Phil Gramm

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, as I said before, I have some sympathy for the Senator from Louisiana. I think this is obviously a very real issue to be considered. But the bottom line is we are on the floor with a bill that has been a year in the making having to do with our goal of trying to see that everybody who lives in rural Texas or rural America has access to their local news and local weather and to the local television station. You could write volumes about what we don't know about this subject, even though we have worked on it for a year, even though we have had extensive hearings, even though we have had innumerable private meetings, and even though we have gone through a markup in committee where we have debated it at some length and reached some consensus on it--not total consensus. The problem with the Breaux amendment is that this is an area, while it is obviously of importance in terms of one potential technology that might be used in the bill--and that is a satellite--we in our bill are not setting out technology as such. We are letting the marketplace decide that. The point is we have had no hearings. We have heard from no one. We have not discussed, analyzed, or studied this in any detail. We are not ready to make a decision on this today. Under the unanimous consent agreement entered into on November 18, no amendment is in order which is not deemed to be relevant--not relevant to mankind, not relevant to any problem facing us in the future, or any opportunity but relevant specifically to the bill that is pending before the Senate. I make a point of order that the amendment offered by Senator Breaux is not relevant.

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

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the vote on the amendment be stacked after the first vote we have today.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

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

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I thank our colleague from Louisiana for raising the obvious point that one of the technologies that would be potentially subsidized under this bill is satellite technology. If you are going to have a satellite, you have to put it into orbit. We have been for some time in the process of trying to commercialize space. There are companies now that are beginning to respond to that potential with real investment and real potential. The question the Senator from Louisiana asked was, Would not this be a good time to address this additional problem? Personally, I believe this is something that will have to be addressed and looked at. The big difference is, on the loan guarantee proposal before us, we have had a series of hearings. We have gone to great lengths to try to minimize the potential exposure to the taxpayer. We have tried to call in technical expertise to be sure we understand what we are doing. In terms of expanding this program now on the floor of the Senate to launch vehicles, I don't see how we could possibly get that job done. I think this is, in terms of this bill, a bridge too far. I think it is something that will be looked at. I know, from having talked to them personally, there are at least two private companies that are interested in commercial launching to try to do in America what we are contracting out to France and to China. We have two problems in considering this today. One is that under unanimous consent, only relevant amendments are in order. This amendment would be deemed to not be relevant, in my opinion. Secondly, I could do my due diligence as chairman of the Banking Committee to agree to an add-on loan guarantee on the floor of the Senate when we have not held a hearing, when we have not looked at it, when we know relatively little about the technology, the public/private competition, the economic feasibility of the project. We don't have any scoring from CBO as to what it would cost. It may very well be at some point, someday, we will be in a position of looking at the proposal that has been made by the distinguished Senator from Louisiana. I don't believe we are at that point today. Obviously, the Senator has a right to offer his amendment. I do not believe we should adopt his amendment today. I think we are already carrying a pretty heavy load on this bill. In order for this to go forward as it is now written, the Appropriations Committee is going to have to appropriate a quarter of a billion dollars. I believe we would have a train that would be overloaded if we added this loan guarantee to it today. I am not hostile to what the distinguished Senator from Louisiana is trying to do. I simply do not know enough about it to make that decision today on the floor. Before I could get to the point of making a decision on it in the Banking Committee, we would have to meet with a lot of different people, a lot of different competing technologies. We would have to meet with NASA. We would have to analyze this in detail. We would have to do our due diligence. We would have to hold public hearings. We would have to go through a markup in the Banking Committee to try to refine it, as we have the bill that is now before us. We are just a long way from that. I am sorry I am not in a position of being able to support the Senator from Louisiana. As of today, I am not. Mr. President, I withdraw amendment No. 2897. That will pull down my amendment and pull down the Johnson amendment with it.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee is concerned that some language we took from the Burns amendment, which was in the bill last year, might potentially create some problems. On Senator Hatch's behalf, I offer an amendment to strike several lines from the bill that have to do with an attempt on our part to guarantee that we weren't changing communication law. But, as often happens, no good deed ever goes unpunished. So we want to strike this. Amendment No. 2902 (Purpose: To strike the provisions relating to retransmission of local television broadcast stations)

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. I send an amendment to the desk and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, let me try to explain the amendment and what the issue is. I know there are strong feelings on both sides of the issue. I believe we have worked out 95 percent of the bill to everybody's satisfaction. But we now have come down to an issue. I really believe that while there will be extraneous amendments offered, this and possibly one other amendment might be the only amendments we will be actively debating. Let me first explain what the bill now does. Then I would like to explain the changes my amendment makes, why I am making them, and then I would like to address the overall issue we are about to debate, potentially through a second-degree amendment or through another freestanding amendment. In the bill as it is now written--as it passed unanimously in committee, even though I knew an amendment was going to be offered--in order to make a loan that the Federal Government guarantees, you have to be an insured depository institution. There has been objection raised to this because of a desire on the part of the Cooperative Finance Corporation. This is a captive lender, for all purposes, for America's REAs, with a very proud record and with a great record of achievement. The question then is, if we take out of the bill that a lender has to be FDIC insured--and remember we are having the taxpayer guarantee the loan they are making--What kind of protections do we need for that guarantee to be extended? I have offered this amendment, really, as an effort at a compromise where we take the FDIC lender out but where we set specifically three sets of rules to apply to different lenders. The first two have to do with commercial for-profit lenders. They are the standard kind of constraints you would normally see in any financial transaction; that is, they have to meet the capital requirement which traditionally, for banks and S&Ls, has been that you cannot lend more than 10 percent or 15 percent of your capital to any one borrower. Second, we eliminate the potential for any for-profit institution to lend to an affiliate. What we are trying to do here is ban self- dealing. I do not believe there is any objection to these two provisions, but it is very important that they be in the bill. Now we get to the controversy. What do we do about nonprofit lenders? Let me remind my colleagues, institutions are not nonprofit for nothing. We grant a very special privilege to an institution when we make it a nonprofit institution because we dramatically lower its costs. And we do it because that institution is serving a public purpose. In this case, the institution that is basically going to be discussed here is CFC, the Cooperative Finance Corporation. Its public purpose is that it provides funding at a very low cost to our REAs that are providing telephone and electric power to rural America. It is true that it makes some other loans, but the principal purpose for its lending is REA power and REA telephone. What we are saying is for these nonprofits, since they are carrying out a Government function, even though they may be chartered as private institutions, they are chartered with tax exemption because they are promoting a public purpose. Therefore, we do have some concern about them. Now, if Citigroup or Bank of America or Chase makes this loan and it is defaulted and they lose 20 percent of it, I am not happy about it-- and I am very unhappy about the taxpayer losing 80 percent--but I figure they are in this for profit. They know what they are doing and what they do to their credit rating and what they do to their profitability; that is their business. That is what for-profit private enterprise is about. I am more concerned about what a nonprofit corporation does because it is nonprofit and it is carrying out a public purpose. In the case of CFC, that public purpose is to make loans to bring electric power and telephone, and to continually modernize both to rural America. More important, they are lending money to 25 million captive customers. Why do I say captive? Because if you are buying power from the REA, you do not have the right to buy it from anybody else. If you are buying telephone services through an REA affiliate, you do not have the right to buy telephone services from anybody else, on a hard line anyway. So in making loans, these nonprofits, and principally CFC, are carrying out a public mandate in providing these services for rural America as cheaply as possible. Why should there be a certain set of rules for nonprofit corporations? Because they are nonprofit; because they do have tax exemption; because they are supposed to be promoting a public purpose. If Citigroup or Bank of America makes a bad loan and it is defaulted, people do not have to do business with them. They can borrow money from somebody else. But if the CFC makes a bad loan and their credit rating goes down, then every REA customer for electric power and telephone, all of whom are captive customers, would have to pay higher prices; hence, the public interest in seeing that we protect the interests of those ratepayers. How do we protect the interests of the ratepayers in this amendment? I have colleagues on both sides of the aisle who want the CFC to be able to make these loans. Frankly, if this were left to me, I would not do it that way. The whole logic of this is for-profit lending. But in an effort to try to reach a compromise, we would let CFC, this tax- exempt entity which is providing credit to rural America, make these loans. But the board would have to find, in making the loan, that they would not lower their credit rating. Why is that important? Why should we care what the credit rating of CFC is? Because that credit rating affects their ability to borrow money, affects the interest they have to pay, and since they are in turn lending that money to REA providers who have captive American customers--25 million of them--if they do something speculative and drive down their bond rating, everybody in rural America is going to pay more money for electric power and telephones. The restriction we are imposing is hardly overwhelming. All it says is, where we are dealing with a nonprofit lender, where the Congressional Budget Office has estimated the probability of default is such that 45 percent of the loan will be defaulted under the House bill, if they want to make this loan, doesn't it sound reasonable on behalf of the 25 million ratepayers in rural America that we would simply ask that the board--the Secretary of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve Board chairman, and the Secretary of Agriculture--that they determine that the CFC is not going to see its bond rating go down as a result of making this loan? Why do we care if it goes down? Because if it goes down, every buyer of electricity, every buyer of telephone services in rural America, is going to pay more money. That is why we should care. So we say, if the board finds that this is not going to lower their credit rating, they can do it. We have a provision that says, if the CFC's credit rating is lowered--and credit rating agencies, when they change somebody's credit, say why they have changed it, so that if they change it and the reason is this loan--we require the loan to be sold so it can move to restore their credit rating. I believe this is an eminently reasonable amendment, and while it does not bear directly on the loan guarantee, it does bear directly on another issue, and that is the well-being of 25 million Americans who live in rural America. I represent more of them than any other Senator here. I am not indifferent to CFC taking action that will drive up interest rates and drive up power rates and telephone rates in my State to Texans who choose to live in rural areas. That is what this amendment is about. This amendment, in responding to a request by Members of the Senate, takes out the requirement that you have to have an insured lender. That opens it up potentially to anybody. We tighten it up in three ways. We say if you are a commercial lender--a bank, for example--you have to meet the capital requirements and the loan-asset ratio that is currently the law, and you cannot do self-dealing. You cannot lend it to your brother-in-law, and you cannot lend it to the bank. It has to be an arm's length transaction. For those lenders, such as Morgan Stanley, that do not have a capital requirement, we say they have to have one. We are not going to guarantee a loan that Morgan Stanley makes if that loan is more than 10 percent of their capital. Why? Because it is risky, and if they lose money, it enhances the chances that the taxpayers will lose money. Finally, for nonprofits, we do not have a capital requirement, but what we say is, since we gave this institution nonprofit status to perform a public purpose--in the case of CFC, to make loans to electrify and bring telephones to rural America--that if the board finds that by making this loan it is going to drive down their bond rating and drive up their cost of borrowing and, in turn, drive up power rates and phone rates for 25 million Americans, the board will be required to not guarantee their loan. I hope my colleagues will look at this provision. Let me give an example. Under current market conditions, the 1-year cost of borrowing for dropping from a AA to a AA- is 5 basis points, or $500,000 on a $1 billion loan. Over 10 years, that would be $5 million. It is pretty relevant when one is talking about dropping a bond rating. If it just dropped by one notch, from AA to AA- on a 10-year loan, that 5 basis points will cost $5 million. If you drop from AA to BB, then the cost will drive by a great multiple of that. This is a reasonable issue. It is not an issue directly involved in this loan, but it is an issue that, unfortunately, has gotten pulled into it. I hope my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will look at this very closely. I yield the floor.

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

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I rise in opposition to the amendment. I think, as people try to follow this debate, it often looks complicated, but if they burrow into the real issue, it boils down to this: In trying to accommodate those who want the Cooperative Finance Corporation to participate in this program, I have taken from the bill in my amendment the requirement that the lender be FDIC insured. I have set out some conditions. For banks, I require that they meet a capital requirement and that they do not engage in self-dealing. That requirement is not in this amendment that would strike my amendment. Under this amendment, potentially we could have an 80-percent Government guaranteed loan to some institution that is lending the money to itself. I am opposed to that. I am adamantly opposed to that. I think that is an outrage. Under this provision, we could have an institution lend all of its capital and the Federal Government is going to guarantee 80 percent of it. Under this amendment which strikes my amendment, some institution somewhere could lend 100 percent of its capital, and the Federal Government is going to guarantee 80 percent of it. I don't think so. Under the amendment I have offered, I have said that in such institutions, we are not going to guarantee their loan if they are lending more than 10 percent of their capital. This is taxpayers' money we are talking about. Both of those provisions are dropped. This amendment does a curtsy toward fiscal responsibility in that it says for a lender to qualify, they have to have one of the top three ratings on at least one issue of outstanding debt. You can issue a 30- day note, and almost anybody can get a AAA rating for their credit for 30 days, but the taxpayer is going to be on the hook for 25 years. The fact that a borrower could get a good rating for a 30-day note does not excite me very much, when the taxpayer is going to be on the hook for 25 years. And that does not even apply to the CFC. They don't have to have any capital requirement at all. Every other nonprofit institution does in their amendment, but not CFC. Let me explain the issue of the CFC. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the loan guarantee in the House is going to have 45 percent of the loan defaulted. The scoring by the Congressional Budget Office of the House bill assumes 45 percent of the loan guarantee the Federal Government makes will be defaulted and that the taxpayer will be left holding the bag. That is what the present value of $350 million is when you are discounting on a 25-year bond. This is risky business. We are lending money on a technology that has never worked anywhere. We are talking about totally new technology. I know there are people running around saying: We are going to have a directed beam satellite. Where are they? Show me one. Where is one working in the world today? They may work. The point is, this is new technology. We are talking about somebody borrowing the money, launching a satellite, for example, using brand new technology, cutting it on, it works. Maybe it works; maybe it doesn't work. The Congressional Budget Office believes this is risky business. They assume 45 percent of the loan is not going to be repaid. I have tried to build in protections, and those protections are critical. The most important protection is that a private lender is on the hook for 20 percent. Our Presiding Officer used to be in the banking business. He did not often get an 80-percent Government loan guarantee, but when he was on the hook for 20 percent, he paid attention to his business because it was his money. The guarantee that we are getting is that people are going to be judicious with the part we are not guaranteeing. Why do we treat nonprofits differently? What is this issue about credit rating of nonprofits? Why should Joe Brown who lives in San Geronimo Creek, TX, care about the credit rating of the Cooperative Finance Corporation when he is going to guarantee 80 percent of the loan they make? What difference does it make to him? First of all, why do they have a tax exemption at the Cooperative Finance Corporation? Because we gave it to them to promote a public purpose. What was the public purpose? The public purpose was to provide electricity to rural America and to provide telephone to rural America and to keep it moderate. That is why they have a tax exemption--because they are providing a public purpose. In letting them be involved in an activity where, under the conditions set in the House, 45 percent of the loan will be, according to the estimate of CBO, defaulted, all I have asked is that this nonprofit organization, or any other, since they are performing a public purpose by lending money to provide electricity in rural Texas and rural America, I want the board to find that their credit rating is not going to go down as a result of making this loan. Now, our colleague from South Dakota says, what business is it of ours whether the credit rating of the Cooperative Finance Corporation goes down or not? It is my business. It is my business because I have over a million Texans who buy electric power and/or telephone from rural co-ops that borrow money from the CFC. That is why it is my business. If they make a bad loan and their credit rating goes down, the cost of borrowing money to maintain electric power and telephone in my State is going to go up, and my ratepayers, who are captive--they can't buy electric power from anybody else and they can't buy hard-line telephone services from anybody else--are going to end up paying more money. That is why I care. That is why it is relevant. Now, this is risky business we are engaged in here. All I am trying to do is say, if you want the financial institution that has historically serviced REA and serviced electric power and telephone-- and let me remind my colleagues you don't lose money lending money to an electric co-op to provide telephone or electric power generation. Why? Because you have a captive market so that if the loan doesn't work out, you raise the rates--you restructure the loan, you raise the rates to pay it. In this case, if that satellite doesn't go into orbit, whose rates are you going to raise? You are going to raise the rates of people in Texas who are buying electric power. That is whose rates you are going to raise. That satellite doesn't work. You don't have anybody buying its services. They have a right not to buy them. You are not going to be able to raise their rates. So all I am trying to do is say before we let this lending institution, with a proud history, which has done a great job--and I don't dispute any of that--this tax-exempt lender that we gave tax exemption to electrify America and to provide phone services to America, before we have them make a loan that the Congressional Budget Office says 45 percent of, under the House structure, will be defaulted, before we let them do it--why is it so offensive to have, among other people, Alan Greenspan look at their loan and their proposal and try to make an estimate as to whether or not making this loan is going to drive down their bond rating and drive up the cost of electric power and telephone services in rural America? Do we not trust Alan Greenspan to make an honest judgment? I don't understand this issue. It seems to me what we have is a captive lender that somehow desperately wants to get into a business we didn't give it tax exemption to do. We have a mission creep here on a gigantic scale. Now, I am willing to let them do the mission creep as long as it doesn't cost Texas consumers of electric power and telephone services in rural Texas money. If it is not going to cost them money, I am willing to let them basically dramatically change the business they are in. If they make a $1.25 billion loan, that is larger by far--twice as big--than any loan they have ever made. Their average loan is less than $20 million. I would say that is a pretty dramatic change in business. If we are going to let them do that, all I am asking is that there be somebody responsible--and I would call Alan Greenspan responsible--who is going to look at their application and make a determination as to whether this is going to drive down their bond rating and cost every REA customer in America a bunch of money. The second provision is if, in fact, it does drive down their bond rating, I want them to sell it and get out of that business. You might say how dare we tell them they can't engage in some of the most speculative lending in America. How dare we tell them that. Well, the reason we dare tell them that is they are tax exempt. We gave them a very special privilege to do a certain kind of work, and that special privilege was to bring electricity and telephone service to America. I know we have let them get into other kinds of business. We let them make a loan so that REAs could go into a partnership with Direct Television. But they didn't put up any satellite or develop any new technology, and they didn't take any real risk. This is big-time risk. So the difference between the two amendments is, first of all, this amendment, in my opinion, is not very well crafted in that it strikes all of my provisions against self-dealing, all of the provisions in my amendment--and you don't have to worry about that when you are dealing with FDIC institutions because they have those requirements already. But those provisions in my amendment that were struck by this amendment are pretty important. If we are going to have the taxpayers on the hook for over $800 million, I want to be sure somebody is not lending this money to his brother in law, or to an affiliate of the company. I don't understand why those provisions were struck by this amendment. Secondly, if we have a traditional REA lender in the Cooperative Finance Corporation making loans, I am willing to let them into this business if they want to get into it; though, to the best of my mental ability, I can't see why they want in this business. But they do. They are determined to get into it. I am saying, let them in the business, but don't let them in if it is going to drive up the cost of electric power and telephone service to rural America by driving down their bond rating. I thought, when we made the concession to treat these nonprofits differently by not requiring them to meet a capital requirement for the size of their loans, that the compromise was going to be accepted. But it seems to me that, basically, what we are trying to do is we are trying to go back and undo all the other stuff we have done in this bill because the logic of the bill is that we are going to have a private lender who is going to be on the hook. Now, some people say, won't the Cooperative Finance Corporation be on the hook? Who will be on the hook if they lose $800 million? Who really loses? Whose money is it? Well, ultimately, who is going to lose is the people who are buying electric power in America, in rural areas, and people who are buying telephone services, because they are going to lose a very cheap source of credit because the Cooperative Finance Corporation is going to end up losing its double-A rating. So that is what this whole issue is about. Unfortunately, we have a series of votes in the Budget Committee, and we don't have proxy voting. It is going to require Senator Johnson, Senator Sarbanes, and I to be there. I ask unanimous consent that we set aside this amendment, that we let other amendments be offered in our absence, but that we don't reach a final disposition of any amendment until the hour of 1:30.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to change the request to 2 o'clock.

Mr. GRAMM. They will. Under the unanimous consent, any Member could speak on this amendment and on the bill, and any Member could offer another amendment. But there could be no final disposition of an amendment until 1:30 when we are back and have an opportunity to address it. I would prefer, if no one objects, to let people offer amendments because we want to finish this bill today. It is not going to hurt my feelings if somebody offers an amendment when I am gone. I can read it when I get back and discuss it.

Mr. GRAMM. That is correct.

Mr. GRAMM. That is correct.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Rules and Administration be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, March 30, 2000, at 9:30 a.m., to conduct an oversight hearing on the operations of the Architect of the Capitol.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Select Committee on Intelligence be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, March 30, 2000 at 2:00 p.m., to hold a closed hearing on intelligence matters.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Subcommittee on Constitution, Federalism and Property Rights be authorized to meet to conduct a hearing on Thursday, March 30, 2000 at 2:00 p.m., in SD226.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be authorized to meet to conduct a markup on Thursday, March 30, 2000, at 10:00 a.m., in SD226.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Governmental Affairs be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, March 30, 2000 at 10:00 a.m. for a nominations hearing to consider the nominations of Alan Kessler to be a Governor on the United States Postal Service and Carol Waller Pope to be a Member of the Federal Labor Relations Authority.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I thank Senator Baucus for working with us on the amendment. We are supportive of the amendment and we accept it.

Mr. GRAMM

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending bill, S. 1712, be placed back on the calendar as it existed yesterday before the unanimous consent agreement calling up S. 1712.

Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, let me give a word of explanation. First of all, let me make it clear that it is my intention as a person who has concurrence in this decision not to bring the bill back up through this procedure, nor will I support it being done unless there is an agreement among the parties. Obviously, I would have a right to file cloture on the motion to proceed at some point. Let me explain what has happened. We have for the last 3 weeks been trying to work out concerns about a very tough, very important, and very complicated bill. America has two competing interests. On the one hand, we want to produce and export items that embody high technology because that is the fastest growing industry in the world. We are the world leader in the high-tech industry, and it creates the best paying jobs in America. We have that as one objective. On the other hand, we want to prevent technology that has defense and security implications from falling into the hands of those who might use that technology against the United States of America and our interests. Between these two interests, there is competition and friction. These are very complicated and very tough issues. In the last 3 weeks, roughly half a dozen Members of the Senate have been working to bring to the floor and pass a bill that passed the Banking Committee 20-0 and that would do something we have not done since 1990: to set in place a new permanent law to protect America's access to the high-tech world market and at the same time protect our national security. We thought yesterday that we had reached an agreement in principle that would allow us to bring the bill to the floor. The problem with reaching agreements in principle is that, as one of my famous constituents once said, the devil is in the details. We found ourselves today thinking we had such an agreement but having great difficulty getting the language to comport to what each individual felt the principle to be. Under those circumstances, I thought good faith required that the bill be pulled down. So we pulled the bill down, and it will not come up under this consent agreement unless an agreement is worked out among the parties that were engaged in this negotiation. I think we all agree that no one acted in bad faith, but what happened was, on a very complicated and very important matter, agreeing in principle is not agreeing to the details. We are hopeful that in the next few days we might still work out these details. If we do, then we will go to this unanimous consent agreement and bring the bill back up. If we don't work out those differences, we will not. Before I yield the floor, because I know the distinguished Senator of the Foreign Relations Committee wants to take the floor, I will make a general point. We started dealing in export control in 1917 with the Trading With the Enemy Act. We then had the Neutrality Act in 1935, and, with the beginning of the cold war, the Export Control Act became law in 1949. We were in a life and death struggle with the Soviet Union. There was an ``evil empire.'' There was a cold war. We won the cold war, and export control on a multilateral basis played a key role in that victory. In those days, two things existed which no longer exist. One was that the United States had a virtual monopoly in high technology. Indeed, we were the world's undisputed leader in technology. Virtually, every area in the world had been decimated by World War II, and we stood supreme. So technology was an American monopoly. Second, in 1949, most of the new technology was driven by defense research. Our legitimate concern, life and death struggle concern, was that this defense research embodied in American industry would end up leaking abroad where it could threaten American national security. By 1990, our consensus had started to fade on the Export Administration Act, and while for two brief periods--from March 1993 through June 1994, and from July 1994 to August 1994--we had temporary solutions, since 1990 we have had no permanent law to protect American national security. Today, the world is very different. We have won the cold war. Today, technology is driven by private industry. Today, it is not defense labs that are generating the new technology that drives American business, it is American industry. We had set out in our export law the number of MTOPS, millions of theoretical operations per second, that a restricted computer could employ, thinking we were protecting what we then called supercomputers. Now, any schoolchild with a computer has the technical capacity, or can get it, and exceed that limit. The number of MTOPS is doubling every 6 months. So we were faced with a decisive question: Can we pass a law and control this technology? We could pass a law and stop it in the United States, but it would occur elsewhere in the world. What we ultimately have to decide is: Is our security tied to our being the leader in technology, or is it tied to our ability to hold on to the technology we have and not share it with anybody? I believe in the end that American security is tied to our leadership in technology. I believe that we have put together a good bill. There is a debate about the details, and there are legitimate differences. As Thomas Jefferson once said: Good men with the same facts are prone to disagree. I have seen nothing in my political career or personal life to convince me that Jefferson was wrong about much of anything, but he was certainly not wrong about this. We have put together a bill that we believe meets national security concerns. But trying to deal with concerns about Presidential powers and waivers is extremely complicated. Yesterday we reached an agreement in principle. There was the nucleus of the agreement, but getting to the details this morning proved more difficult than we anticipated. To be absolutely certain that everyone's rights are preserved, and to be certain we are dealing in good faith, I concluded--and all of the members of the negotiation agreed--that the bill should be pulled down. As a result, I pulled it down. I am hopeful that perhaps as early as tomorrow these differences can be worked out. I don't know whether they can or they can't. I believe America would be richer, freer, happier, and more secure if they could. If they are not worked out, it won't be because I didn't make the effort. I want it to be worked out. I hope it can be. Whether it can be or it can't be, I want to be certain that we are dealing in good faith and that we are dealing with each other on that basis. I think we have preserved that here today. I appreciate my colleagues' help. Someone could have done mischief by objecting; my preference was to go back to the status quo, but we couldn't do that. We have achieved the same result with this agreement, and I thank my colleagues for agreeing to it. I yield the floor.