Judd Gregg

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk and ask for its consideration.

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, there is now pending on this bill an amendment offered by the Democratic leader, Senator Reid, relative to the Veterans' Administration. I am not sure how that is going to be handled, but clearly the bill becomes tied up in that issue for a while. I am not sure whether people are even going to come down and debate that amendment, as it was offered last week to the Interior bill. I am not really involved in that skirmish, but I do want to bring us back to the essence of this bill and the purpose of this bill and return to the fact that from my standpoint the biggest concern we have to address is weapons of mass destruction. The second biggest concern is border security. I wish to talk a little bit about border security because I do believe this is where the Homeland Security agency can make the largest contribution toward trying to make our Nation more secure. I know there is a lot of concern out there today about what happened in England. But you have to remember that the people who probably committed that act in England came from outside of England. They came into England with evil intent. In fact, I have seen some early news reports which have implied the detonating mechanisms used were of a type you could not acquire in England; therefore, it is presumed that the people who committed this act came from outside of England. I think one can safely assume that, especially in light of 9/11 where the people who attacked us came from outside our country, although in some instances they came with legal visas. So it is critical we get control of our borders. Last year, over 3 million people came into this country illegally--3 million people. The estimate is somewhere between 11 and 15 million people are in this country illegally. We know that a large percentage of those people, especially people coming across our border with Mexico, are coming here because they have a legitimate desire to work in America. They are seeking jobs. I guess it is a reflection of the strength of our economy and the strength of our Nation that people seek to come to America in order to get a better livelihood and to give their families a better chance of having a better livelihood. Those people are not threats. Those people are here to put in a hard day's work and make enough money to have a decent living. In many cases, they are doing jobs Americans are unwilling to do. There ought to be a way to address that concern, and it ought to be some sort of guest worker program. Hopefully, we will address that as a Congress. We should address that. I consider it to be one of the primary needs we have to address. In the context of homeland security, if we could in some way identify effectively people who are coming across our borders who are coming not with the purpose of ill-intent but with the purpose of having a decent job, that would significantly reduce the number of people we would have to focus on relative to the threat they present. So a decent and intelligent immigration policy in this country, with an effective guest worker program, is critical to our national security. But that is not the responsibility of the Homeland Security agency. The Homeland Security agency's purpose is to actually have the physical people on the border who check the people who come across the border and stop the people coming across the border illegally. The pile of reports I referred to before--the actual plurality of them if not the majority of them--reflect the failures of our ability to adequately monitor our borders. We have found we are not doing a very good job on our borders. As I said, 3 million people are coming into the country illegally every year--that is the estimate--and over 10 million people who are probably here illegally already. A fair percentage of those folks are not Mexican. They are coming from another country, but they are coming across the Mexican border. And those people may very well represent legitimate threats to our country. So we need to do something to address this issue. There are different levels where we need to address this issue. I mentioned the guest worker program would be a major effort in this area, but in the area of just plain security, there are initiatives that need to be pursued. So what we did was we looked at what was happening with our border security effort and concluded there were certain programs on the border that needed really significant increase in resources in order to be effective. Some of them, unfortunately, could not take as much resources as we would like to have given them because they simply could not handle it effectively. The first was just simply feet on the ground. We need more Border Patrol agents on the ground, especially on the southern border. That is a feet-on-the-ground issue. Unfortunately, because of the training capacity and because of the ability to hire people who want to go into the Border Patrol as a career, we cannot add as many people as we would like to add. As was mentioned by the Senator from West Virginia, there was, 3 or 4 years ago, a proposal to hire 2,000 a year. What we found was the Border Patrol simply could not find the people. And then they could not train the people when they did find them. However, we decided a significant increase was important. Working with the Senator from West Virginia again, in the supplemental, we added 500 new Border Patrol agents this year. We have now added another 1,000 agents with this bill, for an additional 1,500 agents. So that is actually a little bit outside the envelope of what the Border Patrol can effectively train. We are also significantly increasing the commitment to the training facilities so we can increase training capacity so that next year, when we have this bill, it is my intention to add more than 1,500. I hope to get up to 2,000 next year. The year after that, I hope to get to 2,500. The goal is to get to 10,000 new Border Patrol agents within 5 years. Whether we can reach it, I do not know. But if we can get the training facilities up, get the infrastructure up that supports these people, and get the Border Patrol agents up, then maybe we can do it effectively. But the first step is to add these additional 1,500 agents. Now, once you have the Border Patrol physically on the ground, they are going to catch people. That is their job. The problem today is that when they catch people they have to let them go. They send them over to the court, and the court sends them out on their own recognizance. They are supposed to return for a court date, and they never return. About 85 percent of the people who are asked to return do not return. Well, that is not too surprising, really. They came here illegally. Why are they going to return when they are told they can go away and come back on a different date for their court appearance? We need better and more capacity in the area of detention. So this bill, working with the supplemental, again working with the Senator from West Virginia, adds about 4,000 new detention beds. Again, our goal is, within a limited period of time--hopefully not 5 years in this case, hopefully even less--to be able to detain effectively anybody who is caught who is other than a Mexican citizen coming across our border with Mexico, to be able to detain that person as long as it is necessary to make sure they are not a threat to us. It is something we cannot do today. But this bill moves in that direction by adding 4,000 new beds in this area. We also have the unmanned vehicle program. This program, which is an important element of the surveillance of our borders, has fallen on hard times. In fact, the vehicles were basically stopped about a year and a half ago. They just stopped running them because they were not working. They started again, and this bill attempts to get the unmanned vehicle program running at a much more aggressive level. This is a tremendous opportunity for us to survey the border using fewer personnel more efficiently. In addition, we have technology on the borders, the video and the other types of sensor capability. Again, we have run into major technology problems. Contracts were let that should not have been or were let ineffectually. One more time we got a bunch of reports on this one. While the program has been restarted, this bill tries to make sure the program goes forward effectively. This is a fencing issue here. We are saying we were going to give you a lot more funds, but we want to make sure the funds are spent effectively. Also in the area of people coming into this country legitimately who actually are going through our immigration entrance system, we have very significant issues of being able to track who they are and when they come in and when they leave. In order to address that, we are trying to set something up called US-VISIT which is a major new technology initiative of extreme complexity. Therefore, I recognize it is not going to come on line maybe in a perfect way. What we are concerned about, speaking for the Senate and for the subcommittee, is that the US-VISIT Program, which is going to purchase massive amounts of software and hardware capability to go into the immigration system, that that program not end up being like the programs we have had in other major Federal agencies which have initiated major complex IT initiatives, such as the Trilogy Program at the FBI, that we not end up being halfway down the road, hundreds of millions of dollars having been spent, and we realize we have a program that doesn't work. This bill attempts to make sure that the US-VISIT Program is being brought on line in a way that we have benchmarks and we know the software is meeting the criteria and the regimes that are appropriate to that type of software and that the hardware can interface with it effectively. This bill makes a major initiative in the area of basically putting emphasis on the borders, both with the feet-on-the-ground issue, with the technology issue, and with the capital infrastructure issue in the area of border facilities and detention facilities. Therefore, I think it is the right approach. Is it going to get our borders secure unilaterally by this effort? Obviously not. But it is a step in the right direction and part of the formula that should lead us to borders which are more secure. The simple fact is, as a nation, we are not going to be able to protect ourselves from the significant threat of these individuals who will come here for the purposes of killing Americans, and for no other purpose, until we get effective control over the borders and know who is coming in and why they are coming and make sure we do not allow or are able to stop people who are coming into this country whose purpose is to commit acts which will harm Americans. This bill is an attempt to step down that road in a much more aggressive way. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from West Virginia. He always brings a great deal of substance and thought to whatever issue he decides to pursue on the Senate floor. Once again, in the opening statement, he reflected that. He does outline many of the issues which need to be addressed. He outlines them well and makes very strong points. It is a result of a cooperative effort between his staff, my staff, himself, and myself that we have gotten this bill to this point. As he said, the purpose of this bill is to address the threats. That is our goal. Obviously, there is going to need to be, in light of the London event, some adjustment in the accounts relative to mass transit, and there may be other areas where the Senate wishes to work its will. The basic goal of this bill, as the Senator from West Virginia has said, and in which he played a major part, is to address the real problems, the real threats that face this Nation. I continue to try to do that, working with the Senator from West Virginia. I appreciate all his cooperation and his effort. I yield the floor.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, we turn now to the Homeland Security bill. This is obviously a timely period for taking up this legislation in light of what has happened in London. We recognize, once again, as a result of the heinous crimes that were committed in London that there are people out there who totally disregard innocent life and who are willing to kill innocent individuals simply for the purpose of making a political statement as to what their cause is or what their presumed cause may be. Of course, we were, unfortunately, focused on this fact by 9/11, but maybe over the last 2 or 3 years the success of our Nation in resisting attacks has caused a touch of complacency in this area. However, London has to clearly remind us that complacency cannot be tolerated when it comes to fighting these people who call themselves Islamic fundamentalists and who are essentially killers, terrorists, murderers without any moral creed or cause, and whose actions are totally unjustified in any form of civilized society. The Department of Homeland Security was set up in the post-9/11 world in order to try as a nation to get our arms around the issue of how we can best protect us in the United States of America. It was set up in the context of other agencies that have responsibility for other areas of protecting us relative to this war on terrorism. Of course, we have our Defense Department which is, through its extraordinary men and women, pursuing the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and in Iraq. We also have agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency, the FBI, and the Justice Department, that are committed to making sure they obtain the intelligence necessary to protect us. But within this umbrella of agencies which are trying to pursue this war on terrorism, there is included, of course, the Department of Homeland Security. The Department of Homeland Security was put together as an amalgamation of different agencies. I think there were 22 initially that were thrown together. Some of those agencies, when they were put into the Department of Homeland Security, were already functioning extraordinarily well and had a track record of success. Some of the other agencies had a spotty track record. Regrettably, some of the agencies did not have a very good track record at all. But they were brought together for the purposes of trying to involve a coordinated effort in the area of fighting terrorism. I believe we have to recognize, as we pursue this fight on terrorism, that the people we are fighting are driven by a philosophy which we as a rational society, especially as a Western society, find hard to fathom. The concept that you would kill innocent civilians simply for the purpose of making a point is something which we find repugnant and almost incomprehensible. But that is the nature of the people we fight. We have to understand their purpose is not necessarily to win a global war in the sense it has historically been perceived, such as World War I or World War II, or even the Cold War. Their purpose essentially is to assert their culture in a way that destroys any culture which they perceive as alien to it, to assert their religion in a way in which they perceive destroys any religion which they see as alien to it, or any group of states which they see as alien to it. They are willing to pursue this with fanaticism which allows them to develop individuals and attitudes where people will strap bombs to themselves and attack us or where they attack innocent individuals, as they did in London. And thus, the threat is a threat of immense proportion, and it is a threat which we have to pursue in a different way than we have pursued other threats that have confronted our Nation. We all understand this, but executing it has become difficult. I believe we have not yet grasped as a nation how we execute in defending ourselves from this type of threat. What we know is this, and our approach must be tempered by it: We know we can order the priority of the threats as they reflect relative to us. We know, for example, if these individuals get their hands on a weapon of mass destruction-- chemical, biological or, God forbid, a nuclear-capable weapon--that they will use that weapon. They will use it in a way which kills tens of thousands, essentially hundreds of thousands of innocent individuals. So we know that is the No. 1 threat we must confront. We know also that as a nation, because we are a democracy and because we are an open nation and because we seek to participate in the world in an open and vibrant way, our borders are porous and that access into this country is easy, and that represents, regrettably now, a threat to us. We know also that because we are such an open society and because we are a society which is built around the concept of individual responsibility and people being able to go out in the world and participate in activities, that we have innumerable areas of infrastructure, areas of individual participation and activity which are open to attack, such as occurred in London. And that is an issue of threat. What we have attempted to do in this bill is take the resources we have and focus them on a threat-based approach so that we basically focus the most resources on the area where we see the greatest threat. The way we structured this bill is that we are focusing most of the energy of this bill, most of dollars in this bill, in two primary areas, as far as new dollars are concerned. We are still spending a lot of dollars in a lot of different places, but the new initiatives in this bill are focused on trying to better get a handle on defending ourselves from an attack by a weapon of mass destruction and, secondly, making our borders, which are inordinately porous, less porous and having better accountability as to who is coming into this country and what their purposes are. We moved a fair amount of money in this bill to try to accomplish those two basic philosophical goals of addressing those two items of threat. That does not mean we underfunded anything in this bill that was already on the board. But it does mean we tried to focus this bill a little bit better. Within this legislation there are a lot of different agencies. As I mentioned earlier, some of them are functioning extraordinarily well, some are functioning in between, and some simply are not doing as good a job as we hoped they could do. Regrettably, this agency, even though it has only been around for 2 years, has had over 486 reports written about it by either the inspector general, the CRS, or the GAO. I brought them with me because I think they are so staggering in their proportions it is worth looking at in physical proportions the number of reports. There are three piles. If we take one pile, which I probably cannot pick up, and put it on top of another pile--it will all fall over, unfortunately--we end up with almost 3 feet 9 inches of reports about things not going that well at the Homeland Security Department. Each one of these reports is substantive. Each one of these reports is worth review and requires action. They reflect the fact that almost 3 years after this Department was put together, the Department has some very serious problems, and they need to be addressed. I congratulate the new Secretary, Mr. Chertoff, for his approach to trying to get a handle on some of these problems. He is going to report to us Wednesday or Thursday on what his second stage review is. He put a lot of time into this, but I think his approach will probably be based on the concept that we have to have, first, a policy-driven approach and, second, it has to be systemwide. Today, there is too much anecdotal reaction in the Department, there is too much haphazard reaction, there is too much reaction to the crisis of the day. I think his approach is going to be to put in place a much more systematized approach. But that is not going to immediately resolve the problem. Hopefully, it will begin the process of resolving the problems of this Department, which are many and acute. This bill does put in place a large number of what, for lack of a better word, we in the Congress call fences, where we essentially say to the Department: Before you get this money, you have to show us you are going to do this effectively. It is not something I like to do. I am a legislator; I am not a manager. I used to be a manager. I used to be a Governor of a State. That is a management position. But when we see a department which has as many functions as this Department and it is not functioning correctly, regrettably, I do think it is the responsibility of the Congress and especially the Appropriations Committee, which has a unique oversight role, to step in and say before we give you more money to do this, we want to make sure that money is not going to be wasted, mismanaged, misplaced, or misappropriated, so we are going to require you to do something else. So this bill has in it a lot of what I would call fences. The purpose of the bill, as I mentioned, is to fund more aggressively those areas which we see as threats. Obviously, after London, many people are going to feel that a threat which needs to receive more attention is the question of how we handle mass transit. I could not agree more. There is no question but in light of the London attack--and we knew long before this with the Madrid attack and before that with the Israeli situation--this is a clear area where terrorists, who have no regard for human life, tend to focus their heinous activity. We know mass transit is an issue, but the question becomes how do we best protect mass transit. We have put in this bill over the last few years literally tens of millions, now hundreds of millions of dollars which is available for upgrading security, for upgrading electronic surveillance, for upgrading bomb dog activity, for upgrading the number of police officers on mass transit. There is pending, in fact, within the Federal Treasury about $115 million to $150 million that has not been spent. There has been so much money put into this so quickly, it simply has not been spent, and it is still available. On top of that, there is the $7 billion which we have put into first responder money which, if States want to reallocate some of that toward mass transit protection, they can. That has not been spent. So there is a lot of money sitting there for the purpose of helping mass transit. If you talk with people who run mass transit, they say it is not enough. But as a practical matter, it has not been spent yet. So whether it is enough is clearly irrelevant because until it gets spent, it is clearly enough. Independent of that, however--the fact that there is still significant dollars in the stream of things--we have the issue of how to effectively defend mass transit. We all know mass transit is such a huge enterprise where millions of people, on a daily basis--tens of millions if you take all the transit systems in this country--are moving in and out of different transit modes, whether it is trains, buses, or ferries, and are moving in and out of these on a constantly churning basis. The opportunities to attack this type of a system are almost endless. A professional terrorist--and clearly these people are professional. They train for the purpose of killing people, using terrorist weapons. The professional terrorist is always--almost always going to be able to find, in a nation our size, with a transportation system of this size, going to be able to find a point of attack that is not secure unless--I doubt that we could spend anywhere near enough money. We have enough money to spend to fully secure mass transit, and if we did we would probably make mass transit nonfunctional. Yes, we can raise the visibility by putting more officers on trains, more bomb dogs and surveillance agents, and we should do that, but as a practical matter the way you protect your mass transit system is the same way you protect your other infrastructure systems. It is through aggressive and robust intelligence. You have to know who these people are before they attack you. That is the key to this exercise--robust intelligence capability. And there is some irony because to accomplish robust intelligence capability you have to go where the people come from. Where do they come from? They come from the Middle East. We are fighting them in the Middle East. Yet people who have concerns about that want to put dramatically new dollars into the mass transit system. Well, the best place to get intelligence, quite honestly, is the breeding ground of these terrorists: Iraq, Afghanistan. And so that war in Iraq and Afghanistan is, as the President has pointed out a number of times, taking the war to them to find them before they can find us. Then, once you capture the people, you have to get the intelligence from them. That is why Guantanamo Bay is such an important part of intelligence of our country and why people come down to the floor and compare it to a Nazi concentration camp is such a gross misstatement of our purpose there and the actual action there. It is totally irresponsible to make statements such as that. No one has ever lost their life at Guantanamo Bay, and the interrogations which occur there occur under strict regimes. They are constantly monitored and meet all the necessary responsibilities of legal and humane rights. But we get vast amounts of information as a result of moving very bad people from the Iraq and Afghanistan arena over to Guantanamo Bay. We get a vast amount of information from those individuals which gives us the intelligence we need. Then, of course, you have the issue of profiling. Clearly, if you are going to stop these people, you are going to have to profile. That is being resisted. And then, of course, you have the issue of the PATRIOT Act. Clearly, if you are going to stop these people, you have to know what they are doing, and the way to do it is through electronic interdiction of their activities to a large degree. Yet you have people resisting. Intelligence is the key to defending mass transit. Yet within this body, regrettably, there is a lot of resistance to those elements of our efforts which are necessary in order to effectively pursue strong intelligence. But that is not an issue for this bill. The homeland security intelligence role is not at the margin, but it is certainly not at the center of the effort to gather intelligence. That is done by other agencies--the Defense Department, CIA, and FBI. However, I certainly am willing to entertain moving more money into mass transit. We could probably do another $100 million in mass transit and not affect this bill substantially. But once you get beyond that, you are going to have to take it out of the deficit or someplace like that. But will you buy more security with those dollars? Not a great deal, I don't think, because the people you are dealing with know how to get around those types of security initiatives however well you may create a better sense of security. This bill will, I suspect, over the next few days come under amendment in the area of how better to protect our borders. Maybe we will get better border security. The other part of the equation is how you let people into this country who legitimately want to come to work and are not seeking to do us harm but seeking to improve their livelihood. The Guest Worker Program, maybe we will get into that program, and certainly how best to address mass transit protection in light of London. I am open to all of that. I am flexible. Our purpose here is to make this agency work better. In that context, I congratulate the Senator from West Virginia, my ranking member, and who has joined us on the floor. He has been a partner in putting this effort together. He is totally committed to trying to make sure we have a much safer country and a stronger Department of Homeland Security. He has done a great job of putting forward his ideas, many of which I totally agree with, some of which I may not agree with, but most of which I do agree with. I respect immensely his years of service to this Nation, which have been extraordinary, and his counsel, which is exceptional. I thank him and his staff for the generous and extraordinary way they approach everything, but especially this bill. As we move forward, I am sure he will have some additional ideas of how we can improve it on the floor, and I look forward to hearing those thoughts and ideas and I continue to look forward as we move this bill down the road to passage sooner rather than later because the Nation does need a Homeland Security bill. I yield the floor.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following Appropriations Committee staff members and interns be granted the privilege of the floor during the consideration of the fiscal year 2006 Homeland Security appropriations bill and any votes that may occur in relation thereto: Shannon O'Keefe, Carol Cribbs, Kimberly Nelson, James Hayes, Avery Forbes, Carolina Poarch, Pete Flynn, Jonathan Cahoon, and Will Post.

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, at this point, just to inform the membership, what is going to happen is Senator Feinstein is going to introduce an amendment, and then Senator Isakson is going to take time to speak to his amendment. Tomorrow morning, we hope to reach an agreement where Senator Feinstein's amendment will be debated along with the amendment of Senator Collins for up to 3 hours evenly divided, and then we will have votes on those two amendments. I yield the floor.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I believe the Senator can ask unanimous consent for approval.

Mr. GREGG

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

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, the energy and water development appropriations bill for fiscal year 2006, H.R. 2419, as reported by the Senate Committee on Appropriations, provides $31.245 billion in budget authority and $31.118 billion in outlays. The bill contains no mandatory spending. In discretionary budget authority, the bill is $1.5 billion above the President's request, equal to the 302(b) allocations adopted by the Senate, $1.499 billion greater than the House-passed bill and $1.089 billion more than the fiscal year 2005 enacted level. I commend the chairman of the subcommittee and the distinguished chairman of the Appropriations Committee for bringing this legislation before the Senate. I ask unanimous consent that a table displaying the Budget Committee scoring of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, the pending legislative branch appropriations bill for fiscal year 2006, H.R. 2985, as reported by the Senate Committee on Appropriations, provides $3.952 billion in budget authority and $3.947 billion in outlays in fiscal year 2006 for the legislative branch and related agencies. Of these totals, $118 million in budget authority and $117 million in outlays are for mandatory programs in fiscal year 2006. The bill provides total discretionary budget authority in fiscal year 2006 of $3.834 billion. This amount is $194 million less than the President's request, $70 million less than the 302(b) allocation adopted by the Senate, and is $118 million more than the House-passed bill. The 2006 budget authority provided in this bill is $289 million more than the fiscal year 2005 enacted level. I commend the distinguished chairman of the Appropriations Committee for bringing this legislation before the Senate. I ask unanimous consent that a table displaying the Budget Committee scoring of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I hereby submit to the Senate the budget scorekeeping report prepared by the Congressional Budget Office under Section 308(b) and in aid of Section 311 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, as amended. This report meets the requirements for Senate scorekeeping of Section 5 of S. Con. Res. 32, the First Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for 1986. This report shows the effects of congressional action on the 2005 budget through June 28, 2005. The estimates of budget authority, outlays, and revenues are consistent with the technical and economic assumptions of the 2006 Concurrent Resolution on the Budget, H. Con. Res. 95. The estimates show that current level spending is under the budget resolution by $5.062 billion in budget authority and by $72 million in outlays in 2005. Current level for revenues is $407 million above the budget resolution in 2005. Since my last report dated May 26, 2005, the Congress has cleared and the President has signed the Surface Transportation Extension Act of 2005 (P.L. 109-14), which changed budget authority. In addition, the Congress has cleared for the President's signature S. 714, the Junk Fax Prevention Act of 2005, which had a negligible effect on revenues. I ask unanimous consent the report and accompanying letter be printed in the Record.

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, the pending Department of Interior and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill fiscal year 2006, H.R. 2361, as reported by the Senate Committee on Appropriations provides $26.261 billion in budget authority and $27.421 billion in outlays in fiscal year 2006 for the Department of Interior and related agencies. Of these totals, $54 million in budget authority and $60 million in outlays are for mandatory programs in fiscal year 2006. The bill provides total discretionary budget authority in fiscal year 2006 of $26.207 billion. This amount is $532 million more than the President's request, equal to the 302(b) allocations adopted by the Senate, $100 million more than the House-passed bill, and $553 million less than fiscal year 2005 enacted levels. Mr. President, I commend the distinguished chairman of the Appropriations Committee for bringing this legislation before the Senate, and I ask unanimous consent that a table displaying the Budget Committee scoring of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. The Senator from Louisiana appears to want to have it both ways, that the chairman of the Budget Committee has a right to make this point of order because the chairman of the Budget Committee is given that authority by the Senate in order to protect the integrity of the budget process, and when the chairman of the Budget Committee rises and asks a question which is the basis of his point of order, which is that this amendment takes a discretionary program and turns it into an entitlement program, and asks the Senator from Louisiana does he deem that to be a technical point, the Senator from Louisiana says, no, that is not my argument. My argument is something else. Well, I would simply say to the Senator from Louisiana, he cannot have it both ways. He cannot say to the budget chairman he has the authority to do this and then say to the budget chairman, when he asks the Senator whether it is a technical point when the budget chairman elicits why he is doing it, that it is not a technical point. It is a very unusual position to take, that moving a discretionary program to an entitlement program is a technical point, and that is the gravamen of the argument of the Senator from Louisiana.

Mr. GREGG. It is my understanding from the Democratic leader on the bill that there is an objection to any time agreement at this point so there is no point in even entering a discussion on that matter, I guess. Madam President, I rise to address this issue as chairman of the Budget Committee. I begin with this rather unfortunate characterization that a budget point of order is a technical event around here. Budget points of order are not technical events. In my humble opinion, they are rather important. I guess that is because I am chairman of the Budget Committee. We pass a budget and we say as a Congress and as a party specifically, because nobody on the other side of the aisle participated in passing the budget, that we are going to discipline our house, we are going to be fiscally responsible. In fact, the budget we passed was extremely disciplined. It limited nondefense discretionary spending to a zero increase over the next 3 years. For the first time in 7 years, it attempted to address entitlement spending because we see that as probably the most significant threat to our fiscal integrity as a nation. It had very aggressive language in the area of enforcement. Certain accounts were set up, such as the reserve account which has been referred to, in order to make sure that dollars were spent appropriately and not whimsically or outside the purposes of the budget. That budget passed. It was voted on. It passed by a couple of votes but with no Democratic support. However, it was the first budget to pass this Congress in 2 years and only the second time in 4 years did we actually get a budget out of the Congress. I think it is important that we look to the budget for leadership, or at least for guideposts as to how we are going to function around here. To represent that points of order made under the budget might be technical is, to say the least, inconsistent with the purposes of the budget and the points of order under the budget. There are a lot of points that have been raised in presenting this case. There have been substantive points and then there have been arguments that it is not outside the budget and therefore should be paid for. Let me speak initially to the substantive points. I do respect the comments of the senior Senator from Louisiana, when she quite forthrightly stated that the problem that is being caused in Louisiana, relative to loss of frontage and land, is a function of the levying situation--which benefits the Nation. I do not deny that. I read the book ``Rising Tide'' and was amazed at the impact of that flood and know that the levee situation addresses that as well as commerce. But here is the essential problem. I have reviewed this, briefly. I haven't reviewed it in depth, but I asked my people who are expert in this area, especially those who work in NOAA or have worked in NOAA, what causes this erosion. I agree with the Senator from Louisiana, the senior Senator, that the erosion is essentially being caused by the levees. It is not a function of drilling offshore, and therefore there is no nexus here. Between drilling offshore and the need to restore, the conservation issues around the land that is being lost, there is no nexus. A scientific nexus does not exist. The issues are really independent of each other. How you fund the restoration of those shore lands is the issue at hand. But what I think is important is that, from a substantive policy debate purpose, the problem is not being caused by energy production, and the amendment, as proposed, has no relationship to energy production, and this is an Energy bill. In other words, this amendment does not create new production. This amendment does not create new renewables, and it does not create conservation. This amendment conserves land, but the land that is being lost is not necessarily being impacted by energy production, or at least there is no scientific evidence to that effect that I can glean. It hasn't been presented, and I think the senior Senator from Louisiana made the case better than I could make it on that point. So there is not a relationship between what this amendment wants to gather money for and the Energy bill. Second, I think it is important to note that this amendment uniquely benefits five States at the expense of the General Treasury. It essentially says those five States have a unique conservation issue which the General Treasury has an obligation to support over other States which have conservation issues. There may be other places that have conservation issues which are probably directly related to the production of energy. I suspect West Virginia has some very serious conservation issues dealing with the production of coal. There is a pretty good nexus. But this amendment doesn't say we use general revenues, that we use the General Treasury to support that effort. No, it says five States have gathered together to take money out of the General Treasury for the purposes of addressing what they see as their conservation needs, which have no nexus of any significance that can be proven to the energy production. Granted, those States do produce a lot of energy and that energy is a benefit to this country and I appreciate the fact that they do that. But New Hampshire produces more energy than we consume--a significant amount more than we consume--because we built a nuclear plant. I will tell you that produced some conservation issues. But we are not seeking a special fund, for which the taxpayers will have to pay, in order to take care of that issue that will be uniquely tied to New Hampshire.

Mr. GREGG. I understand there is an objection. I believe I have the-- do I have the floor?

Mr. GREGG. Madam President, I do not sense that the manager of the bill is on the floor, but I would be interested in knowing whether the Senators from Louisiana wish to enter into a time agreement so we can move to a vote on this point of order.

Mr. GREGG. I object.

Mr. GREGG. Well, since it is my point of order, I would like to go last, and I will need about 5 minutes.

Mr. GREGG. So I have the last say here and then we will go to a vote.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, what is the parliamentary situation? Is there unanimous consent agreement?

Mr. GREGG. I look forward to that.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I leave it to the good offices of the chairman of the committee, who is an exceptional floor leader, to tell me when he wants to have a vote.

Mr. GREGG. Madam President, would the Senator from Louisiana yield for a question?