Bob Graham

Mr. GRAHAM

Mr. GRAHAM. I thank the Chair. Mr. President, I should like to make two points in the time available to me. The first is the context in which this debate over the specifics of Medicare and Medicaid should take place and then, second, some particular concerns about the proposal that is before us in those two areas. There is no golden road to budget balance. There are many means by which to get to that common destination. We are going to be discussing today one aspect of a proposal to get to a balanced budget and the consequences of selecting that particular route. But I want no one who hears this debate to be misdirected that we are not as committed to the goal of getting to a balanced budget by a date certain, ideally with a bipartisan consensus of the Congress and the American people. There is a word that appeared on the chart we have just seen which I think is important to this context, and that is sustainability. Frankly, Mr. President, I do not believe that cuts of the level being proposed in Medicare and Medicaid are sustainable. They might have enough energy to get through this round of the budget process. That is, they may be able to appear in the final budget resolution. I think they will encounter significant difficulty when they reach the Ways and Means Committee and the Finance Committee, and these large amorphous numbers, $256 billion out of the Medicare Program in the next 7 years, $175 billion from Medicaid in the next 7 years, when those are converted into the specific impacts on people, they will encounter significantly greater difficulty. I believe that even if they should get past that hurdle, the chances of these cuts lasting the full 7 years as they are converted into services, cost shifting, impact on States, impact on the private sector, is very unlikely. So I am concerned as to whether the path that has been laid out for us, which is clearly not the only path, is a path that has the staying power to get to the destination of a balanced Federal budget. Let me talk about some of the implications of the proposal for a $256 billion cut in Medicare, the program that provides health care financing for older Americans, and $175 billion of cuts in Medicaid, the program that provides funding for indigent Americans, which I might say, Mr. President, includes a substantial number of older Americans, older Americans who thought they had made adequate provision for their retirement years and find that because of some unexpected cataclysmic health collapse, they have used up their resources and they become medically indigent Americans. Let me just discuss what the implications of this will be first on beneficiaries. The materials which have been provided indicate that one of the first means of financing this $256 billion cut on Medicare will be cost shifting. Hearings before the Senate Finance Committee indicated that speaker after speaker who supported cuts of this level, when asked where would you propose to go in order to achieve this, gave as their first answer to increase the share of cost paid by beneficiaries. It is estimated that the increased cost to a couple, man and wife, in my State between the year 1996 and the year 2002 will exceed $9,000. That represents, for instance, Mr. President, about half of what that couple would anticipate to receive in cost-of-living adjustments over the period from 1996 to the year 2002. So the real implication of this is that they will not be able to maintain their standard of living against increased cost of living because such a high share of their income will now be going to meeting the additional cost of paying for their health care. Another important area of Americans who will be adversely affected will be the providers of health care services.

Mr. GRAHAM. I appreciate the Senator from Utah responding to my questions. I hope that this will be just one phase of a continuing dialog. We all share in the awareness that this is a critical issue in achieving not only health care objectives, but also the fiscal objectives of a Federal Government that we in our future generations can afford. The question that we are debating here is one of method and the degree in which this can be accomplished within individual programs, as opposed to requiring a more comprehensive approach in order to achieve those results without unintended adverse consequences.

Mr. GRAHAM. I think the Senator's analogy of the telephone system is a superb one. I would draw, in addition to the conclusion he did, another conclusion, and that is the importance of having an integrated, strategic approach to the structure of change for our communication systems in America. If, for instance, in Hialeah, FL, they were still using the system you described of the dial phone, whereas other parts of the country were using push button phones, and if there had not been an organized, consistent movement in an industry which has many providers, we would not have arrived so rapidly at the benefit the Senator has just described. My concern is that what we seem to be about here is saying that each sector of the health care system can be looked at as if it were an airtight compartment and changes made there did not have to take into account changes in the rest of the system. I am concerned that we are about to make a judgment that over the next 7 years, we can restrain Medicaid increases to 1.4 percent per capita against a history in which they have been running in excess of 10 percent per year per capita and where the projection is that the private sector is going to be increasing at 7.2 percent per capita, in spite of the deficiencies you have outlined. Yet, we do not seem to have a specific plan of how we are going to achieve changes of that magnitude, cuts of $175 billion in Medicaid, the health care program for the indigent, and $256 billion in cuts in Medicare, a program for the elderly. Are you not concerned that we are reaching the end result without, from the bottom up, having a clear plan of how we are going to do it, particularly how we are going to do it in a way that will be compatible with the rest of the health care system, just as there was concern for the rest of the communications and telephone systems when we made those kinds of changes?

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, our manager is not here. I ask unanimous consent for 2 additional minutes.

Mr. GRAHAM

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I introduce timely legislation that addresses the problems of a special class of institutions-- Medicare-dependent hospitals--that have Medicare patient loads of 60 percent or more. These hospitals, both rural and urban, have significantly higher Medicare losses and lower overall margins than other hospitals. This problem, particularly in light of Medicare payment reductions in this year's forthcoming budget reconciliation package, threatens the viability of these hospitals and the access to and quality of services to Medicare beneficiaries. The legislation I am introducing in conjunction with my good friend, Florida Congressman Clay Shaw, is called the Medicare Dependent Hospital Relief Act of 1995. The bill would simply require that the Prospective Payment Advisory Commission [ProPAC], in addition to its recommendations on payment rate updates for all hospitals, makes a separate recommendation on updates for Medicare-dependent hospitals. This recommendation would be required to be budget neutral. In addition, the bill would require ProPAC's annual report to Congress to include recommendations ensuring that beneficiaries served by Medicare-dependent hospitals retain the same access and quality of care as Medicare beneficiaries nationwide. The need for this legislation is rather simple. In 1992, ProPac estimates that Medicare payments were $11 billion below the level needed to fully cover the cost of treating Medicare beneficiaries. For the Nation's 1,400 Medicare-dependent hospitals, their high Medicare patient loads limits their ability to cost shift to other payors. In those hospitals with 80 percent Medicare patients, this is particularly difficult--if not impossible. As the March 1995 ProPAC report notes: The ability to use cost shifting to fill the revenue gap where Medicare cost increases exceed payment increases varies across hospitals. Facilities that treat larger shares of Medicare, Medicaid and uninsured patients have a lesser ability to cost shift to the private sector. In view of growing price competition in the marketplace, these facilities will face a greater risk of declining margins, which eventually could threaten their financial viability and their ability to care for Medicare beneficiaries. According to 1992 cost reports, profit margins for hospitals ranged from positive margins as great as 12 percent to losses of 17 percent. Medicare-dependent hospitals, on average, have margins 3 percent below the average Medicare margin. In effect, these hospitals would seem to pay a penalty for their service to the elderly. In fact, due to low margins, limited ability to cost shift and payments from all payors ratcheting down, Medicare-dependent hospitals will have to either close or reduce services. In either case, the ultimate losers will be the Medicare beneficiaries these hospitals serve. I urge my colleagues to support this legislation and ask unanimous consent to have the bill printed in the Record.

Mr. GRAHAM

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I wish to commend the Senators from Vermont for the amendment that they have offered and to suggest, just as the junior Senator from Vermont has said, that this is an example of federalism at its best. Vermont has some special concerns. It is a State with a very high level of environmental consciousness. It wants to be able to meet those needs in a manner that is appropriate to the specific circumstances of that beautiful State. Yesterday, I spoke at some length about some of the special concerns that we have in our State of Florida, which are quite different from Vermont. Vermont is a mountainous State. We are a State where anything above 20 or 30 feet is considered to be a mountain. We have the very serious problem of our ground water supply and its vulnerability to contamination and have used the mechanisms which require flow control in order to be able to support effective and appropriate landfills and other technologies to dispose of our solid waste while also diverting a substantial amount of our solid waste into a recycling stream. My basic concern with this legislation is that it goes beyond what is required to meet the Supreme Court's directive. The Supreme Court, as quoted on page 8 of the committee report, in the words of Justice O'Connor, who stated: It is within Congress' power to authorize local imposition of flow control. Should Congress revisit this area and enact legislation providing a clear indication that it intends * * * States and localities to implement flow control, we will, of course, defer to that legislative judgment. So, clearly, the decision is within our hands. It reminds me of the old story of the callow youth who held a bird behind his back and asked the wise, older man, ``Is the bird dead or alive?'' The wise man, with solemn wisdom, opined, ``It is in your control.'' That is, the young man had the ability to open his hand and allow the bird to fly free or to crush the bird. Well, we are somewhat in that same situation with the opinion of the Supreme Court. It is in our control to do, allowing States to have a wide range of options as to how to deal with this issue, or to narrowly constrain. This is particularly focused on the question of whether there should be prospective operations for States. Should States be allowed in the future to utilize this important technique as a means of achieving the broader end result of public health and environmental sensitivity as that State and its local communities find to be most appropriate for their particular set of circumstances? In an era in which we are applauding federalism, or seriously considering reversing a half century of the consolidation of power by allowing States and local communities to have more control over issues such as health care financing, welfare, child care programs, it seems peculiar and strange in an area that has been as historically local as any in our Nation's history, the disposition of garbage, that we would now be nationalizing that issue. So I join the Senator from Vermont. I applaud his creativity in crafting this amendment and hope that we will be wise enough to allow Vermont to take this initiative for the protection of that beautiful State and as a statement of our own sensitivity to the tremendous diversity in America and its desire to let the creativity of the local communities operate to the benefit of their local citizens. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. GRAHAM

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I think, respectfully, that is not a proper reading of what the Supreme Court said in the Carbone case. I will just refer you to page 8 of the committee report which quotes the language of Justice O'Connor in which she states quite unequivocally: It is within Congress' power to authorize local imposition of flow control.

Mr. GRAHAM. I thank you, Mr. President, and I thank Senator Chafee. This legislation in title II, which is the title to which my remarks will be directed, raises again the fundamental question that this Federal Government has dealt with throughout its history, and that is the appropriate role of the State government and the National Government. In this case, it raises, in stark relief, the question of who should decide an issue as basic to our public welfare as the disposition of garbage. I start from a general presumption that that level of government which is closest to the people who will be affected by the action should be able to control the action and therefore I have a general predisposition toward local and State government having responsibility and control. In this case, that predisposition also happens to be in the historical responsibility of local government for the control of their solid waste and its disposition. Let me turn to a little background of how we got to the legislation that is before us today. I will use for purposes of my examples primarily illustrations from my State of Florida but I believe that similar examples could be drawn from any of the other some 35 States their solid waste. In the case of my State, this involvement was largely driven by environmental and particularly water-related concerns and the impact that those proper considerations of environmental circumstances would have on the public health. I was concerned in reading the report of the committee that the statement is made that the principal issue relative to flow control is economics. In my judgment, while economics are certainly concerns, the statement made on page 6 that ``The primary factor driving the imposition of flow control ordnances is economics'' confuses the ends with the means. The economics are a means of achieving the end. In the case of my State, the end was to have appropriate sites that would protect the environment and protect public health. My State is one which is growing rapidly. We are adding some 300,000 people every year, having just crossed the 14 million size. Eighty percent of the population of the State of Florida lives in the coastal zone, basically a thin strip of land over pools of water. We depend upon that subsurface water for all of our purposes--human consumption, economic purposes, agriculture--for this large and growing population and the economy which supports that population. A number of years ago, it was recognized that if we continued to grow at this rapid rate and continued to dispose of our solid waste in the traditional pattern that we were going to endanger our underground water supply. And, therefore, the State passed a comprehensive solid waste management law approximately a decade ago, a law that I am proud to say has been described as one of the most progressive in the Nation and has been a model for other States. That solid waste management law gave a great deal of responsibility to local government, particularly counties, to implement solid waste disposal programs. The goal was to remove a substantial amount of solid waste from landfills and into other disposal methods or into landfills that met a very high standard of environmental protection. The authority to implement flow control already existed in Florida and thus counties used it as a tool to develop a integrated solid waste management plan that was in compliance with the State law and that addressed the threat of ground water contamination from the more traditional, less protected landfills. It was in this context, Mr. President, that 2 years ago the U.S. Supreme Court issued an opinion, called the Carbone opinion, which essentially stated that States were without the authority to grant flow control power to their local governments, because the use of that flow control could constitute a restraint on interstate commerce. That came as a surprise to many who felt that there were few items that were as indigenously local as the direction of garbage. The Supreme Court reached that conclusion, but went on to provide that it was now the responsibility of Congress to set whatever standards it felt appropriate in order to authorize local governments to continue exercising their flow control authority. If I could quote from the concurring opinion of Justice O'Connor who, in joining the majority in the Carbone opinion stated that, ``It is within Congress' power to authorize local imposition of flow control. Should Congress revisit this area, and enact legislation providing a clear indication that it intends States and localities to implement flow control, we will, of course, defer to that legislative judgment.'' So what we have before us today is the legislative judgment carrying out that empowerment by the U.S. Supreme Court. I am concerned that the judgment that is represented in title II of this bill is a narrow judgment. It is a judgment which essentially says that as the first proposition local governments are denied the authority to engage in flow control; that is the ability to direct their solid waste. As a second point, it provides that those communities which have already engaged in flow control prior to the date of the Supreme Court opinion, or prior to the date of May 15, 1994, which was the date upon which this initial version of legislation was first proposed, that those communities would be allowed to continue to exercise flow control for the period of time that was required for that community to meet its financial responsibility but in no cases longer than 30 years after the passage of this legislation. The implication of that is that no community which was not engaged in flow control prior to May 15, 1994, would be sanctioned to do so and those communities which were so engaged but which met their financial obligations, such as paying off the bonds that were necessary to construct a modern landfill or a solid waste recycling plant or an incinerator, that once those financial obligations were met they would lose their authority to exercise flow control and no community, regardless of circumstance, would have flow control authority for more than 30 years. I am deeply concerned about the philosophy that says that the Federal Government is going to assume that degree of policy control offer an activity which has been so historically local and which, by all of its characteristics, should continue to be local.

Mr. GRAHAM. In further thoughtfulness on the part of the Senator, I move to reconsider the votes by which the two amendments were agreed to en bloc.

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I wish to express my appreciation to Senator Chafee, who, in his usual gracious manner, has been so helpful in working through these two technical amendments as well as having assisted the committee in bringing to the floor this important piece of legislation. I would also like to commend the chair of the subcommittee with specific responsibility, Senator Smith of New Hampshire, and the ranking minority member, Senator Baucus, and Senator Lautenberg for their courtesies in the development of these amendments and other provisions in the legislation. I would like to take this opportunity to make a few remarks on the general subject of title II of this legislation which is the provision relating to flow control.

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, these two amendments represent technical refinements to a provision of the bill which appears on pages 63 through 65, which I understand have been agreed to by both sides of the aisle, and I ask for their immediate consideration.

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendments be dispensed with.

Mr. GRAHAM. The Senator requests that they be considered en bloc.

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I send to the desk two amendments and ask for their immediate consideration.

Mr. GRAHAM. I thank the Chair. Amendment No. 752 (Purpose: To revise the provision relating to State-mandated disposal services) Amendment No. 753 (Purpose: To provide that a law providing for State-mandated disposal services shall be considered to be a reasonable regulation of commerce)

Mr. GRAHAM. I am going to describe in a moment the dilemma that a person like myself is in, because there clearly is an urgency to act for those 15 to 20 communities which had formed an alliance using flow control and committed themselves to these major environmentally and public health protecting measures. But it wounds and offends me that in the same action where we are protecting the past, we are unnecessarily closing off the future for those communities which today, and certainly in a few years, will be exactly like those that have taken advantage of flow control in order to develop these more environmentally and public health protecting measures.

Mr. GRAHAM. You are taking the position that we here in Washington have to be the ``big brother'' to protect 260 million Americans. I do not think that the county commissioners of Broward County, FL, or the city council of Providence, RI, are insensitive to the desires of their citizens. They are the ones who wake up every morning in that community. They are the ones who daily deal with these issues which are, in many cases, difficult balancing questions. Yes, you could have cheaper garbage rates in Broward County if everybody just hauled it to the local hole in the ground and dumped it. But you would also be putting your water supply at risk. And so the commissioners of that community made a judgment that they were prepared to ask their citizens to pay higher garbage fees in order to be able to dispose of their solid waste in a more environmentally appropriate manner. Why should they not be making that decision as opposed to our telling them it is a decision that will be unavailable to them?

Mr. GRAHAM. So we are here, Mr. President, making an important political judgment. We have the range of authority to deny totally flow control authority to anybody, including those reliance upon it, committed themselves to significant financial obligations. That is an alternative that is available to us. At the other end of the spectrum, we have the authority to grant a very broad license to local governments and States to utilize flow control. What we have chosen to do--and I underscore the word ``chosen''--we have selected among options what I will call a targeted grandfather approach, in which we have said that for those who were in business as of May 1994, and a rather tight definition of what you had to be doing in May 1994, all of which is outlined on pages 56 through 58 of the legislation, for a specific duration of time, you shall have authority to use flow control. Everybody else you excluded. Let me, if I could, complete some examples that would give some context as to this theory of who should decide as to the range of local authority. I mentioned earlier a case of Volusia County, Deland, and the largest city, which is Daytona Beach, a fast-growing area in east central Florida. The county currently does not have flow control. The county was wise a number of years ago when it was able to purchase a large piece of land at a low price and has been, in part because of that, extremely successful in keeping its tipping fees--that is the charges to use the landfill--at a low rate, the lowest in the State, and still provide for an integrated solid waste management system. At this point, they are not facing any particular competition and, therefore, the county has not had a need for flow control. But the director of solid waste in Volusia County is concerned about the future. The director recognizes that he may not be able to effectively address the public safety issues in our State--the threat of ground water contamination--without the ability to control the waste stream, should a private facility decide to open a facility in the area that undercuts the counties' tipping fees. In addition, the director of solid waste is concerned about the ability of the county to float bonds in the future when it needs to expand its current facilities. Flow control authority would enable the county to have a stronger bond rating. Therefore, the absence of prospective flow control is a serious concern to this rapidly expanding county in Florida. The dilemma that I mentioned to Senator Chafee that many of us feel is that we recognize the sense of urgency to pass legislation that reempowers those communities which had been using flow control and which had relied upon it. We all agree that we must act quickly to address the financial crisis that those communities are facing now. Again, I use an example in Florida of Dade County. Dade County a number of years ago, utilizing the State authority for flow control in order to carry out its responsibilities for an integrated solid waste system, set up a series of modern landfills and incinerators. Since the Supreme Court action, which has undercut its ability to use flow control to assure that there was a sufficient amount of solid waste going to these facilities in order to generate enough revenue to pay for the cost of operation, maintenance, and debt service on those facilities, the county has been losing 45 percent of its waste, which equates to $53 to $68 million a year in revenue. Moody's Investors Service has recently downgraded Dade County's solid waste revenue bond from an ``A'' to ``Baa1.'' Moody's specifically stated that the significant diversion of waste to out-of-county facilities undermined the current rate structure and that the lack of a long-term strategy jeopardizes the system's continued ability to meet financial obligations. The county is also faced with an inability to plan for future capacity and to ensure that recycling goals will be met in the future, that is, future planning has been eliminated due to the severity of the current fiscal crisis. Half of the bulk waste recycling centers in Dade County have now been closed. These centers used to accept old furniture, appliances, tires, and other materials that could be recycled rather than placed in a landfill. Dade County had extensive school education programs encouraging young people to become involved in appropriate activities for the disposal of solid waste, especially directed at recycling. Those school programs had to be eliminated because of the financial crisis. Dade County had an active mulching program which has been dramatically scaled back now to a bare minimum. This program in the past provided mulching services to residents who brought yard waste and tree branches, and the mulch was distributed to homeowners and farmers. Now it goes directly to a landfill so that the county can come closer to meeting its waste level requirements. Elimination of innovative recycling programs has also been a consequence of this financial crisis. Phone books, high-grade trash, tires, and destruction and demolition debris which used to be recycled are now headed for the landfill. The clean organic waste composting programs are in jeopardy, due to insufficient waste to implement the plan beyond a demonstration phase. Those are some of the urgent consequences of the Supreme Court's action for a community which had adopted flow control, and based upon flow control, an integrated solid waste management program. They had incurred very substantial, in the case of Dade County, over $100 million of indebtedness in order to pay for all those facilities. It is because of communities such as that across America that there is an urgency to pass legislation that will provide for reempowering of those communities to utilize flow control and regain control of an important segment of a traditional local government responsibility. Mr. President, I am concerned that there is a bleak outlook for communities in the future. There are many other communities which are going to want to do what counties like Dade have already done. That is, utilize flow control. The ability of the local government to direct where its trash will be stored, as unromantic a function as government could engage in, but an important function which touches the lives of every citizen in the community; to allow the people who are elected in that community to make the judgment as to what is most appropriate to meet the variety of needs in that community. As I mentioned earlier, when my State came in the Union 150 years ago, it was the smallest, the poorest, and the most remote State in the Union, with a population of slightly more than 40,000. Today it has a population of over 14 million. Twenty years from now, at current growth rates, it will have a population nearing 20 million from its current 14 million. Are we to assume there will not be a similar set of concerns about protecting our ground water supplies, protecting public health 20 years from now, as there was when these communities that today are engaging in flow control adopted their plans? Clearly, the answer to that is no, there will be a similar need for this type of local control of where trash is disposed of in order to meet local environmental and public health circumstances. I believe strongly that these decisions should be made at the local level by those elected officials who are closest to the situation. This is not a conflict between government control and free market. In fact, in my State, most of the actual work of solid waste management is done by private firms. As an example in Hillsborough County, the county seat of which is Tampa, waste energy facility is operated by Ogden-Martin; landfill by Waste Management; BFI operates a majority of the residential recycling program. A wonderful example of a public-private partnership. In Lake County in the center of the State, the waste energy facility is also operated by Ogden-Martin, and the county has franchise agreements to haul solid waste with three different private companies. This is not an issue of the free market versus government control. It is an example of local communities, through locally-elected representatives, taking control of the responsibility for their destiny, particularly protecting one of the most critical resources of that community, its ground water. pass legislation on this subject. I would hope that before we complete our deliberations that we would think seriously about the restraints that we are imposing--I think, unnecessarily--that we would think about the degree to which we are Federalizing what has been a traditional local responsibility, the decision of where to dispose of garbage. We are going to continue to be engaged as we have over the past several weeks in some fundamental questions of what level of government should decide important public issues and whether those decisions should be made one time here in Washington or should be made 50, or 500, or 5,000 times at State and local levels. Earlier today, we passed legislation that changed over two centuries of American law relative to product liability. For two centuries that responsibility was placed at the State level. States had the responsibility to understand their own history, culture, politics, economics, and they make a judgment as to how these matters of civil justice should be resolved. Colorado is a different State than Florida. South Carolina is a different State than South Dakota. I believe in the proposition that the citizens of those individual States should make judgments as to what is appropriate for them today and in the future. I strongly feel that that is also true of the issue of how to protect natural resources, and how the disposition of solid waste affects the protection of those resources. The situation is different from a relatively arid State in the West than it is in a subtropical environment in my State of Florida. The situation is different in the State with the peaks of Colorado, from the State that is relatively close to its water supply as we are with our high underground surface water in Florida. I believe that prudent policy for the future should be as it has been in the past. That it is a responsibility of locally-elected officials who are accountable to the people that elect them, to make a judgment as to what is in the best interest. They would have the same range of choices that we would have, but they would be making it based on their understanding of the specific circumstances in their community. I think that is intelligent federalism which we should apply to this issue of solid waste disposal in the future, as we have in the past. That it is not appropriate for Congress to make a decision here today that two centuries of American tradition will be overturned, and now we are going to federalize into a single decision here in Washington for all of our States and all of our local communities one answer to the question, of how they can dispose of their garbage. Mr. President, I think the American people feel we have a lot of important things to be dealing with here in Washington. Clearly, one of those is going to be how to bring the Federal budget into balance. I would suggest that that is a demanding enough responsibility for Senators to make. We do not have much time left over to decide how Quincy or Greeley will dispose of their garbage. We ought to let the people in Greeley, CO, and Quincy, FL, decide how to dispose of their garbage and put our attention to what the public expects Congress to do--how are we going to balance our budget. If we allocate responsibilities in that way, I think both the citizens of Greeley, the citizens of Quincy, and the citizens of America, would feel as if we were doing the jobs that they expected the Senate to do, and how we were graded on how well we balanced the budget, would hold Senators to account and how well the county and city commissioners of Greeley and Quincy did their job would be the basis upon which they would be held accountable by their vote. Mr. President, in conclusion, I appreciate the fact that my friend and colleague, the junior Senator from Rhode Island and the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, accepted the amendments which I offered earlier. I hope that during this process we will give serious attention to the question of, do we really want to federalize the issue of disposal of local garbage? Or would we not be more prudent to accept the invitation of the Supreme Court to allow this to continue to be a responsibility of properly elected State and local officials? I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I say to my friend and colleague, the Supreme Court has clearly stated, as it does in many of these instances, that activities which are violative of the interstate commerce clause can be made constitutionally acceptable if Congress sets the standards and clearly grants the conditions for that authority.

Mr. GRAHAM. Justice O'Connor has stated it quite explicitly that we have that authority, and I am suggesting that prudence would lead us to a position that would say, let us exercise the authority that the Supreme Court has held that we can possess under the Constitution in a way that decentralizes decisionmaking, that lets local communities, with locally elected officials, take into account their local conditions. For instance, we are about to say to one of the fastest growing communities in my State, Volusia County, which contains cities such as Daytona Beach and Ormond Beach and DeLand--a very rapidly growing area--that they cannot engage in flow control as a means of managing their solid waste in such a way as to give maximum protection to their vulnerable underground water supply. I do not know why we in Washington feel that we know more about the sensibilities, the economics, the values, the environment, the public health threat of the people in Volusia County than their locally elected officials. What purpose are we serving by being so narrow in our willingness to offer--my State just a few years ago was one of the smallest States in the Union. In fact, we are celebrating our 150th anniversary of statehood. When we came into the Nation in the year 1845, we had only slightly more than 40,000 people. One hundred fifty years later, we have 14 million people. Twenty years from now we will have 19 million people. They are occupying the same piece of property with the same environmental circumstances. Many communities, about 15 to 20 in my State, have said, ``We need to do a better job of protecting our water supply and inappropriate landfills.'' Here is what we are going to do for the citizens of my community with the support of the citizens of my community through their elected representatives to do so. We are now about to say that everybody who did not get on to that train, authorized flow control prior to May 1994, are going to be forever shut off. I do not understand what public purpose we are advancing by denying them the right to do so.

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I continue the quote: Should Congress revisit this area and enact legislation, providing a clear indication that it intends States and localities to implement flow control, we will, of course, defer to that legislative judgment. So we have a range of judgments that we can make, including that it is appropriate for State and local governments to continue to implement flow control, those communities which had done it in the past and those which might like to do it in the future and off indebtedness and wish to continue to utilize it. It is within our power to place the decisionmaking as to whether to use flow control or not in the hands of literally tens of thousands of local government officials, as opposed to centralizing that decision in Washington, with the judgment that is contained in title II of this legislation, which essentially is: Thou shalt not engage in flow control unless you were doing it before May 1994 and, even then, only for the period necessary to pay off your indebtedness and, in no case, more than 30 years from now.

Mr. GRAHAM

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, it had not been my intention to speak at this moment but I happened to be on the floor and heard the Senator from North Carolina. I would like, if I could, to put today. The first component of the announcement was that the United States would adopt a new policy relative to those detainees who are currently being held at the naval station at Guantanamo Bay. For some background, in the late summer and early fall of 1994, a large exodus of Cubans commenced from that island and were interdicted by United States Coast Guard and some military vessels. The decision was made by the U.S. Government at that time to establish a safe haven at Guantanamo Naval Station, to which in excess of 30,000 persons who had been interdicted at sea were subsequently taken. In September 1994, the United States Government, as part of what has been a continuing negotiation with the Cuban Government, held negotiations on the specific and limited and singular topic of immigration. As a result of that, an agreement was reached. Parts of that agreement provided that the United States would provide no less than 20,000 visas per year for Cubans wishing to come legally to the United States, and would do so through a process administered by the United States interest section in Havana. Also, as part of that agreement, the Cuban Government agreed to undertake those steps which would be necessary in order to prevent a continuation or restart of a mass exodus from Cuba. Over time, the U.S. Government determined that there were three categories of persons at Guantanamo who deserved to be granted parole in the United States, those three being families with children, the elderly, and those who had serious medical problems. Under those three categories of parole, approximately 7,000 to 8,000 persons have been paroled into the United States thus far. There are another 2,000 to 3,000 to be paroled into the United States. That will leave at Guantanamo a population of approximately 15,000, plus or minus, which will be composed largely of single males, older adolescents, and young adults. Over the past several months, there has been growing concern about what will happen at Guantanamo when we end up with that population. Recently, first privately and increasingly publicly, the representatives of the U.S. military--including General Sheehan, who is the Commander, Atlantic Command, which has responsibility for the U.S. military interests in the Caribbean--indicated that they felt it would be a very serious situation with potential for riots or other major unrest. I personally have visited Guantanamo twice since it has been a principal safe haven for at one time Haitians, then mixed Haitians and Cubans, and now primarily Cubans. I concur, as a lay person, in what I observed at Guantanamo: It is a very stark environment. Many would think Guantanamo would look like their vision of a Caribbean island. It is not. It is a very formidable, rocky, dry, arid place where cactus is more prominent than palm trees. There is great concern about the potential of having a large number of persons of a young male status, without any hope or expectations for their future, being detained for an extended period under those circumstances. I might say, this Senate spoke to that issue itself just a few weeks ago when the Department of Defense requested a supplemental appropriation of over $50 million in order to enhance the conditions at Guantanamo--things like putting in permanent showers and bathroom facilities where currently portable facilities are being utilized. The Senate elected not to fund that supplemental appropriation and expressed in its declination to do so the need for the United States to determine what its long-term policy was going to be relative to the detainees at Guantanamo. So we have had the opportunity as a Senate to speak on this issue, and what we said to the administration was: Come up with a policy of how to deal with this situation before we commit an additional $50 million on top of the $1 million a day we are spending in order to maintain the population which is currently at Guantanamo. Another part of this very unfortunate situation was the fact that there is great concern in the United States about the increasing number of immigrants. What seemed to be a strategy that would try to maximize the positives and minimize what are inherently going to be negatives in this situation was a policy that said let us take some of those 20,000 visas a year we are committed to offer through the interest section in Havana, and let us shift those to Guantanamo and assign those to those persons who, on a case-by-case basis, can meet the standards of entry to the United States. That has seemed to me for a number of months to be a rational policy, one not without risk or problems, but better than a set of unhappy other alternatives that face the United States. I am pleased the administration did not wait until we had a riot at Guantanamo in order to act; that the administration essentially took the direction which this Senate had given, to state what our long-term policy was going to be vis-a-vis Guantanamo. That policy will be that over the next 3 years, we will shift visas from the interest section in Havana to Guantanamo, to begin the process of depopulating Guantanamo. Those who meet our standards will receive one of the visas for entry to the United States. Those who do not meet our standards will be sent back to Cuba. The major concern about that policy was the concern that is referred to as remagnetizing Guantanamo. If you depopulate Guantanamo through this process but in the course of that you create such a strong impetus for people to go to Guantanamo and it refills, then you are back to where you are today. The Cuban Government has restated its commitment of last September; that is, that it will enforce against mass exodus from the island. The United States, now having said we will not take people to Guantanamo as a safe haven, the policy which the Attorney General announced today is that those persons who are interdicted at sea will be given an on-board screening at sea to determine if they have a legitimate claim of political asylum. If they have such a legitimate claim for political asylum, they will be given a special processing commensurate with that status and with our history of humanitarian outreach to political asylees and our obligations under international law. If they do not meet that standard, then they will be returned directly to Cuba. That is a provision of this which causes great concern to many people, including myself. I recognize the long history that the United States has had relative to a special relationship with the people of Cuba. This policy was taken as what was considered to be a necessary backstop to the steps to depopulate Guantanamo without, in the process of depopulating, creating the very impetus that would repopulate it. Mr. President, I am a cosponsor of the legislation that the Senator from North Carolina has introduced. I was the principal Senate sponsor of the Cuban Democracy Act, which today represents the basis of United States policy toward Cuba. That policy, as the President stated, is unchanged. That policy is one of economic and political isolation of Cuba as the most appropriate United States policy for purposes of closing down the 35-year nightmare which Fidel Castro has represented to the people of Cuba. It is a policy that says we will outline with specificity and with compassion what our policy will be toward the people of Cuba during this reign of terror of Fidel Castro, and we will stipulate what our policy will be upon Castro's fall, to reintegrate a democratic and free Cuba into the international family of peace-loving nations and eliminate the one blotch that remains on the map of democracies of the Western Hemisphere, which is Cuba. That was the essence of the Cuban Democracy Act. The legislation which I am cosponsoring with the Senator from North Carolina extends those principles toward the same goal of a rapid, hopefully peaceful transition of Cuba from the tyranny that exists today to a free and democratic government. The decision the President made today was a difficult one. It represents a selection among a series of difficult choices. I respect the fact he did not wait for a crisis to make the decision. He has made it firmly. He has done what will achieve, I think, the maximum national security benefits to the Guantanamo. The U.S. Department of Defense supported this proposition. It will allow Guantanamo to return to its role as an important part of our hemispheric security. It will not serve as a magnet for future buildup and diversion from its military use. It will stop almost $1 million a day of expenditure that we have been making at Guantanamo.

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, there were some difficult decisions that had to be made around that core judgment. The result of the series of decisions will be: First that there will be no increase of total Cuban immigration into the United States, legal Cuban immigration, beyond that to which the United States was already committed. Second, that immigration will now come from two streams, partially from Havana and partially from those persons who are at Guantanamo. Third, the American people will be assured that only people from either place--Havana or Guantanamo--who will enter the United States will be those who meet our standards for entry. Fourth, steps have been taken to demagnetize Guantanamo for further population buildup. Within that policy, the American principle of recognition of political asylum and provision for those persons who seek freedom to make the case that they are seeking freedom out of the basis of a legitimate fear of political persecution will be maintained. They will be afforded that opportunity. The Attorney General outlined in summary form today what those steps will be. So, Mr. President, I appreciate the leadership which the President has taken in making a difficult decision. I believe this Senate should appreciate the fact that he has responded to our request for leadership on this matter; that the U.S. Department of Defense will now be able to return its personnel and facilities to their intended purpose of security of the United States; and that we will be able to say that our policy of respecting human rights, and particularly respecting the rights of those claiming political asylum, will be maintained. They are difficult choices, but in my judgment, choices that had to be made.

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for an additional 2 minutes.

Mr. GRAHAM

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to proceed for up to 10 minutes as in morning business.