Lindsey Graham

Mr. GRAHAM

Mr. GRAHAM. I thank the chairman for the courtesy. As we talk about different views of the budget, one thing I would like to comment upon to the people of North Dakota, I have been very struck and impressed by the way the people of North Dakota have come together with the flood. It looks like tough going there but a hearty group. We all wish them well. The two Senators from North Dakota represent their State well. The Johanns amendment is what I would like to talk about a bit. This idea to most people of a debate about reconciliation probably is mind- numbing and not very interesting. But there is a process in the Congress where you can take legislation and basically put it on a fast track. It is subject to 50 votes. The Senate has served the country well. When you are in the majority, you don't appreciate the minority's role too much. But the one thing about the Senate, it changes hands fairly often. The AIG legislation in the House where there is going to be a 90- percent tax on bonuses because people are upset--I can understand people being upset about AIG, but that wasn't the right response, creating a retroactive tax on a limited group of people because you are mad. The power to tax somebody is a pretty awesome power. It should be used in a constitutional and lawful way. Our friends in the House are up every 2 years, and sometimes they get carried away in the moment. I guess sometimes the Senate does as well. The whole idea of the Senate kind of cooling things down has served the country well. In that regard, to end debate you need 60 votes. If 41 Senators are opposed to a piece of legislation, strongly enough to come to the floor every day and talk about it, that legislation doesn't go anywhere. I argue that is probably a good rule. There were times when we were in the majority that we didn't particularly like the rule. But if 41 Senators from one party or a bipartisan group believes that strongly, it is probably worth sitting down and thinking about. If you took climate change and health care, two very controversial, big-ticket items, and put them on the reconciliation track, you would basically be doing a lot of damage to the role of the Senate in a constitutional democracy. Senator Byrd, who is one of the smartest people to ever serve in the Senate about rules and parliamentary aspects of the Senate, said that to put climate change and health care reform in reconciliation is like ``a freight train through Congress'' and is ``an outrage that must be resisted.'' Senator Conrad said: I don't believe reconciliation was ever intended for this purpose. I think both of them are right. Under the law, you cannot put Social Security into reconciliation because we know how controversial and difficult that is. I come here in support of the Johanns amendment that rejects that idea. Our majority leader said something a little bit disturbing. He said climate change cap-and-trade revenues could be used to pay for health care. If we put climate change in reconciliation, you have really abused the process and will create a bad climate for the Congress. There is a lot of bipartisan support not to go down that road to abuse reconciliation. From the climate change debate, there are some Democratic and Republican Senators who are opposed to 100 percent auction. We believe climate change is real but do not want to go down the road the administration has charted. I believe manmade emissions are heating up the planet. But if you take the revenue stream from the climate change bill to fund the Government, you will lose a lot of support for climate change. The money that is generated from a cap-and- trade system should go back into the energy sector to allow people to comply with the cost of a cap-and-trade system. The Obama proposal, $3,000 per family, is a very expensive proposal. There is bipartisan support for climate change legislation with a mix of auctions and credits that could be done in a reasonable way. The idea of putting climate change or health care in reconciliation will bring the Congress to a halt. It would be everything opposite of what the President ran on in terms of bringing us together. There is a lot of Democratic push back for this idea. I applaud my Democratic colleagues who think it is a bad idea because it is. I do pledge to work on climate change. Health care will be tough. We will certainly try that. But there is bipartisan support for climate change legislation through the normal process. For those who disagree that it is a problem, they can have their say and we can get the votes necessary to put together a bipartisan climate change bill through the normal process. Senator Johanns from Nebraska has done the Senate a service by putting this amendment forward. I urge its adoption and yield the floor.

Mr. GRAHAM. I would like to discuss amendments I intend to offer tomorrow. I thank the Senator from Texas for allowing me to speak briefly. The first amendment is No. 898, which is a point of order against new mandatory spending if the Social Security trust fund dips below $5 billion. There is talk about this economy and the effects of a recession, and they are real. But one of the things we found out a couple of days ago is the Social Security trust fund spent more than it took in, in February. The projections for next year are to have a $3 billion surplus, so the day of reckoning that Senator Coburn was talking about, when it comes to Social Security, is upon us even quicker than we thought. Everybody thought it would be 2018 when we would pay out more benefits than we collect in taxes. If this trend continues, that will be accelerated by several years. That means the longer we delay in finding a fix for Social Security, the harder the mountain will be to climb. If we put this off one Congress after the next, the solutions that will get us to solvency are going to be too draconian and will hurt people. We need to act now because this problem is getting bigger faster than anybody anticipated. If we do responsible things about readjusting the benefits for upper income Americans and for Senators, where if we took $10 less a month when we retire, it would bring about 70 percent of the solvency needed to get Social Security back in balance. Do something on the age that is prospective, that realizes we all live longer. Do something on modernizing the program, so you could have savings on top of the Social Security. There are ways to get there. Increase revenues by raising the cap to have a transition. Let's make sure that people who live past 80--the fastest growing demographic in America--do not outlive their 401(k) plans. So we have a challenge and an opportunity, and this amendment says that there will be a budget point of order against any budget when there is not a $5 billion surplus in Social Security. The second one would be a point of order against any bill that would impose a national energy tax on middle-income Americans. The reason we talk about this is cap and trade. We have to be smart about how we deal with climate change. If we don't watch it, we will create a cap-and- trade system that will be a huge burden on average, everyday Americans. Every time they flip on a light switch, there will be a sales tax. So this point of order is against an energy tax on middle-income Americans. Madam President, with that, I yield the floor, and I look forward to discussing these amendments when I offer them tomorrow. And I thank the Senator from Texas for allowing me to speak.

Mr. GRAHAM

Mr. GRAHAM. Madam President, one, I would like to recognize the role Senator McCain has played on this issue. It is not something he comes to lightly, when the issue of climate change is discussed. He put together a cap-and-trade system with Senator Lieberman at a time when it was not very popular among some Republicans. But I think he understands the issue as well as any Member I have talked with. The idea that what we put into the environment can affect our environment--I am not a scientist, but that is common sense to me. Acid rain is a reality. It was a reality. You could see it in the Southeast, where the Presiding Officer lives in North Carolina, and in South Carolina. It was a cap-and-trade system, a new technology that solved that problem. So it is not much of a stretch to me that CO2 carbon emissions that we are putting into our environment from transportation and power production is heating up the planet, but we can have that debate. If you are serious about energy independence as a nation, it would be good to get away from fossil fuels coming from the Mideast. Clean coal technology is something worth pursuing. The worst thing that could happen to the climate change debate is--you cleaned up your planet and you passed on a better environment to your children only if you did it responsibly. Really, the worst thing that could happen to the climate change debate is what this administration is doing. They have destroyed, in my opinion, a lot of bipartisanship by coming up with a $646 billion budget number, revenue to be created from a cap-and-trade system they never talked to anybody about who has been involved in the issue. This is a radical, reckless departure from the climate change debate that existed before they took office. This 100 percent auction is a bit complicated to explain, but it is a major departure from the solutions that have existed in the past. Under the McCain-Warner-Lieberman approach, 22 percent of the credits available to industry and energy users would be auctioned and there would be an allocation of credits. What do I mean by that? A cap-and-trade system at its very basic level--concept--is that we are going to put limits on how much carbon you can emit into the air as an industry. We will have one for the power sector, the transportation sector, for manufacturing. We are going to put a cap on these industries, and anything you emit above that cap, you are going to have to go get a credit, purchase a credit. Well, if you have a 100-percent auction of these credits, hedge funds are going to come in and buy these credits and bid them up, so it would be very hard for an industry to purchase the credits. People start speculating with these credits. Now, the northeastern compact has a 100-percent auction, but the emission standards they have decided upon allow--basically, it is greater than the current emissions that exist, so the credits only trade for $3 because they don't have much of a cap that puts pressure on anybody. The only way you will solve this problem is to have caps that will push people to get away from using carbon, but our manufacturing sector is hanging by a thread in the global economy. If you put too much of a burden on these industries to move away from carbon and their cost of doing business goes up vis-a-vis their competitors in China and India, you are going to put them out of business. So in some circumstances, you have to allocate to these industries some credits so they can make it through the transition phase. This idea of having a 100-percent auction on day one is a radical departure, and it does generate more revenue, and I think that is what this whole exercise is about--revenue--not solving the climate problem. They have a budget problem, and they are using the climate change debate to generate money. I have asked the Secretary of Energy and the OMB Director: Where did you get $646 billion to plug into your budget? What system did you evaluate that would generate that much money? What did the credits trade for? Nobody has a clue. I literally think they made up these numbers. Some people are talking about the $646 billion being maybe half of what the actual cost would be if you went to a 100 percent auction. So this is a major departure from the way we have tried to solve the climate change problem in the past, and I think it is going to destroy the ability of the Congress to come together to solve a problem that is looming for the world and particularly this country. So I hope our colleagues who are serious about the climate change issue will reject this proposal, and let's get together, talk among ourselves, rather than making up numbers that will increase the cost to American consumers by hundreds of dollars a month. This idea of using revenue from a cap-and-trade system to pay for a tax plan of the administration is a complete departure from what we have been doing in the past. I wouldn't expect my Democratic colleagues to allow the Republican Party to come up with a cap-and-trade system to fund one of our projects. The money from a cap-and-trade system should go back into the energy economy to help people comply with the cost of a cap-and- trade system and to develop technologies to get us away from using carbon. The make work pay tax program is something I don't agree with. It doesn't apply to everybody who will be using energy, and it is a departure from how we would envision the use of revenue, and that is a problem that has to be addressed. If the administration is going to insist on a cap-and-trade system that would generate this much money from our economy at a time when we are weak as a nation economically and would dedicate the revenue to controversial programs, they have done more to kill the climate change debate than any group I know of. You have some people who disagree with the idea that climate change is real. I respect them. They are attacking it up front. We are having a genuine debate. But to say you believe in climate change as a result, and you devise a program such as this without talking to anybody means that you have put climate change second to the budget problems you have created by a massive budget. So this is not going to bear fruit. This is a very low point, in my opinion, in the bipartisan effort to try to create a meaningful inclusion to climate change. I hope the administration will reconsider. To my Democratic colleagues, those of you who stood up and said: We are not going to let reconciliation--we only need 50 votes to pass something regarding climate change; we are not going to go that route, you have done the country and the Senate a lot of good because if you ever try that, you have destroyed the position of the minority in the Senate on a major piece of legislation, and that is not what we need to be doing. That is certainly not the change that anybody envisioned. That would be a radical departure in terms of how reconciliation has been used in the past. To take an issue such as climate change, which has a massive economic impact and is politically very difficult with a lot of honestly held differences, and jam that through reconciliation, well, that would not be the politics of the past, that would be the politics of the past on steroids. That would be taking us to a place where no one has gone before, and if you wanted to destroy any chance of working together, that would be a good way to do it. Now, as to my colleagues on the Democratic side who see through that, God bless you for standing up and not letting that happen. So I wish to end my discussion with where I began. Senator McCain and others have charted a path that would lead to a bipartisan solution. I hope the President will consider nuclear power because it is very disingenuous to say you want to solve the climate change problem and you will not address nuclear power as part of the solution. Seventy percent of the energy that is created in America that is not emitting, that has no carbon base, comes from nuclear power. When he campaigned for President, candidate Obama openly talked about offshore drilling and nuclear power. When his budget comes out, there is nothing in the budget to enhance nuclear power, and Yucca Mountain is now going to be closed, apparently, and the idea that reprocessing of spent fuel is the way to store less spent fuel seems to be resisted by this administration. So I thought we were going to have an administration where science trumped politics. Well, I can assure you when it comes to nuclear power, politics is trumping science. Other than that, I have no problem with what they are doing. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. GRAHAM

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, we have created more Government, new Government than we created jobs. We lost the spirit of bipartisanship we were yearning for. It is going to be hard for us to come back to the American people after this monstrosity of a bill is understood in the next couple weeks and ask for more money in housing and banking. I am disappointed in the process. I am disappointed in the final substance of the bill. We spent $1 trillion in about 2 weeks, with very little discussion. Finally, America wants this Congress and this new administration to be smart and work together. We are not being smart, and we sure as heck haven't worked together. I yield the floor.

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, this debate is coming to an end, and it never really started. We are bringing a conclusion to a process that will spend $1.1 trillion over the next 10 years, and there has never been a thoughtful discussion between the parties to figure out how we can get there from here. The Republican alternative was $440 billion, I believe. It had tax cuts. It had spending on unemployment benefits extension, food stamp extension. It had a $35 billion, $45 billion amount of spending for infrastructure, shovel-ready jobs. It was an alternative that also had a trigger that said that once the economy got back on its feet and we had two quarters of positive GDP growth, any unspent funds would be frozen, and we would look at trying to get back to a balanced budget situation. In other words, it had a slowdown provision. There is nothing in this bill that is going to slow down spending. The compromise that has been reached--$440 billion was the Republican alternative--we are going to settle on a bill of about $787 billion- plus that received no Republican votes in the House. I think they lost seven or eight Democrats in the House. Apparently, they are going to pick up three Republicans in the Senate. I would argue that if the shoe were on the other foot, if Republicans were in charge and we lost more Republicans than we picked up Democrats, that would be a lead story. So the idea that this is bipartisan does not meet any realistic test of bipartisanship, and that is a loss. Mr. President, $1.1 trillion unfocused over 10 years, in terms of job creation, is a huge loss to the next generation of Americans who are going to pay this bill. We had a chance to start over early on in this administration. The attitude that started this process in the House, ``We won, we write the bill,'' never changed. It came to the Senate. We spent 1 hour 40 minutes marking up this bill. We have had a handful of Republican amendments accepted. I am not saying our version is the right way completely. I am saying the difference between $440 billion and $787 billion and $819 billion, the House version, is not $787 billion. There has never been a real effort to try to find common ground. The percentage of this bill that is tax cuts is 27 percent of $787 billion; 27 percent of the amount is for tax relief. A $400 rebate check is a great part of the tax provision. Last year, we gave people $500 tax rebates. That did not stimulate the economy. The $400 will not. What stimulates the economy is cutting taxes for consumers as well as business. As Senator Thune from South Dakota said about 75 percent of the jobs in America are created by small business. If your goal is to stimulate the economy and create new jobs, one test of this bill would be how much did you do for small business. Less than $3 billion in the entire package is directed to small business. I would argue that if 75 percent of the jobs come from the small business sector and only $3 billion of the money is allocated for small business relief, we missed this thing by a country mile. This bill started out of the House as a ``We won, we write the bill'' spending package that never had a focus on job creation. There are so many things in this bill unrelated to creating a job in the next 18 months that it is, in my opinion, a failure as a stimulus package. Of the $580 billion of this bill that is appropriated--about 53 percent of it is appropriated--only 11 percent of that money hits the economy in the first year. Fifty-three percent of the appropriated funds are not spent until after 2 years from now. So the goal I had working with our Democratic colleagues and the White House was to try to create as many jobs as possible by stimulating the economy through a combination of tax cuts and spending that would create jobs in the near term and, yes, help people who have lost a job. We have failed miserably in that endeavor, in my opinion. We have run up the cost of this bill, and every dollar that is wasted in the stimulus package that does not create a job is one less dollar to jump-start housing and banking. To my colleagues, you all know this one fact. We will never get out of this economic mess until we deal with the banking problem and the housing problem. We have wasted a lot of money in this bill that could have gone to banking and housing. There will be a request in the future, mark my words. The TARP funds left to deal with banking and housing of $315 billion are not nearly enough to deal with the toxic assets that cripple the ability to lend, not nearly enough, in my opinion, to deal with the foreclosures that are coming in waves in this country. The stimulus package is important, but it was, in my opinion, the least-effective measure to jump-start the economy. We put all the money in the thing that works the least, and we designed it in a fashion where it will work hardly at all. This is a blown opportunity to come together in a bipartisan fashion to deal with banking and housing. We put all our resources upfront in a stimulus package that has very little to do with creating jobs and a lot to do with growing Government.

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I ask that I be recognized for 7 minutes and be informed when I have used 6 minutes.

Mr. GRAHAM

Mr. GRAHAM. Madam President, we are about to vote at 5:30. Under Senate rules, we need 60 votes to bring closure to a bill, to basically end debate, move on with any amendments that are left hanging, and bring the debate to an end. I hope people were listening to my colleague from Tennessee. I thought he made a very good argument that we are bringing to close a debate that really never began. I don't remember debating doubling the size of the Education Department budget. I do know that education spending in Washington has grown significantly under the Bush years. Maybe there is room for it to grow even more. But I thought we were trying to create jobs to get our economy going. I am quite confident that many of the programs they are trying to expand in the Education Department have more to do with a particular agenda of a few people than creating jobs. The health care issue is enormous. Providing broadband service to rural America is very important. There is $9 billion in this bill to do that. But the question is, Does that money create a job in the near term? The reason I believe we need a stimulus package is because I don't think the private sector has the ability to jump-start the economy because they can't borrow money. There are not many businesses out there that have the ability right now to expand. One thing we could do in Washington to help the economy is cut people's taxes so that businesses would have more money to expand and hire new people; cut individual taxes so people would have more money to meet the needs and manage the budget and make their house payments; and infuse into the economy some spending, shovel-ready projects. You are going to need a shovel when this bill passes, not to build anything, just to get the money out the door. There is $200 million in oversight; $200 million is going to be spent just to try to figure out where the money went. This is an incredible amount of money being spent, $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years with interest, and we have spent 4 days on it in the Senate. The House started this process, and they couldn't pick up one Republican vote. I can assure you, there are Republicans in the House and Senate who really do believe we need to cut taxes and spend money to jump-start the economy. They lost 11 Democrats in the House. This bill started poorly and has gotten worse. It comes to the Senate in the compromise, and I applaud Members for trying to reach a compromise. The bill is $7 billion more in the Senate than it was in the House. I wouldn't want these people to buy me a car. That is not exactly what I had in mind when it came to compromise. Every Republican voted for a bill--I think it was $415 billion--to cut taxes, money for infrastructure spending, money to extend unemployment benefits and food stamps, and other programs to help people who have lost their jobs. Compromise is not going from $415 to $7 billion more than the House bill. To those who said this is the best deal we could get, I couldn't disagree more. This is the best deal you could get with two or three people. But I do believe the American people have seen through this bill, and they don't like it. They don't know exactly what to do. That is probably true of many of us in Congress. This is something unusual. But they know this process is not what they had in mind when it came to change. They know this bill stinks. This bill was written by appropriators, not by economists. The focus of this bill--to create jobs in the near term--has been replaced by what I consider basically an orgy of spending. People have piled onto this bill policy changes that were never debated. We made up numbers when it comes to education and health care without really any vetting. The markup in the Senate, where the bill was drafted, lasted an hour and 40 minutes. We have had 2 or 3 days on the floor to talk about the bill. It has been helpful. But at the end of the day, we are bringing closure to a bill that spends $1.2 trillion that will transfer to the next generation of young Americans a debt on top of what they already owe, and we are digging a hole for the next generation of Americans I don't think they will be able to get out of. Shame on us. If it creates 4 million jobs, who knows, that is still $275,000 per job. If it is 1.3 million, that is almost $600,000 per job. What was intended to be a good thing has turned out to be the old way of doing business. Less than 20 percent of the money gets into the economy within the first year. I argue, if you can't get the money into the economy within a year or 18 months, we should not be doing it. The sad thing is that the fundamental problem with the economy is unaddressed; that is, housing, what got us into this mess, a collapse of the housing industry. You can't borrow money at banks. Why? Banks have a hard time lending money because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and other organizations pushed home loans to people who couldn't afford to pay the loans. They took these questionable mortgages and repackaged them 1,000 times over, calling them different things such as mortgage- backed securities, and it spread throughout the entire world. Now banks own these troubled assets. And the first round of TARP that was supposed to get some of these assets off the book--we just gave the money to banks to keep them from folding. We have yet to address the housing problem and the banking problem. We are going to find out maybe tomorrow what additional money would be required to fix those two aspects of the economy. There is $310 billion left in the TARP fund. It will not cover the needs of the banking or housing industries. The public will be asked to give more money. My point is simple: Every dollar that is unfocused and wasted in the stimulus could be spent on helping people stay in their homes and helping banks lend money. That is the way I look at it. There is so much in this bill that may be worthy but doesn't create a job and could be transferred to the housing and banking problems and not just spent. The President called this a spending bill. I thought it was a bill to create jobs. We have a way to spend money. It is called the appropriations process. We came together early on after the election to try to find a new way of doing business. We, most of us--I think there are 20 Republicans--would sign up for a bill that would cut taxes and spend money in a focused way. The bill we have before us cuts taxes and spends a lot of money, and neither one of them is focused. The public will be asked again to put more of their money on the table--and it is all borrowed from their children--to deal with the fundamentals of the economy, housing and banking, that are pretty much unaddressed. It is disappointing for me that we are bringing to close a debate that really never happened. To the Senator from Tennessee, he has a great reputation of being somebody who listens and is pretty easy to get along with. I think I have a reputation of reaching across the aisle, sometimes to my own political detriment. It is in my nature to try to find common ground on big problems that no one party can solve. I argue that the economic crisis we are in is not going to be solved by one group of people. It is going to be solved by America working together. The message from the election that I thought was received by most Americans is that you want us to be smarter and you want us to work together.

Mr. GRAHAM. The public was hopeful that the Congress and the new President would be smarter and we would work together. I think we have failed. I don't believe this bill is smart at all. It certainly wasn't a work product that came from working together. Where do we go from here? We go to get more of the public money to fix housing and banking. We wasted a lot of their money. We cannot spend enough money through a stimulus package to save this economy unless we deal with banking and housing. We have thrown a lot of good money after bad. I apologize, and I am sorry that we can't do better. I now know why the Congress is in such low esteem. I am disappointed in this new President. Like everyone else, I want him to do well because our country needs to do well. But he has missed a great opportunity.

Mr. GRAHAM. Could the Chair inform me when I have used 9 minutes?

Mr. GRAHAM

Mr. GRAHAM. I think the Banking Committee chairman has a major dilemma on his hands, at no fault of his own. If I thought $310 billion would do it, I would not be here. I think you are going to need more money, and if you take 50 out of the TARP, you are going to have whatever the math is left, and that is still not enough. So what we are trying to do is get money for housing and taking it out of a bill that I think has a lot of room to be offset. I am trying to help, not hurt. I think you are going to need both.

Mr. GRAHAM. I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I wish to thank Chairman Baucus and Senator McCain. I don't have anything Earth shattering to say. I do appreciate the additional time. We are in on Friday. I think this is good for the country that we have slowed this process a bit. It is not good for the country if we don't act. The jobless rate is going up so we need to stimulate the economy. Count me in for doing that. However, we don't need a headline that says we rushed through $1 trillion in spending that would not stimulate the economy in an effective way but will run up the debt, which is already way too high. I think we are at a crossroads, if I may say so, about how we proceed, not just on this bill but as a Congress and as a nation. I think there are plenty of people over here--I can't give you a number; people asked me about numbers--who would like to find a way through a better process to create a bill that would stimulate the economy in a real way, through spending and tax cuts, and if it doesn't help the economy in 2 years from a tax cut point of view or a spending point of view, then I would argue it doesn't meet the goal of stimulating the economy. The spending may be worthwhile, but if it hits 3, 4, 5 years from now, then I think we missed the boat because we are not here to spend money blindly. We are here to stimulate the economy so the jobless rates don't go up. I think my dear friend from North Dakota gets this. There are tax cuts that may need to be looked at. I believe we need to do more than cut taxes, but we need a strategy. To me, the goal should be to get it into the economy within 2 years. If you can do that through tax cuts and spending, that is the place to start. There are some items that are long-term investments that would fit within 2 years but maybe could be taken out and put in a separate bill because what is going to happen next is the administration is going to ask us for hundreds of billions of dollars on top of the TARP money to generate support for the banking and financial sector, and they would be right to do so. So every dollar we can focus in this bill to creating jobs in the short term through tax cuts and spending, and take these other long-term items out, is more money we can put into housing and banking. I don't think most Americans realize this is a three-legged approach in that the stimulus package is just one piece of the puzzle. Quite frankly, it is the piece of the puzzle that is hard politically that does probably the least for our overall economic problems. If we don't fix housing and get credit flowing, we can flow all the money in the world into a stimulus package. Let's don't throw any more good money after bad. We know we have to fix housing. We know we have to do something with banking. When we talk about banking, we are talking about a hard sell, given the reputation of what has happened in TARP, for any Republican or Democrat to come back to the public and say: Give us some more money to fix banking. They are going to say: What the heck did you do with the money we gave you before? We have a crisis of confidence growing. So we are at a crossroads. I want bipartisanship. I couldn't agree more with Senator McCain. He is a man who has walked the walk when it comes to bipartisanship. He has taken a lot of criticism--so have I-- for reaching across the aisle on emotional issues to find common ground. We don't have a process in place that reflects a way to get true bipartisanship. Just picking off a few votes is not going to solve our Nation's problems. We need strong bipartisan support for a stimulus package that is targeted and focused on creating jobs in the near term because we are going to need strong bipartisan support to ask for more money for banking and housing. Let's don't blow it here. Let's don't spend this goodwill that this new administration has. I want to help this new President be successful in areas where our country needs to be successful. I am not talking about tax cuts ideologically; I am talking about a focused plan to jumpstart the economy through a stimulus bill that will draw bipartisanship. That is not where we are. The public wants us to be smart, and they want us to work together. The product we have now is, in my opinion, not smart, and the process we created beginning in the House is not allowing us to work together. We have a chance to turn it around. Let's take advantage of it. Let's get it right so we can come back together to the public and fix housing and banking. If we mess it up with the stimulus package, if we split in different camps and we create a bill the public doesn't support on the stimulus package, we are going to ruin our ability as Members of Congress and the new administration to fix the entire economy. We are at a crossroads. Slow down, get it right. I yield back.

Mr. GRAHAM. Just for 5 minutes.

Mr. GRAHAM. A minute and a half. Well, we are at a crossroads for a minute and a half.

Mr. GRAHAM. Ten minutes.

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I believe we have a modification of the amendment at the desk. I ask that be incorporated. It is amendment No. 501. I ask it be called up.

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I will try to make this as quick as possible. This is as a result of the ``gang of two.'' I would encourage everybody here to form your own gang and see if you can save some money and do some good for the taxpayer. But it has been a real pleasure working with Senator Conrad, who is the chairman of the Budget Committee, who knows more than I will ever hope to know about this, and has probably forgotten more than most of us know about budgeting and spending. We have looked at this bill, and we have similar concerns. One of the things we agree on, I think pretty strongly, is that no amount of stimulus package, no matter how well constructed, is going to solve the Nation's problems unless you do something about housing and banking. We found some common ground on the housing part. Sheila Bair, who is the Director of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, who was allowed to stay in her position by President Obama--and I compliment him for doing that; she is a very smart lady--she has been telling people throughout the country that there is a way to get ahead of the foreclosure problem if she had some money to modify mortgages that are troubled. So what we have done is we have answered her call. She has indicated to us, through a letter, and what we have done is taken $22.725 billion, transferred it to her organization, and she will be able to use that money to deal with service providers to renegotiate mortgage loans that are underwater or about to go into default, make sure that the overall payments of the mortgageholder are no more than 31 percent so people can afford it. The lender and investors would be required to achieve reductions through a combination of interest rate reduction, extended amortization, and principal forbearance. In other words, she tells us if we gave her this amount of money, she could sit down with the private sector and do the following: This proposal is no silver bullet. But we do estimate that it could reduce projected foreclosures by some 1.5 million, assuming the program would last around 14 months. Now, let me say that again. Some 1.5 million Americans, with this amount of money, in her opinion, could avoid having their homes foreclosed on. I don't have names and faces, but imagine for a moment people you know. That is a very big deal to me. And the money, $26-plus billion, is taken out of the underlying bill. We offset it. And as a compliment to my friend from North Dakota, it took us about 3 minutes to find offsets in this bill. What we are able to do is we took a $75 billion fund for States that was undesignated spending, no real rhyme or reason how it will stimulate the economy in the near term, and we said, wait a minute, we know $16.85 billion, if given to the FDIC organization, Ms. Bair, if they got $16 billion of that pot of money, they could save 1.5 million people from foreclosure. If we would do that, it would help the housing market in general. Again, my colleagues, we can print money until the press breaks. If you do not deal with housing and banking, we are never going to shore up this economy. This is, I think, a very responsible amendment. We could do a lot more with this bill. But we have the ability to transfer funds from the underlying bill to the FDIC that could be used in a way to work with the private sector financial managers to help 1.5 million people from going into foreclosure in the next 14 months. I am very proud of the amendment. I am sure it is no silver bullet, as she indicates, but it shows you what we can do around here if we keep our eye on the ball. At the end of the day, whatever amount this bill comes out to be, we have done very little for housing and nothing for banking. Our dear friend, Senator Dodd, on the Banking Committee, knows, and the rest of us should know, that if you do not get credit flowing, if you do not shore up housing, there is no amount of stimulus in the world that is going to bring this economy back. I urge all of my colleagues to support this amendment, because it will help Americans in the near term save their home from foreclosure. It is responsibly spent, and the offsets, I think, are reasonable. I will let my friend from North Dakota tell you about the stimulative effect of the offsets to our economy versus the stimulative effect of the protection of housing of our amendment. With that, I yield to my friend from North Dakota.

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, as I understand the TARP funding situation, we are somewhere in the $310 billion range in terms of funds left. I voted for TARP. It was a very tough vote for all of us. And the first $350 billion, let's put it this way, I do not think inspired a lot of confidence in the American people. I was told we were going to buy toxic assets with the money, that we were going to get those bad debts off the balance sheets so people could lend money. Unfortunately, most of the money went to banks. And I do not have any idea what bank got what, and I have no idea what they did with the money. I know the chairman of the Banking Committee is trying to figure that out. The confidence level of the American people in us is pretty low right now. Do we understand what we are doing and how are we going to get there? I can assure you there is going to be more money requested for housing and banking. Every dollar we spend in the stimulus package that is off the mark is borrowed money, and it is going to make it harder to get new money for housing and banking. So, dear colleague, the next time we go to the American people and ask them to trust us with more of their money to fix banking and housing, they are going to judge us by TARP and this stimulus package. I am afraid we are not doing very well in their sight. This amendment will help in a small way. We can do a lot more. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Bond be added as a cosponsor.

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the letter from Sheila Bair to me and Senator Conrad about what this would do for housing: 1.5 million people would avoid foreclosure if this program were enacted for 14 months. That is a pretty good use of money.

Mr. GRAHAM. If I believed we could fix housing and the banking situation with $310 billion, I would sit down and withdraw the amendment. I don't think we can. I am trying to help. As to my friend from New York, if you think it is more important to spend $400 million to deal with sexually transmitted diseases than it is to save 1.5 million homes, vote against us. I have an offset here. Go through this. If you think this is a better use of money than allocating money to save people from losing their homes, vote no. We are not in a perfect world. We are in a miserable world. We have a stimulus package that has very little to do with stimulating the economy and a lot to do with growing the Government. We have a housing problem and a banking problem that are going to cost a lot more than $300 billion. That is what we are trying to say to our colleagues. The problems are massive. The spending bill is too large. We are trying to create some sense of priorities and urgency. So the $16 billion slush fund that is not going to create any job, if you think it is better to have that than it is to save 1.5 million homes from foreclosure with a program that Sheila Bair thinks will work, let's do it. I wish to work with Senator Dodd to improve the funding available to deal with foreclosures. This is not a silver bullet, but it will help. We have our priorities mixed up. We have a spending bill that doesn't create jobs. It grows the Government. We don't have enough money to fix housing and the underlying banking problem because we have been incompetent with the first $350 billion. I am not blaming anybody. I am telling America the worst is yet to come, and we are wasting money and wasting time. This is not a perfect world. This is a Congress making it up as we go. I would like to get some rhyme or reason as to what we are doing. This amendment has a rhyme or reason about what we are doing.

Mr. GRAHAM. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. GRAHAM. Does the Senator agree with me that whether we can get the public to buy into $500 billion, $400 billion more, has a lot to do with their confidence level in how we are spending their money through the TARP and through the stimulus package? We are trying to improve their confidence level by having offsets that make sense; does he agree that is the purpose?

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. GRAHAM. The point I am trying to make, I say to the Senator, is, I may be wrong, but I do not believe the remaining amount of money in TARP--$310 billion, I believe it is--will take care of what we need to do with our banking problem and our housing problem. Am I wrong?

Mr. GRAHAM. Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question?