Phil Gramm

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I rise today to recognize Rear Admiral (Select) Jake Shuford, United States Navy, for the outstanding performance, dedication, and leadership he has exhibited over the last two years as the Director of Senate Liaison for the Navy. Admiral Shuford is a sailor's sailor. Since receiving his commission as a Naval officer over 27 years ago, Jake Shuford has distinguished himself through his tactical acumen, seamanship, and ``can-do'' attitude. He commanded the hydrofoil USS Aries, PHM 5, the guided missile frigate USS Rodney M. Davis, FFG 60, and the guided missile cruiser USS Gettysburg, CG 64. During Admiral Shuford's command of the Gettysburg, the ship won the prestigious Battle ``E'' Efficiency award while successfully firing 69 Tomahawk missiles during strike operations in Iraq and Kosovo. Admiral Shuford took the conn of the Navy's Senate Liaison Office in September 1999, earning the admiration of Senators who have worked with him. Admiral Shuford epitomizes what is best in our Navy and in America, and the Senate, the Navy, and the American people are indebted to him for his many years of distinguished service. He will soon leave the Senate for his first flag officer assignment in charge of duty assignments for all 375,000 officers and enlisted personnel in the Navy. As he departs Washington, D.C. and the Senate, I know that my colleagues wish the very best for Jake, his wife, Cathy; their daughter, Campbell; and their sons, Bennett and John.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. I send a second-degree amendment to the desk and ask for its consideration.

Mr. GRAMM. I ask unanimous consent reading of the amendment be dispensed.

Mr. GRAMM. I'm not going to spend a lot of time tonight talking about this amendment. We will have an opportunity to talk about it tomorrow. However, I do want to try to make a couple of points tonight. First, I want to make a point we are trying to pass a bill on aviation security. In my opinion, this bill is far from perfect. It seems to me there are 100 Members in the Senate who believe we need to do everything we can do to act quickly and act efficiently in making air transportation safe again. We want the American people to be and feel secure and we want to get planes flying. Our economy is very much affected by the ability of Americans to travel, and in the process, to go about their business, because the business of America is business. We now have a pending amendment, the Carnahan amendment, that has nothing to do with aviation security. I know some of my colleagues will argue that the amendment is meritorious. I have been somewhat amazed by the argument that we took action to ``bail out'' the airlines, and now it is time we do something for the employees of the airlines. I beg to differ. For the last 140 years, the distribution of resources in the American economy has been roughly 80 percent for labor and 20 percent for capital. There is no reason to believe that of the $5 billion of assistance we provided to give emergency relief for the limitations placed on the airlines on the 11th and the ensuing weeks, that approximately 80 percent of that money did not go directly to the benefit of people who worked for the airlines. In fact, the whole purpose of the funding was to prevent weak airlines from going broke and to try to stabilize the situation. Now to come back and say we need another bill dealing with special benefits for people who work for airlines, it seems to me, approaches piling on. Quite frankly, I don't understand the logic that if you work for an airline, and I work for a travel agent, and we are both out of work, why you are more deserving of Federal benefits than I am. I don't understand the logic that treats people differently in unemployment compensation, and to carry over their benefits based on who they work for. That system makes no sense whatever to me. I think it is important to note that the Carnahan amendment, at least by my rough and rugged calculations, would cost $95 billion a year if the same benefits were applied to everybody in the American economy, rather than simply being applied to people who work for airlines. To sum up the points I want to make about the Carnahan amendment: One, people who work for airlines were the principle beneficiary of the $5 billion of direct aid and the $10 billion of loan guarantees. The whole objective was to try to keep airlines operating so they could provide service and so that employees would not be dislocated economically by losing their jobs. I don't understand the logic of an amendment that treats people who work for one private employer differently than people who work for other private employers, even though both may have lost their job as a result of what happened on the 11th. I am not for the Carnahan amendment. I don't make any excuses for being opposed to it. I think it is bad policy. And quite frankly in this era of bipartisanship it looks awfully partisan to me. It seems to me since the decision has been made that we are going to offer extraneous amendments on the Aviation Security Act, both sides can play that game. My amendment is a straightforward amendment that opens up 2,000 acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas production. In the process, it adds more oil reserves to America's proven reserves than 30 years of supply from Saudi Arabia. It would require the use of the best available technology for environmental protection. The provision has been adopted by a fairly substantial bipartisan vote in the House of Representatives. One might ask, what does energy security have to do with the Aviation Security Act? My answer is it has a lot more to do with the Aviation Security Act than the Carnahan amendment. If we are going to vote on extraneous amendments that our Democrat colleagues want to vote on, then I want to vote on amendments that I think will benefit the country. Quite frankly, I think nothing could do more to immediately bolster national security than enabling us to produce more oil and gas here at home at a price consumers can afford to pay to turn the wheels of energy and agriculture. So I wanted to come over today and offer this amendment. Finally, let me reiterate, before I yield the floor and let our colleagues speak, my concerns about the Aviation Security Act. I think 100 Members are in favor of doing something here. But I think we should be trying to do something within two constraints: No. 1, how can we provide additional airport and aviation security in a way that will minimize the amount of time it takes to put it in place? And, No. 2, how can we do it in such a way as to maximize the effectiveness of the security we provide? I personally believe we would have been well advised and the country would have been well served if we had allowed the President, in implementing this program, to decide when to use Government employees and when to use employees from the private sector and to pick and choose in such a way as to implement a program as quickly as possible that would be as effective as possible. I think we have made a mistake by mandating that the people who are employed under this act in our major airports all be Federal employees. It seems to me that will add to the amount of time it takes to put the program in effect, and I think it is highly questionable that that kind of binding constraint on the executive branch of Government is aimed at making the system the most efficient possible. I think we could have written a better bill had we allowed the President to do this within the two constraints of doing it as quickly as possible and having a system that is as effective as possible. The decision was made not to do that, to move ahead even though the President expressed a preference to have flexibility. The decision was made to move ahead by mandating Government employees. I think that is not good public policy. I am not saying we would not be better off having a bill that is non-optimal than not having a bill. But I am simply saying, in this spirit of bipartisanship, it seems to me that the right way to have done this would have been to trust the President and give him the flexibility. That the bill did not do. So in yielding the floor, let me reiterate where we are. We now have the underlying substitute as the pending bill. We have a first-degree amendment, the Carnahan amendment, and we have a second-degree amendment which would open a very limited area of ANWR, 2,000 acres. It would add to the oil reserves of the country the equivalent of 30 years of Saudi Arabian imports. And it would require that this oil and gas be produced with the best available technology. I am sure Senator Murkowski will speak about why this is something we should do, as the former chairman of the Energy Committee, if we are in fact going to consider the Carnahan amendment. Let me say if we simply decide to focus, as I believe we should, on aviation security, if we should decide to drop the Carnahan amendment, I would be willing to pull down this amendment. But if we are going to deal with extraneous matters, then we ought to be dealing with extraneous matters, in my opinion, that are more related to the crisis we face than is the Carnahan amendment. So if we are going to press ahead with that amendment, then I am going to press ahead with voting on ANWR. I understand the rules of the Senate. The majority leader has filed cloture on the Carnahan amendment. I will vote against cloture. I hope cloture will be denied. But if cloture is adopted, then my amendment to the Carnahan amendment will fall. But I will offer it again as a first-degree amendment. I want to reiterate, if we are going to get in this business of dealing with extraneous amendments, which I think is a mistake--I think under the circumstances that, on a united basis, we ought to move ahead with aviation security--but if we are going to get into these extraneous amendments, then I think everybody ought to have the right to get into them. I cannot imagine anything that would be more important that we could do tomorrow on the floor of the Senate than to adopt a House-passed provision that, on a very limited basis, would open ANWR and would add more proven oil reserves to the Nation than 30 years' supply from Saudi Arabia. I appreciate the Chair's indulgence and I yield the floor.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, it is my understanding, we now have of the underlying bill the Carnahan amendment, which is a first-degree amendment; is that correct?

Mr. GRAMM. Reserving the right to object, I'm not sure I understand the unanimous consent request. Could you repeat it.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I have listened to our three speeches. In listening to them, you get the idea that what they want is competition in defense procurement. I would, therefore, like to ask unanimous consent that the pending resolution be set aside and that an amendment be adopted by unanimous consent, which says the following: All defense procurement shall be on a competitive basis, and the Secretary of Defense shall buy products at the highest possible quality at the lowest possible price.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I don't object. I would just like to be recognized.

Mr. GRAMM. That is fine.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I wanted that objection because I wanted to make a point. And that point is, this bill is completely full of noncompetitive provisions. This bill is full of provisions that say who can do business with the Pentagon and who cannot. This bill prohibits someone from even bidding on a contract with the Pentagon unless they pay the highest wage rates paid in their region. There is no price competition in this bill. This bill is the antithesis of price competition. When our colleagues talk about price competition, their bill has none, save they want to destroy Prison Industries. The point I want to make is the following: This amendment has nothing to do with price competition. This bill has to do with killing Prison Industries. Now, look, if you listen to our colleagues, it sounds as though they are saying, we do not want to compete with prisoners. It sounds as if prisoners are getting all this money that would have gone to some private sector producer. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a letter from The National Center for Victims of Crime be printed in the Record.

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

Mr. GRAMM. That is fine. All I want to do is answer the three speeches that have been given. I have two other people who say they may want to speak. They may not get over to the Chamber. If they cannot, they cannot.

Mr. GRAMM. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. GRAMM. Madam President, first of all, I am not in a Federal prison, and I do not have any kinfolk in a Federal prison, so I do not know how I would benefit from that. Second, it is interesting, all this concern about competition. The Defense Department sent the chairman a recommendation that they be allowed to be more competitive in purchasing items by not requiring defense contractors to pay inflated wage rates in order to bid. They estimated that next year they could save $180 million if they were allowed to be more competitive, and that provision was struck and not included in this bill. The Defense Department sent the chairman and the ranking member a letter saying: If you will just let us have a little bit more leeway in getting competitive bidding on small contracts of less than $1 million, that could have saved $180 million in 1 year. Our colleagues who are so concerned about competition today say basically we do not want to save $180,000 if it means competition, and so they rejected that provision. Yet when it comes to Federal Prison Industries, now all of a sudden everything should be different. So I hope my colleagues will vote on this on the merits. Do you want to kill Federal Prison Industries or not? Do you think a handful of workers and a handful of manufacturers who would benefit by killing Federal Prison Industries are more important than the 285 million taxpayers who are paying $30,000 a year to keep somebody in prison where those costs can be ultimately partially paid by prisoners working and where we could use some of the money for victims' restitution? That is the issue, and I hope people will vote on that basis.

Mr. GRAMM. That was in the unanimous consent request?

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, let me first say I want to make it clear that--reserving all of my rights under the rules of the Senate to offer substitutes or amendments--I am hopeful that in the midst of a national crisis we can find a way to gather new information and commit to make a decision on this divisive issue next year. We have voted on this issue probably four or five times in the last decade. To this point, in each and every case we have preserved prison labor in America. Our new chairman of the Armed Services Committee, who has consistently sought provisions in the bill that would effectively end the current program, is now chairman of the committee and has the provision eliminating the program for all practical purposes--I will explain that--has put that in the bill itself which has produced the situation in which we find ourselves. Now let me try to talk about this problem. I want to begin by talking about the history of prison labor in America. I want then to talk about the point at which we came to a fork in the road, and took the wrong fork, in my opinion. And that occurred during the Great Depression. I want to talk about the Levin amendment, as to why it violates every principle in the bill. Then I want to outline the prison labor system and why it is so critically important to our system of criminal justice, and why the program, at least in our last study, which was in 1998, was given very high marks. At that point, I will have made this case, I hope. We do have some Members of the Senate who are voting on this issue for the first time, and I believe it is important that a full presentation be made. Let me begin with de Tocqueville. We all remember that de Tocqueville came to America and wrote the greatest critique ever on democracy in America, the great classic which people read even today to understand the special nature of America and to understand the genius of our economic and political system. Many of us forget that de Tocqueville came to America not to study democracy but he came to America to study our prison system. In fact, his first book was about the American prison system. He basically concluded that we had the finest prison system in the world, and the foundation of the excellence of the American penal system, as de Tocqueville found in the 1830s, was a comprehensive program where, for all practical purposes, every prisoner in America worked. We had a system where prisoners engaged in manufacturing, prisoners engaged in agriculture, and substantial amounts of the cost of incarceration were paid for by prison labor, lifting the burden on the taxpayers of the 1830s in America to fund our prison system; but most important, in de Tocqueville's opinion, was the humaneness of labor in prisons. In fact, de Tocqueville went to great lengths to talk about the prison system and to talk about how humane it was that people in prison in America, unlike Europe, worked. Let me read you a quote from de Tocqueville: It would be inaccurate to say that in the Philadelphia Penitentiary labor is imposed. We may say, with more justice, that the favor of labor is granted. When we visited this penitentiary, we successively conversed with all its inmates. There was not one single one among them who did not speak of labor with a kind of gratitude and who did not express the idea that without the relief of constant occupation, life would be insufferable. In 19th century America when someone went to prison, they went to work, and they worked 12, 14 hours a day, 6 days a week, and in working several good things happened. One, they weren't idle. And as we all know from Poor Richard's Almanac, ``idle hands are the devil's workshop.'' Secondly, they produced food, they produced products that could be sold, and they dramatically reduced the cost of incarceration in 19th century America. From 1900, where virtually every prisoner in America worked--and I would have to say there is some justice to requiring people in prison to work and to share the burden of their incarceration with working people who today pay $30,000 per Federal inmate to put people in prison and keep them there. It is cheaper to send somebody to Harvard University than it is to send somebody to the Federal penitentiary. Now, by the turn of the century, we had an effective prison system all over America. In Texas, I am proud to say, we had a model program where every prisoner worked, and they worked hard. They grew their own food, they made their own clothes, and they produced products that were sold in the economy. Attention was given not to glut local markets, so generally products were not sold in areas where prisons were located. And by all accounts, beginning with de Tocqueville and ending with anybody who studied the penal systems of the world, at the turn of the century, in 1900, we had far and away the finest prison system in the world. And the recidivism rate relative to the current day was low because prison was not an experience that people wanted to repeat. They had generally accumulated productive skills in prison by working, and they were blessed that when they left prison, they knew how to do something and it gave them a chance to go back to society and to try to do it--and do it for pay. This system took a dramatic turn in the 1930s. In the 1930s, we passed three laws: Hawes-Cooper in 1929, Summers-Ashurst in 1935, and Walsh-Healy in 1936. The Hawes-Cooper Act made it illegal to sell prison-produced goods in America across State lines. The Summers- Ashurst Act made it illegal to transport prison goods in interstate commerce. The Walsh-Healy Act, in essence, said, if you produce things in prison, you have to pay prisoners union scale. The net result of these three laws was it killed the prison industry in America. So, today, we have 1.2 million people in prison. Almost all of them are young men in their peak years, in terms of ability to work. Yet all over America, they are idle because of prohibitions against prison labor. So it is all right to let working people work, it is all right to tax people at confiscatory rates to pay $30,000 a year to have people in the Federal penitentiary. But it is not all right to force them to work and to have a process whereby there is productive work to be done. The only vehicle left--the only work that is currently done in America by prisoners is work to produce items that are purchased by the Government. That is a pale comparison with the program that we had in 1900. But it is all that is left today. Now, the Levin amendment would effectively kill that program with regard to the Defense Department, which is the largest purchaser of goods from our Federal prison industry. Senator Levin is going to say that all we want is competition. But I am sorry that I have to say that nothing in this bill is aimed at competition except the prison labor standard. This bill is full of provisions that ban competition, that force the Defense Department to pay a higher price. Not one contractor in America can bid for a job with the Defense Department unless that contractor pays union wages, unless that contractor pays the highest wage scale that anyone is paying in that labor market. That is not competition. You are going to later hear Senator Levin say: All we want is competition. All his bill has is the absence of competition. The only place it calls for ``competition'' is in the prison labor industry. This, in reality, is not a competition provision; this is a special interest provision supported by organized labor and supported by private manufacturers. Senator Levin and proponents of this provision will say: What could be wrong? Business and labor are together on this issue, and if the two great special interests of America are for it, surely it must be America's interest. I beg to disagree. The special interests of labor and business are not in America's interest. And I remind my colleagues that by idling these prisons who are beginning to pay victims restitution, who are beginning to pay funds that displace taxpayers' money, what we are going to do is to impose a heavier and heavier burden on the American taxpayer. We are going to destroy the only system we have that effectively trains prisoners so when they get out, they can go out and get a job and hope to hold a job--and America will be a loser. Part of the problem here is that all the political interests are on the side of the amendment that is now in this bill. I am proud to say that in the last decade we have voted on this thing four or five times, and each time we have saved prison labor in America. I don't know where the votes are here, and I would have to say that I am profoundly disappointed that in a year where we are facing an imminent crisis, that instead of focusing on defense, we have a special interest provision in this bill that is aimed at killing prison labor. I want my colleagues to know that I have proposed doing an independent study through the General Accounting Office where the report would be made in May and where we could have a comprehensive debate and, hopefully, have a compromise that would allow us to solve this problem once and for all. Senator Levin and I have fought over this issue for a decade. Let me go back and complete the story. Where we are is that we have a provision in the bill that basically claims that the Defense Department is a loser from the prison labor system. I want my colleagues to understand the Defense Department did not ask for the Levin amendment. You might ask: How come they didn't send a letter down here saying they opposed it? If you were the Secretary of Defense and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee in the Senate had a provision related to prison labor, would you write a letter saying you are against it? No, you would not. I want my colleagues to understand, the Secretary of Defense did not ask for this provision, and the Attorney General and the Justice Department are adamantly opposed to the provision in Senator Levin's amendment. Senator Levin apparently is going to make the argument, which he has made for the last decade, that the prison labor system is unfair to the Defense Department. I simply make two comments: One, how come every other noncompetitive purchasing provision in the pending bill is not unfair to the Defense Department? Why only prison labor? What is this about? I can tell you what it is about. It is about greedy special interest. That is what it is about. Let me tell you what the facts are, and they are old facts. One of the reasons we ought to do a study is to update the facts so we know exactly what we are talking about. There was an audit report mandated by the Congress that was submitted to Congress on August 5, 1998, 3 years ago. It was submitted by the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Defense. This is basically what it concluded. It was a comprehensive study. I have the study here if anybody would like to look at it. Basically, what the study concluded was that when they looked at a random sampling of procurement by the Defense Department from the Federal Prison Industries Program, in 78 percent of the products they looked at, the price the Defense Department got from the Federal Prison Industries was lower than the competitive market price. In 20 percent of the cases, it was higher. In 2 percent of the cases, it was the same. Also, when they looked at waivers--that is where the Defense Department concluded that the property that was being procured was not being sold at a competitive price or at competitive quality or on a timely basis--in over 80 percent of the cases where the Defense Department sought a waiver because they believed it was not a good deal, that waiver was granted. When you look at the overall aggregate situation that existed in 1998 when we last studied the Federal Prison Industries, in 78 percent of the cases, the Prison Industries sold the product at less than the competitive price in the private sector; 20 percent of the time, it was more; 2 percent of the time, for all practical purposes, it was the same. The quality of the product was found to be excellent. There were problems in terms of deliverability and, in fact, in 1998, a series of reforms were implemented to try to deal with the deliverability problem. Senator Levin will say that all his amendment does is require competition. My answer is, let's require competition in everything the Defense Department buys from anybody. If the Senator will change his amendment to simply give the Secretary of Defense the ability to buy competitively so that the Secretary can have competitive bidding and buy the highest quality product at the lowest price across the board, I will support that amendment. But that is not going to happen because this bill is not a competition bill. This bill is full of restrictions on competition everywhere except prison labor. Another provision I would support and would rejoice to the heavens about would be to eliminate the Federal Prison Industries Program at the Department of Defense and in the rest of the Government and let's allow the Federal Prison Industries to compete with anybody else in Government procurement with no special arrangement, but then, subject to simple restrictions, let's let them sell in the private sector. What would those restrictions be? A, you cannot sell in the area where the prison is located because you do not want to glut the market; B, you cannot sell products that are in excessive supply where the price is falling precipitously; and C, let's focus production where prisoners are producing things we are importing--component parts, for example. Unless I am sadly misinformed by the last 10 years of the debate, I do not expect the proponents of the provision in the bill to say they want competition. In fact, not only do they not want prisoners to work and produce things to sell in the private sector, they do not want prisoners to work to produce things in the public sector. That is our dilemma. We have before us a provision in the bill which was not sought by the Defense Department, which is adamantly opposed by the Attorney General and the Department of Justice, a provision that the Federal Prison Industries Program believes will be extraordinarily detrimental to their program. It is a provision which is now a part of the entire bill. If there were a provision in the bill that said the Secretary of Defense, in promoting the public interest, shall be driven by the same motivation which motivates every consumer and every producer in America, and that is to buy the best quality product at the lowest possible price and they shall be in no other way constrained, I would support that amendment, and I would think it was enlightened policy. I want my colleagues to remember when they hear this impassioned argument about competition, there is no competition in this bill save for prison industry. If the bill had a general competition provision, I would be for it because the benefits to America of having competitive procurement in defense would greatly outweigh the problems it would produce in the American prison industries, but there is no competition in this bill, save an effort to kill the prison industries in America. Part of our problem in this debate, and it has been one for the whole decade--I do not know why it is that I always end up on these issues where there is no constituency--the taxpayers, by and large, hardly know this issue is even being debated today. In fact, they would be stunned. If somebody turned on the television, they would say: What in the world is that guy doing standing up talking about prison labor when the Nation is hearing the drumbeat and the bugle to march off to war? I wonder why we are doing that, too. I did not bring this up. The point is, the American public does not understand we have an effort underway to kill what is left of prison labor. So we have 1.2 million young men, at their peak productive period, who are rotting away in prison and not working. Why is this being killed? Because of the power of special interests, the two biggest ones in America, labor and business. If anybody cares, I want to make an additional argument, and that is about recidivism. I am sorry I did not offer this amendment today. I was getting ready to debate it when it was offered by the ranking member of the committee, and so I have to thumb through my book to try to find it, but let me summarize it rather than reading the number. Those prisoners who work have a dramatic decline in the recidivism rate or, in English, if people work in prison, they are far less likely to come back to prison when they leave. Why? For one thing, because they accumulate skills in prison. What we really ought to be debating today and every day is turning our prisons into industrial parks. We ought to have American manufacturers in joint ventures with our prison systems producing the component parts in prison that we are buying from other parts of the world. We ought to have every prisoner working 10, 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, bringing down the cost of incarceration and building up the skill level, and when they are not working, they ought to be going to school, building up the skill level, so when they get out of prison, they know how to do something. Amazingly--almost astounding to me--is not only are we not going in that direction but we are trying to kill the last remaining vestige of prison labor. I want to ask my colleagues, on the basis of a couple of things, to support the Warner amendment to strike this provision. No. 1, I am willing to support a comprehensive study. We have not had one since 1998. In all fairness, the study was done by the inspector general of the Department of Defense, and that is part of the same executive branch that is for prison labor. So what I proposed, which has not yet been accepted--I am hoping it will be--is we have the General Accounting Office, which is part of the legislative branch of Government, do a comprehensive study of the prison labor system and procurement by the Defense Department and report back to us by May, so we have it for next year, how competitive is prison labor production? What is the quality like? We know in 1998 that 78 percent of the time it was cheaper, 20 percent ofttimes more expensive, 2 percent ofttimes about the same. We should have a report on quality. We know in 1998 quality was excellent. And we should have a report on the problem that was uncovered in 1998, which was deliverability. With that report, I then commit to seeking a compromise within our Government, or voting one way or the other on the program. So I hope my colleagues will vote to strike this provision now, knowing we will have an opportunity next year, hopefully under very different circumstances than today, to deal with this problem. The second thing I ask people is to not kill the remaining vestige of prison labor in America. I know my colleagues are hearing from furniture manufacturers, from some electronics manufacturers, saying: We do not want to compete with prison labor. We want to force prison labor into a--we want to eliminate the special status they have. I say, and have said to manufacturers in my State: Look, if you will let prison labor compete in selling in the private sector, in a no glutting of the market system, then I will support taking away their special relationship with government. I would support that. But they do not want to do that. They do not want to compete with prison labor anywhere. The problem is, if you do not let prisoners work, you have 1.2 million young men idle--idle hands are the devil's workshop--and you eliminate the building programs of victims' restitution and self- funding of prisons. In fact, since the 1930s we have largely destroyed the greatest prison system in history by destroying prison labor. Finally, let me ask my colleagues to look very closely at the recidivism rates. Look at what is happening with people who are working in prison and what is happening when they leave prison versus people who are not privileged to work in prison and their recidivism rate. What you are going to find is the probability of people coming back to prison when they are released falls dramatically if they have worked in prison; it goes up dramatically if they have not worked in prison. So I understand we do not have any prisoner PACs. We do not have any organized lobby from people in prison. I am not sympathetic to people in prison. I think they ought to have to work. I am sympathetic to working people who are going to have to work harder to pay this $30,000 a year to keep people in prison because special interests want to kill off the prison labor system because some desk that the Defense Department is buying or some component part of some item the Defense Department is buying is being produced by prison labor. So remember, if the issue were, let us buy everything competitively in the Defense Department and have the Secretary constrained in no way, save by the best product, the lowest price, put me down as a cosponsor, but there is no such provision in this bill. In fact, there are pages in this bill that prohibit competition. If I am a paving contractor and they are paving a road at the Pentagon or a parking lot at the Pentagon, I cannot even bid on pouring of the concrete unless I pay the highest wages in the region. What kind of competition is that? So when you hear this chest thumping about all we want is competition--that is all they want--where is it? Where is it except for Prison Industries? Secondly, if people think Prison Industries should not have a special agreement with the Government to buy products it produces, let Prison Industries produce and sell in the private sector and eliminate the special privilege. But there is no proposal for competition. There is no proposal for allowing Prison Industries to sell in the private sector. Cloaked in the righteousness of competition--and what special interest in American history has ever cloaked itself in anything other than the public interest?--cloaked in the public interest is this demand by unions and by manufacturers to kill the prison labor system in America. Reform it, yes. Study it and find better ways of doing it, yes. Bring competition to defense procurement in general, yes. Let anybody bid on a prison contract based on pricing and quality, yes. But kill prison labor in America, no. That is what the issue is. I urge my colleagues to vote for this amendment and let us settle this issue. But this issue will not be settled if this amendment is rejected because there are other amendments and other ways of doing this, and I think it is very important. We are talking about the lives of real people. We are talking about the burden on taxpayers. They are not represented. I assume no taxpayers know what is going on here. Nobody has heard from one. I don't take calls from prisoners myself, so they are not busy lobbying. But the AFL-CIO and furniture manufacturers, in particular, are very active on this issue. One will say: All they want is competition. What about competition in selling to the private sector? They do not want that. This is a special interest provision aimed at killing or dramatically reducing the Federal Prison Industries. I think that is a mistake. It is wrong. I am opposed to it. This is a debate that ought to be taking place, but on another day, on another bill, not on our defense authorization bill. I yield the floor.

Mr. GRAMM. I ask unanimous consent that the request of the Defense Department that they have the right to engage in competitive bidding on contracts of less than a million dollars be accepted.

Mr. GRAMM. The point of this letter is, some of the money that is being earned by producing goods in prison is going for restitution to their victims. Prisoners get approximately 5 percent of the value of the products that are sold. This is not benefiting prisoners in any real sense. Who it is benefiting really boils down to three groups of people: One, restitution to victims, where some of the money goes for that purpose; two, we are beginning to develop a program whereby we can pay some of the $30,000 per-prisoner cost of keeping somebody in the Federal penitentiary by having them work; and, finally, indirectly prisoners benefit by a reduced recidivism rate. Our colleagues say: Well, look, why should the Government give to Prison Industries the right of first offering to sell products to the Government? Why shouldn't we just do it competitively? Let me say, Madam President, I would be perfectly happy--in fact, I ask unanimous consent that the current amendment be set aside and that the following amendment be adopted: The Federal Prison Industry Program and its special relationship to the Defense Department shall be terminated and the Federal Prison Industies shall have every right to sell products in the private sector of the economy except with two limitations: No. 1, no products shall be sold in the immediate vicinity of the prison; and, No. 2, no products shall be sold in a market where price has declined more than 10 percent in the last year. I ask unanimous consent that be adopted.

Mr. GRAMM. I ask unanimous consent for one additional minute.

Mr. GRAMM. Madam President, I wanted that objection because I wanted to make the point that when our colleagues are talking about wanting prison labor to compete; they do not want prison labor to compete; they do not want it to work. The unions and the furniture manufacturers pound their chest and talk about: We want to compete with prison labor. But they are not telling the truth. They want to take away the only market that is left for prison labor. They killed off the market for prison labor in the 1930s where virtually everybody in American prisons worked and where they produced their own food, where they produced their own clothes, where they paid for part of the cost of their incarceration, and where they learned skills. So having killed that, now they want to kill the last vestige of prison labor; and that is selling to the Federal Government. They cloak themselves in the righteousness of competition, but they want no competition. Now, lest anybody think the relationship the Federal Prison Industries has is a relationship which is unfair to the Government, I remind my colleagues that in the 1930s we killed the prison industry as it related to producing and selling goods in the private marketplace with three Federal statutes: One, forbid the sale of prison goods in interstate commerce; another, forbid the transportation of prison goods in interstate commerce; and another one said: You can work, but you have to pay them union wages. The simple English was: Prisoners are not going to work. What happened? We drove up the cost of keeping people in prison. The only thing left is Government procurement. Every other kind of production by prisoners is now illegal in the United States of America. Let me recite these facts: In the last comprehensive study by the Office of the Inspector General, Department of Defense--let me remind my colleagues, the Defense Department did not ask for the Levin amendment. The Justice Department is adamantly opposed to the Levin amendment. But you get the idea in listening to the proponents of this provision that, well, these prison products are overpriced and are no good. When we did a comprehensive study that was reported to Congress on October 5, 1998, here is what it found: In 78 percent of the procurements that the Defense Department engaged in with Federal Prison Industries, the cost of the product was actually lower than the cost of the product that was available in the private sector. So 78 percent of the time it was cheaper buying from the prisons; 20 percent of the time, in the survey, it was higher; 21 percent of the time it was roughly the same. When the cost is higher, the Defense Department has the ability to apply for a waiver so that they don't have to buy from Prison Industries if they think it is not a good deal. Well, in listening to the proponents of this provision, you would get the idea that the answer every time they asked for a waiver was no. The plain truth is that in 89 percent of the cases where they said they didn't want this product from Prison Industries, that waiver was granted. Let me summarize by making the following points: First of all, by roughly a 4-to-1 margin in the surveys that have been done, it is cheaper to buy from Prison Industries than from the private sector. Secondly, in those cases where it is not cheaper, almost 90 percent of the time a waiver was granted so that the Pentagon did not have to purchase the item from Prison Industries. Our colleagues talk about competition, but they don't want competition. When I asked unanimous consent to have competition for the Pentagon to buy the best quality at the lowest price, just as Mr. and Mrs. America try to do every day--and as every business in America tries to do every day--they claim it is what they want, but when I ask that we do it by unanimous consent, they object. They say they want prison labor to have to compete, but when I ask unanimous consent that it be able to compete for both Government contracts and private contracts, save the limitation that you could not sell things right around the prison when you glut the market and you could not sell in markets where prices were falling because of an excess supply--when I tried to take the principle they argue on and apply it across the board, they object. So what is the principle? The principle is, having killed prison labor in the private sector, having gone from a system where virtually every prisoner in America worked 12 hours a day, 6 days a week to pay restitution to victims, to pay for their incarceration--having killed that in the private sector, we have an effort before us today to kill it in the public sector. That is what this amendment is about. It is not about competition. Now, it is true that our colleagues hold up letters from the AFL-CIO and from the NFIB, and those letters say they are for this bill, and that is true. We do have a letter from labor unions. We have a letter from people who produce items and who would like to see prison labor killed so that they can sell the items to the Federal Government. But I ask my colleagues, who benefits from that? It is true that the workers of a furniture manufacturing plant that might get more jobs or higher wages by killing the Federal Prison Industries--maybe they will benefit. It is probably true that the furniture manufacturer who would sell the product if we kill Federal Prison Industries will benefit. But there are 285 million people in America who are paying $30,000 per year to incarcerate one person in a Federal penitentiary. We have 1.2 million people nationwide in prison. Does that cost, borne by 285 million people to keep someone in prison, carry no weight? Do we only care about the labor unions and the manufacturers who would benefit by killing the Federal prison system? And do we not care about the 285 million people who would lose by losing victim restitution, by losing our ability to develop a system where prisoners will help pay some of that $30,000 a year? Do we only hear from the voices of the few who would benefit by killing the Federal prison system and not hear from the 285 million people who would lose? What a skewed debate this is. But the problem is, the unions know who they are; they have sent letters and they have called Members of the Senate. My dear friends at the NFIB--one of the great organizations in America, which is a special interest organization--have sent out letters, and they have called and lobbied. Where are the lobbyists for the 285 million people who are going to pay $30,000 a year to keep somebody in prison? Have we heard from them? No. They can't figure out why we are talking about killing Federal Prison Industries when the Nation hears the drum roll and the bugle of war. They don't even know this is being debated. So we have Members of Congress, and over their left shoulder are all those special interest groups that want to kill the last vestige of prison labor in America. They are all going to send letters back home telling people--whether you care about the manufacturer or the labor union, they are going to send those letters. Nobody is going to send a letter back home saying that you cared about 285 million taxpayers because the American public thinks that we are in a crisis and they are paying attention to it. That is how bad laws are made. I urge my colleagues to defeat the Levin amendment. We had a very unusual thing happen. I must say, in all the time I have been here I don't remember it happening before, but it is perfectly within the rules. We had the Senator from Virginia offer a tabling amendment on behalf of another member--in this case, myself-- before I was ready to debate the issue, before I could get together my supporters to come speak on behalf of it. I am sure that was not his intention. His intention was to get on with this bill.

Mr. GRAMM. Madam President, we have a couple minutes remaining, and I would like to have that time, if I may.

Mr. GRAMM. Did we have a unanimous consent agreement dividing the time? If so, I did not hear it.

Mr. GRAMM. The issue is not going to be decided on this tabling motion unless this provision is stricken because I have not yet had an opportunity to offer an amendment. I would like to have a compromise. I would like to get new data, and I would like to try to improve the Federal prison system. I would like to respond to the legitimate concerns that have been raised. But I am not willing to step aside and allow prison labor to be killed in America. We have 1.2 million people sitting around in idleness, and the cost of keeping people in prison is driving up taxes all over America. If, in fact, this amendment is taken out of this bill, it will settle this issue for this year, but if it is not taken out of this bill, it will not settle this issue for this year. I urge the distinguished chairman of the committee to compromise, to come to a reasonable solution so we can deal with the Nation's problems. This is an important issue. There are 285 million people paying $30,000 a year to keep people in prison. We have 1.2 million people in prison. I just cannot be indifferent about that. As a result, I am opposed to the Levin amendment. I will vote against this tabling motion. If it is not tabled, the amendment will be pending and it can be amended. If it is tabled, then another amendment can be offered, so I do not know that we have settled anything. We have had a good debate, and I think the more people hear about this, the better off we are. I cannot imagine an objective American siding with killing the Federal Prison Industries. I thank the Chair.

Mr. GRAMM. Not to keep dragging this dead cat back across the table, but I am not asking for any special privilege. I wanted to offer my own amendment, which someone else offered. The Senator can deal with his bill as he chooses. I have been a private in the Army, but I believe I am a private in the right. I want this issue to be heard, and I want to debate it. I don't understand why that is somehow unreasonable. When people want to pass special interest legislation, they can cloak themselves in the righteousness of the moment. I do not understand why it is even in this bill. I think, quite frankly, people ought to be embarrassed that it is in this bill. In any case, I am not asking for any special privilege whatsoever. I want to exercise my right as 1 of 100 Senators. That is all I am doing. I yield the floor.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Absolutely I do. Why shouldn't prisoners be paid to work?