T. Gorton

Mr. GORTON

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

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the amendment be agreed to, the committee amendment be agreed to, as amended, the bill be read the third time, and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and that any statements relating to the bill appear at this point in the Record.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of calendar No. 167, S. 768.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk on behalf of Mr. DeWine and Mr. Leahy and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate immediately proceed to executive session to consider the following nominations en bloc on the Executive Calendar: Nos. 15, 35, 70, 75, 97, 100 through 103, 131, 132, 134, 138, 139, 141 through 156, and all nominations on the Secretary's desk in the Foreign Service. I finally ask unanimous consent that the nominations be confirmed, en bloc, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, any statements relating to the nominations be printed in the Record, that the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action, and the Senate then return to legislative session.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution and preamble be agreed to, en bloc, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table and any statements be printed in the Record.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of calendar No. 197, S. Res. 59.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the resolution and preamble be agreed to, en bloc, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and that any statements relating thereto be printed in the Record.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and any statements relating to this resolution be printed at the appropriate place in the Record.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to the immediate consideration of calendar No. 186, S. Con. Res. 36.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to the consideration of Calendar No. 195, S. 1259.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. I ask unanimous consent that the committee amendments be agreed to, the resolution, as amended, be agreed to, the committee amendment to the preamble be agreed to, and the preamble, as amended, be agreed to, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and any statements relating to this resolution be printed in the Record.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to the immediate consideration of calendar No. 184, S. Res. 109.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. I now ask for its second reading and object to my own request.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I understand that H.R. 1218 is at the desk, and I ask for its first reading.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and that any statements relating to the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to the consideration of Calendar No. 193, S. 1258.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to a period for morning business, with Senators permitted to speak for up to 10 minutes each.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I ask for recognition to speak in morning business.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, a thoughtful and detailed article appeared about a week ago in the Portland Oregonian indicating public expenditures of close to $1 billion during the current year directed at the recovery of salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest. That is an extraordinarily large amount of money for a purpose of that nature. A modest portion of it comes from State appropriations of the four States in the Columbia River drainage area. The largest single share of that almost $1 billion is paid for through the charges for electric power produced by the Bonneville Power Administration and others, and, therefore, by the residents of the region, but a very substantial share of that money comes from appropriations approved by this Congress. As recently as 1 year or 18 months ago, I and many others in the region were critical of the billions of dollars of spending for this purpose on the grounds that they had shown few, if any results, and that, in fact, salmon runs had declined during that period of time. That criticism is no longer entirely correct. We have had some recent successes, and I will mention a few of them in just a moment. But I think all would agree that those successes are not at this point a proper return on an investment of almost $1 billion a year. For example, with the aid and assistance of my friend and colleague, the senior Senator from West Virginia, the Interior appropriations bill for the current year included $20 million appropriated to the State of Washington for these purposes. And this Senator has to confess that he is not entirely certain what the people of the United States have gotten for that $20 million at this point. This Senator cannot point to a single significant success as a result. Part of the reason, of course, is that in the current year, the spending of that money has not been completed. Part of it is that the programs which it funds are new, and part of it is the fact that the very nature of the salmon resource requires a number of years to tell whether or not any positive results will take place. But nonetheless, we are faced with that very real challenge of determining whether or not we are getting our money's worth out of these investments. For the next year, for fiscal year 2000, I can identify in our own work in this body significant amounts of money coming from the energy and water appropriations bill, especially through the Army Corps of Engineers, through the agriculture appropriations bill, through the Commerce-State-Justice appropriations bill, particularly close to $100 million for the enforcement and maintenance of a recent treaty signed with Canada on the subject of salmon in the Northwest, through the Environmental Protection Agency, and once again, through the appropriations bill the Senator from West Virginia and I will manage for the Department of Interior and related agencies. In addition, of course, there will be those huge amounts of money, close to half a billion dollars a year, through rates charged for electricity by the Bonneville Power Administration and somewhat enhanced appropriations from the four States. There are many, and I have been occasionally tempted toward this position myself, who will say that if we are not getting our money's worth and if there are so many different entities spending money on salmon recovery, would it not be appropriate to have a single federally appointed salmon czar who would determine how all of this money would be spent. The argument for that proposition, I think, would be much stronger if there were a single salmon science; that is to say, if we knew precisely what we were doing, if there were one accepted way of getting the most for our money in connection with salmon recovery. Of course, at this point, there is not. There are serious, well- founded debates throughout the country and in the Pacific Northwest as to various, widely different policy prescriptions for salmon recovery. To have one decisionmaker for all of these expenditures is perhaps not wise, at least until we have learned a good deal more about how we go about attaining our goals. I do think, however, there could be considerably more coordination than there is at the present time. Three years ago, I persuaded the Congress, as a rider on an appropriations bill, to create an independent scientific review board to advise the Bonneville Power Administration on how to spend the more than $100 million a year in actual cash grants that it gives for salmon recovery. I had learned in the previous year that those decisions were made by various self- interested parties who awarded almost all of the money themselves without any discernible positive impact at all, and the situation with respect to that roughly 10 percent of the money spent on salmon recovery has been considerably improved by that independent scientific review. I introduced a bill this year that would expand its authority to all the decisions made by the Bonneville Power Administration, not just direct money grants, but revenue foregone from its power cells, and I hope that the Congress will soon consider and pass that proposal. Nevertheless, there remains a great deal of room for additional experimentation in connection with salmon recovery. The bill which will be presented by the Senator from West Virginia and myself in a few weeks for the Department of the Interior will include a modest $4 million figure that will not go directly to the State of Washington, in this case, but will go, I hope, through a nonprofit organization which tells us that it can more than match the amount of money that we will appropriate and will direct most of its money at private volunteer citizen organizations. I have found that those organizations do give us very much value for the money. Earlier this year, one local group of salmon recovery volunteers joined forces with a landowner on Snow Creek in my State. They received the cooperation of the Association of General Contractors in the State of Washington, an association that has a huge investment in connection with salmon recovery because of the impact of the Endangered Species Act on its ability to build. Together, these volunteer organizations and private donors and representatives of the building industry have come up with an extremely constructive and almost certainly effective salmon recovery plan for a single stream. Like them, an organization of volunteers called Long Live the Kings is one of the dozen or more such organizations in the State of Washington, each of which is working on a single stream or group of streams with tremendous volunteer labor and great enthusiasm. Aid and assistance to them without detailed regulation from the State seems to me to be a wise investment of a modest portion of our money in this respect. There are some in this body and others who say this is a regional problem and it should be paid for entirely by the region itself. And certainly the people of the Pacific Northwest put a very high value on salmon recovery. But the way in which they must approach that salmon recovery is governed almost entirely, some would say distorted, by the Endangered Species Act, an act of the Congress of the United States which is both broad in one sense and very narrow in another sense in its scope, and governs many decisions in the State far beyond simply the management of our waters and of our salmon recovery itself. So the Federal Government, having imposed these requirements, has an obligation at least substantially to help fund them. Nevertheless, I am here today to say that while this is a very high priority of the Congress, an extremely high priority of the people in my State and the other States in the Columbia River Basin, it is one on which we know and believe we should be held accountable by the Congress. We will do the best job we possibly can with the moneys appropriated by Congress or directed by Congress to see to it that we are successful. Recent listings in the Puget Sound area now have the Endangered Species Act, for the first time, as having an immense impact on a major metropolitan area in the United States. The people of my State are eager to take on that task. They have asked for modest help from us here. We are giving them that modest help. We will keep Congress and the people of the United States advised of how well we are doing with the generous assistance that my colleagues have helped me to provide.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I now ask unanimous consent that the Senate stand in adjournment under the provisions of Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 43, following the remarks of my distinguished and extremely patient colleague, Senator Byrd.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 188, H. Con. Res. 35.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, the success of legislation in a matter of considerable controversy in our society is always built upon the foundation of compromise. This relatively short debate on the final passage of H.R. 775 is a perfect example of that compromise. The Senator from Oregon, who was so responsible for the final form of this bill, listed all of the changes that he required in order to approve of this legislation. The Senator from Connecticut spoke eloquently of the way in which he worked with the administration to change a ``no'' into a ``yes,'' and make this legislation a reality. My very good friend, the chairman of the Commerce Committee, the Senator from Arizona, spoke of the fact that both the original House bill and the original Senate bill were much more sweeping and much more decisive in dealing with this Y2K problem. He deserves an extraordinary degree of our thanks and our admiration for working constantly and tirelessly toward a successful conclusion, even though that conclusion is not something he regards as wholly satisfactory. I fall on his side of that debate. I think we should have done much more. I am, in fact, a radical reformer in this whole litigation field, whether it is this narrow issue or the broader issue of product liability or medical malpractice or the questionable utility of punitive damages in civil litigation. I would go much further than this bill does. But what we have done is to bring people together to solve a problem in a way that we can deem a success, all the way through to the signature of the President of the United States. During the last 20 years, our society and our economy may have changed more dramatically than in any other similar period of history. We have become a computerized information society, due to the very technological developments that resulted in a Y2K challenge. But the Senator from North Carolina claims to speak for the voiceless. They are not voiceless. They played a major role in this debate. The coalition that has wanted far stronger legislation than this does, of course, consist of software and hardware companies. But it also consists of the great bulk of the representatives of the customers of those companies. The National Federation of Independent Business is the largest single organization of small business in this country. It favors this legislation. It favors legislation stronger than this. So whoever the Senator from North Carolina was speaking for, it was not the small businesspeople who do not look forward to a blizzard of litigation on this subject. Of course, in retrospect, this new technology might have thought about the Y2K problem earlier than it did. But at this point, our goal should be a solution to the problem, not a blizzard of second-guessing litigation, especially litigation that will almost certainly slow down the future development of the very technology that has been so responsible for the growth in the American economy and has caused such significant changes for the good in the lives of people all around the world. This bill is by no means perfect. In the view of this Senator it lacks that perfection because it is not all-encompassing enough. It is, however, at least a modest step in the right direction, one supported not only by the technology companies that are responsible for the computer revolution but by their customers and consumers as well. So with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, I can wholeheartedly recommend the passage of this legislation to the Senate and look forward with satisfaction to the President's approval of this bill. Mr. HOLLINGS addressed the Chair.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate now proceed to the consideration en bloc of the following bills reported by the Energy Committee: S. 416, calendar No. 130; S. 700, calendar No. 135; S. 776, calendar No. 136; S. 323, calendar No. 140; and S. 1027, calendar No. 178. I ask unanimous consent that an amendment No. 1225 to S. 416 be agreed to, any committee amendments where applicable be agreed to, the bills then be considered read a third time and passed, as amended, if amended, any title amendments be agreed to, the motions to reconsider be laid upon the table, and that any statements relating to any of these bills be printed in the Record, with the above occurring en bloc.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, for the information of all Senators, the Senate will reconvene at 12 noon on Monday, July 12, and will immediately proceed to a period of morning business until 1 p.m. By previous consent, the Patients' Bill of Rights will be the pending business at 1 p.m. Amendments to that legislation are possible. Any votes ordered, however, will not take place until Tuesday, July 13, at a time to be determined by the two leaders. As previously announced by the majority leader, there will be a cloture vote on the pending lockbox amendment to S. 557 on Friday, July 16.