Tom Harkin

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. I am pleased to yield to the distinguished majority whip and lead sponsor of this legislation.

Mr. HARKIN. That is correct.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that after adoption of the substitute amendment to S. 510 and now, after the third reading, the Senate then proceed to Calendar No. 74, H.R. 2751; that all after the enacting clause be stricken and the text of S. 510, as amended, be inserted in lieu thereof; that no further amendments or motions be in order; that the bill, as amended, be read a third time, and after the reading of the Budget Committee pay-go letter, the Senate then proceed to vote on the passage of H.R. 2751, as amended; further, that the title amendment, which is at the desk, be considered and agreed to.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote and move to lay that motion upon the table. The motion to lay upon the table was agreed to.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching the final vote on the Food Safety Modernization Act. For the first time in seven decades, the Congress has addressed this issue. It has taken several years to get to this point. We have had involvement from Republicans and Democrats, from the business community, and from the consumers groups. It is widely supported by both the business sector and the consumer groups. We have had good bipartisan support on this bill with Senator Enzi and others on our committee. This is the product of a long effort to reach the compromise we needed to get good legislation through. The vote we are about to have now is on a substitute offered by my friend, the Senator from Oklahoma. This substitute would basically kill all of this work we have done. It eliminates a lot of the provisions we have in this bill, such as the preventive control provisions that I think is one of the most important parts of this bill, to get preventive measures in and to prevent the contamination of food in the first place. It also eliminates the important trace-back provisions that we have in this bill that we have worked on on a bipartisan basis. It would eliminate the important foreign supplier verification provisions which say they have to verify that the food coming into this country is the same as this. I ask Senators to reject the substitute.

Mr. HARKIN. My colleague is correct. The exemptions for small farms and facilities in S. 510 do not in any way circumscribe FDA's existing authority under current laws. As my distinguished colleague has just stated, this existing authority is expressly preserved in the savings clauses in the bill. Over the past 15 years, FDA has relied on a number of provisions in existing law in establishing preventive control, or ``HACCP,'' and other preventive requirements for seafood, eggs, and juice. These authorities include section 402(a)(4) of the Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act, which gives FDA the authority to take action against ``adulterated food'' when that food has been subjected to ``insanitary conditions.'' In adopting these regulations, FDA has also relied on section 701(a) of the food and drug law, which gives it broad authority to issue regulations ``for the efficient enforcement'' of that law, as well as its authority to ``prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases'' under section 361 of the Public Health Service Act.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, one of the most difficult issues I have had to face as manager of S. 510 is the balance between small growers and processors and larger producers and food companies. This is always a tough issue in agriculture. Those of us who work with our food system know that one size does not fit all. It is always hard to get it right. In this case, I know that some of my colleagues think the Tester- sponsored language goes too far to help small growers and processors. I don't think we have, and here is why I say that. There are some very important limitations on the Tester provisions in S. 510. First, small businesses as we define them here are really small--a company that does $500,000 of sales a year is very small. We can't say exactly how much food these small companies sell, but here is a good example that shows how small these eligible companies are: The smallest member of the California League of Food Processors reports between $2.5 and $3 million a year in sales or five times as much as any company eligible under the Tester provisions. Second, many food companies that buy product from eligible producers will tell them: Hey I want you to follow FDA regulations. I want all my suppliers to follow FDA rules. Some may even require their suppliers to do more than FDA requires. That decision is part of a private contractual relationship. This bill does not affect these arrangements. They will continue to exist and will limit the application of any exemptions provided in this bill. Third, processors that want to be exempted will have to document that they meet the exemption. There are two ways to do that. First, they must show they are in compliance with State law or second, they must show that they have completed a food safety plan of their own. Many processors will simply decide that for competitive reasons or lack of capacity they will simply stick with whatever FDA requires. This is another pragmatic limitation on the Tester provisions. Fourth and finally, FDA is specifically authorized to take action and revoke an exemption if it determines that the food presents a public health risk, and FDA can act to prevent an outbreak if needed. This provision creates a ``one-strike-you are out'' exemption: once a farm or food processing facility has lost its exemption, it may never be reinstated. Mr. President, it is not the intent of this legislation to include in the definition of ``facility,'' for purposes of either FFDCA Sec. 415 or for the pending bill, seed production or storage establishments as long as they do not manufacture, process, pack, or hold seed reasonably expected to be used as food or feed. Further, we note that seeds not used as food or feed have historically not been subject to oversight by FDA.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, today with the passage of the Food Safety Modernization Act by this overwhelming vote of 73 to 25, we have taken momentous steps to help strengthen food safety in America. The Food Safety Modernization Act will bring America's food safety system into the 21st century. This bill gives the FDA the authority the agency needs to help protect America from foodborne illnesses. While this bill is a historic step forward in ensuring that our food supply is safe and protecting Americans from foodborne illnesses, we have to now ensure that the FDA has adequate resources to fulfill their profound responsibilities. I look forward to working with my colleagues on the Appropriations Committee and the entire Senate to ensure that they have the necessary resources to fulfill the provisions of this legislation. As the primary cosponsors of the bill, Senators Durbin and Gregg deserve a great deal of thanks for their outstanding leadership. I asked Senator Durbin when he started working on this bill. He said back in the House 18 years ago. So sometimes it takes a long time to get these things done. But this is the first time in 70 years we have ever had a major revision of our food safety laws. Senator Gregg has also worked at least a dozen years, that I know of, on this bill in his time in the Senate. I would also like to thank my colleagues, Senator Enzi, the ranking member of the committee, former chairman and ranking member of the committee, for his help and also Senator Burr for working hard on the legislation and getting it where it is today. Finally, I thank my friend, Senator Dodd, for his tireless efforts. The Senate will certainly miss his leadership on this and so many other important issues. Additionally, I thank members of our staffs who helped to make this possible, and let me just--I am going to read their names, but let me say at the outset, while many of us were perhaps not around during Thanksgiving week or perhaps even the week after the elections, I can tell you the staffs were hard at work day after day, sometimes late in the evenings, sometimes on weekends, to help get this bill together. These staff people deserve so many thanks from not only me but from everyone involved with this legislation. From Senator Durbin's staff: Albert Sanders, Anne Wall, and Dena Morris; from Senator Enzi's staff: Chuck Clapton, Keith Flanagan, Travis Jordan, Frank Macchiarola, and Amy Muhlberg; Senator Dodd's staff: Anna Staton and Tamar Haro; Senator Gregg's staff has worked on this bill from the beginning: Elizabeth Wroe; Senator Burr's staff: Anna Abram and Margaret Brooks; Senator Reed's staff: Carolyn Gluck and Kasey Gillette; and from my staff: Kathleen Laird, Tom Kraus, Bill McConagha, Mark Halverson, Jenelle Krishnamoorthy, Pam Smith, and Dan Smith. All of them are heroes and heroines in my book. They really put forth supreme effort to get this bill to us today so we could have this overwhelming vote of approval. I yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask if I could have 15 minutes.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Hawaii for yielding me 15 minutes of our time. I challenge anyone--even my friend from Colorado who just spoke, a new Member of this body--I challenge anyone to identify any other part of the Federal budget that is more transparent, more open, more subject to scrutiny, more accessible to the media and the public than congressionally directed funding or earmarks. Every Member who requests an earmark in an appropriations bill must post his or her request online at least 30 days before the Appropriations Committee considers the bill. Every Member who requests an earmark must certify that he or she does not have a pecuniary interest in those requests. Each and every earmark that comes before the Senate is listed in the committee report for all to see, and if you log on to the committee Web site, you can find a link to every single request any Member has made. It is all out there in the open. I remind people of this because one of the misleading arguments against congressionally directed earmarks is that they are supposedly done in secret, hidden from the public eye. At one time, that may have been true to some extent but today, thanks to reforms that were implemented by Democrats, by a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate in 2007, there is more sunshine on congressionally directed spending than on any other spending decisions in the entire Federal Government. There is more sunshine on congressionally directed funding than on any other Federal spending in the entire Federal Government. Why do I emphasize that? Let's consider how the executive branch--the President--directs spending to States and local communities. Make no mistake about it, the executive branch earmarks funding, but there is very little sunshine when it comes to those decisions. They are very hidden. When a Federal agency announces that a facility should be built in Nebraska rather than Texas or Alabama or whether a defense contract should go to a company in Colorado or Arizona rather than Rhode Island or Ohio, there may be no accountability to voters for those decisions. The employees of Federal agencies are civil servants. They are good people, but they are not elected. They do not meet with constituents. They cannot possibly understand the needs of local communities as well as those who stand for election. Most important, no one knows when those civil servants get a phone call from their bosses, higher up, telling them, for example, to jiggle, to rig a grant competition for political reasons. Does anyone doubt that is done? Every single year it is done. Frankly, Senators and Congressmen do it. What Senator worth his or her salt or any Member of the House fighting for their constituency doesn't call up the Secretary of Transportation, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Secretary of Defense? We all do it. We all do it to protect our own constituents. And if you happen to be on the right committee--for public works, maybe, or for education or for the myriad of things the Federal Government does--those Secretaries tend to pay attention, and they especially pay attention if they are in the same party you are or they may pay attention if they want your vote for something else. An example: A few years ago during the Bush administration, I asked the inspector general to examine a program in the Employment and Training Administration called High-Growth Jobs Initiative. It sounds great, doesn't it--High-Growth Jobs Initiative. This was an executive branch program. The IG reported that, of the 157 grants awarded under the program, 134 had been awarded without any competition. Noncompetitive awards accounted for 87 percent of the total funding, and the inspector general found many serious lapses in the award process. For example, a failure to explain why there was no competition; the lack of any documentation regarding potential conflicts of interest. So was it any surprise when we found out that some of these noncompetitive grants went to organizations that supported President Bush's reelection campaign or was this just a coincidence? Let's not be naive. This happens. I may have pointed out President Bush because it happened to be an investigation I asked for. It happens under Democratic Presidents too. If this amendment passes, if the Coburn amendment passes, there will still be earmarks. There will be earmarks, but only the executive branch will be able to do it. They will have the power to designate where those earmarks go, and that flies in the face of the clear intent of the Constitution. Article 1 of the Constitution expressly gives the power of the purse to the Congress. We are all familiar with the principle of checks and balances. One way the Constitution puts a check on the executive branch is by giving this branch, the legislative branch, the final say on spending. I have said so many times that the President of the United States cannot spend one dime that we do not authorize him to, and we can take it all back if we want. Oh, they have set up an executive branch but only because Congress gives that power to the President. The Constitution gives Congress the final say on spending. I realize the Constitution may seem like ancient history to some people. I am sorry to say it may seem like ancient history to some Members of this body. So let me paint a picture of a world where only the executive branch can decide to direct Federal spending. Let me paint this picture. Let's imagine the Coburn amendment passes and a future President wants Congress to pass a bill. It can be a Democratic President or it can be a Republican President. It does not matter. The vote on the bill is going to be close. The President calls Senator Jones and says: Senator, I would like your support on this bill. Senator Jones says: I am sorry, Mr. President, I have thought hard about it. I am not going to be able to support that bill. Oh, there is probably a little pause on the phone, and the President says: You know, Senator, I know that replacing that bridge in your capital city is real important to you. It would be a real shame if your State missed out when the executive branch is setting its priorities for next year. Now, Senator Jones, would you like to reconsider how you are going to vote on that bill? That is executive branch earmarking. Again, as I said, it makes no difference whether the President is a Republican or Democrat. It is a matter of respecting the Constitution and preserving the constitutional prerogatives of the legislative branch. Some people say: Well, Harkin, why do you fight so hard for these earmarks? As Senator Udall says, it is \1/2\ percent of total Federal spending. I fight so hard because the Constitution gives that power to the legislative branch. We should protect the constitutional prerogatives of the legislative branch, not just willy-nilly give them to any President of the United States, which is what the Coburn amendment does. Read the amendment carefully. See how it defines ``earmarks.'' It applies only to ``a provision or report language included primarily at the request of a Senator or Member of the House of Representatives.'' There is nothing in the Coburn amendment to prohibit any earmarks by the President. They can earmark anything, and they will because they always do. They will earmark, and guess what. Senators--Senators--will start going to the President and saying: Mr. President, can you, please, I need that bridge. I need that flood control project. We just had a disaster, Mr. President. Well, Senator, I will think about it when we set our priorities next year. Well, now, Senator, how are you going to vote on my priorities? Do you want to be in that position? I do not want to be in that position. I want to be in the position where Congress fulfills its Constitutional prerogative. So under the Coburn amendment, if Congress requests, it is an earmark; if the President requests, it is not an earmark. How does that make sense? How does that make sense? Well, here is an example again of the double standard. The fiscal year 2011 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education appropriations bill that the Senate will probably vote on in December includes funding for national education groups such as Teach for America, Reading is Fundamental, Reach Out and Read, the National Writing Project, and many others. These are successful, proven programs with significant bipartisan support. But under the definition of the Coburn amendment, all are earmarks and none would be funded. They would all be eliminated. But under the terms of the Coburn amendment, if the President wanted to fund those programs, no problem. They would not be considered earmarks at all and they could receive funding, as long as the President wanted to do it. Again, I ask, what sense does that make? My State of Iowa had terrible floods in 2008--a lot of damage. Louisiana and Texas have had destructive hurricanes on a regular basis. In the wake of these disasters, typically the Corps of Engineers comes up with a plan to mitigate the damage from future possible disasters. For example, the Corps is now working to improve a flood prevention program in Cedar Rapids, IA, which was devastated by the worst flood in the history of Iowa in 2008. If the Coburn amendment passes, whatever the Corps plan comes up with will be final, even if local officials strongly disagree with that. Under the terms of the Coburn amendment, a strong case may be made that any legislative action by Members of Congress to modify the Corps plan would be an earmark--an earmark. Representing my constituents, it would take an extraordinary two-thirds vote in the Senate to change the Corps of Engineers plan--not a majority, not 60 percent but two-thirds of the Senate. Again, I again ask you, what sense does that make? How are we fighting for our constituents when the President decides it; we cannot. We have local constituents who say: We have better ideas and plans on what to do. The Corps says no. Well, that is the end of it, unless the President tells the Corps what to do. I do not want to lose my ability to intervene effectively for local or State officials when this kind of issue arises, and I do not think Senators from Texas, Louisiana or any other State want to lose their ability to stand for the best interests of their State. I cannot imagine any Senator who would forfeit this important constitutional prerogative, give up, give up your constitutional prerogative to the President, so you would not be able to fight for your State and your constituents. Is that what you are going to tell them? Proponents of this amendment say: Forget about article 1 of the Constitution. We have to do whatever it takes to cut the deficit. The only way to do that is to ban earmarks. This is grossly misleading. Yes, we do need to cut the deficit. Banning earmarks will not do anything to help. Congressionally funded mandates, as I said, are less than one-half of 1 percent of total Federal spending. As one observer noted: The best way to lose weight is to shave. My friend, Senator Udall, said reforms circumvent the budget process. No, it does not. Nothing we do on appropriations at all circumvents the budget process. He said: When you are in a hole, stop digging. Well, sure, we can stop digging. We can stop the earmarks here. We are just going to shift them to the President. That is all. That is all that is going to happen. Lastly, I had to laugh when I read this quote from Representative Michele Bachmann in the House. This was in Congressional Quarterly Today. She is founder of the House Tea Party Caucus, one of several lawmakers who have pledged not to seek earmarks. But she told the Minneapolis Star Tribune she thinks the word ``earmark'' should not apply to infrastructure projects. ``I don't believe that building roads and bridges and interchanges should be considered an earmark.'' Oh, so she gets to decide what is an earmark. She wants no earmarks except for what she wants as an earmark. That is it. Congressman Mica of Florida said: ``There are some bills that require some legislative language to direct the funds, otherwise you're just writing a blank check to the administration.'' That is a Republican Congressman from Florida. Congressionally directed spending is congressionally directed spending whether it is a highway or a hospital, whether it is in Wyoming or Tennessee. I, for one, am proud of the directed funding that I have been able to secure on behalf of my State and for other States that I have worked hard for or other entities such as Teach for America. It does not necessarily help Iowa but it helps a lot of States. These fundings have created jobs, trained nurses, built roads, and, as the distinguished chairman said, one time I remember when Pete Domenici put that money in there for the Human Genome Project, it led to the establishment of the Human Genome Institute and a complete mapping and sequencing of the human gene. Had that money not been directed, it never would have happened, I say to my chairman. So a lot of times Congressmen, Senators have good ideas on what to do to direct some of this funding. I think we ought to be proud of that. As long as the sunshine is on it, it is out in the open, everybody knows where it goes, everybody knows who has requested it, to me, this is the constitutional prerogative of the Senate and the House, and we should not--should not--give it up to any President. I yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, in about 35 minutes we are going to be voting on cloture on the food safety modernization bill, a bill that brings us forward almost 70 years. Seven decades it has been since we have modernized or changed our food inspection and safety system in America. So we are taking that step tonight. Hopefully, we will have a final vote on it by tomorrow. I just want to take a few minutes now before that vote to again lay out why this bill is so important and why we need to invoke cloture tonight so we can have a final vote on this bill tomorrow. First of all, the statistics are that Americans are getting sick and they are dying because of foodborne illnesses. You would think in this day with modernization and such we would not have this. Madam President, 325,000 Americans every year are hospitalized and over 5,000 die. Many of these are kids. I have met them with a group called Safe Tables Our Priority. I have met some of these kids. They will be damaged for life, I say to my friend from Illinois, Senator Durbin, who has been such a leader on this bill. In fact, I daresay we would not be here were it not for Senator Durbin's leadership in getting this bill started, how many years ago I do not know.

Mr. HARKIN. I would be glad to yield.

Mr. HARKIN. Well, I thank my friend from Illinois, but he is being way too generous. Again, I recognize the instigators of this, the ones who started this ball rolling, and Senator Durbin is the one who got us started many years ago. And it has taken us many years to put this together. But that is why we have such a good bipartisan bill. We have worked on this. We reported this out of our committee a year ago without one dissenting vote, Republican or Democrat. Since that time, we have been working to get other people, not on the committee, obviously, onboard to get the way paved so we could have a bill that would be broadly supported. This bill is very broadly supported, both by the industry and by the consumers. It is one of the few bills where, as a matter of fact, we have a wide range of consumer and industry support, everything from the Snack Food Association, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, Consumers Union, Center for Science in the Public Interest, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, U.S. Public Interest Research Group. Anytime you get the Chamber of Commerce and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group on the same bill, you know you have a bill that has broad support. This bill does. Again, I thank my colleague, Senator Enzi from Wyoming, our ranking member on our committee, for all of his help in getting this bill through and working on it diligently over the past year. I would be remiss if I did not also thank Senator Gregg and Senator Burr for being heavily involved in this bill and working through all of the compromises a bill like this entails. The Food Safety Modernization Act enhances our food safety system in three critical ways. It improves the prevention of food safety problems. I always think this is key. We have to get in front of this, not to just sort of catch the food once it is contaminated and try to get it done, but to try to prevent it in the beginning. We had success in the meat and poultry industry some years ago with a preventive plan to look at where pathogens could enter the food supply and stop it there. We have applied the lessons we have learned from those last 20, almost 25 years now of that to this, so now we are going to be able to look to have a better system of preventing food safety problems and foodborne pathogens. It improves the detection or response to foodborne illness outbreaks--detect it earlier, stop it earlier, and have a better response to what is happening. In other words, for example, in the bill we provide that retailers have to in some way notify customers if a food has been recalled. That could be a grocery store putting a sign on the shelf, for example, saying: This food has been recalled, maybe putting out a notice in their supplements that they put out in order to advise consumers they may have purchased a food that has been recalled. Third, it enhances our Nation's food defense capabilities. Right now, how many people know that less than 2 percent--about 1.5 percent--of all of the food imported into America is ever inspected? That is 1.5 percent. Well, this is going to increase those inspections. It is also going to increase the defense capabilities in case we have a problem. For example, we have stronger trace-back authority so we can get to the source of where this happened in a better way than we ever have been able to do in the past. As I mentioned earlier, it provides the FDA with mandatory recall authority. A lot of people are surprised to know--consumers are surprised to find out that if there is a foodborne illness or outbreak, the Food and Drug Administration has no authority to even recall the food. One may say: Well, the companies have the authority to recall it--and they do because, frankly, they don't want to get sued, obviously. So why have a mandatory recall? Well, you might have bad actors. You might have a company that is located offshore. Maybe they have imported some bad food into this country, and maybe they think they can just take a few bucks and run. The FDA would not have mandatory recall authority. Now they would have that to protect our consumers. As I said, it also requires the retailer to notify consumers if they sold food that has been contaminated. Now, again, the opponents of this bill have put a lot of rumors out there. Since I have lived with this bill for so long, I am surprised people would be saying things like this. One myth I read is that this bill would outlaw home gardens--you couldn't even have a home garden. I think that comes from Glenn Beck, if I am not mistaken, but it is factually incorrect. It said it would do away with family farms. In fact, the bill states explicitly that the produce standards ``shall not apply to produce that is produced by an individual for personal consumption.'' There is also an exemption for small farmers, small facilities, as they sell their products at roadside stands, farmers markets, places such as those. Then there is another rumor that anyone who grows any food will now come under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security. I heard this myth that Homeland Security agents now will be tromping through your farms and your pastures and your tomato plants--again, absolutely, totally, factually wrong. I am proud to say this legislation comprehensively modernizes our food safety system and does so without injury to farms and small processors; otherwise, we wouldn't have all of the industry groups on board if we were adding undue hardship on our processors and farmers. Our food safety system will continue to fail Americans unless we modernize our food safety laws and regulations. We should give the FDA the authority it needs to cope with the growing, varied risks that threaten today's more abundant food supply. We need to act, and we need to act now. We need to invoke cloture on this bill in just a little over half an hour. How much time do I have remaining?

Mr. HARKIN. Madam President, I know my friend, Senator Coburn, was on the floor earlier talking about this bill. He has a substitute he is going to offer. I have worked with Senator Coburn over the months. I know we have a basic philosophical difference about the role of government in this area. Be that as it may, we have worked hard, as I said, on bill compromises between people who do have differences of opinion. Again, as with any bill, there may be some things in here that I don't particularly like that I think we ought to do differently, but in the spirit of compromise, we don't get our way all the time around here; we have to give and take to get something done. That is what this bill is. So I say to my friend, Senator Coburn, I know he has some problems with it, but, quite frankly, his substitute--and I wish to say this very forthrightly--his substitute kills our bill in its entirety. It kills it in its entirety. In its place, what my friend from Oklahoma would offer would be a few studies to help improve collaboration between FDA and USDA. There is weaker language on preventive contamination, which I think is so important--to prevent in the first place. The substitute will eliminate all of our prevention control provisions. It would eliminate the provisions that enhance coordination between State and Federal laboratories. My friend from Oklahoma--and maybe later on we will get into this and debate it a little bit--my friend has always been saying we need better coordination. He is right. I said that earlier. He is absolutely right. We need better coordination between the FDA and USDA and other agencies, and that is being done. It is being done in this bill. But at the same time, his substitute would eliminate the provisions in our bill that enhance the coordination between State and Federal laboratories, which is exactly what we need to do--have State and Federal coordination. His substitute would eliminate the trace-back provisions that are so important to find out where the foodborne pathogen might be originating from. It would eliminate the important foreign supplier verification provisions we put in this bill--that if you are importing food from a foreign country, you have to verify that the food has met the same kinds of inspection standards we have in our own country. The substitute of my friend from Oklahoma would eliminate that provision. It would eliminate the requirement that we increase our inspection frequencies in this country, and it would eliminate the FDA's ability to recall food--the mandatory recall provision we have-- even when life-threatening contamination is detected. So for all of those reasons, I hope the substitute will not be adopted. As I said, I know my friend has some feelings about this bill. I understand that. But many of the things Senator Coburn brought up earlier and in good faith I worked with him and his staff on--some of his ideas, we appropriated in this bill. Senator Coburn--I say this as a friend--has a keen eye a lot of times for things that are duplicative or things that maybe sound good but don't do what you think they are going to do. He has a keen eye. I give him credit for that. So a lot of those things we have looked at that in the past he suggested, and we have adopted those things and put them in the bill. Lastly, one of Senator Coburn's objections is that the bill is not paid for. Again, I think that is misguided. He knows my feelings on this issue. This is an authorization bill. Any funding that would come for this would have to be appropriated in the future. There would be absolutely no deficit increase at all. This is from the Congressional Budget Office. From our bill, we asked them what would it do to increase the deficit. As my colleagues can see, from 2010 to 2020, there is a zero increase in the deficit because of our bill. So, again, while I understand Senator Coburn has problems with the bill, I think his substitute really wipes out everything we have done on a bipartisan basis. Senator Enzi has worked hard, as well as Senator Gregg, Senator Burr, and others. We have worked with industry and consumer groups for over a year now to make sure we had a good bill, a comprehensive bill--one that was a true compromise between competing interests but one that gets the job done. And what is the job? To help reduce the number of foodborne illnesses in this country. I say in closing, is this bill going to stop everybody from getting sick while eating food? No, no. It will not be 100 percent. Will it be better than what we have? You bet. It is going to prevent a lot of foodborne illnesses that otherwise would happen in this country under the present system. Just think about this: We are operating under a food inspection safety system in this country that was adopted 70 years ago. Think of how our food supply--the growing, the processing, and the shipping-- have all changed in that 70 years. We go to the grocery store in the wintertime and we buy fresh raspberries from Chile or blueberries from Argentina. We go to the store in the summertime and we buy produce made in this country from all over, commingled and shipped together. A lot of times, you don't know where it is coming from. There are so many different things that have happened over the last 70 years. Yet our inspection system has not kept up with how our food is produced, how it is processed, how it is shipped and stored, and we have not updated what we should do with imported foods. We are getting more and more imported foods into this country. So for all of those reasons, I hope we will have a good, strong vote, a good bipartisan vote on the cloture issue and that the other measures that are coming up--we have an amendment on taxes--if either the Johanns amendment or the Baucus amendment is adopted, it will kill this bill. It will kill the bill. I happen to be one of those who think we have to change the 1099 provisions for small businesses but not on this bill. We will do that before the end of the year, but if it is adopted on this bill, it will kill our food safety bill because the House will blue-slip it because the Constitution says bills of revenue have to originate in the House, not in the Senate; likewise, the earmark provision Senator Coburn will be offering--we will have a good debate on that too--again, if that is adopted, it will kill the bill. There is just no doubt about it. So we worked hard for many years to get to this point. We have a good bipartisan bill. We have a bill we believe the House will pass and send on to the President to keep our people more safe. So I hope this body will reject any extraneous amendments. Madam President, I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.

Mr. HARKIN

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

Mr. HARKIN

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

Mr. HARKIN. Madam President, in a very short while here--literally, in about 40 minutes--the time will be expired and we will be voting on the motion to proceed to the Food Safety Modernization Act. The Food Safety Modernization Act. One can wonder why did we have to go through a cloture motion and a vote on that the other day. We got 74 votes on it. But it looks as though now we are going to have to have another vote on the motion to proceed after we have had 74 votes. A lot of effort has gone into this bill by a lot of people-- Republicans and Democrats--and, Lord knows, our staff. This bill has been germinating and being put together over the course of at least the last 3 or 4 years anyway, and probably a little before that when we started. I know Senator Durbin has been working on this for several years, as have Senator Gregg, Senator Dodd, and others. So this has all been put together over a period of several years. But I would say over the last 4 years, diligent work has gone into this bill, and certainly again in the last year. It was 1 year ago, November 18--1 year ago today--that this bill was reported out of our HELP Committee, which I chair. It was reported out without one dissenting vote. It is a bill that is supported by so many different groups and so many different people. Here is a list of the people supporting this bill. We worked hard to get a broad base of support from both industry and consumers. As I have said, this may be one of the only bills I have seen around here that has the support not only of the Food Marketing Institute and the Grocery Manufacturers Institute and the Center for Science in the Public Interest. So we have both consumer groups and the business groups supporting this--the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. When have those two ever been together on a bill? And the Snack Food Association and the Pew Charitable Trusts. I mean, we have wide support for this. The industry wants this. They want it because they know our food safety laws have not been upgraded in seven decades--since 1938, before I was born. Think about how our food has changed in our society and how we produce it and how we process it and how we ship it, not to mention the amount of foreign foods coming into this country. Consumers want it because we know a lot of people are getting sick. I will hasten to add that we do have one of the safest food supplies in the world. But that is not good enough, because we know how many people get ill every year. Thousands of people are contaminated by food poisoning every year--E. coli, salmonella. I have met with families here from Safe Tables Our Priority. I have met with families of kids who are damaged for life because they happened to eat the wrong thing-- they ate some spinach or a tomato or fish, shellfish, or something such as that. These kids are maimed for life. We have worked very hard to put this bill together. As I said, 1 year ago it came out of our committee without one dissenting vote. But there were still some problems out there, and so we worked very hard since last November to try to reach an agreement on this bill. And we have a broad agreement. As I said, we had 74 votes on the floor of the Senate the other day. One of my colleagues has raised a lot of issues on this bill. My good friend from Oklahoma, Senator Coburn, is on our committee, and he has raised a lot of concerns about this bill. I have met with him several times and we have had good discussions. I know he said some nice things about me on the floor earlier, and I appreciate that, and I would repay those in kind; that Senator Coburn is a very thoughtful person and he focuses on these things. He reads these bills and he gets involved. This is not something off the seat of his pants. He has focused on this. Some of the suggestions he made I thought were valid. We looked through them and we incorporated a lot of the suggestions made by my friend from Oklahoma into this bill. We were also willing to go to the consumers and say, look, this is okay. None of us--not any one Senator around here--has infinite wisdom. Only one person has infinite wisdom. No Senators have infinite wisdom. I can't say I have ever written a bill in its entirety that got through here without having anything changed, because we don't know everything. So we rely upon one another in good faith to suggest changes, to point out things maybe we didn't see due to our blinders. We help each other put together bills that have broad support and broad consensus so that we move ahead as a society. To me, that is the way I think we ought to operate. So when other people were making suggestions--and I didn't mean to single out Senator Coburn, because others too had made suggestions--we tried to work with them to incorporate certain provisions in the bill. Senator Tester, for example, on our side had suggestions about exempting certain small producers. That raised the consternation of many on the consumer side. It also raised the consternation of many on the business side. A lot of the bigger businesses said: Well, if we have to do this, you can get just as sick from eating things from small producers too. So we had to work through that. But we did work through it. It took us several months but we worked through and we got an agreement. Quite frankly, we had good input from the Republican side--from Senator Gregg, Senator Enzi, and Senator Burr. I mention those individuals because they have been very integral to this process on our committee. We have worked through that and we got an amendment that satisfies the small producers and the consumers and the business community and the large producers. Not easy. Not easy. But compromises a lot of times aren't very easy. It is a compromise that we worked through. We worked through Senator Tester's amendment too. That took a long time. We were not able to reach an agreement on Senator Feinstein's amendment. We agreed not to incorporate it because we could not reach an agreement on it--on the BPA amendment, even though it is very important to her and very important to a lot of people. We have tried to get something together that would have this broad consensus and yet move us forward in making our food safer, and I believe this bill does that. This bill does this in four ways: It improves the prevention of food safety problems. That is key. For many years, I served as chair or ranking member on the Agriculture Committee--35 years, both here and in the House. Many years ago, we came up with a program of prevention. Rather than solving the problem later, the question was: How do we prevent pathogens from entering the meat supply? We came up with this proposal of finding the access points. Where are the points in the process where contaminants and pathogens can come in? Let us have the industry come up with plans on how to prevent that on their own. That has worked. Does it work 100 percent every single time? No. But nothing is ever perfect. I would hasten to add that even if we pass this bill, will it prevent every single foodborne illness forever and ever? Probably not. Probably not. But it is going to be a lot better than what we have right now, a lot better, because we are going to look at prevention--preventing the pathogens from entrance in the first place. So that is one way we do it. Secondly, it improves the response to detection of foodborne illness outbreaks when they do occur. In other words, we will be able to detect it earlier and respond earlier than we have been able to do in the past. It enhances our Nation's food defense capabilities. Every year, 76 million Americans get sick from foodborne illnesses--76 million. So the stakes are too high not to act. These are the critical ways in which we have moved the ball forward. Again, I know my friend from Oklahoma has said to me many times that it will not solve all your problems. I understand that. It is not perfect. But there is an old saying: Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. This is a good bill. It is going to help keep our people from getting sick. Everyone? No. I would never stand here and say this is going to solve every single foodborne illness problem in America. But it is sure going to do a lot more than we have been doing. Again, I want to make it clear that if anyone says we are trampling on the rights of the minority, I ask you to consider all we have done. We have a bipartisan team in place, we have modified the bill dozens of times to get the right balance, we have all made tremendous compromises--Democrats and Republicans, consumers and business. As I said, we agreed to compromises just lately. The mandatory inspection schedule, which is so important to the public health community, has been reduced tenfold--tenfold--since that bill was reported out of our committee unanimously 1 year ago. We accepted language, as I said, which exempted the small facilities from these new requirements--the Tester amendment. We agreed to changes in the section on traceback, which limits the application of the new rule to farms and restaurants. There is no registration fee to help pay for the bill. The routine access to records the FDA wanted, we don't do that either. That is a short list. I can go on and on. I think one of my friends on the other side said we have bent over backward, and we have. We wanted to reach a point where we could move ahead with the bill, even offering to let some amendments be offered and we would vote on those amendments. But what has happened now, I understand, is that the Senator from Oklahoma, my friend, has now said he wanted to offer an amendment dealing with earmarks. Look, earmarks is an issue. It is an issue that the next Congress, I would say--probably the next Congress--is going to have to address. But it should be done in the spirit of debate. It should be done in the spirit so committees that have relevant jurisdiction can look at this, make recommendations. We should not do it in the heat of passion, right now. We just came off of a very heated election. There have been a lot of changes made. I understand that. We live with that. That is fine. But now is not the time to start throwing up red-hot issues that were in the campaign. Let's let things cool down a little bit and approach an issue such as earmarks thoughtfully, with due diligence and with due debate. This bill that is going to protect our people from getting sick and our kids from being injured for lifetimes because they eat contaminated peanut butter--this is not the bill to deal with something dealing with earmarks. I hope my friend from Oklahoma will relent. There will be plenty of time and plenty of opportunities when we come back in January with a new Congress, I say to my colleague from Oklahoma, to bring up the matter of earmarks and have it debated fully and have some kind of resolution by both the Senate and the House on that issue--but not right now. This is not the time to do it, not in the heat of coming off the campaign. Let's keep our eye on the ball. This is a food safety bill. We have come so close. We have an agreement from the House that what we pass here, the bill we have put together, that we reached all these compromises on--we have an agreement from the House, if we pass it and we do get significant--we get bipartisan support, that the House would take it and pass it and send it right to the President. What more could you ask for than that? We get to decide what the President actually signs into law. Without going into every little thing we have done here, let me just mention a few. Senator Coburn was concerned about the authorization level, so we offered in good faith to reduce it by 50 percent. That is kind of a compromise--we just reduced the authorization by 50 percent on the grants. We offered to modify the sections on performance standards and surveillance. It is completely done. We completely struck section 510. We called for increasing the hiring of FDA staff. In our bill, we called for increasing staff to conduct certain inspections. My friend objected to that. In the spirit of compromise, we struck it. We said no, we are not going to call for increasing hiring of field staff. Mr. Coburn had some concerns--rightfully so, by the way--about improving coordination between FDA and USDA, so we offered to add his language that would force them to get together and not duplicate efforts, and on the customs side, too, so we would eliminate any kind of duplication of inspections. We put that in the bill. We offered to do all this and to put it in the bill, and we did, and that will be in our amendment that we offer. We will in good faith put those things in our bill. But then I am told that now we are probably going to have to file cloture, fill the tree, and do all that stuff which I was hoping we would not have to do. That is not the way to do business here. I don't like doing it that way. That is why we worked so hard to try to reach these agreements. But I guess we are going to be forced to do that. I hope that is not so. I also heard that maybe someone might want to read the bill. That is 4 hours of reading the bill. That bill has been out here for a year. If anybody wanted to read it, they could have read it by now. But that is just another delaying tactic we really do not need. Again, on this issue of saying we cannot vote on this bill unless we will vote on earmarks, I say earmarks is an important issue. I am happy to have the debate and to have a vote on that but not now. This is a food safety bill. We have it ready to go. We have all our compromises in place. This is not the time and this is not the bill on which to debate the whole issue of earmarks. You might say, why are we so willing to compromise, why am I so passionate on this bill? Because people are dying. We have Thanksgiving coming up. People will be gathered around with their families--except for all those people in homeless shelters. Mr. President, 950,000 children in America who go to elementary, middle, and high school will not have a home to go to this Thanksgiving because they are living in homeless shelters. Think about that. They are living in cars and homeless shelters. They are being shunted around--950,000. Am I going to stand here and say that if we pass this bill and get it to the President, that is going to keep any one of them from getting sick on what they might eat on Thanksgiving Day? I am not here to say that. But what this bill will do is send a strong signal that we are going to take the steps necessary in the coming months and years to upgrade our food safety system so that the chance, the likelihood of them ever getting sick from eating contaminated food is going to be greatly decreased. Surely we can at least send that hopeful message out to our families before Thanksgiving. Surely we could do that and not get bollixed up around here in politics and political debate. I know of no politics on this bill. I know of no politics. I mean Democrat, Republican, left, right, liberal, conservative--I don't know of anything like that. There is not. I do know that this issue of earmarks, regardless of the substantive issue, is a political issue too. They may have substantive reasons, but there is also a lot of politics hanging around that. Let's take the bill that has no politics, knows neither left nor right, conservative, liberal, Democrat, or Republican. It has nothing to do with earmarks or what we ever do with earmarks or anything else. It has to do with the safety and welfare of our American families, of our kids. I am just asking people to be reasonable. There is a time and place for political debate, even here on the Senate floor. We may say it does not happen, but we know it does. There is a time and place for that. That will happen--not now, not on this bill. We have come too far. We are too close. We have too many compromises that we made that are so widely supported. I am afraid that if we lose this, all the good work that has gone in in the last year, the last 2 years, the last 4 years putting this together, it is going to be very hard to put it back together again. So people will continue to roll the dice when they buy food. Maybe it is safe and maybe it is not. We will continue to see more things happen like what happened to Kayla Boner, Monroe, IA, age 14. On October 22, 2007, she turned 14 and passed her learner's permit. The next day, she stayed home. She had a foodborne illness due to E. coli contamination. She was admitted to the Paella, IA, Community Hospital. Her symptoms worsened. She didn't respond to antibiotics, and within a week her kidneys began to fail. Kayla was transferred to Blank Children's Hospital for dialysis, but her condition continued to deteriorate. She suffered a seizure and began to have heart problems. A few days later, Kayla's brain activity stopped, and her parents made the painful decision to take their beautiful daughter off life support. For Kyle Allgood--spinach. His family is going to have an empty seat at their Thanksgiving table this year. Kyle, a playful 2-year-old, fell ill after eating bagged spinach contaminated by a deadly strain of E. coli. They thought it was flu. He began to cry from excruciating abdominal pain. He was flown all the way to a Salt Lake City hospital. His kidneys failed, he had a heart attack, and he died--from eating bagged spinach. Stephanie Bartilucci's family is also going to have an empty seat at their Thanksgiving table this year--killed by listeria, eating lettuce. She was 30 weeks pregnant, Stephanie was. She felt that something was wrong. When she went for an ultrasound, it showed that the baby was not moving. She had contractions, and eventually her heart began to beat dangerously fast and she had to undergo an emergency C-section. When she awoke, she found that her baby boy had bleeding in his brain and couldn't breathe on his own. He was intubated and brain dead. Stephanie soon discovered she had been suffering from a bacterial infection from eating contaminated lettuce. The bacteria was so deadly that she became septic and almost lost her own life. Her newborn baby, Michael, died in her arms that night. There are also families who have had loved ones survive foodborne illnesses, but their lives will never be the same, such as Rylee Gustafson and her family. On Rylee's ninth birthday, she began to complain of stomach pain after eating E. coli-contaminated spinach. Within 72 hours, she had been admitted to UCSF Children's Hospital. Her kidneys began to fail, and dialysis treatments were started. In addition to kidney failure, she experienced hallucinations and temporary loss of vision, developed high blood pressure and diabetes, and had fluid buildup in her lungs and around her heart. On the 10th day of hospitalization, Rylee's condition had deteriorated to the point where the doctors believed it necessary to prepare her family that she might not pull through. Rylee spent 35 days in the hospital and will have to endure the memories of that traumatic time for the rest of her life. The long- term effects of her illness are currently unknown. How many Americans will have to die, how many of these kids will become sick before we fulfill our responsibility to modernize our woefully outdated food safety system? How many families will have to endure a tragic loss before we pass this legislation? One more tragedy is one too many. I urge my colleagues, as they think about their holiday plans and their preparations, to take a moment to think about families who have had their holidays disrupted by contaminated food. Five thousand people die every year in this country because of contaminated food. Among them are many children. As they spend the day with their loved ones preparing Thanksgiving banquets, the last thing people want is to be jeopardized by the threat of food contamination. Yet many families are haunted by this. It is unacceptable. It is past time we do something. We have come too far. We have reached compromises. We have the support of many sectors of society. Again, if we pass this bill, will it ensure that no kid like Rylee will ever get sick again? I can't make that promise. Or that no one will ever die? I can't make that promise. But I can promise this: With the passage of this bill, putting it into law, the chances there will be another Rylee Gustafson will be diminished greatly. Let's not get this caught up in politics. Let's get the politics out of this. Let's vote on the bill. Let's get it through. Let's go home. Let Senators go home for Thanksgiving grateful that we have done a good thing, that we have done something good for our country, and that we didn't let it get all boxed up in politics. Isn't that the least we can do for the country on this Thanksgiving week? I yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN. Madam President, I thank my friend and colleague from Illinois, Senator Durbin. He has been the leader on this issue for several years. We have been working on this bill for a number of years. It is Senator Durbin who has led the charge on this going back literally several years. We have come so close. We have made all the compromises. We have consumer groups, the Chamber of Commerce, U.S. PIRG. We never get those people to agree on anything, and they all agree on this bill. I thank Senator Durbin for all his great leadership. Hope springs eternal, and I still hope we will get the votes to pass this and keep the politics out of it. I wish to correct something I said earlier. Earlier today I had met with Senator Coburn, and we had a number of things he wanted that I said I would try to put in the amendment on which we will be voting. In good faith, I said I would do that. But then, of course, we had to send it out to various offices to get Senators to sign off on it. We couldn't get Republican Senators to sign off on it. So I wish to correct the record. The changes I had mentioned earlier that I was willing to put in the bill for Senator Coburn were not objected to by anybody on our side. It was objected to by Republicans and not Democrats. It is not in the bill. These were changes I was willing to make to accommodate the Senator from Oklahoma.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Texas for yielding. I wish to thank Senator Durbin for all the work he has done on food safety for so many years. He has been a leader. He has prompted us and prodded us to get to this point, and we have a good bipartisan bill. I wish to take a few moments to talk about it before the vote that will be coming up in the next hour. The aim of the Food Safety Modernization Act, as it is called, is very simply to bring our Nation's antiquated and increasingly inadequate inspection service into the 21st century. This bill takes a comprehensive approach to reforming the current system. I am pleased to report that this bill is a product of strong bipartisan collaboration on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Again, I wish to particularly thank Senator Durbin and Senator Gregg who have worked together over many years to produce this excellent bill. I also wish to thank our ranking member, Senator Enzi, for his leadership in helping to bring this bill to the floor, as well as to my good friend Senator Dodd who has been working on this bill also from the beginning and adding his expertise, especially on food allergies. I also thank Senator Burr, who has been personally involved in this entire process. Senators often speak about the importance of addressing kitchen table issues here in the Senate--the practical, everyday concerns of working Americans and their families. Well, food safety is a kitchen table issue and it couldn't be more urgent or overdue. It is shocking to think that the last comprehensive overhaul of our food safety system was in 1938, more than seven decades ago. Think about how our food system has changed in those 70 years. On the whole, Americans enjoy safe and wholesome food. We know that. But the problem is that ``on the whole'' is not good enough any longer. As my colleagues can see from our first chart, they will see that recent foodborne illnesses have been wide in scope and have had a devastating impact on public health. When people get sick from eating bagged spinach, we have a problem. When kids take their peanut butter sandwiches to school and they get sick from it and go to the hospital, we have a problem. We had 90 deaths and 690 reported cases in 46 States. We have found salmonella in tomatoes, in peppers, and even in cookie dough. When families eat cookie dough and they are getting E. coli, we have a problem. Recently, of course, we had the salmonella outbreak in eggs. So it is widespread. It is not just in bagged spinach or eggs, it is in peanut butter, cantaloupes, tomatoes. It is widespread. So we know we have a real problem. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that foodborne illnesses cause an estimated 76 million illnesses a year; 325 Americans every year are hospitalized because of foodborne illnesses; and 5,000 Americans die every year due to a foodborne illness. These are not my figures. These figures are from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. According to a Georgetown University study, the cost to our society is about $152 billion a year in medical expenses, lost productivity, and disability. So the numbers are staggering, not only the number of people who get sick, but the number of people who die and the cost to our society. I checked in my own State of Iowa, and the cost alone in Iowa--we have over 800,000 cases every year. Each Iowan has to spend about $1,800 in annual health-related expenses, and about $1.5 billion in total related costs. My colleagues can look at their States and see the impact. So these are intolerable, but somehow we tolerate them. No longer can we do that. Our current regulatory system is broken. It does not adequately protect Americans from serious widespread foodborne illnesses. Our meals have grown more complex with more varied ingredients and more diverse methods of preparation and shipping. By the time raw agricultural products find a way to our dinner plates, multiple intermediate steps and processes have taken place. Food ingredients travel thousands of miles or, as Senator Durbin said, from other countries to factories here and then to our tables. They are intermingled and mixed along the way. Yet, despite all of these changes, our food safety laws have not changed in 70 years. What we need to do for starters is improve processes to prevent the contamination of foods and methods to provide safe foods to consumers. To achieve this, more testing and better methods of tracking food can be utilized and verified that the processes are working. Here are some interesting figures. Thirty years ago, we had 70,000 food processors in this country. The FDA made 35,000 visits a year. So we had 70,000 food processors and we made 35,000 visits a year. Today, a full decade into the 21st century, we have 150,000 food processors-- over twice as many--but today FDA inspectors make 6,700 visits each year, one-fifth as many as they did 30 years ago, with twice as many plants. So is it any surprise we are getting more and more foodborne illnesses throughout this country? Referencing what Senator Durbin said earlier, more and more of our food is coming from other countries. All we are saying in our bill is you have to adopt the same kind of food safety processes and prevention methods that we have in this country to be able to ship your food in. I don't think that is unreasonable, to say that their processes and their safety procedures have to be at least the same as ours or as adequate as ours. As this chart shows, our bill overhauls our food safety system in four critical ways. First is prevention. We have had some success in our Agriculture Committee in the past on what is called a program of finding out where are the points where contamination can come in and then address those points in a preventive manner. Well, we are now kind of extending that beyond meat and poultry to all food to get the prevention in place. We improve the detection and response to foodborne illness outbreaks with better detection services and better response times. We have a mandatory recall in here that the Department has never had, ever. We enhance the U.S. food defense capabilities, and we increase the FDA resources in order to take care of this. This bill today will dramatically increase FDA inspections at all food facilities. It will give FDA the following new authorities: It will require all food facilities to have, as I said, preventive plans in place, and the FDA can have access to those plans. So they have to have preventive plans that the FDA gets access to. We have better access to records in case of a food emergency to try to find out what happened. It requires, as Senator Durbin said, importers to verify the safety of imported food. It strengthens our surveillance systems. It requires the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to establish a pilot project to test and evaluate new methods for rapidly tracking foods in the event of a foodborne illness outbreak. As I said, it gives the FDA the authority to order a mandatory recall of food. A lot of people don't know this: If there is an outbreak of illness because of foodborne diseases, pathogens, FDA does not have the authority to recall that food. You might say that the companies do that. Well, they do. Most of them see it in their best economic interest to do that. But you might have fly-by-night operators out there that will take the money and run. You might have some foreign-based companies--and I don't mean to pick on them--that are offshore and they may have some food in this country that has caused foodborne illnesses, and they may not want to recall it. We cannot go after them. The FDA doesn't have the authority to recall that food. This bill would give them that authority. This is a bipartisan bill, strongly supported by consumer groups and industry. I have letters from the Grocery Manufacturers Association, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Restaurant Association, Pew Charitable Trusts, Consumers Union, Center for Science in the Public Interest, and Trust for America's Health, to name a few. I think it is a rarity when I can say both the Chamber of Commerce and the Center for Science in the Public Interest are on the same page. That is true here. I have several letters, and I ask unanimous consent that they be printed in the Record.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I have said many times that to say that food safety in this country is a patchwork is giving it too much credit. Food safety has too often become a hit-or-miss gamble, with parents obliged to kind of roll the dice when it comes to the safety of their kids' food. It is frightening and unacceptable. It is past time to modernize our food safety laws and regulations--70 years past time. We need to give FDA the resources and authority it needs to cope with a growing problem that threatens today a more abundant and diverse food supply. We need to act now. I urge my colleagues to join the bipartisan sponsors to pass this important legislation and vote for cloture this afternoon on the motion to proceed. Hopefully, we can get on the bill and pass it as soon as possible, so that the families of America will have more assurance that the food they eat, no matter what the source, or from where it comes, has more safety procedures attached to it, and so that we have a new process for prevention in place for all facilities in this country and in foreign countries, and so we can raise the bar and say to our families that you can have more assurance in the future that the food you buy, whether it is the fresh fruits you buy in the middle of winter, shipped from Chile, Argentina, or Mexico, or Guatemala, or the fresh fruits you get in the summertime from California, Washington State, and Canada, or the produce, the lettuce, the bagged spinach, or whatever it might be, will be more safe for you and your family. That is what this is all about--protecting our families and making sure our food safety laws are adequate for the 21st century and not the 18th century. I yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN

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

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Joel Murray, Kia Hamadanchy, Caitlin DuBois, and Krista Maier of my staff be granted floor privileges for the duration of today's session.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, the day after tomorrow, on Wednesday, we are going to have three cloture votes. These cloture motions were filed before we broke in October. Those will be the first three votes of our returning this fall. Those three cloture votes are, of course, motions to proceed--a motion to proceed on an energy bill, a motion to proceed on the paycheck fairness bill, and a motion to proceed on the food safety bill. Mr. President, the food safety bill came out of my committee, the HELP Committee, on November 18 of last year. We have been working for a year to get this up. It has strong bipartisan support. We tried to get it up before we broke in October, but there were objections on the Republican side, and we were not able to move forward even though we had been working--Senator Enzi and I--on this along with Senators Gregg and Burr on the Republican side, and Senator Durbin, I, and others on the Democratic side to work it out. I believe we are there. This bill has strong support from the consumer groups, from the business and industry groups, and it has strong bipartisan support. I hope we will be able to get a successful vote on the motion to proceed to that bill. I will have more to say about that later in the week, on Wednesday specifically. Today I wish to confine my remarks to the other two cloture votes, the Energy bill and the one on the Paycheck Fairness Act. On November 9, a bipartisan group of us from the Senate-- four of us--sent a letter to the majority leader, Senator Reid, about this bill, the Energy bill. We are going to be voting on the motion to proceed to this bill on Wednesday. Basically, what this letter--which is bipartisan--said to Leader Reid was that we need to move forward on energy legislation. We all recognize that. But there is a major omission in this bill. What is missing from the bill is any mention of biofuels and what biofuels can contribute to our energy independence in this country. At the outset, first of all, I ask unanimous consent that this letter be printed at this point in the Record.

Mr. HARKIN. Again, what is missing is biofuels. While I will certainly vote for the motion to proceed because I think we should proceed to it, major changes need to be made in this bill before it can earn my support on final passage. Let me talk about what those changes are. First of all, I think it is very clear that we have to wean ourselves off of spending more and more of our taxpayers' dollars, consumer dollars, on imported oil. I think President Bush said that, and President Obama has said that, and it is not a partisan issue. It is a national security issue dealing very much with our economic security in this country. What is missing from the bill is a focus--any focus at all--on the one thing that over the last, say, 20 years has decreased our dependence on foreign oil; that is, the use of biofuels for transportation. Again, there have been a lot of alternatives proposed: natural gas, hydrogen, electric vehicles--all of which will be pursued in the future. But, quite frankly, the only thing right now and in the foreseeable future, the next 10, 15 years that will do anything to decrease our dependence on foreign oil is biofuels. There has been a remarkable success story with biofuels in this country. This chart shows what we have done--it shows production increasing from 1998 up until about 2010. We had a huge increase in the use of biofuels, so we are up to about 11 billion or 12 billion gallons a year. Under the renewable fuels standard 2--the mandate we passed in 2007--that is projected to go up to 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022. That is in the law--36 billion gallons by 2022. So, again, this is what is going to replace imported oil. We are well on our way to doing that. However, right now biofuels are facing significant market limitations. Well, first of all, about the only thing that can be used is 10 percent ethanol blends with gasoline--E10--although the EPA just recently came out with a new standard where we will be able to use E15--or 15 percent ethanol--in model cars 2007 and higher. It is thought that maybe sometime next year EPA will come out with another standard that will allow as much as 20 percent ethanol. These are all well and good, but, again, there are a couple of things that need to be done. First of all, let's keep in mind that converting to use of biofuels is much quicker and much easier, much more cost effective than using natural gas. For example, to use E85 or any other blend of biofuels at a pump just takes a different kind of pump. But you, as the driver of the car, would simply drive up, pick up the handle, put the fuel in your gas tank, just as you put in gasoline today. But for natural gas, there would have to be a big pressurized storage tank. That natural gas would have to then be transferred to your vehicle tank, a very strong tank in your car, and there would have to be some kind of nozzle to transfer that pressurized fuel. It wouldn't just be putting gasoline in a vehicle. So a whole new infrastructure would have to be built to accomplish this. But no new infrastructure needs to be built to put biofuels in your car. So it is much easier and much more rapid. Now, a couple of things I have already said about the infrastructure, but let me talk a little about two things. The first is the ethanol tax credit. Right now it is at 45 cents a gallon. There is a lot of talk that when it expires this year it shouldn't be renewed because it costs $5.9 billion a year for this tax credit for ethanol. You might say: Maybe we shouldn't be spending that. Well, studies by McKinsey and others show that ethanol reduces gasoline prices--estimates vary, but conservative estimate is 17 cents a gallon. So that savings of 17 cents a gallon saves consumers in America $24 billion a year--$24 billion a year. So it is not a net cost to taxpayers but a real savings of four to five times as much as the cost in the tax credit. Secondly, on jobs. Everyone is talking about jobs. We have to have more jobs in this country. Well, each 1 billion gallons of biofuels generates anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 jobs--a broad range. So if we go from 13 billion gallons today to 36 billion gallons in 2022, that would generate over 400,000 permanent jobs--400,000 permanent jobs. That is not to mention the number of construction jobs that would be needed during the building of the facilities. Now, two other things about market problems. Right now, we have a problem in terms of the number of cars that can be flex-fuel. Every car that General Motors makes in Brazil is flexible fuel. Every car Ford makes in Brazil is flexible fuel. Every car Honda makes in Brazil is flexible fuel. They can burn anything from gasoline to 85 percent ethanol--E85. So why aren't they doing it here? The cost is minimal. The second thing is to get blender pumps--pumps at gas stations--that can take ethanol and blend with gasoline at any mixture you want and then can be put in that flex-fuel car. So we need two things: We need more flex-fuel cars, and we need more blender pumps. Very low cost, very easy to install. Senator Lugar and I have repeatedly introduced legislation to accomplish this, and that ought to be a real part of this Energy bill we are bringing up a motion to proceed to on Wednesday. Lastly, let me get to the issue of net energy. This is a red herring that comes up all the time. People say it takes more energy to produce ethanol than we get out of it. We have been hearing this for about 30 years, and it is simply not true. It is like the old Will Rogers saying: It is not what we don't know that hurts us, it is what we know that ain't so. And what we seem to know that isn't so is that it takes more energy to produce ethanol than we get out of it. That is factually incorrect. Take gasoline for example. Think about gasoline in terms of net energy payback. For every unit of energy going in, how much do we get out? For gasoline, it is .813. In other words, we get less energy out of the gasoline than we have used to drill for the oil, pump the oil, transport the oil, refine the oil, get the gasoline, and pipe the gasoline. All that takes energy. That plus the energy in the resource means the net energy payback for gasoline is at about .813. For ethanol it is 1.42. Now why is that? Why would we get almost half, again, as much as energy from a unit of ethanol than we put into it? Very simple. The energy that is in the biofuels comes from the Sun when it is growing, and that is free. That doesn't cost anything. This figure also takes into account the energy used to make the fertilizer, the energy in the diesel fuel for the equipment, the energy used in harvesting, and the energy in conversion and transportation. That is all figured into this, and we still get 1.42 units of energy for every unit of energy going into ethanol. Now, that is just the ethanol. We know when we take the ethanol out of certain biofuels--say corn--there is something called distillers dried grain left over which we can feed to the livestock. If we take that into account, and allocate some of the input energy to those byproducts, then we get over two times the energy output for every unit of energy we put into ethanol. But I will not go there. I am just talking about using the ethanol that we would put into a car where we would get a net payback. So, again, we have heard for the last 30 years about how ethanol takes more energy than we get out of it, and that just isn't so. So, as I say, Mr. President, on Wednesday, the motion to proceed to the Energy bill, that is fine. I am going to support that. But I want to make it clear there have to be major changes in the bill before I can support it, and one of the major changes is that we need to make sure we have a strong biofuels section in that bill. The second issue that is coming up on Wednesday that I want to discuss is the Paycheck Fairness Act. Again, this is something I and a lot of others have been working on for a long time. I say the real leaders on this have been Senator Mikulski and Senator Dodd. They have led the charge on this for a long time. In 1963 we passed the Equal Pay Act, which said a woman had to be paid the same as a man for the same job. In other words, if you had the same job, same job description, you couldn't have any pay differential. That went into effect in 1963. However, all of these years later, right now, a woman earns 77 cents on the dollar compared to what the man makes. There is a differential even if we talk about different jobs. And why is that? Well, it is because, quite frankly, this wage gap between men and women basically has been ignored lately, and we have built in a kind of infrastructure that lends itself to women being sort of shortchanged. Studies done by the Academy of Management Perspectives in 2007 tried to explain the difference as to why women are making only 77 cents on the dollar compared to what a man makes. Race accounts for 2.4 percent--that is interesting--whether they were a member of a union--organized labor--experience, and then the industry category or what industry you were in might explain the difference. For example, the construction industry would be more heavily dominated by men than women. Then the occupational category--the occupational category itself. I have always said truckdrivers tend to be men not women. So the occupational category, that explains a lot of the differential. The point is that 41.1 percent was unexplained. It could not explain why there was a difference between what a woman makes and what a man makes. What is the difference? Well, quite frankly, the difference is the gender. The gender gap is what it is. No other thing, nothing else explains it other than that. The other thing we have to understand is that today two-thirds of mothers are major contributors to the family income. Almost 40 percent are the primary breadwinners. Think about that: 4 out of 10 mothers are the primary breadwinners for their families, and 24 percent are cobreadwinners. In other words, the husband and wife are both working together. About 36 or 37 percent are other factors. In other words, they may be a third or something like that because of maybe part-time work or other things. The fact is, that is not what Congress intended when we passed the Fair Pay Act back in 1963. We wanted to close that gap. Yet 47 years later we still have this gap. So the Paycheck Fairness Act would strengthen the penalties for discrimination. It would give women the tools they need to identify and confront unfair treatment. It would fund education programs designed for women and girls to support and empower them. It would increase training, research, and education to help the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission respond to wage discrimination claims more effectively. Again, these are steps that are meant to make the Equal Pay Act of 1963 more meaningful. We had a lot of bills in the past on civil rights, but it wasn't until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that we actually put teeth in it and made those previous laws something that meant something. So, Mr. President, we can't afford to kick the can down the road any longer on the Paycheck Fairness Act. On the heels of the Paycheck Fairness Act is what I call the Fair Pay Act. I have been introducing this bill every year since 1996. In every session of Congress since 1996 I have introduced the bill. It is basically to understand the gap that occurs--this gap here--in this occupational category. You see, there are a lot of women who work at jobs that require as much education and training as a man's job, but it is in a different category. For example, millions of female-dominated jobs--such as social workers, Head Start teachers, childcare workers, nurses, nurse assistants, long-term care assistants in our long-term care facilities--are equivalent in skills, effort, responsibility, and working conditions to similar jobs dominated by men, but they pay a lot less. Again, this is inexcusable, and that is why I have introduced this Fair Pay Act in every session of Congress since 1996. The Fair Pay Act would require companies to publish their job categories and their pay scales. It wouldn't require a company to say what each person is getting paid, it would just say they have to publish their pay scales and their job categories. That way people would know what their contemporaries are making, or at least a range of what they are making. I asked Lilly Ledbetter when she appeared before our committee a couple of years ago if the Fair Pay Act had been in existence when she was discriminated against would she have been in a better position. She said yes; she would have known then that she was being unfairly paid less than what her contemporaries were. So, again, that is why we have to move ahead on the Fair Pay Act. We can't forget that there are millions of women who work very hard--they care for our elderly, they care for our kids, they teach our kids, in many cases they are daycare workers, nurse assistants, and they do extremely important work. What would we do without them? But because they are categorized as women's jobs, they are paid a lot less. For example, take the difference between a truckdriver and a nurse. They both require about the same amount of skills, education and training and physical ability--about the same amount. Yet a truck driver is making much more than a nurse makes. Why is that? We tend to think of truckdrivers as big burly men but, you know, with power steering and power brakes and some other machinery, it does not require a lot of muscular effort anymore. But a nurse, who has to turn patients over--that requires physical effort also. That is one example of the disparity we have in our society. We have to end this categorization that certain jobs are women's jobs and therefore we can pay them less. I daresay a truckdriver is an important part of our society. You make no bones about it. But so is a long-term care assistant taking care of our grandparents, or someone on an Alzheimer's unit, or a person who is taking care of our kids in the dawn of their life when they are in daycare centers. They do important work, vitally important work. They should not be discriminated against any longer. I hope we will move forward on these two bills. As I said, the third bill is the food safety bill. I am hoping we will move forward on that also and that we can finish that bill by the end of the week. We reported this bill unanimously out of our HELP Committee November 18 of last year. There was not one ``no'' vote against it. Frankly, I daresay if we can bring the bill out on the floor--I am just wagering--I bet we get 90 votes. But there is a small group on the Republican side that is basically filibustering the bill. I am hopeful in good faith, working with Senator Enzi, Senator Burr, Senator Gregg, and others on our side, we can break this logjam and we can get the food safety bill through this week. It is so vitally important. As I said, it has broad bipartisan support. We worked hard to keep it that way. We have industry support and consumer groups support. Certainly it is vitally important to the health and safety of our country. Our food safety laws have not been upgraded in 30 years. Think about the changes that have taken place in the way we grow food and ship food and prepare it compared to what it was 30 years ago. Again, I am hopeful we will be able to bring that up and pass it, not only the motion to proceed but the bill itself, sometime this week. I will have more to say about that. I yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. I did respond that the bill of rights applies to all plans.