, myself, Senator Brown, Senator Udall, and the Congressman from the First District of Virginia, Congressman Wittman, whom I did not know before the trip but with whom I was very impressed. My general impression of what is going on in Afghanistan--I was initially very skeptical when I went over there. I thought we got an honest assessment. I thought they talked about the positives, the negatives, and the challenges ahead. I agree with the Senator from Delaware. I was very impressed with both the civilian and military leadership we have in the country. I was impressed with the plan they put in place. The key to the plan, which is very similar to what we had in Iraq, is we have to clear, basically provide security. Then we have to hold that security, not just go and clear and then leave. We have to clear and then hold it. Then we have to build. We have to give people opportunities, economic opportunities, and some reason to hope. Once we build, then we need to transfer the authority to, in this case, the Afghan people, the Afghan Government. The first part is a lot of our responsibility, although a lot of the clearing and holding is in combination with the Afghan Army. As a matter of fact, I don't think a lot of Americans realize there have been more Afghan soldiers killed in Afghanistan than American soldiers or coalition soldiers. But the challenge is going to be in the transfer. We saw that the Afghan Army is being built up and trained fairly well. Two big areas of concern are, one, the Afghan police. It has taken a lot longer to train them than we hoped. We experienced some of the same problems in Iraq. The Afghan police are not even close to being fully trained. There is a lot of corruption in the police. There are a lot of challenges to overcome there, but they are challenges that, given the right plan, given the right amount of time and resources, can be overcome. Another huge problem in Afghanistan is development of infrastructure. I have heard Afghanistan described as an 18th century or 19th century country. However, one can really describe it as a second century country. There are many parts of it where people are living in mud structures with no electricity, with no running water, with none of the modern conveniences or technologies we think about. In those areas, and the vast majority of the country, there is no governmental infrastructure. There is no rule of law. There is nothing to build on there. It literally has to be built from the ground up. There is neither a lot of experience not the necessary resources in Afghanistan to do that. That may be the major problem going forward in that transfer that I think the members of the delegation learned while we were over there. It is also why we questioned, when we came back, if we have the right strategy with the best chance of being successful. None of us know whether our strategy is actually going to be successful in the future. But it is worth attempting. It is in our vital national interest to do it. Then we have to pray it is successful in the future. I think all of us came away thinking the American part of it, the international coalition part of it, will be successful. What we do not know will be successful is the transfer of authority to the Afghan government, the part at the end. Is that the same impression the Senator from Delaware had?

Mr. ENSIGN. If the Senator will yield.

Mr. ENSIGN. First of all, we were flying over the Kandahar Province in the southern part of Afghanistan in these Black Hawk helicopters, visiting a few of the forward operating bases--one for training, the other one for trying to provide stability for the region. As we were flying over, it was surprising how many agricultural fields there were in that part of the country. It was a very fertile area, and it seemed to me that 80 to 90 percent of the crops I saw from the air were poppies. This is just an estimate, but it was pretty easy to see them because the poppies were in bloom. They were everywhere, including right next to our bases, because we have stopped the eradication program. There has been a change in policy. This change was the one element of policy which I disagreed with over there. I think we do need to reevaluate, as the Senator from Delaware talked about, this tough love approach. I do think that is the way to go because you do have to have the positive incentives in there to grow other crops. But I don't believe you can do that without the negative consequences if farmers do decide to grow the poppies. In other words, if the positives are not strong enough, they may decide they are going to grow poppies anyway. A couple problems with the poppies is, one, the Taliban wants to grow them because it helps fund the Taliban; and two, poppies are a very drought-resistant crop and Afghanistan has been in a drought for about 8 years. So growing poppies is a stable source of income for the Afghan farmers. The other thing the Senator from Delaware mentioned is that other countries in the area would love to have their produce. The problem is getting that produce to market. They do not have anywhere to store the produce. They have a guaranteed market there for the poppies with the transportation. The Taliban is not going to attack their transport, if that is what they are growing. So this is very much a difficult situation, but it isn't a situation that is, I believe, without a solution. I believe we can come to a solution on this, and that is why I think we need to reevaluate what we are doing in Afghanistan by not including eradication as part of the process. Because when we talk about the police--and I see Senator Brown has joined us, one of our colleagues who was on the trip--there is corruption in the police force. Well, in every country in the world that has a serious drug problem, it leads to corruption in the police, which leads to corruption of any kind of judicial system, officials in the government and on and on and on. I would be curious to hear from my colleague, our newest Senator, the Senator from Massachusetts, who was a real joy to have with us on the trip.

Mr. ENSIGN. I have a couple of other observations and comments to make. I expressed this to General McChrystal and Ambassador Eikenberry when we had one of our briefings regarding the various aspects of the international coalition including USAID, the State Department, the military, all the members that make up what are called PRTs, provincial reconstruction teams. In that meeting, I asked the question about how much money we were spending now. It was very clearly a concern, when we were talking about the economy of Afghanistan and whether it would be able to support this large army and large police force we are putting into place. So I asked the question: How much money are we spending now, how much money is going to be needed in the future, and for how long is that money going to be needed? President Obama has talked about us starting to withdraw troops about the middle of 2011. As we are to start drawing down some troops there around July 2011, it became obvious to me that we are going to have a commitment there for some time, and I think it is important for us to be honest with the American people, first of all, about how much it is going to cost. I think a conservative estimate, for many years to come, is that we are going to be talking about spending at least $10 billion a year--around $6 billion to support their army and their police force and another $4 billion as far as helping build their economy. The Afghan economy can eventually take over if their natural resources come to be what the U.S. Geological Service says some of their minerals are worth; what they think the oil and gas reserves potentially are. China is coming in to build probably the largest copper mine in the world there, but it is going to take years to develop these resources. So that is one of the things I came back with. We need to be a little more open with the American people that we are going to be there for a while and it is going to cost us quite a bit of money. We should be able to say to our constituents back home: Here is how much we are going to be spending and here is why it is in our vital national interest. The other thing we haven't taken a lot of time to talk about is Pakistan. First of all, we have some great leaders over there, as well as Ambassador Patterson and Vice Admiral LeFever. They are the military leaders over there, and their teams are impressive as well. As Senator Brown mentioned, we visited a refugee camp, and we also visited a base that we built over there for Pakistanis to train. The Pakistanis who train there are called the frontier scouts and they work in the tribal areas to help fight the Taliban. It is in our interest to be able to do that. I was very encouraged by what I saw in Pakistan, by the new leaders there giving up some of their power voluntarily, the new President, and seeing Pakistan as much more of an ally to the United States in the future. In general, I thought that part of our trip to Pakistan was very much worthwhile. I would conclude my remarks with that, and turn it over to the Senator from Massachusetts.

Mr. ENSIGN

Mr. ENSIGN. Madam President, I call up amendment No. 3593.

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

Mr. ENSIGN. Madam President, very briefly, this is an amendment to improve the health care system in America. We talk about making health care more affordable. One of the ways to do that is to encourage people to give away health care. In my veterinary practice, I used to give away about 10 to 20 percent of my business. I did not have to be worried about being sued. Every doctor, every health care provider I have talked with, if they give away, if they do it pro bono, if they do it out of compassion, that is one of the first times they are going to get sued. What this amendment says is, unless there is gross negligence, if a health care provider is giving their services away out of the compassion of their heart, they cannot be sued. It is a very simple amendment. We have had this debate on the Senate floor before. This would greatly improve our medical system by encouraging people to be compassionate for those who cannot afford medical care, but they should not have to be worried about being sued if they happen to be compassionate enough to give their services away. This is a commonsense amendment. I encourage all our colleagues to vote for this amendment. This will improve our health care system in the United States.

Mr. ENSIGN. Pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 and section 4(g)(3) of the statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010, I move to waive all applicable sections of those acts and applicable budget resolutions for purposes of my amendment and ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. ENSIGN. I call up amendment No. 3710.

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

Mr. ENSIGN. I call the attention of the Senate to this clever cartoon. This cartoon has captured a very important part of this health care bill. It is a Trojan horse that says ``health care reform'' on it. You see a bunch of IRS agents coming out. My amendment goes to the heart of one of the problems with this bill. There is an individual mandate that puts fines on people that can also attach civil penalties. And 16,500 new IRS agents are going to be required to be hired because of the health care reform bill. Do we want IRS agents showing up at people's houses, not only to audit them because of their taxes but because now they are not paying an individual mandate fine? I do not think America wants expansion of the IRS. We should be focusing on jobs, not new jobs for IRS agents. I encourage my colleagues to vote for this amendment that would eliminate the individual fines on the individual mandates and civil penalties.

Mr. ENSIGN

Mr. ENSIGN. Mr. President, tourism is the backbone of the economy of my State of Nevada. It has taken a nosedive over the last year with the crash of the Nation's economy. More than ever, the industry has needed a lifeline that was recently given to my State when the legislation I authored with Senator Dorgan, the Travel Promotion Act, was signed into law by the President. Our legislation will revitalize the tourism industry across our country and in my State of Nevada by reintroducing our rural class destinations to people all over the world. On the piece of legislation before us, I have offered two important amendments to the FAA bill that will also help tourism in my State and will create jobs in this important industry. Last week, Senator Reid and I sponsored an amendment that will encourage more construction on land around McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, which will ultimately create more jobs for the area. Our legislation lifts an outdated deed restriction for land surrounding McCarran International Airport which previously prevented development on this land because of an agreement with the Bureau of Land Management that enforced noise mitigation for airlines flying overhead. However, because of technology, aircrafts are not as noisy as they were 10 years ago, when this restriction was put in place. While our amendment does not alter the noise threshold in the area, it does broaden the types of buildings that can be constructed on the land because airline noise no longer threatens to violate the threshold. Clark County can now sell the lands to be used for hotels, arenas, auditoriums, and concert halls. Not only are we making this land more attractive and more valuable, we are creating jobs by increasing construction in the area and increasing the use of the land. I was happy this amendment was accepted by both the majority and the minority. The second amendment Senator McCain has been working on for a long time, as well as myself, Senator Reid, and others was unfortunately pulled, but it deals with the issue of flights--helicopter flights, especially, and fixed-wing flights--over the Grand Canyon, which is something I have been working on since I was in the House of Representatives. I thought we were close to getting this amendment finalized because it is very important not only for tourism, but it is also important for those who cannot necessarily hike the Grand Canyon, who cannot experience the wonderful aspects of it--those in wheelchairs, the elderly--and this amendment would have made sure they would have continued to have access. I hope we can work on that and get that amendment either in conference or in some other way. It is not only good for the economy, but it is also good for those who are disabled or those who for other reasons cannot go and enjoy the Grand Canyon such as hikers and others can. Amendment No. 3476, as Modified The last piece I wish to talk about is the amendment we have before us today. It is called the DC perimeter amendment. Once again, this is something I have been working on for many years. The initial rule was put into place in 1966, to put a limit on how far flights could fly out of Reagan, then known as Washington National Airport. It was to divert air traffic over to the new Dulles Airport, basically making National a short-haul and Dulles a long-haul airport. To carry out this purpose, there was a restriction of 1,250 miles put from National Airport. While Congress has granted certain limited exceptions to the perimeter rule over the years, the rule continues to place arbitrary limits that restrict air traffic between the airport and the Western United States. Today, there are only a dozen nonstop flights between Reagan National and the entire Western United States. I encourage my colleagues to work on this amendment in conference. In a little while, we are probably going to be withdrawing the amendment, but we want to work on it in conference so that more areas, more places in the United States will have direct access to Reagan National Airport, which is much more convenient to use than Washington Dulles or the Baltimore airport. I will say this: It really is a matter of fairness. Should only the east coast or the Midwest have access to Reagan National or should the rest of the country have the convenience of flying into Reagan National? My amendment actually would not have increased the number of landing slots available. My amendment would have allowed airlines to take the slots. They fly from certain airports, the large hub airports, and transfer those to other slots that work better for their business plan as well as gives other people in America the right to fly into Reagan National Airport, which is, as I mentioned, so much more convenient. So after 40 years of implementation of the perimeter rule, it is outdated. The last time I checked--and I fly Dulles all the time-- Dulles is thriving. As a matter of fact, it is packed. I circled for over an hour today because of the number of flights coming into Dulles. It is an extremely busy airport. I don't think we have to make sure Dulles stays busy any longer. It has more than it can actually handle. But it is time to scale back the perimeter restrictions at Reagan National. So I really hope in conference we can get together and work on reasonable changes to the DC perimeter rule that will give other Americans, other than those living within the perimeter rule today, access to the closest airport to our Nation's Capital. With that, I thank the chairman and the ranking member for their willingness to work with us on this amendment as well as generally. This is important legislation they have worked on. We have a lot of outdated technology in our current FAA system, and this is a very important piece of legislation. I applaud the efforts they have made in bringing the legislation to this point. I yield the floor.

Mr. ENSIGN. The amendment allows any carrier which currently has slots at DCA to convert flights now serving large hub airports inside the perimeter into flights serving any airport outside the perimeter. This would mean that more passengers travelling from the West could fly into and out of National, avoiding the inconvenience and additional expense associated with getting into the city from Dulles.

Mr. ENSIGN. The amendment does not reduce the number of flights between DCA and small cities within the 1,250-mile perimeter; it does not affect the slot regulations at DCA; it does not increase the number of allowable flight operations at the airport; and it does not impact the small and medium size airports inside the perimeter. Rather, the amendment is a reasonable pro-competition solution that gives tourists and business travelers from around the nation another option for visiting the nation's Capital.

Mr. ENSIGN. There are only a dozen nonstop flights between Ronald Reagan National Airport and the entire western United States. To put that number in perspective, that is 12 beyond the perimeter flights at DCA out of approximately 400 flights daily. The beyond the perimeter flights represent just 3 percent of all daily, domestic operations at DCA.

Mr. ENSIGN. No. In 1962, Dulles only served approximately 52,000 passengers. Today, however, Dulles is thriving. In 2009, the airport served approximately 23 million passengers. According to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, ``Dulles has emerged as one of the fastest growing airports in the world and a major East Coast gateway for domestic and international travelers as well as cargo activities.''

Mr. ENSIGN. Yes, the Wright amendment of 1979 was a Federal law restricting flights at Dallas' Love Field Airport. It originally limited most nonstop flights from Love Field to destinations within Texas and neighboring States. In 2006, Congress passed the Wright Amendment Reform Act, which issued a full repeal of the Love Field perimeter rule with conditions. Lifting the restrictions at Love Field gave the traveling public more flight options, cut prices, and made traveling more efficient.

Mr. ENSIGN. The slot conversion provision ensures that service to small and medium hub airports within the perimeter would not be affected. There is no restriction, however, on converting a flight that currently serves a large hub airport within the perimeter to a small or medium hub airport beyond the perimeter. So, presumably the Ensign amendment could expand service to small and medium hub airports beyond the perimeter.

Mr. ENSIGN. No. The number of flights currently serving DCA remains the same. Residents around the airport will not hear an increase in noise from takeoffs and landings and will not see larger planes operating at DCA. The only change is that a few of the planes would have a different destination.

Mr. ENSIGN. Yes, because Senator Dorgan and our other colleagues have agreed to address the DCA perimeter rule as the FAA reauthorization process moves forward.

Mr. ENSIGN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that my amendment No. 3476, as modified, be withdrawn.