Tom Harkin

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. I understand there was an order, and I am allowed to speak for 5 minutes. Disaster Assistance I take this time first to thank all the Senators who voted for S. 454, expressing the sense of the Senate that disaster assistance ought to be emergency spending and not taken as an offset out of any other program, especially the farm bill. The vote was overwhelming, 71 to 14. Once again, as we have in the past, the Senate has spoken very loudly and clearly that when a disaster strikes, wherever it is, this is an emergency. It ought to be taken out of the whole pot of Government money rather than invading a program and taking money out it as an offset. Again, I have the deepest sympathy for all the people who got hit by the hurricane in Florida and other States. They ought to be compensated. That is a true emergency. It is a disaster. But we have had disasters in other parts of the country. We have had floods, tornados, droughts, all kind of things. Just because it is not a big hurricane does not mean it is not just as devastating. It is. It makes no sense why we should have to then offset, take money out of existing farm programs, to pay for agricultural disaster assistance. But that is the position of President Bush and of the House leadership. We do not require offsets to respond to the hurricane disaster, and we should not do it for any other disaster. Seventy-one Senators again spoke and said emergencies are emergencies. Disasters require emergency spending. I have to point out that last night in the debate in St. Louis the President said he had fought for strong conservation provisions in the farm bill. I was there when the President signed the farm bill in May 2002, and he touted the conservation title and how much he supported it and that one of the main reasons he was signing it was because of the strong conservation title. Yet today, his people, the President's own people from the White House and OMB, are up here telling the members of the House and Senators that in order to respond to the droughts, flooding, tornados and other disasters we have had around the country, that the disaster payments have to be taken out of the farm bill and that the place to take them is from conservation. Yes, you heard me correctly. The President of the United States, who so loudly last night said he fought for a strong conservation title in the farm bill, today, his people are up here and saying to take money out of conservation to pay for agricultural disaster assistance. I am sorry, can someone please join the dots for me? What is happening? The President is saying one thing, but his people are up here doing exactly the opposite. Does the President not know what his people are doing up here or have they not informed him or what is going on? The farmers and ranchers of this country, as well as Americans who support conservation, ought to know that there is a provision soon coming before the Senate that will take money out of conservation to pay for disasters. It is wrong. Seventy-one Senators just spoke and said it is wrong. Yet the White House is insisting that disaster money has to be taken out of conservation. The White House and the House insist on provisions that basically take money away with hand and give it back with the other and say to farmers and ranchers: You are better off. It is a cruel hoax for agricultural producers. Farmers who receive disaster payments should not suffer the loss of other farm bill benefits. Nor should our Nation's farmers as a whole, the majority of whom will not receive any disaster payments, be forced to bear the cost of disaster assistance by having farm bill benefits taken away to be transferred to a disaster program for only some farmers. Why should the farmers in Pennsylvania have their conservation funding taken away from them to transfer to farmers in Nebraska or Wyoming or Colorado or Oklahoma or Texas or wherever the disaster may be. The White House did not say to do that for Florida's hurricane losses. They did not say to take money away from Alaska or Ohio or places like that to go to Florida. No, and they should not have. We should all pitch in as we have before, the whole country, to respond to the hurricane recovery. We pitch in because it is a disaster and emergency and so we fund it as an emergency, not by taking funding away from other vital programs. Yet for agricultural disaster assistance responding to droughts, or floods or other disasters, the White House and the House leadership are telling farmers and ranchers they will have to bear the cost of it by losing conservation funding from the farm bill. I am sorry, it is not right and not fair. And 71 Senators said it is not. Again, I ask the President: Please, Mr. President, you touted the conservation program.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, you touted the conservation program. Last night you said you fought for a strong conservation title in the farm bill. And now you are taking money out of conservation to pay for disasters. Please, Mr. President, I am telling you, get ahold of your people who are at OMB--your people. They work for you. Get them on the phone right now and tell them, this agricultural disaster money ought to come out of emergency assistance, just like you proposed for the hurricanes, and not out of farmers' own pockets. I thank the Presiding Officer and yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Whatever time I have remaining I would be glad to yield.

Mr. HARKIN. I will read one sentence from the editorial: "The reality of the situation is that there will be no disaster money before we go home unless we provide budget offsets,'' said the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va. Easy for him to say; farmers in his State are covered by the hurricane disaster assistance package. He doesn't have to worry about whether it is emergency money. What kind of selfishness is that around here? If you are from a State where you get the hurricane disaster assistance, to heck with everybody else? The Des Moines Register editorial said: Cutting farm programs to pay for the assistance would amount to taking money from growers in the Midwest and giving it to producers in drought-stricken areas of Montana, the Dakotas and other Plains states. I want to help those farmers. They should be helped. But as Senator Daschle said, they should not take it out of one pocket and put it in another. I also ask that a letter from a number of different farm groups opposing the using of farm bill conservation money for disaster assistance be printed in the Record following my remarks. This is in opposition to the President's position.

Mr. HARKIN. We all need leaders to organize us, to inspire us, to get us moving in the right direction. Our distinguished leader, Senator Daschle from South Dakota, was kind enough to say good things about me with regard to the Agriculture bill, but we would never have gotten it together had it not been for his leadership. We, on this side of the aisle, all rely on his inspiration and his leadership, pulling us together. Nowhere is that more evident than our fight for farmers and ranchers and people who live in small towns and communities all over America. I thank my good friend and my leader from South Dakota for what he has done for the people who live in the little towns such as my home town, Cummings, IA, with 150 people, for the farmers and ranchers of Iowa, South Dakota, and all over this country. Senator Daschle has been their voice and their leader, as he has been our leader. I daresay we wouldn't have half of the things we have for agriculture today had it not been for Senator Daschle, in making sure we had a good farm bill 2 years ago. As Members can tell today, his passion is still there. I thank the good farmers and ranchers and rural people of South Dakota for having him here and having him as our leader. Madam President, I ask that an editorial from the Des Moines Register of October 9 be printed at the conclusion of my remarks.

Mr. HARKIN. How much time do I have remaining?

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I understand I have a half hour of time yielded to me. I may have to yield it to another Senator, but I will take some time right now. Natural Disaster Relief Mr. President, the resolution I have offered is very straightforward. It simply reiterates the policy that this Senate and this Congress has endorsed repeatedly over the decades. It basically is that agricultural disaster assistance should be designated as emergency spending and not taken out of other farm programs. This is the way we have done this going back 50 years or more. In fact, I have looked and I have only found one instance in the last 50 years where we have offset, as they say, disaster assistance with some other money from the same program. That was 2 years ago and that was corrected right away. We are now about to do the same thing. Mr. President, one of the few uncertainties about agriculture is the uncertainty of the weather. And that is true whether it is farming or ranching, growing orchard crops or growing any other type of agricultural production. Even when a farmer has used his best practices, taken prudent steps to produce a crop, severe weather events can destroy years of work and threaten their livelihood. Let me just quote from the USDA Web site: Natural disaster is a constant threat to America's farmers and ranchers. From drought to flood, freeze, tornadoes, or other calamity, natural events can severely hurt even the best run agricultural operation. We have responded to these disasters through emergency legislation in the past because we believed it was essential to respond to natural disasters to lessen the financial hardship involved. We do have programs in place such as crop insurance, loans, and so forth. However, major disasters can easily overwhelm these programs, and that is why Congress has consistently responded to natural disasters by providing emergency assistance. This emergency assistance usually covers crop losses, forages--that is hay and things like that--pasture losses for livestock producers, funding for tree assistance programs, and again there is some misconception that this disaster money makes the producer whole, puts the producer where he would be if the disaster never happened. That is just not true. Let me give you an example. It is only available, first of all, if you have over 35 percent loss of your expected production. So if you have a loss under 35 percent, you don't get anything anyway. But let's take an example of a Kansas farmer who, in a normal year, produces 100 bushels of grain sorghum per acre. Now he only harvests 80 bushels. Well, if the grain sorghum is worth $2.30 a bushel, that farmer will have an income shortfall of $46 an acre, but he will not be eligible for any disaster assistance because he only had a 20-percent loss, so he gets nothing. If the yield is only 50 percent, that means he has a 50-percent loss. His income shortfall is $115 an acre. Now the farmer is eligible for disaster assistance for 15 bushels of that loss--at a low payment rate. So, again, it is only a small fraction of what he gets. He loses $115, and receives only about $20. So some people think disaster assistance puts you back where you were if you were whole. No, it does not. It basically just kind of keeps you going, and that is about it. Now, you will hear a lot of reference to drought relief or a drought bill or drought emergency assistance. Well, that is a misconception. It has been a misconception all along. While that may be the most common problem, disaster legislation covers the whole range of weather-related losses. The bill language covers losses ``due to damaging weather or related conditions.'' In addition to drought, the regulations that carry out disaster assistance include hurricanes, hail, floods, fires, freezes, tornadoes, mud slides, pest infestation, and other calamities--in short, just about anything Mother Nature can throw agriculture's way. It doesn't matter what weather event causes the loss. It doesn't matter if it is part of a hurricane that has a name or just a plain old ordinary storm that strikes the Midwest. It doesn't matter whether the crop loss happens in a catastrophic afternoon storm or whether it is the result of a drought that lasts 9 or 10 or 12 months. We have always included those in disaster assistance and treated them alike. That is what we passed in the Senate a few weeks ago. We passed an amendment unanimously on a voice vote to cover all types of weather-related disaster losses across the country and treated them the same. That is basically what my resolution says. The White House and the House of Representatives decided to take a different approach. President Bush sent Congress the disaster assistance proposal that included agricultural disaster payments only for losses caused by hurricanes and left out assistance for a whole range of other disaster losses across the country. Furthermore, this hurricane disaster assistance would be designated emergency spending, meaning that it would not be taken away from other programs. The President was adamant that if Congress is going to respond to any other disasters across the country, then the cost has to be offset from the farm bill, and that is what the House measure did. It is interesting, the States included in the House hurricane package are Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. So if you are a farmer in those States and you have a hurricane-related loss, your losses are covered without offsets. You get the emergency spending measure assistance. Here is the interesting wrinkle, Mr. President, in the President's package. If you are a farmer in one of those hurricane States that I just mentioned, but your loss was not from the hurricane--let's say you had a hailstorm. Let's say you had high wind damage from a severe storm in May. Let's say you had a pest infestation or something like that. Guess what. You get no assistance. In the House, in what the President proposed, if you suffer loss from a hurricane, your payments are under emergency spending. But if you are in a hurricane State and you have another disaster caused by a hailstorm, well, then the cost of your assistance comes out of the farm bill. What kind of nonsense is that? A sugarcane farmer, God bless him, in Florida lost his crop because of the hurricane. That farmer gets compensated out of the emergency package. Let's say you are a corn farmer in Ohio and your crop was knocked down by a tornado. Guess what. You are not in. Whatever assistance you get has to come out of the farm bill. So why is it, why is it that if you got hit by a hurricane, you are treated one way; if you get hit by a tornado or a hailstorm or a fire or a drought, you are treated another way. It absolutely makes no sense. So, again, we draw these artificial lines. The President has drawn them. Why discriminate against certain farmers? If you are a farmer and you lose your crop, as I said, to a tornado or high winds in Ohio or Wisconsin or Iowa or Minnesota or Missouri, well, guess what. They are going to take it out of one pocket and put it into your other pocket. But if you are a farmer down in Florida, they don't take it out of your pocket. The whole country, all of us, help pay for those disasters as we have done for the last 50 years. Now the President wants to take the money out of the Conservation Security Program. That program covers the entire United States of America. Why would you want to take money out of a State such as Pennsylvania that uses conservation money or Ohio or Wisconsin or Minnesota or Iowa or Missouri, taking money out of those States to send to Texas or Oklahoma or Wyoming or Colorado to help the farmers who had a drought? That doesn't make sense. It seems if you are going to have a disaster assistance package, the whole country ought to pay for it, all of it. When you have an earthquake in Alaska, do we take the money out of one State, just one State, and pay for that--or two States--or do we just take it out of a State that maybe--we take it out of California because they have an earthquake and we send it to Alaska? No. The entire United States of America, all of our people contribute to make sure that anyone who is hurt by an earthquake in Alaska or California or a flood in Iowa gets compensated and gets help. We had a flood in Iowa in 1993 that devastated our State. We didn't take money out of South Dakota or we didn't take out of Missouri or another State, out of what they get. The whole country came to our assistance. As I said, I feel sorry for the people who have been hit by hurricanes, and we should help them, but we ought to do it on a national basis and not try to take it out of one pocket, one part to help another. That is not right. It is not right to discriminate against farmers. One last thing I will say before I yield the floor. We don't take away a community's Federal funds for highways or housing or hospitals to fund civil disaster assistance. In other words, if we have a civil disaster, why should we take the money out of the highway money? If we are going to help Florida out, why don't we take it out of Florida's highway money? Take it out of their housing money? Take it out of their hospital money to pay for their civil disaster? We don't do that. So why should we do it in agriculture, on farmers? Why should we take it out of the farmers' pockets to pay for a disaster? Why don't we take the money out of the highway money going to Florida to pay for the hurricane? Take it out of their hospital money? Take it out of their housing money? We don't do that. We don't do it because it is not the right thing to do. We should not take it from the farm bill either. I realize those of us who represent farmers and farm States, we get hit often because they say farmers get this and that. I want to point out, as I have pointed out time and time again, since we passed the farm bill in 2002 and the President signed it in May of 2002, we have saved the taxpayers of this country over $15 billion in less commodity program spending. I think that is a pretty healthy contribution by our farmers and our ranchers to help reduce the deficit of this country. Now they want to take more money out of agriculture to pay for a disaster. It is wrong. That is why I have offered this resolution which basically says: It is the sense of the Senate that the 108th Congress should provide the necessary funds to make disaster assistance available for all customarily eligible agricultural producers as emergency spending and not funded by cuts to the farmer. It is very simple and straightforward. Madam President, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. HARKIN. Madam President, I don't know if anyone wants any time. I will be glad to yield to my friend from North Dakota.

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

Mr. HARKIN. I do not mind. I thought I had half an hour under the rule. I do not care when I take my half hour. I can take it now or I will take it whenever. It does not make any difference to me.

Mr. HARKIN. I do not have to take it now if the Senator wants to do something else.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, tonight, in just a couple hours, there will be another Presidential debate between our colleague, Senator John Kerry, and President George Bush. The debate tonight will be with questions from audience members. I assume these are rank-and-file citizens of Missouri or maybe Illinois and Iowa. I do not know where they are coming from. It will be interesting to see. The moderator is going to pick and choose the questions that are asked of both President Bush and Senator Kerry. I understand they will cover a broad range of topics, but the basic topic tonight will be on domestic issues. Well, I hope there will be a number of questions asked of President Bush for him to explain why it is that he is so intent on taking away the overtime pay rights of over 6 million American workers. A year and a half ago, his Department of Labor issued proposed regulations to drastically--drastically--change who is eligible for overtime pay in America. After analysis by independent groups, I decided we had to do everything we could to stop these rules from going into effect and hurting the workers of America. So we have had debate on this issue over the last year and a half. The Congress has voted six times--four times in the Senate, twice in the House--each time voting to overturn and to stop these onerous new regulations from going into effect. Six times, the President has not listened to the elected representatives of the American people. Six times he basically said: I don't care what you want; this is what we are going to do. Now, keep in mind, when these proposed regulations came out in February of 2003, they were sort of put out in the middle of the night, so to speak a stealth attack. Not one public hearing was held on these proposed rules--not one. Congress was not involved in shaping or fashioning them. This simply came out of the heads--I wouldn't say the hearts because these are heartless kinds of regulations--but it came out of the heads of some people in the Department of Labor, I guess, and maybe in the White House. We have said time and time again they should not go into effect, but on August 23 of this year those rules went into effect. The new rules took effect on that date because House Republicans have been able to strip my amendment and its House companions in conferences. It goes to conference, they strip it out. Now, I want to be clear. And I want to clear up one misstatement that comes out of the administration's press releases all the time; and that is that somehow I am denying workers the right to get overtime pay because the base pay on which people are exempt from overtime--I should say not exempt from any overtime regulations--starts at about $8,000 and goes up to $23,000 under these new rules. Every time I have offered my amendment, we keep that in there. The base ought to go up. But we say that no person who was eligible for overtime prior to August 23 ought to lose overtime afterwards. They ought to still be eligible for it. That is what the White House has said time and time again. They say: Well, if people got overtime before, they are going to get it afterwards. I say: OK, why not pass my bill? That is all I say. Anybody who got it before ought to get it afterwards. But the White House has resisted that. As a result, employers will no longer have to pay more money for overtime work for millions of American workers. And most of these workers will be women, make no mistake about it. This is going hit women hardest. Why do I say that? Because women are in that class of employees out there who many times are salaried. They work at what might be termed white-collar-type jobs. They work with perhaps information systems. They are inputting data in computers, many times working for small businesses. A lot of times they are working in jobs that are maybe their second job, for example, or they have entered the workforce later in life after their children have grown, and they are working at a job that does not pay a lot, but they are salaried. Well, right now, they might be eligible if they worked over 40 hours a week to get time and a half. But under these new rules, they will be reclassified. They will then be asked to work over 40 hours a week and will not get one dime of overtime pay. As one woman wrote me, who lives in Seattle, WA, she said: When I get home from work, my second job starts. I have to take care of my kids. I get dinner ready. I make sure they get to their afterschool events. Then we have homework. I put them to bed. And I have my laundry to do. But she said: That time with my family and that time at home is my premium time. If I am asked to give up my premium time to work longer, I ought to get at least premium pay for it. I have never heard it said better. Yet that woman will be asked to give up her time with her family, her time with her children, working longer hours, and not get one dime of overtime pay. If overtime pay is free to the employer, it is going to be overused. If employers no longer have to pay more money for overtime work, they will have no incentive to demand longer hours, no incentive to hire more workers. Workers will have less time to spend with their families. A study done by the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University showed that only 20 percent of the workers eligible for overtime worked more than 40 hours a week. In other words, of 20 percent of workers eligible for overtime, only 20 percent worked more than 40 hours a week, but 44 percent of workers who are exempt from overtime pay work overtime, so twice as many. In other words, if the employer doesn't have to pay you overtime, you are twice as likely to work over 40 hours a week than if they have to pay overtime. That is common sense. It stands to reason. When Congress enacted the overtime provisions in the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, Congress did so with the intent that a hard- working America would not leave behind the concept of valuable family time. We believe that workers should be paid extra for the extra hours they work. Time-and-a-half pay accounts for some 25 percent of total income of those who work overtime, and the economic health of too many families is at stake. Congress has voted on this six times on a bipartisan basis to protect these American workers' overtime. Now they want to strip it out again, out of conference. In these tough economic times, why are we taking away families' rights to be fairly compensated in their overtime? During the first 3 years of the Bush administration, the typical household saw their real income fall by more than $1,500. Real wages have fallen while gas prices have gone up. Milk prices have gone up. Health care costs have gone up. More than 4 million people have been thrown into poverty since the beginning of the Bush administration. More than 5 million have joined the ranks of the uninsured. In this kind of economy, why would the President of the United States want to take money out of families' pockets? I hope this will be something that will be talked about tonight in the Presidential debate. I am sure the President will say they are expanding overtime pay because they are raising the base. They are raising the base with one hand, taking it away with the other. It is the old shell game. Yes, a worker who is making $15,000 or $18,000 a year will now be automatically covered by overtime. But guess what the administration did in the rules. They have suggestions to employers on how to get around it, how to get around paying the lowest income workers in America overtime. We have had examples of that. We had an example in The Detroit News: ``Workers Agonize About Overtime Loss.'' Two managers out of 150 at metro Detroit Burger King franchises became eligible for overtime. Rather than make them hourly workers, the company gave them $20 a week raises to maintain their salaried status. They gave them a $20 a week raise so they would just be over that threshold, and they are not eligible for overtime. That means they have a $20 raise, and they to have work 3 or 4 hours' overtime. They are getting minimum wage or below even for working overtime. Two managers out of 150 eligible for overtime. So that is what is happening. The President might say tonight: Well, they raised the base. But they are already telling employers how to beat it. I hope the President will tonight respond and answer to the American people why he is so intent on taking away the right to overtime pay, to time and a half over 40 hours of work. Please, Mr. President, tell the women of America why you are sticking it to them, the working mothers of America, why you are taking away their premium time from their families but not allowing them to make premium time by working overtime. Another issue I hope comes up tonight is the issue of job growth. The job report came out today. The economy created 96,000 jobs last month, less than two-thirds of the amount needed just to keep up with population growth. Only 59,000 were in the private sector, so just slightly over half in the private sector, and the rest were in the public sector. We have lost 1.6 million private sector jobs since President Bush took office. They may say: That is not quite right. There was an 813,000 job increase. Well, that is because of Government employment. The gap between total jobs and private sector jobs accounted for 813,000 jobs in Government employment. That is called socialism. I wonder what this is called now. President Bush is for socialism? We can't get jobs in the private sector. We will put them on the Government payroll. Shades of the Soviet Union. But the private sector jobs are not there. Total manufacturing jobs fell by 18,000 in September, the largest drop since last December. A total of 2.7 million manufacturing jobs have been lost since President Bush took office--the first President since Herbert Hoover to not have created one net new job in 4 years in office. What a record. I hope the President talks about how great that is for our country, that the only increase we are getting is in Government jobs. The unemployment rate is unchanged, 5.4 percent. It was 4.2 percent when the President took office in January of 2001. Eight million Americans were unemployed in September; 2 million more Americans unemployed today than when President Bush took office in January of 2001--a 33-percent increase. That is a terrible way to say it, a 33- percent increase in the number of unemployed in this country since President Bush took office. Let's talk about long-term unemployment. That is longer than 26 weeks. That means you are out of work longer than 6\1/2\ months. Long- term unemployment rose by 83,000 last month. It is now at 1.7 million people. It has increased by 1 million under President Bush. That is long-term unemployment. The long-term unemployed are now 21.8 percent of the unemployed. That share has nearly doubled. This is the economic record. Long-term unemployment more than doubled. In January of 2001, there were 680,000 long-term unemployed. September 2004, there are 1.75 million, a 160-percent increase in long- term unemployed. That is it. I hope that the President will please talk about that tonight and how good this is for America and why things are getting better for America and for American families. As I said, he is the worst President since Herbert Hoover to face the voters, having lost jobs during his tenure. He will finish his term with the worst record since the Great Depression and finish his term having lost private sector jobs. While the economy has created jobs over the last year, the recovery has been modest, with a total of 1.7 million jobs created, which is about 143,000 a month. This is below what is needed to keep up with population growth. A healthy labor market would be creating jobs at a more rapid pace. During the last economic expansion, the economy created 200,000 jobs per month, for a full decade, every year, and 236,000 jobs per month during President Clinton's two terms. I will repeat that. During President Clinton's two terms, the economy created 236,000 jobs per month. During President Bush's tenure, we have had 143,000 jobs created per month. In January 2001, we had 111,560,000 private sector jobs. In September 2004, we had 109,930,000, with 1.6 million lost during that period of time. So when the President says they are creating jobs, yes, they are creating jobs--mostly in the public sector, Government employment, but far fewer than is even needed to keep up with the population growth. The administration has billed its tax cuts as a solution. But its predictions of the impact of the tax cuts have been consistently wrong. In 2001, Congress passed the President's economic plan. Three years later, we still have fewer jobs than existed when the plan became law. In 2003, the administration predicted that passage of that year's tax cut would create 5.5 million jobs by the end of this year, 306,000 jobs per month. That target has only been reached in 2 months, and the total 15-month shortfall is 2.9 million jobs behind the pace predicted by the administration. Job growth is roughly 7 million behind the administration's 2002 prediction of the impact of their economic plan. I know these are big numbers when you talk about 306,000 and 5.5 million. Well, the fact is that has resulted in hitting our families hard. Here is what happened to families. Median household income: In 2000, the median household income was $44,853. Today, it is $43,318. So it is down $1,500. I hope the President tonight talks about how this is good for America, how things are getting better, when family income is coming down. I hope the President will address himself to the huge increase in the cost of natural gas in the Midwest, and what that is going to mean to our farmers, our families, to the elderly who have to heat homes with natural gas, to our manufacturing concerns who use natural gas, and power companies that use natural gas to produce electricity. Yet, household family income is down. The price of natural gas is up, gasoline is up, and oil hit a new high yesterday at $53 a barrel. Great for Halliburton and the oil companies; not too good for our families who have to drive a car to work--maybe drive two cars to work if they have two people working at different times. That is the median household income right there. I hope tonight's debate will be about domestic issues. I hope they talk about the lack of job growth, the cut in median family income, the number of long-term unemployed; and, yes, I hope they talk about overtime pay and what is happening to people who work hard and are now going to see their rights to overtime pay taken away. Those are mostly women. So that is the economy. I want to talk about all of those who are going to be hurt by the rules on overtime. Employees earning between $23,660 and $100,000 a year are going to find themselves with their right to overtime restricted or taken away, including veterans, police, nurses, team leaders, journalists, cooks, financial services, computer workers, and many others--a lot of people. So someone earning as low as $23,661 a year will find that their rights to overtime will be taken away. They will be reclassified. As I pointed out, in Detroit, 2 out of 150 managers at a certain place of business were eligible for overtime--2 out of 150. What happened is the employer realized how to fix it. By raising their salary so it was $23,661, or $23,662--just over the $23,660--guess what. They don't have to pay them overtime anymore. I hope they will talk about that tonight. I hope we will also recognize that there are no excuses for this overtime being taken away. Three career employees of the Department of Labor who worked in this area under Presidents Reagan, the first Bush, Clinton, and this Bush-- so they have worked for various Presidents--all three of them basically said that in every instance where the Department of Labor has made substantive changes to the existing rules, it has weakened the criteria for overtime exemptions, thereby expanding the reach and scope of the exemptions. That means that in every instance where they have made substantive changes to these rules, it has made it easier for employers to deny you the right to overtime pay. So I hope the President again tonight will respond and tell us why he is intent on taking away the right to overtime pay. I also hope they will talk about health care and what happened to health care coverage in this country. We are now up to about 4.5 million more people who have lost health insurance under this President. Somewhere around 45 million to 50 million people in America have no health insurance coverage--none. No health insurance coverage. As we have said, the rate of poverty has gone up in this country. We know that especially the elderly are cutting pills in half and going without medicine to pay their heating bills or their lighting bills or their rent. Well, I happened to listen to the Senator from Utah, my friend Senator Hatch, this morning go on and on. As I said, I like him, but he happens to be wrong on this issue, that's all. I don't know how anyone can stand here with a straight face and say that Medicare doesn't have the right to bargain down prices of drugs. In the Medicare prescription drug bill that we passed, which the President signed into law, there is an express prohibition against Medicare bargaining with the pharmaceutical companies to get a cheaper price. They are prohibited from doing this. The Veterans' Administration is allowed to bargain, and they get great prices. In fact, our veterans get the cheapest drugs anywhere in America through the Veterans' Administration. That is great for our veterans. Why shouldn't Medicare be able to do the same thing? John Kerry has a plan. He has a plan for better health care in America, and the first part of his health care plan is to take away that restriction on Medicare and to allow Medicare--not even to allow Medicare, to insist that Medicare bargain with the pharmaceutical companies to get a cheaper price for drugs for the elderly in this country. Now that would be meaningful prescription drug reform. The second part of the Kerry plan for having better health care for our people is to allow us to have free trade with Canada. One might say we have a free-trade agreement with Canada. Of course, we do. We have NAFTA. It allows free trade with Canada. We can have free trade in cars, clothes, shoes, glasses, paper, and I suppose anything you want to mention, except one item. We do not have free trade with Canada on prescription drugs. Go along the northern border of the United States and people are driving across the border every day to buy cheaper drugs. Sometimes they take a bus from Iowa, go up through Minnesota, buy prescription drugs, and come back. Why don't we have a free-trade agreement with Canada on drugs? Why not allow us to reimport drugs from Canada for our people in this country to get a cheaper price? It is time to do so. The Bush administration will not allow that to happen. For a lot of people in this country who do not have health insurance, they look at us. I have a really good plan. I have a health care plan that allows me to choose doctors and hospitals and covers me wherever I go. Every year I can change my plan. When our kids were little, we had one plan. Now that our kids are grown up and married, we have a different plan. I get to choose from about--I don't know, I didn't check last year--15, 20 different plans. It is a good plan. I have that plan. President Bush is under that plan. Vice President Cheney is under that plan. If it is so good, why don't we let the American people buy into this? Why don't we let them buy into the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan? Senator Kerry says we ought to do that. President Bush says no. It is OK for us, but it is too good for the American people. I think it ought to be good enough for the American people. John Kerry says, yes, he wants to open up the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan to allow the American people to buy in. That would be very meaningful, especially for small businesses and people who work for small business. The fourth part of John Kerry's comprehensive plan to have better health care for America is to allow better tax breaks for small businesses to cover their employees with health care. It is very meaningful to those of us who live in rural States. Most of our people who live in small towns and communities work for small businesses. Small businesses simply cannot afford any longer to cover their employees. John Kerry says we should provide up to a 50-percent tax credit to small businesses and to family farmers to allow them to purchase health care coverage for their employees. President Bush says no. But this is where we need to focus--on our small businesses. That is where most of the people work, and that is where most jobs are created. Yet small businesses simply cannot afford it any longer. John Kerry says, let's provide tax cuts to small businesses to get health care coverage for their employees. The fourth part of John Kerry's comprehensive health care program is to extend and make more comprehensive the SCHIP program; that is the Children's Health Insurance Program. One might say, the President says he is for that. At his convention in New York, President Bush announced a new $1 billion initiative to enroll millions of poor children in two popular Government health programs, but next week the Bush administration plans to return $1.1 billion in children's unspent health funds to the Treasury. A projected shortfall in Federal SCHIP funds reduced health care to more than 200,000 children. There you have it. A President Kerry would expand the SCHIP program and get every kid covered. Let poor families get into the SCHIP program and provide them the wherewithal to do so. Under this administration, fewer and fewer children are being covered under the SCHIP program. Lastly, in his comprehensive plan for health care reform, Senator Kerry has said that we need a real prescription drug benefit for the elderly, not a phony card. And that is what it is, a phony card. That is what the elderly get today, a card. I cannot tell you how many senior citizens have come up to me in Iowa and told me how worthless that card is. They say: I have two or three cards in my billfold or in my purse and some of those are better than the Government card. The card I got with this drug company, or an AARP card--whatever card they have; there are a bunch out there--are better than the Government card. So why should they buy yet another card? Senators were on the floor the other day saying we should not be denigrating; we should not be talking badly about this card for the elderly. We ought to be promoting it. Promoting it? Don't talk to me; talk to the senior citizens. Find out why they are not buying it. They are not buying it just because I got up here and said it is worthless. They know it is worthless. They are telling me it is worthless. But we are supposed to, I guess, be a cheerleader and get them to buy something that is not in their best interest, that is worthless. Senator Kerry says we need a real prescription drug plan for the elderly and not just a phony card. Lastly, I want to talk about education. I hope education also is a part of the debate tonight. The President can probably tout the fact that he got a bipartisan bill through called No Child Left Behind. I supported that bill. I am on the Education Committee. We had a lot of negotiations. I was sitting there, since I am a senior member of that committee, in the final negotiations, and the big holdup was how much money would we put into it. We agreed on a number, and President Bush agreed that in exchange for the States doing these things and the mandates we put on No Child Left Behind, in exchange for that, we would provide the funding necessary to meet these requirements, and we specified how much money that would be. What happened? The first budget year comes up, they get shortchanged. The second budget year comes up, shortchanged again, and once again this year. I believe we are now in the neighborhood of about $27 billion short in education from what we had guaranteed. If I am wrong, I will come back and correct that, but it is something like that. I know it is over 20. The figure 27 sticks in my head. Even if it was $10 billion or $5 billion, the fact is, we put a mandate on our schools. We said we were going to pay for it, and we have reneged. Now, do not take my word for it. I tell people, talk to your teachers. If you do not like that, talk to your principal or your superintendent. Talk to your school board members and see what they say about No Child Left Behind. Most of them will say, look, it is test after test. We can handle that, but we are not getting the supporting mechanisms we need because we do not have the funds to do it. I cannot tell my colleagues how many times it has happened to me in my State of Iowa that I have seen schools where, guess what, they have cut out art classes, they have cut out music classes, they have cut out PE. Why? Because they are pinched. They are strapped. They have to put the money in for No Child Left Behind. Why? Because we did not fund it, one of the largest unfunded mandates ever. President Bush has not asked for the money in his budget. He did not put it in there to fund No Child Left Behind. I think the President should be held accountable for that on education. The second largest unfunded mandate our schools have is special education. We promised 25 years ago that we would pay up to 40 percent of the additional costs of funding special education in America. I think we are now at about 18 percent of funding additional costs for special education. We promised 40 percent, and yet time and again we do not get the funds and we do not get the budget allocation to fund special education. So I hope these will be some of the issues that the President will talk about tonight, that I hope will be involved in the debate because these are the issues that affect families in their daily lives. Lastly, I will take a little bit of time to talk about why I have been involved in slowing down the process in the Senate today. There are a lot of press people who talked to me about that so I thought I might at least take this time to explain why I am doing it. The Senator from Arizona yielded me a couple of minutes to explain why I was doing it, and I have only one simple declarative sentence: I am doing it to protect our farmers. I am doing it to protect the jurisdiction of the Agriculture Committee. The occupant of the Chair is our distinguished chairman. When we pass bills that are multiyear bills, sometimes it takes a lot of debate and discussion and working things out. In the 2002 farm bill, that was true. It took many weeks. I can remember sitting in these conversations on Saturday, Saturday night, and Sunday working it out. These are tough negotiations. Agriculture is very diverse, but I have always believed the Agriculture Committee ought to represent all of agriculture; that we are all in this together. So we hammered out a farm bill and we passed it. There was give-and- take. Now, I did not get everything I wanted. The Senator from Indiana, who was ranking at the time, did not get what he wanted. The House Democrats did not get all they wanted. The House Republicans did not get all they wanted. That is the art of compromise. But I thought we had a pretty good bill. We had one which was a true compromise, and everyone signed off on it. We passed it with big majorities in the Senate and the House, and the President signed it. I was there for the signing. I remember the President talking about how this bill was so strong on conservation. That was one of the reasons he was signing it. Yes, I am proud of the fact that the bill had an 80-percent increase in conservation, everything from the WHIP program, the Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program, to the Waters Resources Program, Wetlands Reserve Program, CRP, Conservation Reserve Program, and a whole host of others, and a new program that we started called the Conservation Security Program, Farmland Protection Program, a lot of conservation programs. So we had a provision dealing with the Conservation Security Program, which was designed to be an uncapped program that entitled every farmer who met certain requirements to be eligible to get payments for protecting soil, water, and air, and being a good farmer. I have long believed that it was not right that we just pay farmers to take land out of production. What about all of those farmers who do produce our food supply and work hard every day, who are good stewards of the land? Should they not have some incentive to take care of the soil, to protect our water, to protect our wildlife? So that is what we hammered out in the Conservation Security Program, an incentive program for farmers, yes, to take better care of the land. It does not require one iota of land taken out of production. It is voluntary. It is not a mandatory program. No farmer has to participate, but if they will do certain things--there is a minimum level, a moderate level, and a higher level, and if they do these things they will get a payment. But they have to agree to do it for between 5 and 10 years by contract, and then they have to meet certain requirements from the Natural Resources Conservation Service. They sign an agreement that they will do certain things to indeed keep soil from running off, make their soil better, better tilled, protect the water, a whole host of things, all kinds of things, because what is considered good conservation practices in my State of Iowa may not be good conservation practices in the States of Mississippi, Colorado, Washington, or Pennsylvania. Different soil, different land, different crops, different ways. So we wanted to make it so it was adaptable to every part of the country; it was not some cookie-cutter approach. Well, everyone touted this as a new approach. It was signed off on by the Agriculture Committee, passed and signed by President Bush. Then what happened was the Department of Agriculture began to drag their feet. In the bill, we gave them 18 months to come up with rules and regulations to get this program implemented. We passed the law and it was signed by the President in May of 2002. So that is almost 2\1/2\ years ago, and the final rules still have not been promulgated by the Department of Agriculture. They put out the proposed rules finally after 2 years. So they have been dragging their feet. I guess they just did that for some reason. We finally got it going and then a couple of years ago for the first time in the history of this Congress we responded to a disaster, a drought, by providing for disaster assistance to hard-hit farmers, but for the first time ever we took it out of agriculture. We made agriculture pay for it. In the 50 years that we have been providing disaster assistance to farmers--or others--it has always been paid for as an emergency spending. Two years ago, for the first time, they took it out of agriculture. I warned at the time that they were reopening the farm bill, changing a program that was agreed upon and passed by an authorizing committee; that they were fundamentally changing the appropriations process--and I am on the Appropriations Committee, as is the occupant of the Chair. I said that they are fundamentally changing it; this is not right to do this. Well, it was an on an Omnibus appropriations bill. The House passed it, went home, the funding of the Government was in it, so we had to pass it. I entered into a colloquy with the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, the chairman of the Agriculture Committee, the Presiding Officer, the Senate majority leader, and Senate minority leader. In that colloquy we stated that we agreed, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee agreed that at the first possible time--I will get the exact language--we would put the program back so that we could assure that it would run as intended by the farm bill for the life of the farm bill, which would take us to 2007. Fine. That is OK. So it was put back. Because there was a lapse of time there, a gap in time, the Department of Agriculture issued some rules on how to implement this program, but they issued rules based upon the fact that it was a capped program and not eligible to every farmer. But the farm bill said it is eligible for every farmer in every State of this country if they meet certain requirements. They said they had to do that because it was capped. I said, Now it is not capped. We changed it back. The Department said, OK, we will have to change the rules to make it go back, and they said that. They said they were going to change it. I know this is a long story, but now it takes us up to today. Once again, we had a disaster. We had two hurricanes, three hurricanes that hit Florida and Georgia and the Carolinas so they are going to provide disaster assistance. I think we should. We always have. How are they going to pay for it? They are going to pay for it as emergency spending. But there is another disaster that has taken place in other States of the country. We have had tornadoes, mud slides, high winds, hail in other agricultural parts of the country. We want those disasters taken care of, too. The administration said: Yes, we will take care of those disasters, but agriculture has to pay for it, and guess what, it is going to come out of conservation. Strange. If you are a citrus farmer in Florida and you have an orange grove and there were tornadoes in this hurricane, if a tornado came through and ripped out your trees--and it did, by the way, in a lot of places--you will now get disaster assistance, crop-loss disaster assistance paid for under the hurricane bill, not taken out of agriculture. But if you are a farmer in Mississippi or Iowa and you had a tornado come through and take out your cotton crop or take out my corn crop, you might get compensated, but, guess what, they are taking it out of your other pocket. They are taking it out of agriculture. Why should our farmers be treated differently than the farmers in Florida, I ask. That is why I have slowed this up today. That is why I wanted to get the attention of the Senate. I have always believed farmers had to be treated the same no matter where they are. That is why this is so bad, what is happening. They are opening up the farm bill again. They are taking it out of conservation again. They say they are going to do it. It may be conservation today. Next year, it might be commodity payments, maybe payment limitations. I have fought on this floor to protect those things. Maybe that is what it is going to be next year. Look out. Once we in agriculture divide ourselves up and we say, No, that's all right, we will take it out of there; we will treat farmers someplace different than in another place. Now we opened the farm bill. Our baseline is going to be down. It is going to take it right out of the baseline of agriculture. I know that is sort of the inside game around here. That means agriculture is taking a hit. What makes this so terrible is that in the last 3 years we, agriculture--I should not say ``we''--the farmers of America saved the taxpayers of this country $15 billion that was allotted for them under the farm bill that they did not have to take. That was $15 billion that went back to the Treasury. You would think we would say: OK, if we saved $15 billion, that is where the disaster assistance ought to come from. We are talking about $3 billion or $2.8 billion. We have already saved $15 billion. But no, they are not going to count that. They are not going to count that. I am sorry to have to say this. We in the Senate passed an amendment to provide for disaster assistance that would be emergency. We did it here, but the House didn't. And the White House, OMB, is insisting, insisting that this $2.8 billion of disaster assistance for our farmers be taken out of agriculture but not the disaster assistance for farmers in Alabama or Georgia or the Carolinas or Florida. Please, someone tell me, what is the difference? Maybe we are just not lucky enough to have the President's brother as our Governor, or your Governor. That is why I am so upset about this. It is just not right. It is not right what they are doing. They are fundamentally changing a program we agreed upon. They are taking it out of agriculture, even after we saved all this money. It is not right. I am going to stand here and I am going to fight. I told them I probably can't win. They have the votes and they have the White House. But I am going to fight for my farmers. I am going to stand here or sit here to the bitter end. If I do not win this time, I will be back. I told the majority leader. Majority leader, I said, I like you, I respect you. He is a fine guy and he has a tough job. But, I said, I have to fight for my farmers. I have to fight for my rural people. I have to fight to make sure they are not discriminated against. I said, Leader, if I get rolled here, I will be back. If we come back in October, I will be back then. I will be back in November, too. I will be back. I will be back. Mr. President, I yield the floor. Jurisdiction

Mr. HARKIN. Then, I ask, as others have before me, unanimous consent to speak as in morning business but that the time keep running on the bill.

Mr. HARKIN. Yes.

Mr. HARKIN. I thank the Presiding Officer.

Mr. HARKIN. I object.

Mr. HARKIN. Parliamentary inquiry, Mr. President. Under the procedure we are under now, the Senator from Iowa has how much time to speak?

Mr. HARKIN. Under the bill?

Mr. HARKIN. Not once until 2 years ago they did it once, and that was corrected. Now they want to do it again. Once was once too many. Now they want to change the underlying structure of the farm bill. I am telling you, it is not right to do so. I thank the Senator from Arizona for giving me the time to explain why I am doing what I am doing. I thank the Senator.

Mr. HARKIN. My plans are to fight for what we in the Agriculture Committee----

Mr. HARKIN. The Senator asked what my plans are. My plans are to protect my farmers.

Mr. HARKIN. I thank the Senator from Arizona. I did not hear what he said.

Mr. HARKIN. I thank the Senator for that kindness.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I object.

Mr. HARKIN. Parliamentary inquiry: Are we not in a quorum call?