Orrin Hatch

Mr. HATCH

Mr. HATCH. I grant the Senator 1 more minute.

Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. HATCH. I yield to the Senator from Virginia.

Mr. HATCH. On your own time.

Mr. HATCH. Let me ask the question on my time. I would like the answer on the Senator's time. As to the number of circuit court of appeals judges, No. 1, who was in charge of the Senate when Abe Fortas was defeated by a filibuster? No. 2, were any of those circuit court nominees defeated by filibuster, or were they all confirmed?

Mr. HATCH. That is right.

Mr. HATCH. May I reclaim my time?

Mr. HATCH. If the Senator has questions, I will be happy to take them. In the case of President Clinton, yes, in the first 2 years it was 86 percent. Yes, Joe Biden was chairman at that time. Yes, the Republicans cooperated to make sure those circuit court nominees went through. In the first 2 years of George W. Bush, the Democrats were in control of the committee. We cooperated all we could. That is the best we could get done. I think those statistics still stand up very strongly. What we are seeing is a slowdown in the confirmation of Federal judges--a systematic and calculated effort to block the nominees of the President of this country from the Federal bench. It is time to stop it. It is time to reform the system, to de-escalate. The first step, of course, is to vote on Mr. Estrada's confirmation. But there is much more that we can do to ensure that no other judicial nominee repeats this experience. I urge my colleagues to join me in my efforts to put an end to partisan politics in the confirmation process. I have to say, both sides have not been right in this process in the past years. I am not trying to just find fault there, but one fault I can find: Never in the history of this country has there been a filibuster succeed against a circuit court of appeals nominee. To argue that he has not provided enough documentation or enough answers when they refused to meet with him, refused to submit written questions, when they had one of the longest hearings on record for a circuit court of appeals nominee, when they have a massive amount of documents, not only all the arguments he made before the Supreme Court but his briefs as well and a tremendous, almost 300-page record of proceedings before the committee, it certainly makes my point. To come here and say that we now have to have privileged records on a fishing expedition that doesn't name anything specifically seems to me to fly in the face of what is right and proper. As I understand it, we will go back and forth. I yield the floor.

Mr. HATCH. Let me put it this way: If we had not gone through--

Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I have listened to the distinguished majority leader, and I have been very interested in what he has had to say. The fact is, in spite of what he has said, there has never been a filibuster that has been successful against a circuit court of appeals nominee--never--in the history of the Senate. During the time President Clinton was President of the United States, I was chairman of the committee for 6 years. I admit there were some on our side who wanted to filibuster some of his nominees. I worked very hard and diligently to make sure no filibuster could succeed. As a matter of fact, I don't think there was a serious, true filibuster at any time against any of the Clinton nominees. I suppose people can have their own viewpoint, but the fact is that we helped to make sure no filibuster would succeed. We on this side made sure--the leadership on this side, including myself as leader of the Judiciary Committee--that no filibuster would succeed. In fact, there is only one filibuster in the history of the country that has succeeded, and that was against Justice Fortas, back in 1968. I do not agree with that. I think it was the wrong thing then. It is the wrong thing now. It is really the big issue we are talking about today. With regard to the request for additional information from Mr. Estrada and the unfortunate claim that he has not cooperated with the other side, look at the transcript--almost 300 pages long. It is one of the longest hearings on a circuit court of appeals nominee in history. Just look at the transcript. He answered question after question after question. Then every Democrat on the committee was given an opportunity to submit written questions. Only two did. The others didn't avail themselves of that opportunity. They called that hearing a very fair hearing. It was conducted by them. It could have gone on longer. They could have gone on another day if they had wanted to, or more than 1 day, more than 2 days. They didn't do it. The reason they didn't is that they thought they would never call him up anyway. Unfortunately for them, they lost the election and today the Republicans are in control and he has been called to the floor. Once called to the floor, he deserves an up-or-down vote under our laws. They are saying that, in spite of an almost 9-hour committee hearing, in spite of having all of his briefs and his oral arguments before the Supreme Court in 15 cases, in spite of the fact that he has the unanimously well qualified highest recommendation of their gold standard, the American Bar Association, in spite of the fact that they have numerous other documents and records and have documented his cases, they are saying they do not know enough about Mr. Estrada so they have to go into the highly privileged matters concerning recommendations for appeals, certiorari, and amicus curiae matters, some of the most privileged documents in the history of the country, in the Solicitor General's Office, in spite of the fact that seven living former Solicitors General have said that should never be allowed. In each of the cases that the distinguished majority leader has cited where some documents have been given, these documents were given pursuant to specific requests for documents. In this case, we have the generalized request of a fishing expedition into virtually every document he ever worked on at the Solicitor General's Office. No one has ever allowed a fishing expedition into these privileged documents of the Justice Department, let alone the Solicitor General's Office. I join my colleagues here to voice grave concern over what appears to me to be a system in serious danger of breaking. I am talking about the system by which the Senate exercises its constitutional obligation to provide advice and consent on judicial nominees. At the outset of my remarks, let me take a moment to set straight the proper role of the Senate in the confirmation of judicial nominees, starting with the text of the Constitution. In its enumeration of presidential powers, the Constitution specifies that the confirmation of judges begins and ends with the President. The Senate has the intermediary role of providing advice and consent. Here is the precise language of Article II, Section 2: The President . . . shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint . . . Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law. There is no question that the Constitution squarely places the appointment power in the hands of the President. As Alexander Hamilton explained in The Federalist No. 66: It will be the Office of the President to nominate, and, with the advice and consent of the Senate, to appoint. There will, of course, be no exertion of choice on the part of the Senate. They may defeat one choice of the Executive, and oblige him to make another; but they cannot themselves choose--they can only ratify or reject the choice he may have made. It is significant that the Constitution outlines the Senate's role in the appointments process in the enumeration of presidential powers in Article II, rather than in the enumeration of congressional powers in Article I. This choice suggests that the Senate was intended to play a more limited role in the confirmation of Federal judges. Hamilton's discussion of the Appointments Clause in The Federalist No. 76 supports this reading. Hamilton believed that the President, acting alone, would be the better choice for making nominations, as he would be less vulnerable to personal considerations and political negotiations than the Senate and more inclined, as the sole decision maker, to select nominees who would reflect well on the presidency. The Senate's role, by comparison, would be to act as a powerful check on ``unfit'' nominees by the President. As he put it, [Senate confirmation] would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity. This is a far cry from efforts we've seen over the past couple of years to inject ideology into the nominations process, and to force nominees to disclose their personal opinions on hot-button and divisive policy issues like abortion, gun control, and affirmative action which undoubtedly will come before the courts. Historically, deliberation by the Senate could be quite short, especially when compared to today's practice. Take, for example, the 1862 nomination and confirmation of Samuel F. Miller to the United States Supreme Court. He was nominated, confirmed, and commissioned all on the same day! The Senate formally deliberated on his nomination for only 30 minutes before confirming him. His experience was not the exception. Confirmations on the same day, or within a few days, of the nomination were the norm well into the 20th century. Contrast the Estrada nomination. He waited nearly a year and a half for his confirmation hearing, which lasted for hours. His nomination is now in its fifth week of debate on the Senate floor, nearly 2 years after the President nominated him. Clearly, this is a far cry from the role for the Senate that the Framers contemplated. What was enumerated in the Constitution as advice and consent has in practice evolved to negotiation and cooperation in the best cases, and delay and obstruction in the worst cases--like that of Mr. Estrada. The Estrada nomination illustrates what is wrong with our current system of confirming judicial nominees. Despite a bipartisan majority of Senators who stand ready to vote on his nomination, a vocal minority of Senators is precluding the Senate from exercising its advice and consent duty. This is tyranny of the minority, and its is unfair. It is unfair to the nominee, who must put his life on hold while he hangs in endless limbo, wondering whether he will be confirmed. It is unfair to the judiciary, our co-equal branch of government, which needs its vacancies filled. It is unfair to our President, who has a justified expectation that the Senate will give his nominees an up-or- down vote. And it is unfair to the majority of Senators who are prepared to vote on this nomination. The filibuster of Mr. Estrada's nomination also represents a new low in the annuals of judicial confirmations. If Mr. Estrada is not confirmed, he will be the first lower court judicial nominee defeated through a filibuster. More broadly, he will be the first judicial nominee, period, defeated through a party-line filibuster, since the filibuster of the Fortas nomination for Chief Justice was supported by Democrats and Republicans alike. This bipartisan opposition was apparently well grounded, since Justice Fortas ultimately resigned from the Supreme Court amid allegations of ethical misconduct. Of course, no such allegations of misconduct surround Mr. Estrada-- only pure partisan politics can be blamed for the obstruction of a vote on his nomination. Let me take a moment to illustrate. What does it take? There are so many Republican efforts to confirm Miguel Estrada that the nomination is in the fifth week of debate on the Senate floor. There is no end in sight. Seventeen attempts for unanimous consent to end the debate and have the vote were all rejected by our colleagues on the other side. The White House offer for Mr. Estrada to answer written questions was rejected by all but one Democratic Senator--all but one when they offered him to answer written questions. The White House offer for Estrada to meet with Senators was rejected by all but one Democratic Senator. It doesn't sound to me as if they really want to know what is on his mind. In my opinion, they could easily do so by merely meeting with him and asking him any questions they want. Of course, cloture filed to end the debate was rejected. The system is broken. This case illustrates it more than any other case that has ever come before the Senate. There can be little doubt that the breakdown in the Senate's advice and consent role is not limited to Mr. Estrada's nomination. All nominees for the circuit courts of appeals have suffered, as these charts illustrate. Let me just go through this. I am talking about a system in danger of breaking. I think it is broken. This shows the average days pending for circuit court nominees for the first 2 years of a President's tenure. In the case of Ronald Reagan, it took an average of 51 days for circuit court nominees to be pending before they got to a vote on the floor. In the case of President George Herbert Walker Bush, it took an average of 83 days in order to get a judge pending. In the case of President Clinton, it did go up. It took an average of 107 days. With George W. Bush, the current President, it has taken 355 days. That is a system in need of repair. What we are seeing is a slowdown in the confirmation of Federal judges. Look at this: Again, a system in danger of breaking. The confirmation rate of circuit court nominees for the first 2 years: Reagan, 95 percent; Bush, 96 percent; and, Clinton, 86 percent of his circuit court nominees were confirmed. George W. Bush has 53 percent.

Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I yield 5 minutes to the Senator from Pennsylvania.

Mr. HATCH. I don't have that chart.

Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I yield up to 5 minutes to the distinguished Senator from Texas.

Mr. HATCH. I yield 4 minutes to the distinguished Senator from South Carolina.

Mr. HATCH. I yield time for the distinguished Senator from South Carolina to complete his question, and I hope the distinguished Senator from Vermont will answer his question.

Mr. HATCH. I yield up to 3 minutes to the Senator from Missouri.

Mr. HATCH

Mr. HATCH. Madam President, I rise to declare my support for the President and his administration as he prepares this country for the coming war with Iraq. I do this sharing the President's reluctance to go to war. But I offer my support with admiration and respect for the President for facing this decision without reluctance or avoidance, for the forbearance he has demonstrated by pursuing all other reasonable options, for courage he has shown in making the decision, and for the honesty with which he has included the American public, and the world at large, in his administration's deliberations. The President has not shirked from the problem of Iraq. Since coming to office his administration has recognized that the United States could not ignore a stale and festering policy that had devolved to inattention and a self-deluding hope. A war never concluded in 1991-- for Saddam Hussein has never abided by the ceasefire terms of disarmament that the international community declared a condition of the end of the first Gulf War--had devolved to a collapsed inspections regime and a deteriorating sanctions regime. The international community could pass 16 resolutions declaring disarmament our goal and expectation--now 17--but the international community could not impose the inspectors to guarantee that disarmament, nor could it sustain the sanctions to force the regime to comply. President Bush came to office recognizing the nature of Saddam Hussein's regime was not changing: Saddam was overtly intent to threaten the region, and he was covertly dedicated to amassing the terrible weapons necessary to achieving this goal. Years of inspections reports and defectors' stories confirmed, for all to see, that Saddam's behavior was not changing, and that, in fact, he was emboldened by over ten years of successfully deceiving and confronting the international community. The administration could have looked the other way. They could have presented a rationale, heard from the streets protests today, that this was not a threat to the U.S., that Saddam was always brutal and dangerous, but that, after all, we'd never caught him plotting against us. I wonder where the signs are saying: Saddam disarm; Saddam quit being the way you are. I am amazed that those aren't the signs in the street demonstrations. A previous administration looked the other way on another threat--the threat of Osama bin Laden. In 1996, I began warning that this man was a threat to the United States. Every time we acted against him, I applauded the President, but I urged us to do more. In 1998, after the attacks on our embassies in Africa, President Clinton responded by cruise missile attacks against Sudan and Afghanistan. A few people accused the President of ``wagging the dog,'' using force to distract from his other problems. I told the President two things: One, good job, Mr. President. Two, but don't let this be the only strikes. Finish the job. Osama bin Laden lived to launch the attacks of September 11, 2001, and today he remains at large. But last weekend's capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed demonstrates that our war on terrorism continues relentlessly, and that the cooperation we have with foreign nations and our intelligence and law enforcement professionals will disrupt, capture and liquidate al-Qaida. Osama bin Laden and Shaikh Khalid Mohammed launched an attack that changed the way America sees the world, and I am grateful that the Bush administration has changed American foreign policy in response. We recognize, finally, that the concept of imminence is not an abstract idea as we contemplate the preemptive use of force. Preemption is not a new concept in international law, as many of the President's critics suggest. It is as old as Grotius, the founder of modern international law. And contrary to critics' misinformed assertions, the U.S. has never forsworn the use of preemption. Not since the U.N. Charter, and not under either Democratic or Republican administrations. Preemption has always been conditioned on the idea of imminent threat. In the pre-nuclear era, we could see the armies amassing on a border. In the nuclear era, the idea of imminence grew murkier. Was it the fueling of the ICBM? Was it the glare on the rocket as it left the launch pad? Was it the warhead's return through the atmosphere? These were the reasons why the U.S. did not adopt a no first-use policy during the era of strategic competition with the Soviet Union. Imminence becomes murkier in an era of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. When did the threat of al-Qaida become imminent? I know when it became manifest: Not, by the way, on September 11. Osama bin Laden had struck many times before then. On September 11, the threat became catastrophic. It was well beyond imminent. All Americans must be grateful to President Bush because he will never allow imminence to slip into catastrophic reality. None of us can read Saddam Hussein's intentions, Madam President. We don't know when, or if, he gives the command to pass his countless biological or chemical weapons to his numerous contacts in the international terrorist network. We know, however, that Saddam has shown no intention of disarming. And we know of Saddam's capabilities. As this administration has repeatedly stated to American and foreign audiences alike, there is a huge weapons gap in biological and chemical weapons. The evidence of this gap is not fabricated here; it has been meticulously collected, vetted and authenticated by the international community. Our intelligence community, meanwhile, has asserted through the years that Saddam's Iraq is a safe harbor for international terrorism. This Congress has approved, through the last decade, these conclusions. Association is not causation, every logic professor would say. And a cautious national security establishment would reiterate: Associating with terrorist groups, as we know Saddam Hussein has done, even training them, or giving them moral and financial support, is different than directing them. True enough. But the days of measuring imminent threat on this conservative notion are done. We will no longer confuse the reluctance to act with the self-deception that a threat is not there. And I admire President Bush for plainly saying to the American people that the nexus of Saddam's regime of weapons of mass destruction and terrorist links is a threat we can no longer ignore. I admire the courage that says: American security cannot be held to a hope against reality but must eliminate a threat before it is too late. I admire the President for pursuing all diplomatic options available to him. Last night he said he would submit another resolution before the Security Council, and I think that's a gutsy move. But the President has been clear, since he first took the case himself to the United Nations last September 12, that American national security would not be constrained by endless international resolutions without resolve. If the United Nations wishes to become a spineless debating society, that is its right. If it or anyone else believes that it can pervert international law to constrain the legitimate use of American force for the protection of our national security, then it will begin the 21st century on its self-imposed decline to irrelevance. I hope all members of the Security Council recognize this, as they recognize the diplomatic courage and honesty that the Bush Administration has demonstrated to that body. Madam President, a war with Iraq will be the most serious exercise of American power in this century. We have reason to be optimistic: If we succeed militarily, and I believe without a doubt that we will, we will show the political commitment to ushering in a new era of stability and, I hope, democracy, for the people of Iraq. At the beginning of the 20th century, colonial powers had their hand in shaping the Middle East. At the beginning of the 21st century, America is the lone superpower, but we are not a colonial power. The Administration has repeatedly stated that Iraq is for the Iraqi people, that their land, society, resources are for them to shape and mold. We will remove the oppression of Saddam and his Arab Stalinist Ba'athist dictatorship. And we in Congress, I hope, will provide the resources and support to sustain our commitment to a transition to a self- determining Iraqi society. We will work with the Iraqis, we will stay as long as we need, and we will not stay one day longer. I admire President Bush for the candor he has shown the American people and the world. I admire him for facing difficult choices without reluctance, and I admire him for the courage he has shown in making the most difficult decisions a president can face. I join my prayers to those of countless other Americans as they pray for the success of our Armed Forces and for President Bush and his administration.

Mr. HATCH

Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, it is one of those ironies of history that the U.S. Senate began debate on the ratification of the latest and historic arms control treaty on the day that historians mark as the 50th anniversary of death of Stalin. Whether, in fact, Stalin died on this day, or whether he had been poisoned a few days before, is a fact that, like so many others of Soviet history, is clouded with uncertainty. But it is a fact that he was one of the most brutal dictators of the 20th century and he died at a time when the Soviet Union was a global foe of the United States. More interesting for this debate, Stalin's death in 1953 occurred at a time when our nations were just beginning a strategic competition that would see our nuclear stockpile grow to massive and frightening levels before we reached our first accommodations, nearly 20 years after Stalin's death. Today, while we still have many cultural and political differences with the Russian state, we cooperate on more issues than we compete, and we do not compete under the threat of nuclear annihilation. A decade ago, the Soviet Union went to the dustbin of history, and with it went an ideological enmity that locked us in a spiral of growing nuclear arsenals and the existential comfort of mutually assured destruction, a comfort that made sense to the strategic thinker, but left of lot of other people all over the world, including in our own societies, feeling quite insecure. After President Nixon initiated an era of arms control agreements with the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, or SALT, the pendulum began to swing the other way. And, as is often the case with historic pendulums, it far exceeded a sensible point. By the early 1980s, while strategic arms treaties had already reduced the aggregate megatonnage of our combined strategic arsenals, a school of arms control theology had been accepted that, as is often the case with the social science theology of the moment, threatened to overcome all rationale thinking on strategic issues. The answer to all arms control issues was always yet another treaty. Existing treaties were sacrosanct, with the wise old dictum so famously and wisely uttered by Bismarck in the 19th century ignored: ``At the bottom of all treaties is written in invisible ink, rebus sic stantibus''--Until circumstances change. Circumstances did change. Technologies barely imaginable in the 1960s, when the first strategic treaties were contemplated, became commonplace in the 1980s. An era of self-enforced vulnerability to mutually assured destruction, enshrined in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, became anachronistic as physicists and engineers first imagined missile defense and then a visionary president, Ronald Reagan, grasped its potential to defend societies against missiles armed with weapons of mass destruction. In doing so, President Reagan reflected a very American belief that know-how and new thinking can provide security to those who never felt secure under mutual assured destruction. What bumpkins and dreamers, the conventional arms control theologians declaimed. Let us dismiss these simpletons and disparage their thinking as ``Star Wars,'' they said; as if the Strategic Defense Initiative had anything to do with stars or wars, but instead a more secure world here on earth. Today, it would be inaccurate to state that we have developed missile defense to a functionally deployable state. But, we are closer to a functional stage than those who dismissed it out-of-hand ever imagined. They were wrong and, today, our challenges to perfecting missile defense are largely in engineering, no longer scientific. A grateful Nation has President Reagan to thank for being able to transcend the conventional wisdom and believe in American creativity and technology to move us into a new strategic era. But the arms control lobby would not relent, or even reform, through the 1980s and 1990s. We had some good arms control agreements negotiated, signed and ratified--I supported the START treaties. We had some treaties that I believed did not enhance our security--and I voted against the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. While I have generally supported the idea that bilateral and verifiable reductions of the strategic arsenals of Russia and the U.S., preserving necessary strategic arsenals of Russia and the U.S., preserving necessary strategic force structures, was stabilizing and therefore in our interest, I have never believed that this world would be more secure if the U.S. handicapped its nuclear option. Circumstances changed. Our global foe of 30 years ago is not our primary threat today. The mutual assured destruction doctrine that held the world in nuclear check for nearly 50 years became suspect, an old strategic doctrine of vulnerability. New threats and new, vicious substate actors became the threats that brought us grief and anxiety. We saw technologies spread to a host of rogue nations, many of which hold explicitly antagonistic postures toward the U.S. In 1998, a congressionally mandated Commission To Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, chaired by Donald Rumsfeld, brought to light the fact that, ``concerted effects by a number of overtly or potentially hostile nations to acquire ballistic missiles with biological or nuclear payloads pose a growing threat to the U.S., its deployed forces and its friends and allies.'' Further, the report concluded that ``the threat to the U.S. posed by these emerging capabilities is broader, more mature and evolving more rapidly than has been reported in estimates and reports by the intelligence Community.'' Such clarity in assessment forced us to refocus the efforts of the Intelligence Community, and they responded. But it also forced us to continued to challenge the conventional wisdom on arms control at the time, and that required that we face up to fact that we needed to proceed with our research and development of a missile defense capability, and that, if we were serious about this, we had to recognize that we would need to abandon the ABM Treaty. One candidate for the 2000 presidential election shared the vision of President Reagan. He recognized that the ABM Treaty was not sacrosanct. In fact, he had read the test, which plainly allowed for the U.S. to withdraw. I don't know if President Bush knew the doctrine in international law of rebus sic stantibus, but President Bush certainly knew that the strategic situation had changed, and U.S. national security required that we not constrain our security for tomorrow by a concept from yesterday. Such an approach was to guarantee insecurity. And President Bush understood something fundamental about strategic doctrine: insecurity does not sustain stability. President Bush told us all that the days of the ABM were limited. And the arms control lobby went, to make a bad pun, ballistic. Abandoning the ABM Treaty with Russia would herald a new era of unrestrained nuclear competition, as both sides would try to outbid the other's arsenal with enough weapons to overwhelm, they declared with certainty bread of doctrinaire conviction. President Bush and his advisers didn't flinch in their thinking. But they did address the question: If the fear is that withdrawing from the ABM Treaty which we did--the U.S. withdrew from the Treaty on December 13, 2001 and the Treaty was effectively terminated 6 months later--then the U.S. will match our withdrawal from the ABM with a new proposal to lower the START II levels to historic new reductions. And on March 24 of last year, the Russian Federation and the United States concluded the Treaty on Strategic Offensive Reductions, which will now be overwhelmingly passed as this body provides our advice and consent. This is a historic moment for nuclear arms reduction. It is, more importantly and in my opinion, a historic moment in the evolution of arms control doctrine. The treaty reduces operationally deployed warheads for both sides to a range of 1,700 to 2,200 by December 31, 2012. Today our arsenals are more than twice that level. The reductions are to be implemented based on the established START I verification regime and mechanism, which will be in place until 2009. The treaty allows for consultation and extension of verification mechanisms beyond that time. The Treaty allows either party to ``determine for itself the composition and structure of its strategic offensive arms,'' meaning that we will be able to configure our triad according to the evolving needs of our nuclear posture review. The treaty does not link the objectives to our continued Cooperative Threat Reduction program, appropriately known as the Nunn-Lugar programs, recognizing all of the work the current chairman of Foreign Relations Committee and our former Democratic colleague have committed in their careers toward the cause of disarmament. I commend my colleagues on the Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees for engaging the administration in extensive discussions about continued support for this program. I strongly approve the administration's commitment to this program, and I will continue to support their budget for this. Lord Palmerston said in the 19th century, ``We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual.'' Our interests evolve year-by-year, and the world remains a very hostile place. Russia competes with us geopolitically, but it does so in the Security Council, not in strategic arms. It is in the interests of the world that our two arsenals be reduced, and it is in the interests of both of our countries that we reduce them with transparency, and flexibility. These principles are enshrined in the Moscow Treaty. I commend the administration for concluding it with Russian administration, and I urge the Russian Duma to proceed with their own ratification, as I encourage my colleagues today to join me in support of this historic treaty.

Mr. HATCH

Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the subcommittee on Communications be authorized to meet on Wednesday, March 5, 2003, at 9:30 a.m. on E911.

Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be authorized to meet to conduct a hearing on ``The Asbestos Litigation Crisis Continues--It is Time for Congress to Act'' on Wednesday, March 5, 2003, at 2 p.m. in Hart Senate Office Building Room 216. Panel I: The Honorable Max Baucus, U.S. Senator [D-MT], Washington, DC; The Honorable George V. Voinovich, U.S. Senator [R-OH], Washington, DC. Panel II: Melvin McCandless, Williamston, NC; Brian Harvey, Vashon, WA; David Austern, Esq., President, Claims Resolution Management, General Counsel for the Manville Personal Injury Settlement Trust, Fairfax, VA; Dennis Archer, Esq., President-Elect, American Bar Association, Washington, DC; Jonathan Hiatt, Esq., General Counsel, American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), Washington, DC; Steven Kazan, Esq., Partner, Kazan, McClain, Edises, Abrams, Fernandez, Lyons & Farrise, Oakland, CA.

Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Governmental Affairs be authorized to meet on Wednesday, March 5, 2003, at 10 a.m., for a business meeting to consider S. 380 and also pending nominations before the Committee.

Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, March 5, 2003, at 10:30 a.m., to hold a Top Secret Briefing on the Turkish Aid Negotiations and Developments in Northern Iraq. Briefers: The Honorable Beth Jones, Assistant Secretary for European Affairs, Department of State; The Honorable Earl Anthony Wayne, Assistant Secretary for Economic & Business Affairs, Department of State; The Honorable Ryan C. Crocker, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs, Department of State; Mr. Ian Brzezinksi, Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and NATO Affairs, Department of Defense; and Major General Dunne, Vice Director, J-5, The Joint Staff, Washington, DC.

Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Wednesday, March 5, 2003, at 3 p.m., to hold a hearing on Tax Convention with the United Kingdom (T.Doc. 107-19) and Protocols Amending Tax Conventions with Australia (T.Doc. 107-20) and Mexico (T.Doc. 108-3). Witnesses Panel 1: Ms. Barbara M. Angus, International Tax Counsel, Department of the Treasury, Washington, DC Mr. David Noren, Legislation Counsel, Joint Committee on Taxation, Washington, DC. Panel 2: The Honorable William Reinsch, President, National Foreign Trade Council, Inc., Washington, DC.

Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Indian Affairs be authorized to meet on Wednesday, March 5, 2003, at 10 a.m. in Room 485 of the Russell Senate Office Building to conduct a BUSINESS MEETING on pending Committee business, to be followed immediately by a HEARING on the President's FY 2004 Budget for Indian Programs

Mr. HATCH

Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I join my colleagues, the distinguished minority floor leader from Nevada, who is a dear friend of the distinguished Senator from Kansas, and my dear friend from Kansas, in paying tribute to Victor Baird. That is one of the most miserable, tough jobs I think in the whole Senate. As both of them have said, there is not a lot of thanks for doing it. I personally thank him for the efforts he has put forward, and those who worked with him, because this is a very difficult job. He has always been straightforward, honest, and decent in all of the experiences I know about. I join my colleagues in their remarks and ask that I be associated with their remarks. I wish him the very best.