John Glenn

Mr. GLENN

Mr. GLENN. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to. amendment no. 179

Mr. GLENN

Mr. GLENN. Mr. President, this amendment clarifies how the provisions of S. 1 will treat reauthorizations of existing laws that contain mandates. Our understanding all along, with both myself and Senator Kempthorne, is that S. 1, as did S. 993 last year, shall apply only to future mandates that add new costs, and this amendment clarifies that intent. There has been some confusion about that. Basically, the amendment does the following. It ensures that reauthorizations which do not change existing laws but merely extend them are not covered under S. 1. So if a law is simply extended for several years without any substantive change, it is not covered under the mandate legislation. Second, if a reauthorization amends the mandate and imposes new costs on State and local governments and the private sector but in another part of that reauthorization bill the costs of existing requirements are reduced, then those savings are credited against the new costs imposed. Third, this language makes clear that in reauthorization bills, it is new costs that will be scored and that the baseline of existing costs are not part of the CBO or Budget Committee calculations. So direct costs are net costs. Finally, this amendment covers situations that may occur when an existing law expires and there may be a short gap in time before it is extended. I believe this amendment is noncontroversial and clarifies what has been our intent all along, that S. 1 apply to the new mandates imposing costs. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. GLENN. I thank the Chair.

Mr. GLENN. Mr. President, I am sending an amendment to the desk. Because the amendment makes changes at more than one place in the bill, I ask unanimous consent that consideration of this amendment shall be in order.

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. GLENN

Mr. GLENN. Mr. President, I accept it on our side, also.

Mr. GLENN

Mr. GLENN. Will the Senator withhold?

Mr. GLENN. Mr. President, I believe we set aside the Hatfield amendment this morning, and would that not have to be disposed of as the pending business before we could move on to another amendment?

Mr. GLENN. To be offered. That does not answer my question, I do not believe. Do we have to do anything to deal with the Hatfield amendment before we can bring up other amendments?

Mr. GLENN. Mr. President, I rise to take just a very few minutes to address the Hollings amendment. It is a sense-of-the-Senate amendment. It talks about the importance of interest on the national debt as far as being an unfunded mandate. But in part B, it says that prior to adopting, in the first session of the 104th Congress, a joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution requiring a balanced budget, a sense-of-the-Senate, then revenue changes to achieve the balanced Federal budget by the year 2002; two, enforce the congressional budget process, the requirement to achieve a balanced budget by the year 2002. Let me address that briefly. I thought originally maybe that this did not have any place being addressed on the unfunded mandates legislation. This just says that we want to know in advance what the impact is going to be. In other words, it is truth in legislating, as best we can tell that truth, in advance. I submit that is what this unfunded mandate legislation is all about. We are trying to determine what the impact is in advance, and tell States and local communities just exactly what Federal mandates are going to do to them in advance. And we require the Congressional Budget Office to actually spell out the dollar impacts on them in advance. That is what Senator Hollings is proposing with this legislation. Why should we not do this? Why should we not, to the best of our ability, say how a balanced budget amendment, if it goes into effect, will be dealt with? That is exactly what we are trying to do with this unfunded mandates legislation as it deals with the States and local communities. Apropos to this, I think when we come to consideration of a balanced budget amendment, I read some figures over the weekend, I believe in one of the columns, that if we take the things that everyone seems to say are off limits in the House and here also--Social Security, Medicare, interest on the national debt, and defense, those four items--I do not know whether those can all be taken out and made exempt from any consideration when we get into budget cutting or not. If we cannot, if some of those come in, I say to the Social Security recipients that some of your benefits are in danger. The same thing is true with Medicare. We know we have to pay interest on the national debt. We do not want to cut defense. We feel it has been cut enough already. So if you leave Social Security, Medicare, interest on the national debt, and national defense off budget, or off limits, what does that leave? As was pointed out in the column I read over the weekend, that then would require approximately a little over a 30-percent cut in all the other functions of Government; a 30-percent cut in all the other functions of Government. If you take Social Security, Medicare, interest on the national debt, and national defense off budget, it would be a 30-percent cut in every other program. If we applied that across the board, this means that next time you climb on an airliner after this, maybe, you will know that 30 percent of FAA funds; 30 percent of National Transportation Safety Board funds; 30 percent of CDC, the Centers for Disease Control funds, trying to deal with the AIDS problem, an enormous problem; 30 percent of NIH funds, the National Institutes of Health dealing with cancer problems; FDA, trying to see what drugs are safe, are cut. You may say: We will not deal with any of those; we would leave those fully funded. What else gets cut? What else gets cut in that situation? How about immigration? Do we want additional restrictions on immigration? Do we want to provide the people to firm up the borders? Would that get its 30-percent cut? How about farm subsidies? There is an attractive one. We are going to cut these 30 percent or more to make up for keeping something else from this 30-percent cut. Then there are prisons, and we could go on and on. We are dealing in this unfunded mandate legislation mainly with the impact on the States and local communities. What do the States get right now? States, right now, under discretionary and entitlement funding, receive about $230 billion a year, about 70 of that in discretionary funding and about 160 in entitlements. This is broken down into Medicaid, for instance, and $173 billion goes into Federal and State, total, for Medicaid; 57 percent of that is Federal, and 43 percent is State; that is $230 billion total. I use that figure for this reason. If we pass something that says that we are not going to say what we are going to cut, we are just going to do that after we, in effect, threaten ourselves and say, OK, we are going to force ourselves to buy a balanced budget amendment to make these decisions but we are not going to say in advance where the decisions are made, then I submit that the States with what they receive now, what is given to them now for all these various programs, that $230 billion is going to be a very, very attractive target for budget cutters looking for some way to balance the budget without getting into cuts on Social Security, Medicare, interest on the national debt, or defense. What Senator Hollings has proposed is a how-to piece of legislation-- knowing what we are going to do, giving us an idea of what we are going to do in advance to get to a balanced budget. All of us want to get to a balanced budget. Certainly, I do. I do not think there is anybody here who does not want to get to a balanced budget. What Senator Hollings says is let everybody, the States included, know in advance whether they will be the ones who will be unfairly dealt with in this other area if we pass a balanced budget amendment. Will the efforts to balance the budget then come out of the State's hide of $230 billion that we send from the Federal Treasury to the States every year? Surely we would not take the other tack and say on Senator Hollings' amendment that we would adopt in the first session a joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution requiring a balanced budget, one, the Congress should not set forth specific outlay and revenue changes. Surely we would never add that should not and prohibit anyone from saying exactly how this is going to affect anyone by prohibiting the listing of what the outlay and revenue effects would be. So all he said is that in the Constitution requiring a balanced budget, the Congress set forth specific outlay and revenue changes to achieve a balanced Federal budget by 2002. It seems to me that we are just trying to predict and make forecastable what is happening between the Federal Government and the States with this unfunded mandate legislation. All Senator Hollings is asking in his proposed amendment, it seems to me, is that we do the same advanced kind of planning in trying to get where the cuts or where the revenues would come from, what the impact would be, the amounts, and trying to determine these things in advance. So, Mr. President, I rise in support of Senator Hollings' amendment. Mr. GRAHAM addressed the Chair.

Mr. GLENN. Mr. President, I compliment my friend for moving in this direction. I think this makes a lot of sense. Since there are a lot of questions I would like to clarify in the legislative history here on the floor, though, as to whether it is the Senator's intent that the study being done will include the estimated costs? After all, that is what this bill deals with and unless the costs were going to be above $50 million it would not be a threshold item for this particular item.

Mr. GLENN. That will be agreeable to the Senator from Ohio and the Senator from Idaho with the provision the Senator's remarks not be in the middle of our conversation about when the votes are going to occur.

Mr. GLENN. I withhold.

Mr. GLENN. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. GLENN. The 4 o'clock limitation was 4 o'clock today, was it not?

Mr. GLENN. Mr. President, I object.

Mr. GLENN. Senator Dole, the majority leader, went before the Governors Association and said he thought this was important enough that he would make it S. 1, the prime bill before the Senate, to be brought up as the first bill this year. I agreed with that. I have been an advocate of correcting this unfunded mandates problem for a long time. We worked on this for the better part of 2 years with my distinguished colleague from Idaho, Senator Kempthorne, the floor manager on the other side. I did not quarrel with that. But now we are being blamed somehow for not going ahead with this. That is just not right. But what happened this year? Let us follow this thing through. Because of the priority accorded this legislation, it was referred to committee on the following timetable: Voted off the Senate floor to committee; sent to committee. It was introduced on the floor one day, and sent immediately to committee with a hearing to occur the following day, with the agreement that the three; introduction, committee hearing, committee markup. Just like that, and bring it back to the floor in short order. Now what happened? We got it over and had the markup, and a lot of people had some legitimate concerns about some of the things that had been put into the bill when it became S. 1 this year--using the basis of S. 993, but going beyond that. There were concerns about this. So I requested that the committee markup not be done, as I recall, on a Friday. We asked that this be put off over the weekend so people could find out what the changes were; so we would know what we were voting on. This was not going to be a rubber stamp. There was no mandate that came out of the November election that said we now have to approve everything the Republicans now suggest because they are in the majority. We wanted to know what the changes were and let everyone else know what the changes were. That was the purpose of asking that this be put off over the weekend. So it was put off over the weekend. We had the markup on Monday. Then what happened? We went to the committee and we had a number of substantive changes--these were not frivolous or delaying items at all. They were amendments that we had prepared. I had some and Senator Levin, in particular, who did a real analysis of this legislation, had substantive amendments about how specific parts of this bill would be applied. He wanted to clarify some of those things. Do you know what happened in committee? In committee, we were not even permitted to bring up our amendments. We requested to bring up amendments and were told, ``No, leadership wants this back up on the floor right away and any amendments will be dealt with on the floor.'' We thought this was not the way to go. We objected and we had some rollcall votes on different substantive things. These were not delay items, they were substantive items to be brought up in committee. On a straight party-line vote, it was said, no; we cannot consider those things. Those will be considered on the floor. We were voted down on a party line basis. We got rolled on every single one of them. Then it was stated, ``We are going to send this to the floor without a committee report.'' The importance of a committee report--if anybody has ever read through one of these bills with the technical language, the whereases and therefores, and everything that makes it conform to the whole United States Code, to the average layman, it is virtually unintelligible, and to a lot of Senators, too. So what do we have? Normally, as a requirement, we have a committee report, and it is carefully written. It explains in layman's language, going through each section of the proposed legislation, exactly what it means, giving the pros and cons on it so every Member and staff member working on a particular piece of legislation, when it comes to the floor, will be able at that point to have an understanding of what the legislation provides. By and large, we rely on those committee reports. That is the importance of them. We objected to sending the legislation to the floor from the Governmental Affairs Committee without the committee report being filed. In fact, we thought it was important enough that after some discussion of it, and we were still being denied that right, it was brought up where we finally insisted on a record rollcall vote on it, and, once again, we got rolled--still with the provision that we could bring up anything we wanted on the floor. So over our objection, it was voted out. I understand that our committee chairman, Senator Roth, was under considerable pressure from leadership to bring this to the floor that day, no matter what. I appreciate his position on that. Let me just say this. I have been around the Senate now for over 20 years, and I was chairman of the committee 8 years. Never in the 8 years I was chairman did I ever have our majority leader say: I want you to roll this through committee no matter what, and bring it out to the floor without a report on any piece of legislation. Occasionally, we sent legislation from the Governmental Affairs Committee to the floor without a report, but only with the agreement of the minority, and then usually only on bills that were comparatively innocuous and not major pieces of legislation, as this is. This is landmark legislation. This changes the way we have operated for 60 years and starts moving things back in a different direction, to a different Federal responsibility, a different relationship, Federal, State, and local. That is the reason I call this landmark legislation. It makes the first steps--it is the first major piece of legislation that makes steps in that direction. What happened? We got to the floor, the bill is called up, and all at once there is a move to try to curtail amendments, keep them to a minimum, saying ``We have to get this through; we have to beat the House,'' as though this was a legislative drag race, and more important than the substance of this legislation. I predicted in committee before this was voted out--first, I will give a little bit of background. Usually, in committee, you try to take care of all of the substantive amendments anybody has and they are focused on that piece of legislation. Usually, you do not have a lot of extraneous amendments come up in committee because people are focused on that piece of legislation. We were not permitted to do that this time around. Then when a bill comes to the floor, if it has had all that kind of due consideration in committee, what happens on the floor? Then you are on good grounds to say we have dealt with the substantive matters as we see it in committee, and we brought this out as a pretty good, clean bill. If somebody really has something that deals with substance, let us consider it. But other than that, we are going to try to defeat other amendments that can be put on in the State, extraneous amendments that can be put in, because the Senate has no germaneness rules, unless we are under cloture or for certain applications on certain appropriations bills. But we are going to say that--we will try to say, OK; whichever side of the aisle puts on extraneous amendments, we have dealt substantively with this in committee, and so we are going to oppose all those, no matter how meritorious they might be on their own freestanding bill, if it was put in as such. We are going to oppose it in legislation on the floor. I predicted in committee that if we brought this bill out without the substantive amendments being taken care of in committee, this bill--I think my words in committee were that this bill was going to draw amendments like flies to honey. And it sure has. We got to the floor-- and I think it is important that everybody understand this so the remarks of the Senator from Wyoming of a few minutes ago are understood. His revisionist view of what happens does not square with the facts. We got to the floor and what happened? Senator Byrd objected to the fact that we had not had the committee report. I indicated the importance of that a few moments ago for legislation like this, which is landmark legislation. Senator Byrd very properly objected. He said that this was important legislation, he wanted to see the committee report. When could we have that committee report available? That is what the debate was about, for about 2 days here. The debate was not about the substance of whether unfunded mandates problems should be corrected or not corrected. The debate was about the procedure that was used in bringing this to the floor and whether we should have a report so all Members would have the benefit of the thinking of committee members and would be permitted to put minority views in that committee report. Now, in committee they said that they would put the committee report in the Congressional Record. We said, ``What about the minority views that usually goes along with it?'' They said, ``You could also put those in the Congressional Record if you wanted.'' That is a very, very poor substitute for our normal procedures here. That is exactly what Senator Byrd disagreed with and what we fussed about back and forth on the floor here for 2 days. At the end of that time was when the majority leader decided that he felt that there was delay on this and he filed a cloture motion. What did that do? What did that do? Just as I predicted in committee, it flushed out more amendments than anybody considered and cloture is going to be voted, your amendment has to be filed at the desk before cloture is invoked. And do you know what happened? We had 117 amendments--117 amendments--put forward to try to beat that cloture deadline, largely because of the procedure that had been used up to that time. Now that really threw things in a cocked hat. I did not know where we were going at that time, because I knew that the Republicans--and both sides knew this--did not have the votes for cloture; did not have the votes for cloture. Did this mean, then, without having the votes for cloture with 117 amendments, was this going to kill our consideration of unfunded mandates? I did not know whether it would or not. It was in that context that I mentioned to my distinguished colleague from Idaho, who has been on this for a long, long time--and he and I have dealt very straightforwardly with each other on this--I mentioned to him, if things really got bogged down--and it was bogged down over the lack of a committee report and the fact we did have all the new provisions in S. 1 that had not been in S. 993--that this was going to delay things and it looked like we might not get it through the Congress at all--and I think it is important we are getting legislation through the Congress; I reiterate that I support this legislation, fought for it as chairman of the committee, brought it out of the committee last fall as S. 993--I suggested to my colleague from Idaho that if push came to shove and it looked like we were not going to get cloture and it was going to be a long stalemate on this and maybe even have to pull the whole thing down eventually, we might want to consider dropping back to S. 993 so we get something through. I think it is important we do that. And while the big seven that I referred to a little while ago certainly does want S. 1 more than they wanted S. 993 last fall--they were happy with that; now that they have gotten more, the chance of getting more, they are very much enamored of S. 1. I understand that-- any drop back in that position to S. 993 would have been something that they would abhor. I mention this only in the context of where we were in the legislative process at that time, with the possibility that there was going to be an inability of the Republicans to invoke cloture, which requires 60 votes, and they only had 53 for sure and what they could peel off on our side. But that meant they had to get another seven votes off the Democratic side and they could not do that, at least not in the early round on this. If it meant this was going to be delayed too much, then we were going to have to consider what we would do. Would we pull down S. 1, as I saw a possibility of at that time, and go back to passing something which everyone thought was adequate last fall, although they liked the additional provisions of S. 1 now? That was the context of where I talked to my distinguished colleague from Idaho about that possibility. The cloture vote was held. Cloture was not invoked. And so here we are, with all of the delay of the past week, with nothing having really substantively happened on this legislation. Meanwhile, while all this was going on, we did have a group meeting, both sides trying to define what amendments were important, which ones were not, who really wanted to put their amendments in or who had put in frivolous amendments of the 117 that we had submitted at the time before the cloture vote. Fortunately, that group finally made some progress on this. And so, after the Republican side did not invoke cloture, we fell back to what was reality, I guess, and said, ``OK, we will now try to get a unanimous-consent agreement that only about 60 of those ones that people said yes, they really wanted to put them in, only about 60 of these would be eligible to be placed in consideration as amendments on this legislation.'' Meanwhile, we had gone through on the floor, during another 2 days or 2\1/2\ days, we had worked our way through a number of amendments. But the way those had been structured, they had been submitted as second- degree amendments by the parliamentary situation we were in at that time, so before we went to this unanimous-consent agreement, Senator Dole moved to strike through a series of five amendments that he proposed. We went through the stripping of everything we had done there. And that was probably the best thing to do. I do not quarrel with that. So now we start over with this finite list of amendments that can be considered, and those are all to be submitted by 3 o'clock tomorrow afternoon. Now, today, we can get on with these amendments. We can debate amendments today, but no votes will occur before 4 o'clock today. Why do I go into all this detail? It is beginning to get a little aggravating. I do not normally get up and gripe back and forth. I usually stay out of these back-biting things, where these inflammatory words are used here. And I think my record on the Senate floor would show that I only rarely get up and try to respond when some of these things are said. I leave it to other people who sort of enjoy getting locked into that kind of verbal combat, I guess, for whatever partisan purposes it may provide on either side of the aisle. But for my distinguished colleague to come in this morning and talk about us opposing this legislation when we tried to get it out last fall and were blocked by the Republicans; tried very hard to get it out. I was still trying down to the last 2 days of the session last year to get it out on a unanimous-consent request and could not do it. We had objections on both sides. The final objection did fall on the Democratic side, let us be fair about this. But the reason we got down to even considering it on a UC basis was because there had been this scorched-earth, do-not-let-anything-through policy on the other side that had prevented consideration of a lot of bills, of which this and the congressional coverage bill were two. To come on the floor and say that we are creating gridlock on the Democratic side and say that we are using tactics we used when we were ``overlords of years past'' and to talk about the Democrats stonewalling this legislation is about the biggest revisionist view of history that I can think of. That there are political beliefs being pushed for unfunded mandates by our political gurus, our advisers, somehow advising us in this area that we are trying to delay--``trying to delay this train'' was another quote--that just is not true. The reason I have taken this time to lay out what happened on this bill is because I think it is important that everyone know exactly what has happened. This is not a filibuster of S. 1 this year. The filibuster, if there has been anything to be construed as a filibuster on the floor of the Senate this year, is objections to the ramrod procedures that were used to roll the minority in committee and not even permit a regular committee report to be sent to the floor with this legislation. Now, that was flat wrong. I have never seen that done. I have been here 20 years. I have never seen that done before on any committee I have been on where at the specific request of the minority, even a record rollcall vote that the minority requested, to try to say a report will accompany this legislation, did I ever, ever, hear the majority say, ``No, it has to go. We cannot have a committee report. We will just put something in the Congressional Record. If we want minority views they can be put in the Record. This is such a fast track we have to bypass everything. We are in a legislative race with the House of Representatives so we do not get behind the people in the House somehow. If this was some little innocuous bill that made no difference whether it passed or not or of very little importance, I would not think it is worthy of even standing up to correct the statements made on the floor a little while ago that I am responding to. This is not that kind of legislation. The days when I was growing up, days of the Great Depression, were tough days. Okies headed west. People headed for soup kitchens and so on. There was unemployment of over 20 percent for 4 years, 25 percent for 1 year. They were tough days. Families had taken care of families up until that time, a Norman Rockwell type of existence. In the days of the depression, people could not do that anymore. People were hungry. There were of the country because communities and States could no longer take care of their own and do it in an adequate fashion. Either could not or would not. What has happened? The New Deal came in. FHA was put in. There were a lot of programs. I will not try to detail all of those. Starting with that premise--that States and local communities were unable to take care of their own--was the premise of the New Deal, and it moved into a whole new area of Federal activity. Now, have some of the programs over the last 60 years built up and gone too far? I would be the first to say that certainly we should correct those. There is a move now to go back to let the States take over a lot of these things that the Federal Government has been doing. I think that is OK in some areas but not completely. I would not agree with all of it. We need to do this carefully to make sure that the social safety net that has been put together over the last 60 years and that people have come to depend on, we can say rightly or wrongly, depending on Democrat or Republican view, if that social safety net is just thrown out and we let some States take up these services and some States not, that will deal very unfairly with millions of Americans. Now, I am all for unfunded mandates legislation. I support it. I supported S. 993 last year and am a cosponsor of S. 1 this year. Do we need to consider it carefully? Yes, we absolutely do, to make sure that we do not do some damage while we are trying to do good and prevent these unjustified mandates. Many of them are being just heaped upon the States, heaped upon the States, at the same time, over the past 5 or 6 years, that we have been cutting down on some of the programs-- community development block grants, things like that. We have been cutting down on programs that have sent much money back to help the States. So we have to do this very carefully. And to think that somehow the minority is going to roll over and play dead and say, ``Yes, whatever you want to do we will do it,'' without consideration of important pieces of legislation, important amendments to correct some of these matters. Let me just very briefly--and I know I am taking a long time and people are waiting--but let me just say this. Senator Byrd wants to have an amendment, which was listed the other day, which would say, basically, that as part of this bill where we say to an agency if the emergency is not there but there is less money available, the agency, then, can bring this up or can somehow judge how the money will be spent and so on. In other words, the question he raises is a good one. I am in support of S. 1. I repeat that again. What he raises is a question: Are we passing our legislative authority over to unnamed bureaucrats over there; and what guarantee do we have that they will not go too far with them. That is just one. I have a series of some of the things that were left out with regard to color and age discrimination. That was one. Another as to when the point of order would lie. Are we going to permit it on every single amendment? Are we going to have a point of order lie to begin with or at the end of the amending process before final passage of whatever the legislation is? There is some uncertainty as to who would determine applicability where we have a judgment is something a mandate or not. Is that justified by the way the bill provides now with the presiding officer-- for example, meaning the Parliamentarian--who would determine what a mandate is, or should that be by the Governmental Affairs Committee? We have an amendment on that. That is substantive. We have some that would clarify the differentiation between what would apply in a public sector--that is, governments--as opposed to what would apply in the private sector at the same time. We have another one that would clarify that where a bill is reauthorized from a past provision of law, a bill comes up at the end of its time to be reauthorized--as the bill is now, it is not clear enough; it says that this could not be challenged if it is over $50 million. We clarify that the $50 million would only apply if a reauthorization went $50 million beyond its previous requirements, which makes it compatible with the rest of the bill. Senator Levin has some amendments. He wants to propose that this is important legislation, maybe we ought to sunset it so we are forced to reconsider the implementation at the end of a certain time period. He would have another one that, if a committee determines that there is a significant competitive disadvantage to the private sector--for instance, where there are competing electric generating plants between the government and private sectors--should we clarify whether we are beginning to have to move in and subsidize a requirement on the public sector and not do the same thing on the private sector, which would give a major advantage in some areas of light generation, sewer provision, water, whatever, where there are competitive interests between public and private businesses. I think that should be corrected also. We have a number of others here. I will not go through the rest of them. I want to show that these are substantive. Now, some put in over on the Republican side deal with judicial review, when there is any question about a particular provision of the bill, if a person could file suit in Federal court right off the bat. Can we figure any way to possibly bring the Government to a halt faster than that? By allowing everybody that disagreed with a particular item to say, ``We will file suit.'' What is substantive is the point I am making. I do not want to argue the merits. It is substantive. That would be proposed by Senator Brown, I believe. Motor-voter has been brought up again as a cost to the States. We will have to go through motor-voter. Is that substantive? It certainly is. Impact analysis for independent agencies by Senator Domenici would ensure analysis for impacts included for certain independent regulatory agencies as FCC, FERC, FTC, and the Interstate Commerce Commission. One on our list at this point that Senator Gramm may bring up is an amendment requiring three-fifths of the Senate, making it much more difficult to waive a point of order and get on with consideration of a certain bill. CBO estimates on conference reports would be required by another amendment. Senator Grassley has one that is on our list, at this point at least, and I do not know whether he intends to push it, which would extend application of the act to past and current mandates. I do not know, if we went back on all previous Federal mandates without some limitation, I do not know how many trillion dollars that might involve. That is an amendment and it certainly is substantive. I will not go on with these. There are a number of others like this. The point I want to make by listing just some of these is that these are very substantive amendments. They are things that are important to iron out so that this landmark legislation, when it is enacted--I hope it will be enacted--is done with all the best thinking of the Senate and the House of Representatives so it can be as workable as possible, can be used for, really, changing the direction of the relationship between the Federal, State, and local governments. Now, Mr. President, there are some others that I could list here also, but I will not go through them. That is the reason I wanted to go through this and explain exactly what happened and how we got to where we are. And the fact of the argument so far, the debate back and forth, has been about 90 percent on consideration of procedure and whether we are adequately protecting everyone who might want to make substantive changes to this piece of legislation, changes that might be very valuable and be good and that all the big seven and everybody can agree with are good. And so being prevented from doing that in committee and the attempt made here to push very rapidly once we got to the floor, that has been the heart of the debate so far. That has been the disagreement so far. So when I hear words that the Democrats are the ones delaying--it is Democratic gridlock; it is just Democrats trying to be ``overlords of years past,'' we are trying to stonewall--nothing could be further from the truth. I do not care how many statements are made on the floor to that effect. triggered my response here just were flat not true. I know from my personal experience in caucuses on this side, what happened in committee last year, and having been in committee this year where this big, unnecessary push was made to push this stuff through too fast. We need to consider this. It is very, very important legislation. I yield the floor. Mr. KEMPTHORNE addressed the Chair.

Mr. GLENN. Mr. President, I have to rise to comment on the statements just made by my distinguished colleague from Wyoming. I think we need to review what has happened here. This revisionist view that was just expressed of what happened last year, and what so far has occurred this year, is a little strange to me having lived through last year and what has happened this year. You know, we voted it out of committee. I was chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee last year. We voted out in August the unfunded mandates legislation. Senator Mitchell wanted to bring it to the floor. We tried to bring it to the floor. There was so much delay, I think we had 20 some cloture votes filed against the Republicans last fall. It was a scorched-earth policy and they were taking great pride-- some, not all--on the other side. Some absorbed what was going on to their credit. But on the other side there was a scorched-earth policy of, ``Don't let anything get through.'' And we found objection and all sorts of procedural matters being brought up just to delay, to delay. To say now that after November 8 there is some great mandate that says that we move forward on all these things that we considered last year and wanted to bring up and could not because of the Republican filibusters on the floor of the U.S. Senate, and now to blame us for not getting these things through, is about as clearly a revisionist view of what happened last fall as anything could be. The statement was made that the Democrats enjoy this kind of delay, and we are putting through what was referred to as CYA amendments. And I think we all know on the floor what that means. Those are not my words. Those are the words of the Senator from Wyoming. No one enjoys delaying anything on our side that I know of around here because most of the people on our side of the aisle are in favor of the unfunded mandates legislation. We just want to see it go through in a form that it can be administered and be good. It was said that we put out our press releases on this thing, and talked about how we ignored completely the fact; that the reason we did not have congressional coverage legislation last year and unfunded mandates last year was somehow the fault of Democrats. Nothing could be further from the truth. We had them on the calendar ready to be brought up. That is fact. That is not a revisionist view of what happened last year. Now somehow my colleague from Wyoming indicates that the Republicans are trying to force this and the Democrats are opposing it as though the Democrats were not for it last year, and we were being opposed by the Republicans last year. He talks about Democratic gridlock of the past. He says that November 8 brought all of this home, that all the chickens came home to roost. Why bring up this litany? Well, he said the situation of the past week where the Democrats were somehow--and I think I wrote down the words correctly--were trying to continue their policy of being ``overlords'' of years past. Those are harsh words. And the ``stonewalling''--that is another word--``stonewalling'' of the Democrats, and that the majority would eventually prevail; and that the Democrats seem to think with their gurus that there is some political benefit to blocking unfunded mandates. Mr. President, those remarks are about as ridiculous as I can think of here after we tried last year to get congressional coverage and get unfunded mandates through and were blocked repeatedly because of procedural steps taken on the Republican side to block us even from consideration. We did not have time to consider unfunded mandates. We brought them out of committee in August. There were statements about we were trying to delay their train. No. That is not true. Let me just recount for the record so we get the facts straight. S. 993 was introduced last year in the Senate. That is what we were trying to get through. After the November 8 election it was felt that the House was probably going to come up with a stiffer, tougher bill than S. 993, although all parties, including the big seven of State, county and, local officials--the big seven different groups, as they are called--were in favor of S. 993 last year, and we had some 67 cosponsors. We could have passed it, just like that, if we had not had the delay occasioned by the Republican's scorched-earth, do-not- let-anything-go-through policy of last fall. We could have gotten it through last fall. But what happened then after the election this year? I will tell you what happened after the election this year. They said the House is going to come up with a tougher bill and we had better move our bill here to make it a little bit tougher so that perhaps the Senate bill can prevail, something the whole Congress can get behind and get passed because we need to deal with unfunded mandates. So I did not fight that. Our staffs all worked together and came up with some new proposals here, and there are some tougher mandates here. Maybe we have gone a little far in some of the consideration of our people that were one or more of the 67 cosponsors of last year. But we came up there with a new bill, S. 1. (Mr. THOMAS assumed the chair.)

Mr. GLENN

Mr. GLENN. So that we can get on with the business of the Senate on this, I ask unanimous consent that the Hatfield amendment be temporarily set aside so we can continue with debate on other amendments.

Mr. GLENN. Mr. President, in response, I do not know who the Senator referred to as those who are scheming, as he put it, to go beyond what was originally intended with this law. If there are those in the agencies who are doing exactly that, then we have to disabuse them of that and bring them up short in a very short period of time. I am interested in what the law actually provided, period. What we required the States to do, what we required schools to do, universities, whatever. We gave some latitude to the metric board, the commission that was formed to administer this. But as far as other people being able to scheme to force the States to take highway signs down or to force action like that, quite apart from what was provided in the law, then I think we ought to be very careful of that. We all could give chapter and verse of examples where the people over in the agencies writing the rules and regulations pursuant to well-intentioned legislation passed here in the Congress go too far and they have to be brought up short. There are two ways we do that in our regular, normal scheme of things in Government. One, all the regulations are to be submitted to the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and they are to pass on what rules and regulations are legitimate and permit them to go forward and make sure at that point, at OMB and OIRA, the requirements of law are being carried out and nothing more. So we do not propose to let the people over in the executive branch of Government in a particular agency administer the laws up here to their own liking. And if that is being done, then I will join my distinguished colleague today or any time in the future in seeing that we bring them up short on that and make sure they do not go beyond the realm of what was in the law itself as written here and what the legislative history shows is the intent of the law. If they are going beyond that and requiring things that the law as written and signed into law by the President did not provide, then we should stop them immediately. So I would join him in that effort here. But I have not seen any evidence heard any real major complaint from the States in that regard. I yield the floor.

Mr. GLENN

Mr. GLENN. Will the Senator yield just for a correction?

Mr. GLENN. No range, is the way I interpreted that myself. If they cannot do that, then they just tell us that and we take that into consideration.

Mr. GLENN. The bill now is silent on this thing of ranges. It says CBO will make an estimate. That means to me they will make an estimate.

Mr. GLENN. In either case. As long as CBO can tell us in their best judgment it is going to exceed the threshold, that is what we need to know, and have some estimate of that and give a figure. I think when we get into these ranges and you say what if the range is $10 million to $1 billion, for instance--just to pick numbers--then it is they could not possibly do that and it would be of no use to us here on the floor, anyway. So I think we are on solid ground saying either pick an estimate and that is the figure we hopefully rely on, or if they do not have any confidence in that figure, tell us that and they just cannot make an estimate.