T. Gorton

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, sometime late tomorrow or early on Wednesday the Senate will begin formal consideration of the budget resolution adopted late last week by a conference committee. That budget resolution, in common with its predecessor a year ago, will clearly put the United States on the road to a balanced budget, a goal shared by more than 80 percent of all of our fellow citizens. To a certain extent, Mr. President, a balanced budget is a goal in the abstract. It is a phrase that sounds good, sounds responsible, but nonetheless is divorced from our day-to-day concerns. It is, however, vitally important to our future, but most particularly to the future of our children and our grandchildren, to those who come after us. Almost 200 years ago Thomas Jefferson spoke of it as a moral imperative, that it was simply a moral wrong for the politicians of his day or of ours to spend money on programs, however worthy, that they supported, but to refuse to pay the bill, to send that bill to someone else. Thomas Jefferson's words are as important and as valid today as they were at the beginning of the 19th century. It is our obligation to seek this goal, and not just to seek it, but to put the Nation on a path pursuant to which it will be attained. It does, of course, go beyond a pure moral imperative. It is a financial imperative as well. We know by the almost unanimous opinion of economists who dig deeply into this issue that the mere promise of a balanced budget, accompanied by a set of policies that will lead us shortly after the turn of the century to reach one, will have a positive impact. Such a promise will lower the interest rates that men and women pay on the homes they purchase or wish to purchase, on their automobiles and other large consumer purchases, on their businesses, small and large, designed for their own future, and for the creation of opportunity in our society and our economy. The actual accomplishment shortly after the turn of the century of a balanced budget will mean somewhere between $1,000 and $2,000 per average American family additional in their pockets, partly because of the lower interest rates that I have already described and partly because, all other things being equal, the economy will be that much stronger. There will be that many more and better jobs for Americans in just a very few years from now. This is a case in which the moral imperative and the financial desirability as a course of action lead us in precisely the same direction. Mr. President, under those circumstances, why is this not only a unanimous goal, but why are not the policies that lead to that equally unanimous? I do not remember during the course of the last year any Member of this body standing before the body and saying, ``It is a poor idea. It is not something that we should bother with at all.'' No, Mr. President, everyone gives at least lip service to the idea, but that lip service goes little further when it comes to the practical methods of attaining the goal. With those who voted no as recently as last week on a constitutional amendment that would mandate attaining a goal, to those who will vote no tomorrow or the next day, the answer will constantly be, ``We have to do it differently. I do not like this balanced budget.'' It is some other balanced budget, my own or someone else's, that is the only way to go. In other words, the details, the tendency for perfection in the mind of each individual Member, interferes with attaining a goal so important both morally and economically. Mr. President, perhaps all of us could have been accused of that course of action as recently as a handful of years ago. Almost never, in my memory, did anyone seriously propose a budget that led to that balance until the dramatic vote of something more than a year ago in which the balanced budget constitutional amendment, having been approved by the House of Representatives, was defeated here by a single vote. Following that dramatic loss, many Members took much more seriously the lip service they previously had given to a balanced budget. In fact, a majority of this body came up with a budget resolution and then enforcing statutes that would reach that goal by the year 2002. Regrettably--I think profoundly regrettably--the President of the United States vetoed that proposal with the statement that we ought to do it in a different way. Now, that statement came in spite of the fact that the President of the United States had never previously proposed any way of reaching that goal. Since that veto, Mr. President, not surprisingly, given the predictions of what success would bring, failure has brought an increase in interest rates. Almost half of last year's gain has now been lost. The prospects of the good economics that result from a balanced budget are limited. The President criticized the budget by reason of what it did to strengthen and preserve Medicare. Yet, just last week, his own Medicare trustees have said the very challenges in the Medicare system that last year's balanced budget was designed to cure have become not better, but worse. Even so, Mr. President, we now have a proposal from the administration called a ``balanced budget'' that has been severely, and I think appropriately, criticized by Members on this side of the aisle on the ground that it was not real. Just yesterday in the Washington Post we saw an analysis of some elements of that proposal by a normally relatively liberal columnist who pointed out what we already knew, the President's budget for this year increases spending on a number of politically popular programs and proposes dramatic cuts in those programs next year and the year after. However, Mr. President, when his Cabinet Members in charge of administering those programs were asked how they would deal with those reductions in future years, they assured Members of Congress that, in fact, the President had privately assured that they would never, in fact, take place; that they were, in effect, phony figures designed to create a paper balance that never, in fact, would take place. Now, Mr. President, we are faced with a dramatic choice: Do we vote in favor of the one proposed budget resolution now available to us that includes difficult but necessary policy decisions to reach this goal desired by so many Americans for so many good reasons, or do we continue to say, ``Not this one, not now, wait until next year, do it differently''? Mr. President, I was one of the dozen Republican Members who joined with a dozen Democratic Members to come up with a different proposal, a bipartisan proposal, to reach the same goal in approximately the same period of time, a proposal that I thought at least in some respects to be superior to the one that is about to come to the floor of this U.S. Senate. Mr. President, that proposal received 46 affirmative votes out of 100 Members of the Senate. That is not quite enough. The reason that it did not quite go over the top was that the President of the United States rejected that proposal to exactly the same extent that he rejected the Republican proposal. He would not endorse it. He would not even say he would sign it if its enforcing legislation was to be passed. So the first bipartisan attempt in a decade at solving this contracted budget problem has been rejected. Now we are faced with another proposal, almost as good, certainly plenty good enough to reach the goal, which is very, very likely to be passed by a strictly partisan vote, and then to have its enforcing legislation vetoed by the President of the United States. I regret that, Mr. President. I hope during the course of the debate in the next 2 or 3 days some Members of the other party who worked so hard and so sincerely and so diligently on the bipartisan proposal will see the many similarities between their product, our product, and the one that is now before us, and will generously and with a good heart determine that if they cannot have perfection, they can certainly get--even from their own perspective, with our budget--a vastly superior program to that proposed by the President's administration. I hope that some of them at least will have courage enough to join with us to move the whole project forward, to help us see to it that we do something that we are enjoying to do, like no less a historic personage than Thomas Jefferson, as a matter of moral imperative, and something that will have such a tremendously positive impact on our children and grandchildren in general and generations yet to come, who do not have the right to vote in this fall's election, but who are our responsibility nevertheless. Mr. President, this is a fine resolution. It is a courageous resolution. It is a moral resolution. It is an effective resolution. It should be passed, and it should be enforced. I yield the floor. Mr. LUGAR addressed the Chair.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, this week is Small Business Week, during which we honor and express our appreciation for the men and women who, by dint of hard work and risktaking, help keep the American economy going strong and create jobs for millions of their fellow citizens. The life of a small business owner is not easy: Long hours, uncertain finances, competition, the very real chance of failure. Add to these burdens Federal taxes and regulations, and you have a rough road indeed. Many small business people will tell you that the Federal tax and regulatory burden is an obstacle to growth, and that the Federal Government's excessive interference poses a threat not only to their growth, but in some cases to their very survival. It's time the Government got off the backs of small businesses, and stopped throwing obstacles in the way of their success. Because small businesses are so vital to our economy, and because so many American workers benefit from employment in small businesses, Congress is working to relieve some of the tax and regulatory burdens on small business owners so that they may be free to grow, create jobs, and contribute even more to the economy. We've done quite a bit, passing--and making law--15 bills that included measures endorsed by last year's White House Conference on Small Business. Unfortunately, eight bills that contained important small business relief have been vetoed by President Clinton. Yes, that's right--eight bills that included recommendations from the White House Conference on Small Business were vetoed by the current occupant of the White House, President Clinton. Those eight measures, which would have been of tremendous help to small business men and women were: An estate tax reduction, health care reform, pension reform, legal reform, a health deduction for the self-employed, an expensing provision, broad-based capital gains reform, and small business investment via capital gains reform. Last year, at the conference, the President expressed strong support for these measures and led us to believe that he wanted to relieve some of the burdens on our Nation's entrepreneurs. Well, as we know from past experience, you can't always rely on what the President says he's going to do. I certainly hope this Small Business Week will jog his memory as to the promises he made last year, and that he will work with Congress as we continue in our efforts to ease the burdens on small businesses.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I am authorized to yield such time from Senator Thomas' time as I may need. Mr. President, in a free country, some questions are never answered finally and definitively but must be addressed anew by each generation. It is, I think, for that reason that the words of Thomas Jefferson at the beginning of our Nation's history are so apposite today. Thomas Jefferson said: To question whether one generation has the right to bind another by the deficit it imposes is a question of such consequence as to place it among the fundamental principles of Government. We should consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts and morally bound to pay them ourselves. That method of phrasing the question in Thomas Jefferson's time is every bit, if not more, applicable today during the course of this debate as it was almost two centuries ago. This debate is most fundamentally about a moral question, about our right as Members of Congress, as representatives of the people of the United States to spend money, to advance programs--however well- intentioned, however successful--for which we are not willing to pay and to send the bills to our children and our grandchildren. The question is practical as well as moral: Constant deficits, the increase in the burden of debt, the increase in the rate of interest which the Federal Government must pay on that debt and, equally significant, the interest rates individuals must pay when they purchase homes or automobiles, that businesses must pay when they wish to expand and give more opportunity. Burdens--the burdens of regulation, the burdens of a large Government--are enhanced by unbalanced budgets, by the creation of bureaucracies, agencies, rules and regulations for which we are unwilling to pay but are willing to undertake only because we can send the bill to someone else. Mr. President, there are a series of objections to this proposal. I hope it is not oversimplifying it by saying in some connections, they come from those organizations and those individuals who simply fear for the survival of their programs if present-day taxpayers are required to pay for those programs. Those fears are perhaps well-founded. Clearly, if this amendment were a part of the Constitution of the United States, we would spend less on today's programs. We would be required to set priorities to determine which are the most important programs to a far greater extent than we do at the present time. A second objection which I have heard is, ``Oh, it won't be enforceable anyway. People will find escape valves, ways to get out from under the requirements of this constitutional amendment.'' A third is that we are turning the entire proposition over to the courts of the land, that courts will be able to impose taxes or cut spending if the Congress does not do it itself. These are just some of the parade of horrible theories with which opponents regale us during the course of this debate. Some of them may or may not to a certain extent have a degree of validity. But the other half is reality, Mr. President. For all of the fine words about our balancing the budget without a constitutional amendment, no Congress and administration has done so in 30 years. Yet, there has hardly been a Member of this body or the other body during that three decades who has not given lip service to the proposition that a balanced budget is a good idea. It has just not been quite so important as some other idea which each of those hundreds, perhaps thousands at this point, of Members of Congress have had. Reality, in other words, Mr. President, speaks far louder than any words we can possibly state. I must admit that I was persuaded by some of those arguments a decade ago. I voted against a predecessor to this constitutional amendment based on the proposition that Congress ought to do the job itself. Well, Mr. President, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. It had not happened before I came to this body; it has not happened since I came to this body. I simply leave off with the proposition that if we do not change the structure in which we operate, the same excuses, the same reasons will be presented a decade from now that are being presented here today, and it is very likely that we will be no closer to that balance, that we will continue to pile unjust burdens on our successors, that we will continue to fail the moral duty that Thomas Jefferson outlined for us. Just last year this constitutional amendment was defeated, largely by the votes of Members of this body who said, ``We don't need a constitutional amendment. We simply need the moral courage to pass a balanced budget ourselves.'' We took up that challenge, Mr. President. The Presiding Officer was a part of it. I was a part of it. We did, in fact, in this body and in the House of Representatives pass a balanced budget plan that would have met the requirements of the constitutional amendment had it been a part of the Constitution. We did that for the first time in 30 years. And we were faced with a veto by the President of the United States. In turn, the President of the United States then presented what he claimed to be a balanced budget, though all of the heavy lifting, all of the significant spending cuts would not take place until after the next President's full term had expired. That has not been accepted. As recently as 2 weeks ago, Mr. President, for the first time in several decades, a group of Members from both parties in this body, Democrats and Republicans, came together and came up with an alternative proposal for a balanced budget that significantly impacted the entitlement spending programs which are at the heart of our deficit challenge. But, Mr. President, they failed, even though they got 46 votes out of 100 in this body. They failed. And they failed, among other reasons, because of the deafening silence from the President of the United States, a silence which communicated disagreement, disagreement based on the proposition that the President of the United States would no more have signed that bipartisan proposal than he would the Republican proposal of last December. So, Mr. President, why should anyone listening to this debate believe that what has not taken place for 30 years will take place if this constitutional amendment is defeated? Every element in our history tells us that it will not. Each individual Member is more committed to something that he or she considers more important than the balanced budget, absent the discipline this constitutional amendment will impose on us. So, Mr. President, I think this debate comes down to our own individual answers to a series of questions. Do we really want a better economic future for our children and grandchildren? Do we want them to be able to live in better homes because mortgage interest rates are lower? Do we want them to have greater opportunities and more choices of jobs in a more prosperous economy? Do we want their incomes to be higher because their Governmental burdens are less? The answer to each of these questions, of course, from everyone here is in the affirmative. But the fundamental question, Mr. President, is, do we want those goals for the future badly enough to do something about it, badly enough to take a difficult vote at this particular time? Do we, Mr. President, want to live up to the advice of Thomas Jefferson? Do we care enough about our ethical and moral responsibilities to those who come after us to say, ``The present system has not worked. We need a new system''? Only if we pass this constitutional amendment, only if we allow this debate to take place in 50 State legislatures, as they debate the confirmation of such a constitutional amendment, will we carry out our duties. History tells us, Mr. President, that we will not do it on our own. This constitutional amendment is needed. We hope for the endorsement of the President, which we are almost certain not to get. But we hope, even more significantly, for the courage, the concern for the future, the concern for our economy, the concern for our moral duties that can, in my opinion, only be carried out if this constitutional amendment is passed and submitted to the States for their ratification. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, today I am joined by junior Senator from Washington State, Mrs. Murray, in introducing the ``Snoqualmie National Forest Boundary Adjustment Act of 1996.'' Earlier this week Representative Jennifer Dunn, of Washington State, introduced identical legislation in the House. This legislation will facilitate the exchange of land between the Weyerhaeuser Company and the Forest Service by adjusting a National Forest Boundary. As Chairman of the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, which funds our National Forest and Parks, land exchanges result in less expense to the Federal taxpayer than do land acquisitions. I will be working over the course of the next few months to get this legislation passed by both the House and Senate, and I encourage my colleagues to support this legislation.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, the remarks beginning the debate this morning on the part of the Senator from Rhode Island were directly on point. Now is the time and this is the place for the oratory to end and the true work in balancing our budget and building a brighter future for our own generation, for our children and our grandchildren, is to begin. There are no longer any real excuses. A year ago, for the very first time for 20 or 30 years, this Congress actually passed a balanced budget that was then vetoed by the President. But that balanced budget changed the entire nature of the debate. The President himself proposed a budget that was balanced, as inadequate as it was unfair, but nonetheless lip service to this proposition. Again, this year we have before us from the Budget Committee, with my support, a budget that is truly balanced, but the execution of which will almost certainly receive another veto from a President in an election year. This group, for the first time in a decade, two decades, three decades, has gotten together, on a bipartisan basis, to solve the greatest problem facing the United States of America, Democrats and Republicans working together. It has a proposal that in the long run creates a greater degree of financial stability and security for the people of the United States than do any of the other proposals. Most Members in this body would like to vote for it if they only believed that it would become law. But, Mr. President, we cannot tell whether or not it will pass the House of Representatives unless we pass it here in the Senate. We do not know whether a President would respond to the dynamic of it passing both Houses until it has passed both Houses. So the ball is in our court. If this is simply a good try that fails, we will be debating the same issues over and over and over again, but we will not have done what we were supposed to do for the people of our country. If we pass it, maybe it will be defeated in some future place in this political debate in this election year. But maybe it will not. Perhaps it will build its own dynamic. Let us give it that opportunity, Mr. President. That is what we were elected to do.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, the function of the debate in this U.S. Senate is only on rare occasions designed to persuade other Members of the U.S. Senate to adopt a particular position. This is one of those occasions. If we reflect on previous budgets, we understand that if the majority party in Congress is the party opposite the President, the operative phrase is, ``The President's budget is dead on arrival.'' If the majority party is the same as that of the President, all reservations about a budget are withheld and that party will defend even those elements in a budget it knows to be fraudulent or unsound. In other words, most of the time we use our opportunities here, not to talk to our colleagues, but to talk either to the people of the United States as a whole or in an attempt to come up with some blithe phrase that will appear in television or in the morning newspaper. But again, Mr. President, this is not such an occasion. It is an occasion on which we are genuinely addressing ourselves to many of our colleagues on a vitally important issue on which they have not entirely made up their minds. Why? Because for years, perhaps for decades, we have not had a sound and thorough and broadly supported bipartisan approach to the major fiscal and budgetary issues that are facing this country. So many of the colleagues beyond the 11 of us on each side who have prepared this have talked to us privately and said, ``I really sort of like what you are doing. Gosh, I don't know whether I can afford to vote for it if it doesn't have any chance for success, but I think you are moving in the right direction.'' We are here to persuade them that not only are we moving in the right direction, but the time has come for them to move in that direction with us. First, of course, because this is the first truly bipartisan opportunity we have had to pass something that will be accepted by the country as a whole and, we hope, ultimately by the President of the United States. One of the reasons that it should be so is that this is substantively the soundest of all the proposals with which we have been presented. It has the best and most effective and broadest based reforms of entitlement programs, some of which do not even appear in the statistics for these 6 years because their impact will primarily or solely be felt after the 6 years are up, but will have a tremendous positive impact toward solving challenges that we know will exist at that particular period of time: The age of Medicare eligibility, the Consumer Price Index, means testing the premiums for Medicare part B, a pretty thorough welfare reform. Second, this is the most realistic budget because it deals most fairly and realistically with domestic discretionary spending. The President's budget allows it to go up in the immediate future and then it drops off the cliff in the end. We know that will not happen. The Republican budget does much less than that, but nonetheless the further we get down the road, the more unrealistic its figures for domestic discretionary spending are. What is that? Spending on education, on law enforcement, on medical research, on all forms of transportation, on the environment, on national parks, on myriad responsibilities which have been increasingly squeezed. As the Senator from New Mexico knows very well, dozens of the amendments that he has had to deal with in the last 2 or 3 days have said, ``hold harmless--'' you fill in the blank, whatever the individual sponsor's pet project is, hold that harmless. We will probably vote for a bunch of those, but we know they are utterly unrealistic. If we follow the road we are on today, there will not be any money left for them. None of them, not even the defense of the United States of America, will be held harmless. This is a good budget because it does provide for tax reductions for Americans who feel they are overtaxed. It spreads them out more modestly than do some other budget proposals, but nonetheless in all of the areas in which legitimately people can claim that they are too highly taxed. My friend, perhaps my closest friend in this body, the chairman of the Budget Committee, the Senator from New Mexico, said something a couple of hours ago which really struck home. He said maybe we will never get to this real solution, including the hard kind of choices that are involved in this budget, until we have Presidential leadership. For years at home I was saying exactly that, maybe even more pessimistically. I felt you would never get to it except in the first year after a brand new Presidency, when a new President can say that none of this was his or her fault. Yet I think the actions of my friend, the Senator from New Mexico, belie that statement because last year he led us in this body and in the House of Representatives to pass an honest balanced budget, the first one in 30 years. It was, unfortunately, vetoed, but he must be eternally optimistic. He has another one for us here. The problem is, if we enforce it, it will probably be vetoed as well. So it seems to me that we ought to try a different course of action, a course of action that binds together Members of both parties. Maybe it will not work. It certainly will not work if those Members who privately agree with us say, ``It will not work and I do not dare vote for it.'' Maybe if it does work in this body, it will not work in the House of Representatives. But we will never know unless we pass it in this body. Maybe if it passes both this body and the House of Representatives, the President will still veto whatever enforcement mechanisms come out of it. Certainly he has given us no encouragement so far. But we will never know unless we give him that opportunity. That veto would be in the teeth of almost every important group and, I suspect, newspaper and editorial writer in this country who really does long for a solution like this one proposed by Senator Chafee and by Senator Breaux. So, to those in this body who say privately this is a good idea if only someone else higher up would go along with it, I say, ``Please come on in. You have an opportunity that you and your predecessors have not had perhaps for decades. The time is now. The challenge is tremendous. We need to do it for ourselves, for our children, for our grandchildren, for our country.''

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, with an extensive shoreline in Washington State, the Coast Guard plays an important role in protecting those people who rely on the waters of the Columbia River, Puget Sound, and the Pacific Ocean for commercial and recreational purposes. Whether it is dangerous search and rescue operations, enforcement of existing fishing treaties with Canada, or maintenance of navigational aids, the Coast Guard does its job and it does it well. For that reason, Mr. President, I included language in the report accompanying the budget resolution that commends the Coast Guard for both its current operations, as well as its efforts to streamline and reduce its overall budget. Under Adm. Robert Kramek's leadership as Commandant of the Coast Guard for the past 3 years, the Coast Guard has reduced its work force by 4,000 positions and lowered its budget by $400 million per year. All of this done without reducing any valuable services to the general public. In all of the debate over the next 9 months regarding funding for specific programs, I hope that the fiscal year 1997 Coast Guard budget appropriately reflects the efforts being made by Admiral Kramek and all of his staff to provide better government at less cost, while still providing important services to the citizens in Washington State and across the country.

Mr. GORTON. The Senator from Nebraska has me at a certain disadvantage. As he knows, I am sitting in for the chairman of the Budget Committee this morning. I cannot give him definitive answers to either of his questions. I can say, however, that I have no anticipation that we would vote before noon. I am sure we can informally divide the time between now and noon and give Members assurance we will not vote before then. It may be that it is after noon before we get to do so. As was the case with the Senator from Nebraska, our chairman asked Republican Members to report to him on all the amendments they would have by noon today. Well, it is still an hour and a half from noon. We have only a relative handful.

Mr. GORTON. I yield 10 minutes to the Senator from Missouri.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, we are now beginning a debate over the President's budget proposal for 1997 and for succeeding years. In a very real sense, the fact that we are debating this proposal represents a major step forward from the situation in which we found ourselves last year. As my friend, the Senator from Nebraska, has pointed out, last year it was members of the Republican Party who put up the President's budget to be voted on and voted down. Members of his own party were not willing, systematically, to defend that budget. Because, Mr. President, as you will remember, last year the debate was fixed very firmly on the proposition that one side, the new Republican majority, felt it vitally important not only to promise a balanced budget at some time in the future, but to make the very difficult policy decisions that were required to assure that the budget was, in fact, balanced. We succeeded in doing so. We succeeded in doing so so well that during the entire period of time in which it looked as though this promise would be kept, interest rates declined all across the country. What did that mean? It meant that people buying homes paid less in the way of interest on their mortgages and therefore were more likely to be able to afford to buy a home or to buy a better home. It meant that businesses, small and large, paid less in interest and were therefore able to increase their productivity and increase the jobs that they had to offer and increase the quality and compensation for the jobs which they did offer. In other words, even a binding promise to reach balance in the future that was believable had a positive impact on our economy, and by the year of balance, 2002, it would have meant at least $1,000 per family in the pockets of the average American family. During the entire development of that balanced budget, the other side refused to come up with any alternative that would reach that balance, and the struggle was between a group of Republicans who felt it absolutely unethical and immoral to continue to spend money by the hundreds of billions of dollars, the bills for which we sent to our children and grandchildren, and a side led by the President who felt this was not relevant and was unimportant. Beginning in December, however, and culminating with the offer of this Presidential budget, we have had, in fact, at least lip service-- and I must say that lip service is important to the proposition that a balanced budget is of great help to all Americans by removing some of the burdens of Government from their shoulders, by freeing them up and, implicitly, leaving more of their hard-earned money in their own pockets. Unfortunately, however, doing that job is more difficult. It is harder work than the President of the United States is willing to undertake. His dedication to the proposition is welcome. The product itself is seriously flawed. As a consequence, that makes even less valid his characterization of our efforts as being extreme in nature. In fact, the President has never made any real steps in our direction, even when compromises and modifications were made on the part of the Speaker of the House and the majority leader of the Senate and the distinguished chairman of our Budget Committee, Senator Domenici. So we now have a unity with respect to our goals, but a dramatic difference in connection with the way in which those goals are reached. What we have in this proposal, the amendment that is the subject matter before the Senate right now, is spending increases in 1997, rather than a move on a steady path of lowering spending so that we reach a goal on a gradual but even path between now and the year 2002, 6 years from today. What we get are a series of mechanisms and gimmicks rather than choices that do require the Congressional Budget Office to show reduced spending and reduced deficits, though there is not a single detail as to how we get there in the key years right after the turn of the century. More accurately, if we look at the policy judgments that are contained in this Presidential budget, we see that it has a deficit of $84 billion in the year 2002, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Mr. President, $84 billion is not a modest amount of money by any stretch of the imagination, just under $100 billion after 6 more years of lip service to a balanced budget and at that--to get to that figure, our one-time savings and assets sales, which is immediately after that year, will have resulted--the budget deficit would increase very, very substantially. So this proposal is a very modest step in the right direction, but it is not a balanced budget. It is not a serious attempt to make decisions now that will lead to a balanced budget. It is, in fact, a promise of very difficult choices for the President after next, for the President who is elected not in 1996 but in the year 2000. What are the gimmicks, what are the mechanisms that allow this to be determined as a balanced budget that are, in fact, no more than gimmicks? A discretionary trigger, No. 1; an end to the tax reductions that are called for in the bill, No. 2; outrageous shell games with respect to Medicare, one of the vital social safety nets in our entire society; welfare reform that is not reform; and a number of other sleights of hand. Let us go to some of the gimmicks first. This proposal increases domestic discretionary spending for next year, the one year of the budget that is absolutely binding, by $10 billion, so that the President, during the course of the reelection campaign, can point to a wide variety of increases in programs supported by various interest groups and by large numbers of people. Then from 1998 to 2002, there are a significant number of cuts, none of which is specified, none of which can be attacked because they are amorphous. They are simply figures on the wall without any detail to back them up. Finally, for the last 2 years, the President calls for increased discretionary spending, even though the Congressional Budget Office says that the trigger mechanism to balance the budget included in this proposal will reduce discretionary spending by $45 billion in the year 2002 alone. But worse than that--worse than that, Mr. President--as gimmicky as it is, is the President's treatment of Medicare. This budget takes one of the most vital elements of Medicare, an element that is now protected by being in the Medicare trust fund, paid for by the payroll taxes that each of us at work pays every single year: Home health care, not an insubstantial program, Mr. President, which costs $55 billion. It is taken out of the trust fund by the President's proposal, out of the protection of the trust fund in order that the President can show that the trust fund stays solvent for a longer period of time than would otherwise be the case, and transfers it we really know not where. In one sense, this Presidential budget says, ``Well, we're going to transfer home health care to Medicare part B,'' the part that pays for physicians' fees in Medicare, an element of Medicare that is not covered by the trust fund, an element of which about 75 percent is paid by general taxes, that is to say, the deficit, and 25 percent by premiums paid by the beneficiaries. Medicare part B, of course, is voluntary. It is such a good deal that there is practically no one eligible for it who does not take it when you are only paying 25 percent of its cost. But it is voluntary. So home health care at one level is transferred into part B. But it does not become voluntary, it is still there. It is not subject to any of the copayments that are a part of part B. It is not subject to the 25- percent premium cost that part B is subject to otherwise. So, in fact, it simply becomes a completely, totally, absolutely unfunded entitlement, Mr. President. What does that mean? It means $55 billion a year more in bills transferred to working Americans, out of the trust fund, which they are already paying and--incidentally, those payments are not cut at all-- simply into the general fund to be added to the deficit. That does one of three things, Mr. President: either it greatly increases the deficit by that $55 billion, or it will result in a tax increase of $55 billion on the American people, a new tax, or at some point or another, when things get tough, it just will not be paid for at all, and it will disappear, home health care will disappear. Mr. President, I use the word ``gimmick.'' This does not really get appropriately covered by the word ``gimmick.'' This is a fraud. This is something to which people are entitled now, that is being paid for now, that is in a trust fund now, that suddenly is just hanging out there with a new bill for the American people. There are other gimmicks in the Medicare cuts that are in the President's budget. The amount of money he claims to save is not saved, according to the scoring of the Congressional Budget Office, what they come up with for it. There are more triggers on the amounts of money for outpatient hospital services. There is a new entitlement program for workers temporarily unemployed, but it sunsets in the year 2000. Taxes on working families, college students, and small businesses will be increased in the year 2001. Payroll taxes will be accelerated at that particular period of time, Mr. President. And these really are gimmicks. A whole slew of asset sales are pushed into the year 2002 to show a one-time balance with, of course, no balance thereafter. There is a spectrum auction of spectrum for the year 2002, of spectrum that will not be returned to the Federal Government until 2005, even if it is ready to be returned at that particular time. Will it get less money than if it were auctioned at the time it is actually available? Obviously those will be lower. So as CBO indicates that they will be $6 billion short, there is just a contingent $6 billion charge on broadcasters to make up the difference for the year 2002. Governors Island in New York Harbor is going to be deserted after 1998, but it will not be sold until 2002 so that it can balance the budget in that year. The strategic petroleum reserve, the Weeks Island Naval Petroleum Reserve--the same thing, they get sold long after we have assumed that they would be sold to balance the budget in that year. In welfare, the President's welfare reform program does not require its recipients to be enrolled in Work First until 2003 so that the payment for their new education and training management does not begin until later. So even if you accept all of the gimmicks, all of the tax increases, all of the unspecified spending cuts, to get us to balance in 2002, it all goes to hell in a hand basket immediately thereafter. Mr. President, I have only begun to list the gimmicks and the outrageous transfers of responsibility that are included in this proposal. It just is not serious. Successive speakers will speak to some of the circular reasoning that is contained in this proposal. It is a proposal that is very comfortable for next year, one in many respects in connection with discretionary spending I wish that I could support, but one I cannot support when it does not really reform entitlements, when it leaves all of the heavy lifting to the President after next, and when it leaves that President after next with a huge unfunded liability in the third year of his or her Presidency. As I said to begin these remarks, Mr. President, it is a major step forward to have a commitment to a balanced budget on the part of the President of the United States. But when that commitment is lip service only, when there is no heavy lifting, when there are no serious reductions or serious policy changes, we have not even gotten halfway. We should be and we are grateful that we are halfway. I am grateful that the Senate is actually seriously debating two--no, three before we are done--serious possibilities. I will support two of those possibilities, the bipartisan budget which will come up, I suspect tomorrow, and the Republican one because, while they take a slightly different path, they both deal seriously with the problem of balancing the budget. They have a real balanced budget. They have policy decisions that will affect the years not directly covered by this budget as well as those that are covered by it. I regret to say that the proposal that we have before us this minute does none of those things. Lipservice, Mr. President, is not enough. Action is required. Mr. EXON addressed the Chair.

Mr. GORTON. I suggest the absence of a quorum and ask unanimous consent that it be charged equally on both sides.

Mr. GORTON. That is certainly a good sign. We will be able to answer his question, of course, more definitively in a relatively short period of time. I think that, on an informal basis, we can agree to simply go back and forth. We have yielded time to the Senator from Missouri. I see the Senator from South Carolina. It would be appropriate for him to go next, and then back and forth for a period of time, at least.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, in my few minutes, I will make three points. The first point is to agree with my colleague, the Senator from Nebraska, by the analysis of the Congressional Budget Office, the President's budget does indeed balance in the year 2002. It does, according to the Congressional Budget Office, because of an automatic set of tax increases and spending cuts in the years 2001 and 2002, if the Congressional Budget Office's projections of spending and of the economy are correct. In fact, Mr. President, the President's budget would balance if the Congressional Budget Office showed half a trillion dollars' difference between now and the year 2000 with automatic huge tax increases and spending cuts in the years thereafter. If you put in such a trigger, the balance is automatic. The real point is that in the real world, using the same set of figures, it will not reach balance unless that trigger is pulled. We have just voted against the trigger. The second point I would like to make is with respect to the debate right now on two amendments in front of us. Those two amendments each say that we should not reduce veterans benefits in the way that the President's budget indicates they will be reduced, a little increase in the first couple of years, then a huge reduction thereafter. The difference is the classical difference between the parties. Republicans restore those veterans benefits by welfare reform. Democrats restore them by tax hikes, tax hikes sufficient so that the President's very modest tax reductions in his budget become a net tax increase over the period of time covered by this budget. That is a classical difference. People can decide, would they rather support our veterans with welfare reform or would they rather support them with tax hikes? I think that is a relatively simple question. But, Mr. President, my third point is that I am not sure of the total relevance either of the debate on triggers that the Senator from Nebraska has spoken of, or even of the two amendments with which we are going to engage now. It is at this point I want to compliment and support the remarks of my Democratic colleague from North Dakota, Senator Conrad, who points out that there is a superior way of going toward either of the proposals that are on the floor here right now, one which I believe we will debate early next week, the first proposal in several years that is in fact bipartisan in nature, the one that most decisively deals with a reform of entitlement programs, that makes them more realistically affordable by the people of the United States and, therefore, is more reasonable with respect to the amount of money that we have to spend on education and the environment and law enforcement and national parks and the myriad of other year-to-year responsibilities of this body. So in that respect the Senator from North Dakota is right. I have the privilege to work with him. We will later on in this debate be presenting that budget. I believe the Republican budget much superior and much more honest to the one that is before us right now, and I intend ultimately to vote for it if that is the last vote before us. But I believe the one worked out by this bipartisan group to be markedly superior to any of the others that have been presented this year. Mr. ABRAHAM addressed the Chair.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, on December 5, 1992, President-elect William Clinton resigned his position as Governor of Arkansas. On that date, of course, he was assured of another job, after having remained as Governor through at least the full year in which he devoted very little time and attention to that governorship. On this day, May 15, 1996, Senator Robert Dole announced his resignation not only as majority leader of the U.S. Senate, but as senior Senator from the State of Kansas. Mr. President, I cannot think of any two facts taken in juxtaposition which illustrate better the respective characters of the two candidates for President of the United States, any statement of fact that can better illustrate the different direction in which Robert Dole will take the United States as President. So, for him, while some have characterized his action as principled, others as unprecedented, the word that comes most quickly to my mind is principles, the same kind of principles which have actuated his entire life--his childhood, his military service, his recovery from a terribly debilitating injury--and his entire political career. Of course, Mr. President, from a strictly campaign point of view, this gives Senator Dole the opportunity full time to share his vision of the future of the United States and his ideas about the widest of our public policy questions with the people of the United States who most unfortunately do not know him in the way in which you and I and our other colleagues here in this body know him. That, I believe, will be an advantage to his campaign, a clear advantage to the people of the United States and a terrible loss to all of us who serve here in this body. We will miss his wisdom, his sound counsel, his never failing sense of humor more than any of us can possibly state on the floor of this body here this evening. But we give him up to a greater cause, the cause of sharing these qualities of character and personality and of purpose with the American people. This is the contrast, the contrast in character and the contrast in direction for America, that this day and this action have so magnificently illustrated.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, in connection with the debate, which I suspect will soon be superseded by debate on a budget agreement, a few points are still very, very much in order. No. 1, there is a concerted effort here on the floor of the Senate to prevent a vote on a reduction in the gas tax, a reduction triggered by the rapid runup in the price of a commodity of vital importance to every American. But I think often overlooked in this debate is the fact that this is not just any run-of-the-mill gas or motor vehicle fuel tax. This tax, imposed about 3 years ago at the time of President Clinton's first budget, represented an unprecedented change in the use of motor vehicle fuel tax. Always previously here in the Congress--and for all practical purposes almost always in our States--motor vehicle fuel taxes were used for transportation purposes, generally for the construction and maintenance of highways, but more frequently in the recent past for mass transit systems, whether bus related or on fixed rails. As such, motor vehicle fuel taxes were usually less objected to by the vast majority of people than was the case with many others taxes because they could see what they were getting for their money, because one paid in proportion to one's use of those very transportation facilities. President Clinton, however, flouted that convention in 1993 and determined that this gas tax was to be used for various social purposes. As the junior Senator from Missouri so eloquently put it a couple of days ago, the net result was that people who must use their automobiles to get back and forth to work were paying a tax to pay welfare to people who were not working at all and, in some cases, had no intention of doing so. So, Mr. President, the concentration on the removal of this tax is not only based on the proposition that the American people are too heavily taxed as it is but on the fact that this one is peculiarly unfair and peculiarly unprecedented. Nevertheless, the vote was taken a couple of hours ago on this floor. Once again there was an eloquent statement on the part of the President's party that they would not allow this repeal to come to a vote. The second element of that filibuster is directed at the TEAM Act, an act absolutely essential to validate the new sense of cooperation which is gaining wider and wider acceptance in labor-management relations across the United States and, indeed, is necessary if we are to meet the competitive pressures of the present economic world. Close to 90 percent of American workers in the private sector are not unionized and have chosen not to be. Yet, they are prohibited from entering into voluntary relationships with their employers to discuss matters of common interest, of morale, of productivity, of the very future of their jobs by a recent ruling of the Supreme Court enforced by the National Labor Relations Board. A TEAM Act to encourage that cooperation will be of great importance in enhancing American competitiveness and in making many American workplaces happier and more interesting places for the vast majority of Americans to spend their working hours. Because of their distaste for each of these proposals, the President's party, ironically enough, they are filibustering an increase in the minimum wage, a proposition made out to be of urgent and vital importance, more important than anything else before this body. Their actions speak louder than their words in this connection. They are not willing to let the majority of this body make a judgment on a gas tax repeal and on the TEAM Act while at the same time increasing the minimum wage if those issues are joined together, though, of course, it was originally their idea to join the minimum wage to an immigration bill to which it had no relationship whatsoever. Finally, of course, Mr. President, underlying all of this bill is a modest, House-passed piece of legislation to provide overdue and just relief to those wrongfully fired from the White House Travel Office 2 years ago and, in one case, prosecuted for actions determined not to have been remotely criminal by a jury. So three significant matters are now being filibustered by the President's party in order to protect the President from the embarrassing situation that, in order to get three pieces of legislation which he has said he would sign, he would also have to take one vehemently opposed by the chiefs of organized labor but supported by the overwhelming majority of American men and women who are a part of these labor-management teams at the present time. Mr. President, my advice to the majority leader is to continue on his course of action, that it is appropriate to say that we should look at a larger world and the relationships on these pieces of legislation, that we should not say to the President we will not ask you to do anything embarrassing, we will simply send legislation to you that you have already fully endorsed both publicly and privately and anything that might be a bit controversial we will allow it to be killed by filibusters in the U.S. Senate. No, Mr. President, their pairing is an appropriate pairing. I hope we will continue until we and, not at all incidentally, the American people succeed in getting the relief to which they are overwhelmingly entitled. Mr. President, I note the absence of a quorum.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, what is the state of the business before the Senate?

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, we will act tonight on Megan's law, which strengthens and improves a good law, and provides families with needed protection against the most heinous of crimes. Although Megan's law will not affect my State of Washington, which should, and does serve as a model for other States around the country, it will assist those States that, for whatever reason, have been slower to act or more timorous in their fight against crime. In 1994, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. The act contained a number of good provisions, perhaps the one I cared about most was the provision calling for the registration of sexual offenders and community notification. Most States have already implemented systems to require people who abduct children, or who commit sexual crimes, to register their addresses with State or local law enforcement officials. The provision in the 1994 act, however, was not as tough as I would have liked. The Act permitted State and local law enforcement to notify communities that there was a sexual predator in their midst, but it did not require this notification. We are back now to improve upon that law by requiring community notification. Even with this mandate, however, State and local law enforcement officials, still will retain the substantial discretion to determine when community notification is called for, what information to release, and how to best inform the community. Parents have a right to know that their children are in danger, that the person living next door to them, or down the street is a convicted sexual predator. The need for this notification was tragically illustrated in the case of Megan Kanka, for whom the law before us today is named. Two years ago, Megan was allegedly raped and murdered by a man who lived across the street from her, a man who twice before had been convicted of being a sexual predator, and who lived with two house mates who were themselves sexual predators. Megan's parents did not know this. If they had, they could have advised their daughter not to accept her neighbor's invitation to come into his house to see a puppy.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. I ask unanimous consent for another 5 minutes.

Mr. GORTON. Would the Senator from Georgia agree that the only offer--perhaps not offer; demand--demand we have from the minority party is that we deal with these issues in a way in which those that the minority party favors are assured to become law while those that the majority party favors are assured to be vetoed?

Mr. GORTON. Would the Senator from Georgia agree that we now have before us not only those two together, but also an increase in the minimum wage, the very increase in the minimum wage that the other party has asked for, but at the same time that we deal with that aspect, the questions relating to labor, that we have wanted to ensure that the Senate majority could work its will with respect to the TEAM Act, an act which will authorize the kind of cooperation which is in fact taking place right now in more than 30,000 places of employment throughout the country, in which members of a corporation management and labor can work together for safer conditions, for better productivity, for the creation of production teams and the like, things that are not specifically collective bargaining, and that we have thought it was quite appropriate that we deal with both the minimum wage on one side of the equation and this one as a package and ensure that, if we are going to have one passed along, we would pass the other as well?

Mr. GORTON. Would the Senator from Georgia not agree that we asked for the ability to debate a repeal of the gas tax, an unprecedented gas tax, not for use for transportation infrastructure, but for the first time in the history of our country the gas tax increase passed 3 years ago simply went into the general fund for various social programs, and we are denied the ability to deal with that issue standing alone?

Mr. GORTON. Would the Senator from Georgia agree that at the present time we on this side of the aisle have sought to pass a very simple bill, which has already passed the House of Representatives, to reimburse attorney's fees and costs to those people who were wrongfully fired in the White House Travel Office just a couple years ago, and that we have been denied the right to pass that bill without any changes and without any conditions?

Mr. GORTON. Is being filibustered and would be vetoed. The only way we can possibly get it into law is to marry it with something that the other side would like to see passed and let them determine whether or not their expressed devotion to a minimum wage increase is sufficient to overcome their loyalty to these union leaders. Is it not the opinion of the Senator from Georgia that they have now shown us that their devotion to a minimum wage increase is far less than their devotion to following the dictates of union leaders who say that no relationship between management and labor can take place except through formal labor unions?

Mr. GORTON. So those of us who feel that cooperation, rather than confrontation, is the future for America and labor-management relationships, that this is the way we will build more jobs and greater competitiveness, that the only way we can authorize what in fact has been going on until it was determined to be a violation of an act from the 1930's, that the only way that we could bring ourselves into the 1990's or into the 21st century under this set of circumstances is to marry this proposal, which otherwise would be filibustered and vetoed.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, perhaps a brief review of what it is that we are debating on the floor of the U.S. Senate might be in order at this point for those who may be watching or listening. The bill before us is to provide a modest degree of relief, the reimbursement of attorney's fees and costs incurred by former employees of the White House Travel Office who were fired at the beginning of the Clinton administration and one of whom was unsuccessfully prosecuted. That bill has passed the House of Representatives. If the Senate were permitted to pass it, it would go to the President and, I presume, be signed. It is not particularly controversial. But the majority leader of the Senate has been unable to get consent from the other side of the aisle simply to pass that bill and send it to the President without conditions being imposed upon that consent. So now this modest House resolution has had included with it a reduction in the tax on motor vehicle fuel, the 4-plus-cents-a-gallon tax that was imposed in 1993. At the time at which it was imposed, at the time at which that tax hike was passed, every Member on the Republican side of the aisle voted against it. In some measure, that vote was simply a statement that we did not feel that increased taxes was appropriate. But there is another element in the opposition then and the desire to repeal it now, which is equally important. That element is the fact that for the first time in the history of the Congress and almost without precedent in any of the 50 States of the United States, a motor vehicle fuel tax was imposed to pay for various social and political programs entirely unrelated to transportation. I think it is appropriate to say that perhaps the least objectionable tax to most of the people of the United States is a gas tax, a motor vehicle fuel tax, when it is used to improve transportation, when it is used to maintain or to build roads and highways or, for that matter, to improve mass transit systems in our major metropolitan areas. Lord knows that we have fallen far behind in that traffic infrastructure. This gas tax increase in 1993, however, was not for that purpose. That was not a part of the agenda at the beginning of the Clinton administration. It was simply for the wide range of other spending programs in which the then new President desired to ``invest,'' in his own words, to ``spend'' in ours. And so much of the impetus for this reduction comes from the fact that that was a terrible precedent to set. The gasoline tax is not a general purpose tax, should never have been used that way in the first place and should not be used that way now and, therefore, ought to be repealed. If the President wishes to come to the Congress with a proposal that would build our infrastructure by the use of user fees, he would certainly get a more positive response than he does when it is simply to disappear into the mass of hundreds of other programs. This view, that we ought to repeal this gas tax, is not partisan in nature. There are, I think, at least a few Republicans who feel it to be unwise. There are a significant number of Democrats who are quite ready to vote for it, and the President has at least indicated that he will sign and approve it. But, Mr. President, when the majority leader asked that we deal with the gas tax repeal alone, he was denied that right unless certain other unrelated demands on the part of the Democratic Party were met. So we cannot provide the relief for people wrongly fired in the White House Travel Office; we cannot deal simply with a gas tax repeal which, whether wise or not, is something the American people understand and understand the debate about; no, we cannot do any of these things unless, Mr. President, paradoxically we agree that we will, in fact, have a vote on an increase in the minimum wage uncluttered by any irrelevancies. So it is do as I say, not as I do. Those on the other side of the aisle demand the right for absolutely uncluttered votes on their agenda but deny that right to the majority party. Personally, I think an increase in the minimum wage undesirable for the very people it is nominally designed to benefit. My inclination is to believe that it will cost a significant number of jobs, both among those who lose their jobs, because their employers do not think that they really produce this larger hourly wage, but even more significant, among those who are attempting to work their way off welfare or are teenagers coming into the job market who will not get jobs in the first place because of a minimum wage that is too high. It also seems to me that it is an extremely blunt instrument with which to increase the obviously too low income of those Americans who are the primary support for families and who are now on full-time employment at the minimum wage, something like 3 percent of those who are making the minimum wage at the present time. But, I am perfectly willing to admit that there is an argument on the other side of that question. Most middle-of-the-road economists think that an increase in the minimum wage is neither a particularly good idea nor a particularly bad idea; that it will not have all of the harmful effects that some of its opponents state and clearly will not have the positive effects that its proponents assert. As a consequence, I think as a part of an overall look at the economy of the country, it is perfectly appropriate that we vote on increasing the minimum wage. But, Mr. President, I think it is perfectly appropriate and far more logical that we vote on it at the same time that we vote on something else which really will help the economy of the United States, which will improve labor-management relations, which will increase productivity and which will increase the number of jobs that we have for people who are coming into the job market or seeking to improve the position that they hold in it. But we are told that the TEAM Act, which has actually been the subject of hearings in the Labor Committee and approved by the Labor Committee, unlike a minimum wage increase, is such a hard prospect that we will not be allowed to vote on it by a minority that demands the right to vote clean on a minimum wage increase. Mr. President, that is simply an unsupportable position. If we are to do something that clearly makes it more difficult for people who provide jobs to provide them for those who are coming into the market, we certainly at the same time are overwhelmingly justified in saying that a practice that is now in place in some 30,000 places of employment in the United States, the setting up of informal teams to deal with questions of productivity and vacations and the incidental frustrations that are a part of everyday life, should be validated as against a decision of the courts not wanting that which says, ``No. You can't do any of these things unless you have a union and engage in them through collective bargaining.'' That is great for the people who lead labor unions. And there may even have been the remotest justification for it in the 1930's. But in the 1990's, and a more prosperous time, in a more competitive time, the time at which the United States is very much in competition with the rest of the world, and a time in which the ancient total antagonism between management and labor is being increasingly succeeded by cooperation, a system, a proposal which encourages that cooperation is not only a good idea, it is a necessity. So what we have before us right now is a refusal by filibuster, however politely described, to allow a vote, to allow a majority to determine whether or not we should have the passage of the TEAM Act, very much needed in a growing economy, together with an increase in the minimum wage, together with a reduction in the gas tax, and tend to this horrid precedent that we use it for other than transportation purposes, together with the relief of the victims of the White House Travel Office. Mr. President, that seems to me to be highly reasonable. If a majority of the Members of the U.S. Senate do not like it, they can certainly vote against it. Personally I think it is quite clear that a majority of the Members of the Senate would vote for it. But the demand that we can only deal with a minimum wage and that the minimum wage is the only proposal to which this rule applies, without attaching anything else to it, that it is so important, so pristine, that it must go through without amendment, while everything else can be filibustered, that is a demand that is as unreasonable as it is unlikely to succeed. So, Mr. President, my suggestion is that we go forward, we have a debate on the merits, the shortcomings, of the TEAM Act, on the merits and the shortcomings of a minimum wage increase, on the merits and shortcomings of the gas tax increase, being the three elements in this amendment, and then vote on the amendment and determine whether or not we are for it, or alternatively, as the majority leader has suggested, without acceptance, that we vote separately on those first two. And if both are passed, they go out of this body together to the House of Representatives. If one is passed, and one is defeated, the survivor goes out as it is. All kinds of alternatives have been offered to the minority party. But it will accept only its own proposition for the way in which the business of the Senate will be conducted. That is neither in the interest of the Senate, Mr. President, or of the people of the United States. Let us go forward and by the end of the afternoon vote on the amendment that the majority leader has proposed for us, and get on to other business. Mr. KENNEDY addressed the Chair.