Judd Gregg

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, first, I appreciate the Senator from West Virginia reminding us that spring is going to come, soon we hope. It is always a pleasure to have his spring speech. It causes us to spring forward with enthusiasm. The reason I rise today, however, is to address this issue of FSC, which is the tax bill that recently was not allowed to go forward because of failure to get cloture. Cloture, of course, is a weapon that can be used by the minority in the Senate for the purposes of avoiding acting on legislation. It is a very legitimate tool, and it is something that has historically served the Senate well. But its purpose should not be to stop legislation which is critical to American workers. The FSC bill, if it is not approved, will lead directly to the loss of jobs in the United States. We have, regrettably, found ourselves in a situation where the World Trade Organization, to which we are a signator and in which we participate, has ruled that we, as a nation, are in violation of the rules of international commerce. We fought this case aggressively. We used our legal rights. We lost in a court of jurisdiction, which we acknowledge and which we respect. As a result of losing that case, it is very clear the European Community, specifically, has the right to assess tariffs, duties, or penalties against our products as they move into Europe. The practical effect of those duties is that our products will be less competitive. The practical effect of them being less competitive is fewer of them will be sold. The effect of fewer of them being sold is that fewer Americans will be employed to produce them. The bill before us today is a jobs bill. So why was the weapon of the filibuster used against it? Why would the Democratic membership of this body, many Members who have come to this floor on innumerable occasions, lament the state of the economy, lament the actions of this administration relative to the issue of the creation of jobs, expressing at least formal concern, if not substantive concern, about the fact that the economic recovery that we are participating in has not created as many jobs as historic economic recoveries usually create? Why would the Democratic Party in this Congress, in this Senate, bar our ability to pass a bill which would correct a problem which, if not corrected, will lead directly to the loss of American jobs? It makes no sense at all. The only reason they appear to have done it is because they wish to make a political point on an issue which is tangential to and not related at all to the issue of the jobs which will be lost as a result of failure to pass this bill which corrects tax policies and gives relief to the workers who will lose their jobs if this bill is not passed. It is purely a political decision on their part to try and highlight their concern about a regulation which is being issued in the Labor Department, which has not yet been finalized but which they believe is an inappropriate action. This regulation deals with overtime pay and the attempt by the Labor Department to straighten out what is a morass of regulations on the issue of overtime pay, which has led to a litigation frenzy and has also created significant costs in overhead to the community of entrepreneurs in this country who are trying to create jobs for Americans. Independent of that, this regulation has no bearing at all on the WTO case, on the duty issue, and on the jobs which will be lost if this tax bill is not passed. This regulation is not even in place yet, has not even been formally written yet. We do not even know what is in it in its final form. Yet the Democratic membership of this Senate is willing to hold up this bill over a regulation which is not yet finalized, the language of which we have not yet seen, in order to try to make a political point, which political point is costing Americans jobs because we cannot respond to the ruling of the WTO and create an atmosphere which will allow our people to sell overseas without being subject to a punitive duty. I think this action is callous on the part of the minority in the Senate. This action of using the filibuster to stop this bill, which would allow more jobs in America to be created, is callous because it is so politically motivated. Its only purpose appears to be to make a point on a regulation which is not yet even finalized. So we find ourselves in a position where for literally months Members of the other party have claimed that this administration's economic policies have led to a jobless recovery. Some of them do not even admit that we are in a recovery, but to those who are honest enough to say we are at least in a recovery, they say it is a jobless recovery, and they come to the floor and claim that this administration has no sensitivity to the needs of American workers because of this jobless recovery. Yet at the same time they filibuster a bill which, if it is not passed, will absolutely lead to the loss of jobs in America, manufacturing jobs specifically. So one has to question whether all the presentations on this floor which have occurred before now, which have claimed concern that the jobless recovery is affecting America and is inappropriate and that this administration is not doing enough in the area of creating jobs-- one has to wonder if all of those claims were not crocodile tears because if they were legitimate, if they were real, if there was a real concern about the creation of jobs on the other side of the aisle in this Senate, this bill would not be blocked today. It is incomprehensible that a bill that should have gone through this Senate with no opposition, a bill that should have passed almost perfunctorily to address the adverse decision of the WTO against us, but in order to correct that problem so that the duties which are going to be levied against our manufacturers would not occur, that that type of bill would have been stopped and would have been stopped over such a political exercise. We have already voted on this issue relative to the Labor Department regulation once, and the regulation still is not final. Are we to continue to vote on it with all legislation that comes before the Senate or should we not take the proper approach, which is let the Labor Department make their finding, let them issue their regulation, the final regulation, and then once we have had a chance to actually read the regulation--I know that might come as a shock that some people would like to read the regulation once it comes forward-- then if the other side of the aisle still has concerns about it, there are a number of courses of action they can take, including an expedited procedure to repeal the regulation which we have as a matter of process in this Senate. To hold up this bill over a regulation which is not final, the language of which this Senate has not had a chance to look at because it has not even been printed--this is a bill that will directly impact the ability of Americans to hold and keep their jobs--is a callous and inappropriate action by the other side of the aisle, purely politics. Yes, we are in a Presidential season and, yes, we all are sophisticated enough to understand that much of what happens on the Senate floor and the Congress for the next 8 months will have huge political overtures and tinges to it, but on this issue, where there is no legitimate difference of opinion as to the need to pass this bill, or there should not be, on this issue which is going to have an immediate present impact on people whose jobs would be lost as a result of these duties being levied on this bill, we ought to set the politics aside and pass the legislation. The filibuster ought to be stopped. We ought to move forward. It is time to move on with this legislation. I yield the floor.

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

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, on December 9, 2003, I filed Report 108-220 to accompany S. 1879, a bill to amend the Public Health Service Act to revise and extend provisions relating to mammography quality standards. At the time the report was filed, the estimates by the Congressional Budget Office were not available. I ask unanimous consent that a complete copy of the CBO estimate be printed in the Record.

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, on March 18, 2004, I filed Report 108-245 to accompany S. 1172, a bill to establish grants to provide health services for improved nutrition, increased physical activity, obesity prevention, and for other purposes. At the time the report was filed, the estimates by the Congressional Budget Office were not available. I ask unanimous consent that a complete copy of the CBO estimate be printed in the Record.

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I certainly appreciate the Senator from Massachusetts repeating what was said in New Hampshire. One thing I said in New Hampshire was I don't believe we should be increasing taxes on the American public disproportionately. This amendment increases taxes by $9.8 billion. It does not necessarily fund the Pell grant program, but in this bill, under the leadership of Senator Nickles, we have funded the Pell grant. We have increased it by almost $1 billion, and we continue a large commitment to this program, which is very appropriate and which is being undertaken in an aggressive way in the budget as presented. So I would vote against this tax increase, and mention to the people in New Hampshire that I continue to oppose taxes.

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, it has been a good debate. It certainly has outlined the issues involved. I want to reemphasize some points made by the chairman of the Finance Committee who spoke about how the $17.2 billion of tax increases in this amendment work. It is the only real part of this amendment. The amendment represents it is going to take this tax increase and use it to fund No Child Left Behind at the fully authorized level. It can't do that for parliamentary reasons. It is unable to make that clear event within the amendment. The only clear event within the amendment that does actually occur is there is a $17.2 billion increase in taxes. The point which the chairman of the Finance Committee made, and which I think needs to be reemphasized, is those dollars could easily, if they are raised in this manner, end up significantly impacting our ability to allow people who are now benefiting from no longer having to pay the marriage penalty; those folks could end up paying the marriage penalty because we won't be able to extend the relief from the marriage penalty tax. If taxes are raised under this bill, those dollars could easily absorb the money intended to be used for the purpose of addressing the issue of the child tax credit, which is a $1,000 tax credit. The extension of that might well be impacted. Those dollars, if this tax is put in place, could potentially impact the ability of this committee to finance the continuation of the expansion of the 10-percent bracket for low-income Americans so they have to pay less burden. Why is that? He made the point, and I thought rather well, that that is because he intends to use the alleged loopholes recited here by my colleagues, which loopholes should legitimately be closed. There is no reason people should be selling and leasing back the subway system of New York, and the President supports making sure that loophole is closed. He intends to use that revenue in order to fund the ability of people to get a child tax credit of $1,000, to avoid having to pay a penalty because they get married, and to assist in expanding the 10-percent bracket. As he makes the point, rather legitimately, if the dollars are siphoned off from those loophole closures that are planned under the budget, put in place, and are already in place and accepted as part of this budget, if those dollars are siphoned off and end up flowing pursuant to this amendment into a reserve account, he won't have the dollars available to him as chairman of the committee to accomplish those tax relief efforts. We are playing with some serious fire here. Basically, the risk of this amendment is, No. 1, raising taxes $17.2 billion over what we need to do; but No. 2, it puts at risk the ability of the chairman to address the use of the taxes that have been put in place in this budget through loophole closings to jeopardize the use of those taxes for the purpose of addressing the marriage tax penalty, the child tax credit, and the 10-percent bracket. A very important point. Secondly, this amendment represents the goal is to fully fund No Child Left Behind at the authorized level. I believe we have discussed this at some length, but I think it is worth emphasizing again. Authorization numbers are guideposts. Rarely, as a Congress, have we met authorization numbers. The proof is in the pudding. The last time the Congress was controlled by the Democratic Party and there was a Democratic President, title I was not funded to the full authorization level. It was funded significantly below the authorized level. In fact, this President's commitment to funding education has dramatically outstripped the prior President's commitment or actions in this area. I am sure he had a commitment, but he wasn't able to find the dollars. This President has made a huge commitment in the area of funding education, and the dollar increase has been a billion dollars a year every year--a billion, billion, billion, billion--cumulative billions for the special education accounts, and a billion and a half to a billion cumulatively for title I and for No Child Left Behind. I see the chairman of the Finance Committee. I was trying to restate, probably nowhere near as well as the chairman can, the effect of this $17.2 billion credit on his ability to do the extenders, which are so important to low-income families and married people and people with children. I yield the remainder of our time to the chairman.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I think the Senator from Louisiana had a question. I yield to the Senator from Louisiana, but I ask that the time for this question be taken off the side of the Democrats.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I have not yielded the floor yet.

Mr. GREGG. How much time does the Senator need to close?

Mr. GREGG. I will yield when I finish my statement. I would be happy to. If we go to title I, we will see in the last year the Presidency and the Congress were controlled by the Democratic Party, there was $6.7 billion spent on title I. When the Republicans took over the Congress, by the way, that started to move up. In the years since President Bush has come into office, that number has jumped dramatically, so we are now up to $13.3 billion being spent on title I. The same is true of IDEA, which is a more startling number because the Clinton administration never proposed increases in IDEA until the last year and they were the result of a Republican Congress forcing those increases into the Clinton administration. Again, the IDEA numbers went down during the first years of the Clinton administration and started to go back up when the Republicans took control of the Congress. I was very involved when we demanded $1 billion a year. This President has proposed more increases in the first 3 years in IDEA funding--$1 billion each year onto each prior year--than the Clinton administration proposed in their entire 8 years in office. This is an example of that during the Clinton administration. IDEA funding was increased by $1.4 billion over their 8 years. In three years in office, President Bush has increased that money by $3.7 billion. It brings me back to a side issue. I found it entertaining that basically if we listen to the Senator from Massachusetts, he said all this new funding which has flowed into the various accounts--and it has been dramatic, as shown by the first chart, into special education and title I--it was a function of amendments offered by the Democratic leadership and the Democratic membership of this Congress. I point out I am not aware the Democratic Party controlled the Congress for these 3 years and it certainly did not control the Presidency, so I am not sure how they managed to do that. The fact is we could not pass the amendments unless the President agreed to them, signed the bills, and the Republican Congress agreed to them and passed it. What can be pointed out is when the Clinton administration and the Democratic Congress did control the issue of funding, had unilateral control of the issue over funding because they had both Houses of Congress and the Presidency, their accounts went down. It was not until a Republican Congress and a Republican Senate made it its No. 1 priority under Senator Lott, Senator Specter, and other Members of this Congress that we started to see the IDEA funding go back up dramatically. This is a very substantive point because it makes the case that what we are hearing from the other side is truly politics, the politics of education, not the substance of education. The substance of education is whether a low-income child in America today is better off in the system than they were 3 years ago. There can be no question but that child is. Finally, after years and years and years, we are finding out whether that child is being educated at the same level as his peers, through assessment, and when we find that out and if we discover that child is not being educated up to his peers, we put in place systems to address that. It is also important while we are on this topic to address the nature of this amendment. The amendment does not actually say the funding will go to education. The amendment sets up a reserve fund. The only thing the amendment actually does is raise taxes. It raises taxes by $17 billion and puts that money in an account. That account may or may not get spent. What we do know is it will raise taxes. What does $17 billion in new taxes account for? We heard from the other side it will go against those wealthy Americans who are making too much money and we need to tax them some more. That may philosophically be what they want to do, but as a practical matter that is not the effect this amendment would have. The proposals which are most at risk today in the tax laws do not impact wealthy Americans; they impact moderate- and middle-income Americans. It is the child tax credit that lapses, it is the marriage tax penalty which goes back into place, and it is the 10-percent bracket which gets kicked back out if we do not extend the tax reductions which are on the books. Ironically, the $17 billion of higher taxes which this amendment is going to force on the American people is probably going to be borne primarily by people who are married, because the spousal deductions and the marriage tax penalty, if not extended, add up to $15.7 billion, an ironic joining of numbers but clearly a logical place where it will occur. If the $17 billion tax increase occurs, it will occur as a result of these extenders not being put in place. Therefore, the spousal tax, which is $15.7 billion and which basically says if you are married you should not have to pay more than if you were separated, will end up being most likely the place I suspect this tax increase will occur. This amendment is unique in that it does not really impact the education accounts because it puts it into reserve. It does, however, raise taxes, and most likely on married people. While we are on the subject of how well funded No Child Left Behind is, we should go into some specifics. The No Child Left Behind part of title I--and what we have are charts that reflect how significantly we have increased funding under title I since President Bush came into office. Over the 8 years President Clinton was in office, he raised the dollars into title I by $2.6 billion. In the 3 years since President Bush has been in office, we have seen a $4.6 billion increase or almost twice as much, at least 70-percent higher funding levels from President Bush as from President Clinton. The argument is made that is still not enough, that we should be funding this to the full authorized level. I have been around this place for 11 years and I think I understand we do not fund at authorized level and everyone in this institution understands the authorized level is a statement, not a number. It is a goal. But it is not necessarily the goal that will be reached. What proves that beyond any serious doubt is the fact when the Democrats did control both the Presidency, the House and the Senate, they did not fund title I at full authorization. If there is credibility to their argument today, they would have had to have funded the authorization at its full level back when they controlled the Congress. But there is not credibility to their argument because they did not do that. In fact, when we look at the level of funding increases that occurred during their administration when they had the Presidency and when they held the Senate, it was pretty much flat funded, and it has only been with President Bush that the dramatic increases in these accounts happen. Do we have enough money in the pipeline to address title I and No Child Left Behind? That is an argument we hear a lot about. We do know the number has increased dramatically. States are getting a lot more money. In fact, a lot of states are not pulling down the full amount they have available to them. We know there is some good anecdotal information coming in right now that says No Child Left Behind is being adequately funded. I was interested to see a recent study by two public officials in Massachusetts, one of whom was the Massachusetts State school board chairman and another who was a member of the school board in Massachusetts. James Peyser is chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education and Robert Costrell is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, on leave, and currently serves as the chief economist for the Executive Office for Administration and Finance. These two gentlemen did a study of how much money was coming in under No Child Left Behind and whether it was adequate. The report says they thought there was sufficient money in the pipeline in Massachusetts to effectively implement the law. Here are a few things they cite: The $391 million of Federal Department of Education money that has been set aside specifically to administer the additional State assessments required under No Child Left Behind is more than adequate. That was their conclusion. They did say: Although new funding may be needed in the future, the authors observe that ``The needed dollar amounts are relatively small and could be met easily by allocating funds from lower-priority problems.'' Another finding: Shortfalls in federal support of school technical assistance, as required under No Child Left Behind, are small at present but are likely to grow significantly as more schools are found to be in need of improvement. To fill the gap, the authors call for greater flexibility in federal guidelines. ``Much of the gap can be filled,'' Peyser and Costrell explain, ``by allowing states to allocate more of their federal dollars to supporting turnaround efforts in low-performing districts.'' The estimated cost of testing required by No Child Left Behind runs at $20 per student, a small fraction of the per-pupil cost in the United States. Today, the per-pupil cost in the United States is $7,392. Interestingly enough, if you take the $391 million that the Federal Department of Education has set aside--and this is not their numbers-- to do the assessment work, you find it exceeds the $20 by a rather dramatic number. I know in New Hampshire, for example, it exceeds it by a factor of almost 10. In fact, the dollars increased per pupil from 2000 to 2004 in Federal spending, these two gentlemen discovered, was about $300 per pupil across the country, which certainly far outstrips the cost of the per-pupil testing requirement, which is the primary requirement in this law. So you have folks who are very intimately involved in this business in Massachusetts concluding that the funds which are flowing, which have represented a very significant increase in funding--as shown by this chart, $13.3 billion right now under this budget--more than exceeds what is needed to efficiently deal with the No Child Left Behind requirements. One of the reasons we hear a lot about No Child Left Behind not being funded I think is that most States and school districts today are under significant pressure. But the pressure is not coming from No Child Left Behind; the pressure is coming from local property tax burdens and State revenues. We have gone through a recession and those States have contracted in their revenues. Property taxes have gone down. As a result, school districts find themselves under pressure. I do not deny that. Everybody recognizes that. But because money is fungible, people easily identify the Federal dollars as being less than what are required to fund what traditionally would have been cost driven by and funded by local property taxes and State dollars. The No Child Left Behind function is well funded. In fact, in this bill we have increased it again. It is up another $1 billion specifically have increased special education funding in this bill by $1 billion. We have done that, by the way, without repealing the child tax credit. In fact, we plan to extend that. We have done that without requiring parents--people who are married--having to pay more in taxes by not extending the marriage tax penalty relief language. We have done it by retaining the 10-percent expansion so low-income people pay much less in the way of taxes. All of that would be at risk--all three of those areas--were the $17 billion of new taxes, which this amendment represents, to be adopted. I do not believe this amendment is legitimate from a standpoint of addressing the concerns of No Child Left Behind. I do not believe it is consistent with what happened in this Congress when the Democratic Party controlled the Presidency and the House and the Senate. It requires full funding of an authorization level, which was not done at that time. I do believe it would have a huge detrimental impact, potentially, especially on married women and men, as a result of its ironic identity with the cost of extending the marriage penalty, which is $15 billion, which is essentially the amount of taxes this bill would raise. I believe it is hard to defend this amendment either on a substantive ground that it is going to make No Child Left Behind work better or on a policy ground that it is consistent with historical actions in this Congress--funding full authorization--or on the ground that raising taxes makes good sense because I do not think you can support raising taxes, especially when it might have such a dilatory effect on married people or people with children. Therefore, I strongly oppose this amendment. Mr. President, I would yield to the Senator from Louisiana on her time. Mrs. MURRAY addressed the Chair.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I appreciate the comments of the Senators supporting the position represented by Senator Murray. But I do believe it is important to understand from where we come and where we are going, relative to educational spending in this country, and specifically in this Congress, and who is accountable for what. Because, obviously, the representation coming from the other side is that this President and this Republican Congress has not been as committed to education as we should have been. It is a hard case to make, honestly, in light of the history of educational spending. Let us return to the scene of the crime, as they say in the business of reviewing evidentiary facts. The scene of the crime is the Clinton administration, its spending on education, and its woeful efforts in the area of special education and title I. The scene of the crime is the Clinton administration and its failure to address the fact that for generations low-income children had been left behind in this Nation. That is what this is about. You can throw out all the numbers you want. But the issue is whether we as a Nation will continue to abandon the low-income child and leave him or her in school systems which simply shuttle him or her through, meaning when he got to the end of his or her academic career--if you can even call it that--in our school systems, he or she was unable to participate in the American dream because she couldn't read and he couldn't write relative to their peers. The President of the United States, George Bush, came into office and he said, Let us do something about this. Let us address the issue of the fact that so many children in this Nation for generations have been shuttled through the system. He proposed the No Child Left Behind Act as a way to address that. The No Child Left Behind Act is not only about money in a tangential way. No Child Left Behind is really about the philosophy of whether a low-income child should enter the school system at a level at which they are not competitive with their peers and be left in that school system for the rest of their academic career and come out at a level that is not competitive with their peers. The No Child Left Behind Act is an issue of whether we are going to try to take the children in this country who come from a low-income family and give them a shot at the American dream by bringing their education up to a level where they at least know what they need to know in order to participate in our society, which is a very academically oriented society--a society which depends disproportionately on your educational ability in order to obtain success. The President proposed the concept which was to say to local school districts throughout this country, You decide, school districts, what children in your school know in the third grade, in the fourth grade, in the fifth grade, in the sixth grade, in the seventh grade, or in the eighth grade. You decide. We as a Federal Government are not going to tell you. You go out as a community, you sit down and brainstorm and decide what your fourth graders should know, what level of math, what level of composition capability, what level of English. Then once you decide that, you set up a process, a regimen, where you evaluate whether the children in your school system are meeting those obligations, are meeting those standards, are learning English at the level and writing and spelling at the level you, the local school district, decide is appropriate. One of the key things the President said was don't cover up the low- income child by putting them in a large group with all the other children in the school system--what is called disaggregation. Let us look at these different groups, whether they come from minority backgrounds, whether they come from low-English backgrounds, or low- income backgrounds. Let us find out what each group of children actually is learning. Let us not say just because fourth graders in the school system which has a lot of kids and who come from average income families that are doing well on the scores as a gross number, but that school system is working well when we know for a fact the low-income kids in that school system are still being left behind--disaggregation. We set up a system. The President proposed a system where we go out and say to the local school, You find out, you find out, parents, teachers, and principals, what children should learn in these elementary school grades and say whether the children by income groups or by ethnic groups are learning. Those two ideas were rather radical. But the radical idea was we were actually going to tell the parents in the school system whether their children are being taught, whether they are learning at a level that is going to bring them up to their peers. Low-income parents--most of whom, by the way, are single parents struggling to make ends meet--are finally going to know whether their children in that school system are learning what is necessary in order to make them competitive as defined by that school system and as defined by their peers. If the parent finds out their child is in a school system that is not teaching that child, then we are going to give the parents some tools to try to correct that problem. We are going to allow public school choice. We are going to allow extra help for low-income kids so they can be brought up to speed if they aren't up to speed with their peers. We are going to allow the school districts to go into schools, which unfortunately have systemic failures, or large percentage failures, and put more resources into those schools to try to correct their problems. This was the idea. It was revolutionary, and it has fundamentally improved education in this country. Everywhere you go in this country today, school districts are addressing the issue of whether the children are learning, whether the low-income kids are learning, whether they are being assessed, and the information is being put out to the public and the public is making assessments as to whether it is right. This bill has been one of the most creative and aggressive bills we have ever passed as a Congress, or even the States, in the area of trying to correct what has been a fundamental problem in which our public school systems, regrettably for years, were passing low-income kids off and not giving them a shot at the American dream. It is working. We incessantly hear from the other side about the failure of the bill. Why are we hearing that? Is it really because it has not been funded? No. It is because there is an educational establishment out there which does not like the fact it is being held accountable. This isn't about funding. This is a raw attempt by the educational establishment to try to undermine the No Child Left Behind Act law because they do not like the fact they are being held accountable. They do not like the fact low-income kids are finally getting a chance, are finally learning something, or are being told they have to learn something. That is what this debate is about. Let us not try to color it with money because it is not about money. Let us get into the money issue to prove that is not the case. If money were the issue, the prior administration would have poured a lot more money into this program than they did. They did not. If money were the issue, the school systems in this country would not have enough money to do the assessments that are the essence of this whole bill. They not only have enough money to do the assessments, but they have more than enough money to do the assessments under this bill. If money were the issue, the money we have already put in the pipeline would have been spent. There wouldn't be any available. What we find is there are literally billions of dollars of money in the pipeline which have not been spent as a result of the fact this law has been aggressively funded. Let me put it in context. The last time the President of this country was a Democrat and the Congress was Democratically controlled was 1995. You would have thought at that time, if you listened to the rhetoric around here, title I and the programs under title I which still existed at that time--the No Child Left Behind Act obviously wasn't the law-- would have been funded right up to the authorization amount. That is all we have heard about from the other side on this bill. Surprise. It wasn't. It wasn't even close to the full authorization amount in 1995. Not only that but the increases which flowed into the account under a prior administration were minuscule in key areas such as title I and special education. I heard the good Senator from Massachusetts come down here and say all the new money that has gone into title I, or most of it, is the result of the fact they offered amendments on the other side and those amendments made the changes in these programs and added all of this extra money. I appreciate the fact he at least gives credit to this administration for putting a larger amount of new dollars into the education accounts. That is nice, because it is true. There has been a huge infusion of new dollars into the education accounts. This chart shows that in real terms. I appreciate the fact the Senator from Massachusetts basically acknowledged it. The last year of the Clinton administration, it was $42.2 billion in education accounts. As of this year, there will be $58.7 billion in education funding, which shows the rather dramatic increase.

Mr. GREGG. I have no problem having the Senator close now and we can go to a vote. I am sorry. I can't do that. I guess I will speak for about 8 minutes and then yield to the Senator.

Mr. GREGG. As long as my answer is also coming off the time of the Senator from Washington.

Mr. GREGG. Will the Senator yield on that point?

Mr. GREGG. I will try to recall it.

Mr. GREGG. I yield to the Senator from Wyoming such time as he may consume.

Mr. GREGG. Reserving the right to object, I didn't hear that.

Mr. GREGG. Then, Mr. President, I reserve the remainder of our time.

Mr. GREGG. I ask unanimous consent that debate on this amendment be for an additional 2 hours and 15 minutes with an hour on the minority side and an hour and 15 minutes on the majority side.

Mr. GREGG. It is still not necessarily a fair division of the time. I would agree to some sort of time limit that gave us a little extra time. If the other side wants to go for an hour and we go for an hour and 15 minutes, which would be 2 hours and 15 minutes on this amendment, that would give them an additional hour--they have already done an hour--and we would get an hour and 15 minutes.

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I recognize that probably is a disadvantage for us because the other side has been going now for an hour, and although we are probably more succinct and more persuasive in less time----

Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I have been talking with the manager of the bill on the Democratic side, and he suggested maybe we should enter into some sort of time agreement on this amendment. I see there are a number of people on his side who want to speak. Is there something the Senator recommends?

Mr. GREGG

Mr. GREGG. I appreciate the Senator's courtesy.

Mr. GREGG. Literally thousands of people's lives would be affected if that country, which happens to be England--our closest ally, closest friend, one of our largest trading partners, after Canada--if that country were to take the view that is being taken by the Senator from Connecticut, that they should deny their companies creating jobs in the United States. That company would be closed down in Nashua, NH, our second largest city and our largest employer. Is the Senator aware of that?

Mr. GREGG. I do not have the time.