Jim Inhofe

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. First of all, let me say the senior Senator from Utah is doing a yeoman's job of exposing some of the fraudulent things we have been involved in for ObamaCare over this period of time, and I applaud him for that. Amendment No. 1911, as Further Modified Earlier today, I made a motion that was incomplete, and I wish to correct it, having to do with a drafting error. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Hatch amendment No. 1911 be further modified to address a drafting error.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, there is one last comment I wish to make. This is something that doesn't happen on the Senate floor. But the Senator from Arizona is indeed a very good friend. We disagree on this amendment. We will have a chance to have a vote on it. But the fact that he did make a commitment that I would have the vote is very meaningful to me, and he did keep his word, and I thank him very much. I yield the floor. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. INHOFE. Thank you, Mr. President. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be recognized for a couple of minutes.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, first, I wish to say to the Senator from Maryland how much I appreciate the fact that we are reaching across the aisle and doing something that is right for the kids who are out there risking their lives for us. I make it a habit to go to the areas of combat with regularity, as do other members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and I always get a chance to really talk with and get to know them. You learn a lot more by talking to the kids in the mess hall there than you do by going to the committee hearings here in the United States. One of the things they have a real love for, as I am sure the Senator from Maryland suggested to you, is the commissary. In some areas that are remote, there is no competition. There aren't any Walmarts around; there is just a commissary. And there is almost a fraternal belief and feeling, as people go around--particularly, the spouses will meet there. They will do their shopping there. It is something that is very serious to them. There is language in this bill that says that they will take an experiment in some five different areas that have large commissaries, go ahead and privatize those, and then after that takes place, do an assessment as to whether they should be privatized. This amendment is very simple. It merely says: Let's do the assessment first. Why go ahead and close these commissaries if we find that is something that we should not, in fact, do? We have so many interests. First of all, we have--as I am sure the Senator from Maryland mentioned--we have some 25 cosponsors already. This is without real effort. We also have some 41 organizations supporting this bill. I see that the time is up. I yield the floor.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to lay the pending business aside for the purpose of considering the Inhofe-Mikulski commissary amendment No. 1728.

Mr. INHOFE. I just did.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I rise for a special request. I just returned from a military trip overseas with four other Members just a matter of minutes ago to find out that the two amendments that I was trying to get pending--and I would really settle for just one of those two. I was not here when all of these UCs were made and the arrangements were put together between the parties. So I ask the leader on the other side--or the handler on the other side, Senator Jack Reed--if he would consider a waiver of his commitment to allow me to bring up one of these to get in the queue. I yield to the Senator.

Mr. INHOFE. Regaining the floor, I would only say to my good friend that as the second ranking member on the Armed Services Committee, I have talked about these for a long time. I tried to do them before I left for 4 days on business. Also, Senator Mikulski is my cosponsor on amendment No. 1728. So I have to make a motion to lay the pending amendment aside for the purpose of consideration of amendment No. 1728.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I wish to make a comment, because first, this is something beyond anyone's control. No one could have controlled this. We had four Members who were gone. It couldn't be helped. We were on business. I have 41 amendments, almost equally divided, Democrat and Republican, on an issue that is probably the most significant issue to the spouses of our kids who are over there, overseas. What it does is that it lets us do an assessment before we close any of the commissaries--not close them but privatize them, instead of privatizing them and then seeing how it works. I think we have a vast majority of people who do support that. It is something that is offered on a bipartisan basis, and it is something that a lot of people--over 100 organizations are sponsoring this amendment--spoke very strongly in support of and consider this amendment to be the most significant amendment in the everyday lives of our troops. Anyone who travels overseas and travels to these various areas knows that when they go through a commissary, they see-- particularly in areas where there are no other opportunities out there--that there is almost no competition. It is something like a club. It is something that the wives, the husbands, the families, and the kids do. They go to the commissary. Taking that away would be taking away a tradition. Again, the bill doesn't state that it goes away, but it does temporarily privatize five major commissaries. Now, when that happens, you have started the ball rolling. And the bill also states--and we discussed this in committee--that this gives us time to look and evaluate to see whether we want to privatize them. So everyone who is on here as a cosponsor has made the statement: Why don't we find out first. So that is all we want to do--instead of closing or transferring five and then finding out whether we did the right thing, go ahead and have the study and then go ahead and proceed however we think is in the best interest. So it is a very serious amendment. I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending business.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, it is my intention, as soon as we get to the point where we can get into the queue and get unanimous consent to set the current business aside--it would be my intention to do that to consider this amendment. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

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

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I am fully aware that we are not going to be able to get past a unanimous consent request, but I wanted to make sure the Chair knew and others know that we have an amendment that I will do the best I can to bring out. It is an amendment that already has 21 cosponsors. There is a provision in the Senate bill that was put in by the Senate that is not in the House bill that has to do with commissaries. It is viewed upon as privatizing commissaries. It is not really that. It is an attempt to evaluate the idea of the commissaries being privatized by using five commissaries as test cells to see what kind of result we would get if we did privatize them. What we are doing with my amendment is taking it back--taking that language out--in order to go ahead with an assessment before we do that. It wouldn't make sense to me that if we wanted to get this done, even if we felt very passionately about privatizing, that we would do it before we had an assessment. So the assessment would be first. We had a lot of discussion about this in the Senate Armed Services Committee. As I said, we now have 21 cosponsors who would like to reverse this so we can do the assessment and then make the determination. It is kind of interesting, even though most people say privatizing is not going to actually save or make any money, the amendment simply requires the assessment on privatizing before we make any significant changes to our servicemembers' privatized commissary benefits. This is something that is very popular among members of our service, wives, and husbands, when surveyed last year. Approximately, 95 percent of the servicemembers were using the commissaries to purchase household goods to achieve needed savings in their family budgets with a 91-percent satisfaction rate. We don't get 91 percent satisfaction rates around here very often. The language in this bill as it is now ignores the recommendations made by the Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission that we are all very familiar with. In the report released in January, it specifically stated, in recommendation No. 8, ``to protect access and savings to DOD commissaries and exchanges.'' Well, that is exactly what we want to do. I have a very impressive list, which I will not read, of 41 organizations and associations, including labor unions, the Gold Star Widows, American Veterans, and others, and I ask unanimous consent that this list be printed in the Record.

Mr. INHOFE. I also have a synopsis of letters of support that is from six different organizations, including the Military Officers Association of America; the Armed Forces Marketing Council; the International Brotherhood of Teamsters; the American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO; the American Military Retirees Association; and saveourbenefit.org. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the synopsis of these six letters representing these organizations be printed in the Record.

Mr. INHOFE

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

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I know that we have a lineup of speakers. We have a speaker from Hawaii who is going to be here shortly, at which time I would be very pleased to yield, but I wish to make a couple of comments. First, the fact that we are getting to this bill is great, because if you look at the last few years, we have not had a chance to do this until late in the year. The last 2 years it was December before we actually got around to it. It could have been a real crisis, because I think most of us in the Senate know that if we had gone to December 31, all kinds of things would have stopped--funding for a lot of our reenlistment bonuses and other things. I applaud the chairman for using his influence to get this bill on floor so we could go ahead and get it passed. It is something that we need to make sure the people who are out there risking their lives on a day-to-day basis know and that they know we are having this as our top priority. I want to make one comment about sequestration. People are talking about putting equal amounts of increases--not just in the military or in the defense portion but also in the other portions of government, such as the IRS and the EPA--without recognition that as we went through the funding mechanism, we were taking money out of military on a 50-50 basis with nondefense moneys, while the military is only 16 percent of the budget. So we have already started at a great disadvantage. As far as the OCO is concerned, that is kind of a desperate effort. It is not the way we should be doing it, but we must have the support and keep the readiness up with our troops. We do have some good things that are in this bill, such as funding for the KC-46, the Paladin Integrated Management Program, the Long- Range Strike Bomber, and the F-35. So we are at least treading water here. I wish to say one thing, though, that I didn't approve of in this bill, and we may try to make some changes on the floor. It is the BRAC process. I think we all know that the base realignment and closing process has been going on since 1987. This is no time to be doing something with that. I am very pleased that we are able to continue that and not see one for a period of time. One thing that is consistent about BRAC rounds is that they all cost a lot of money in the first 5 years. People, if there is ever a time in the history of this body and of the military when we can't afford to take money out, it is now. We have addressed a couple of things. There are some things that need to be fixed as we move on to the floor. I know that our chairman, Senator McCain, has been asking people to bring down their amendments. I think we should be doing that, and I anticipate a lot of amendments will be coming down. I wish to say one thing about Gitmo. There is this myth out there that somehow the terrorists think that we hurt people at Gitmo. Somehow they think it is something that should be altered and should be changed, but I don't believe that is the case. I see the Senator from Hawaii is on the floor. I am cutting into his time right now. So I am going to continue comments throughout the rest of the afternoon, tomorrow, and yield back the time to him, which I have taken away from him for a few minutes. I yield the floor.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I ask that I be recognized.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I know we have all had a chance to talk about this and the seriousness of what is now before us at this time. I look at the seriousness of this, and I listened to a lot of people standing on the floor and saying things that sound popular to people back home, and I have heard from some of the people in my State of Oklahoma, saying: They talk about the privacy problems and all these things that might be existing. Then I always think about my 20 kids and grandkids and think that they are the ones who are at stake. This world we have right now is a much more dangerous world than it has ever been before. I look wistfully back at the good old days of the Cold War when we had a couple superpowers. We knew what they had-- mutual assured destruction. It really meant something at that time. Now we have crazy people with capabilities, people in countries who have the ability to use weapons of mass destruction. So right after 9/11 we formed the NSA. We have been talking about that down here. It is not perfect, but I think it is important at this last moment to point out the fact that a lot of lies have been told down here. I heard one person--I think two or three different ones talking about and making the statement that since the NSA procedure was set up after 9/11, that has not stopped one attack on America. I would like to suggest to you that a good friend of mine and a good friend of the Chair's, General Alexander, who is a very knowledgeable person and ran that program for a while, said--and this was way back 2 years ago, 2013--information ``gathered from these programs provided government with critical leads to prevent over 50 potential terrorist events in more than 20 countries around the world'' and that the phone database played a role in stopping 10 terrorist acts since the 9/11 attacks. I was very pleased to hear from my good friend, Senator Sessions, a few minutes ago that a brand new poll that just came out of the field shows that almost two-thirds of the people in America want to go back and give back to the NSA those tools we took away 2 days ago. Now we have a situation where we can talk about a few of the cases where major attacks on this country were stopped by the process we put in place after 9/11. One was a planned attack in 2009. Najibullah Zazi was going to bomb the New York City subway system. The plan was for him and two high school friends to conduct coordinated suicide bombings, detonating backpack bombs on New York City subway trains near New York's two busiest subway stations; that is, Grand Central Station and Times Square. Sean Joyce, the Deputy FBI Director, said that the NSA intercepted an email from a suspected terrorist in Pakistan communicating with someone in the United States ``about perfecting a recipe for explosives.'' On September 9, 2009, Afghan-American Zazi drove from his home in Aurora, CO, to New York City, after he emailed Ahmed--that was his Al Qaeda facilitator in Pakistan--that ``the marriage is ready.'' That was a code that meant ``We are ready now to perform our task.'' The FBI followed Zazi to New York and broke up the plan of attack, and they stated it was because of the email that was intercepted by the NSA that allowed them to do that. How big of a deal is that? People do not stop and think about the fact that if you look at the New York City subway stations down there, we know that the average ridership of the New York City subway during peak hours averages just under 900,000 people--that is 900,000 people, Americans who are living in New York City. What we do know is that when they came to New York City to perform their plan at Grand Central Station and Times Square, it was the NSA using the very tools we took away from them 2 days ago, and you wonder, how many lives would have been lost? If there are 900,000 riders on the subway and they are ready to do this at two stations, are we talking about 100,000 lives, 100,000 Americans being buried alive? That attack was precluded by the tools that were used by the NSA that we took away from them just 2 days ago. Many more have not been declassified. GEN Michael Hayden and GEN Keith Alexander, who are both former Directors of the NSA, and others have confirmed to me personally that at least one of the three terrorist attacks on 9/11 could have been avoided, and perhaps all three could have been avoided if we had had the tools we gave the NSA right after 9/11, and also the attack on the USS Cole could have been prevented entirely. So you have to stop and think, it is a dangerous thing to stand on the floor and say we have formed this thing in this dangerous world and it has not stopped any attacks on America. That is what we are faced with today. I voted against the program the House passed that is going to be considered in just a few minutes. I felt it was better to leave it as we had it. Now that is gone. I look at it this way: I do support the amendments that are coming up. I do think the last opportunity we will have will be the program we will be voting on in just a few minutes. So let's think about this, take a deep breath, and go ahead and pass something so we at least have some capability to stop these attacks and to gather information from those who would perpetrate these attacks and then have time to put together a program that will be very workable and make some changes if necessary. With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor. Extending FISA Provisions

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I would like to inquire as to the order.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, let me observe that after hearing all the Senator from South Dakota said and what his goals are, he sure chose the right committee, the committee I chair, the Environment and Public Works Committee. That is what we talk about. That is what we do. I had the honor of being in South Dakota before the election, and as I walked around in South Dakota and looked around, I thought, I could just as well be in Oklahoma. While I was there, I talked to the farm bureau people there, and they said it is the regulations. That is a farm State. Oklahoma is a farm State, and we understand that. Of all the regulations they have and the problems they have, they say the EPA overregulates and causes the greatest problems. They singled one out--endangered species. They singled another one out--the waters of the United States. Currently, we are doing legislation on the waters of the United States, and it is legislation that is going to get that burden off of the people from South Dakota and Oklahoma. Right now, we are considering the most expensive of all the regulations, which is the ozone regulations. It would constitute the greatest single increase in expenditures or taxes of anything in the history of this country. So it is nice to know we have someone who is so committed to the goals of this committee to be singling this out in a maiden speech as his greatest concern. I appreciate that as the chairman of that committee, and we are going to do wonderful things together for South Dakota, Oklahoma, and America. Madam President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I am afraid this may end up out of order. If we are going to pursue this further, it seems as though the forgotten continent has always been, in our experience, the African continent. So we are going to address equal trade with Africa, and that is the upcoming area on which we need to be concentrating. Ten years from now, we will look back and see that those were the real, live economies, and we have to quit ignoring them. I withdraw the amendment.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that following Senator Warren's remarks, I be recognized.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, last week the Senate voted 97 to 1 to reauthorize the African Growth and Opportunity Act--AGOA--for 10 years. It was first enacted in 2000, so the 10 years were up and we had to get it reinstated. It provides the African countries with duty-free access on most of their exports to the United States. I have long been a supporter of AGOA. The program has done a lot to improve our trade relationship with the continent of Africa, primarily sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2002, annual trade between the United States and sub-Saharan Africa has increased by almost 50 percent. So it is very successful. It has also been estimated by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that it has had the effect of increasing 300,000 jobs in sub- Saharan Africa and 100,000 jobs here in the United States. Trade with Africa is important because many of the world's fastest growing economies are in Africa. According to an analysis that was done for The Economist magazine, six of the world's fastest growing economies were in sub-Saharan Africa in the 10 years it has been in effect. This is going to continue. I have seen it firsthand. Every time I go to Ethiopia, Rwanda, Tanzania or many of the other countries in Africa, I see more and more cranes going up and bigger and better buildings. It is really a live spot in the world. The infrastructure in places like Rwanda and Tanzania is high quality. People who go to Rwanda come back with memories of something that is a modern city, not a Third World country, as it has been in the past. So we have really good things going on there, and we need to continue to build on their trade, infrastructure, roads, highways, seaports, railways, and airports to help their economies grow. For too long sub-Saharan Africa has been ignored as a trading partner by the United States. I have been to Africa probably more than any other Members have. In fact, there was something very critical of me just last weekend in the press--if I can find it here I will state what it was--anyway, they were critical of the attention I have been paying to Africa. I can remember when the United States had the same problem. We ignored Africa. Back when we were going into Bosnia, I was kind of leading the effort to keep Americans from going into Bosnia. This was during the Clinton administration. The excuse they were using was that we had to get into Bosnia because of ethnic cleansing. I said on the Senate floor, for every person who has been ethnically cleansed in Bosnia, there are 100 in West Africa. Just last weekend, ``Vice,'' a satirical show on HBO, tried to connect me to a law drafted by the Parliament in Uganda that was antigay. I have always opposed this law and had nothing to do with it. However, there are things that are going on in all these countries that need to be looked into. My work in Uganda started many years ago to help bring an end to the Lord's Resistance Army. A lot of people are fully aware of the LRA now, but they weren't back then. There was one individual, Joseph Kony, who was going into the various areas of Northern Uganda and was kidnapping the little kids. They called them ``the children's army.'' The young people would be kidnapped out of their village and then be forced to learn to join their little army, to kidnap other people. If they refused, they were forced to go back to their villages and murder their parents. That is the LRA, and we finally are making progress there. Other countries around the world are not ignoring Africa's potential as we have been. Brazil and China have secured preferential trade agreements with Africa. Every time you see something new and shiny in Africa, it comes from China. Economic Partnership Agreements of the European Union have also been signed. So we are kind of left out. This AGOA has been a worthwhile program. We need to start looking ahead to the future. Nearly a billion people who live in sub-Saharan Africa and individual countries over the next decade or two will reach the point where they are competing head-to- head with many other countries around the world. Our thinking about trade with Africa needs to be mature as their economies grow. That is why Senator Coons and I have offered the African Free Trade Initiative Act, amendment No. 1312 to the trade promotion authority act. We are doing it jointly. This amendment requires the President to establish a plan to negotiate and enter into free-trade agreements with our friends in sub-Saharan Africa. African nations want to enter into free-trade agreements with us. When I was in Tanzania earlier this year, I met with Richard Sezibera. Richard Sezibera is the Secretary General of the East African Community, which is made up of Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Tanzania, and Kenya. Richard Sezibera told me he wants their Eastern African Community to enter into a free-trade agreement with the United States--just those five countries. This makes sense because FTAs bind business communities together and can pay long-term national security and foreign policy dividends. While some in our government may not deem sub-Saharan African countries ``ready'' for an FTA with us, our amendment requires the administration to articulate what each country needs to do to get ready. It is not enough for them just to say they are not ready to be associated with us in this type of a treaty. The amendment also requires the administration to determine what kind of resources might be needed to help the countries get ready for an FTA with us. Between the Millenium Challenge Corporation and USAID, we have had a lot of resources going into sub-Saharan African countries to help their economies develop, and many outside aid organizations and other countries do as well. It makes sense to identify which of these resources could be channeled for the purpose of developing a free-trade agreement with us. We had a great guy. Unfortunately, he is leaving USAID. His name is Raj Shah. He has taken a personal interest in Africa, in developing relations with Africa. USAID has a large trade focus, but much of its work is geared toward helping small businesses in places like Tanzania grow their exports. Now, this is good. It is a good thing to do, but they should also be working at higher levels to improve the trade activities of these economies as a whole. They can do this by working with our African friends, helping them prepare for a broader trade relationship with the United States, either by helping them identify how they can improve their agriculture safety regulations or general private property rights. To that end, our amendment authorizes USAID to use its appropriations to help implement the strategy that will be developed under this amendment. The Senate just reauthorized AGOA for another 10 years. In the next 10 years, we should be considering one or more free-trade agreements with our partners in sub-Saharan Africa. Our amendment will help this desire become a reality. As I said, our government and the media have to get beyond their opposition to Africa, and hopefully we will be able to be doing that before long. If we don't make free-trade agreements with Africa a priority, then I think we will find ourselves here in 10 years and see a much stronger, highly competitive African economy. We will be reauthorizing AGOA again and asking ourselves: Why didn't we push to enact free-trade agreements with these countries? We would rather not find ourselves there. If we don't do it, China will, and we should be the ones writing the rules for trade in Africa, just as we are trying to do in Asia. So I appreciate the support of Senator Coons and others on this amendment, and hopefully it can be adopted to the free-trade promotion authority bill. I yield the floor.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 173.