Jim Inhofe

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I have had rankings as the most conservative Member of this body many times, and I have often said there are two areas where I am a big spender: one is national defense, one is infrastructure. We desperately need this bill. It is interesting to me that so many of my good friends--and they are friends, including the Senator from Tennessee--will vote as they did back in 2008 for $700 billion for a bailout and then something such as this comes up and somehow this is an excuse to kill the bill. You can kill the bill and we can go back and start all over again. I wish and I think the Finance Committee is going to come up with something that is going to allow us to get this done by the time we get into conference. I urge my conservative friends particularly to go ahead and vote for the highway bill.

Mr. INHOFE. We do not have Senator Thune here, who is doing a great job in the Finance Committee. Unfortunately, his mother died and he is not here. We would be able to sit down and solve this problem and not delay this bill. Right now it is set up so we can have a highway bill. This could kill it. I hope folks will talk to their people at home. You cannot do it before this vote, but afterwards I might suggest you do that.

Mr. INHOFE

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 President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. INHOFE. I ask unanimous consent that I be recognized as in morning business.

Mr. INHOFE. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I want to announce that I introduced a resolution of disapproval just a few minutes ago under the Congressional Review Act. A lot of people don't know what the Congressional Review Act is, but it is an act that will allow Congress to look at some of the regulations. If there is something they don't believe is in the best interest of the country, they are able to introduce something to rescind that. It would call for a vote, and the vote would be a 51- vote. So it is one that has not been used very much, but it is a measure that would prevent, in this case the Obama EPA, from going through with its Utility MACT. MACT is the maximum achievable control technology. That is used quite often because there are sometimes requirements in these EPA rules that require different industries to do things where there is no technology available to allow them to get that done. So the Utility MACT is one of the most expensive environmental rules in American history, second only to President Obama's cap-and-trade rules, which he was unable to achieve legislatively. Left untouched, the Utility MACT would destroy over 1 million jobs and cost the American economy billions of dollars. My CRA, the Congressional Review Act, will be the moment of truth for a majority in this body who understand how harmful the Obama EPA regulatory agenda will be for their constituents. Remember, last year at this time 64 Senators voted in different ways to rein in the EPA's destructive greenhouse gas regulations. I had a bill to take away the jurisdiction from the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases. It was called the Energy Tax Prevention Act. At the same time, there was another I call a cover vote. Sometimes when you want to tell people at home that you are against something, you can have a less maybe severe vote, and there happens to be a cover vote that takes place. The bottom line is 64 of the 100 Senators voted to do something about the overregulation that is coming out of the Environmental Protection Agency. That particular one was on the regulation that would be the most expensive of all. The Utility MACT I am offering the CRA on now is probably the second most expensive. But to refresh your memory, in order to have the EPA have jurisdiction of the greenhouse gases, they had to somehow come up with an endangerment finding. They did, and they based it on the IPCC science that gave rise to the concern that was exposed in climategate. I think everyone understands that was flawed science. But, nonetheless, that is what they used. That is why we were able to get two-thirds of this body to object to the EPA regulating greenhouse gases. I think the bottom line now is that there are more than a dozen Senate Democrats who have claimed they want to rein in the EPA because they know the devastating impact the Agency's regulatory train wreck will have at home. The Senators understand if their constituents lose their jobs as a result of these overregulations, they might lose their jobs. So today the Senate can look forward to having one more opportunity to stand up to President Obama's war on affordable energy. They can vote for this CRA which will put a halt to one of the Obama EPA's most expensive and economically destructive rules. Under the Utility MACT, it would cost American families--and nobody disagrees with this--the range is between $11 billion and $18 billion in electricity rate increases. That is over an 11-percent rate increase on average that it would cost if we were to pass this Utility MACT under the regulations of the utilities. This would send ripple effects throughout the economy, causing approximately 1.4 million net job losses by 2020. And it is not just jobs in the coal industry that would be affected. Dr. Bernard Weinstein of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University has estimated EPA's air rules could endanger 1 million manufacturing jobs outside of the coal and utility industry losses. Workers recently laid off in Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia are feeling the devastating impacts of the rule. Sadly, these lost jobs are all part of Obama's wider war on coal and fossil fuels. You might remember that he admitted this was his goal in the campaign of 2008 when he said: If somebody wants to build a coal-fired plant they can. It's just that it will bankrupt them. And under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. When the cap-and-trade failed, Obama began aggressively pursuing these goals through an executive regulatory barrage of unelected bureaucrats. So companies such as Solyndra got big cash payoffs while a regulatory train wreck was unleashed by the EPA to destroy America's fossil fuel industry. The political climate is much different now than it was in the days when global warming alarmists could bask in their historical gloom-and- doom predictions about the end of the world. Now, President Obama wouldn't dare say anything like that because the American people no longer are buying it. Instead, he has begun touting oil and gas development and saying he is for an all-out, all-of-the-above energy strategy. In an election year, he knows the American people want the hundreds of thousands of jobs and affordable energy prices that come with domestic oil and gas. But he is clearly still determined to achieve his global warming agenda. His war on affordable energy is moving underneath the radar and wrapped in lies about protecting public health. Make no mistake, the train wreck will achieve all of Obama's global warming objectives, and it will severely undermine our Nation's economy in the process. So I will spend just a moment on that. When President Obama could not achieve cap-and-trade through legislation, he said he would just do it through regulations. EPA's greenhouse gas regime will cost American families between $300 billion and $400 billion a year. This is important because no one has refuted this. We have gone through the Kyoto convention, and that was a range that was given to us by the Wharton econometrics survey at that time. And several others chimed in--MIT chimed in, CRA chimed in. So the cost of regulating greenhouse gas would be about $300 billion to $400 billion a year. When we talk about billions and trillions of dollars, I am like everybody else. I have a hard time seeing how that really affects us. In my State of Oklahoma, I regularly determine each year how many families in my State of Oklahoma are going to file a tax return, and then I do the math. This particular one, at $300 billion a year, would cost each family filing a tax return in my State of Oklahoma about $3,000 a year. Now, that is not just once, that would be every year. What do you get for it? And this is the thing that I think is important, and the American people finally have caught on. They have admitted that through the EPA, when you ask them if we were to pass one of these things regulating CO2 through the cap-and-trade legislation that we have defeated, would this reduce greenhouse gases, the answer from the Administrator of the EPA is, no, it wouldn't because this only would affect the United States of America. This isn't where the problem is. China would still be doing its thing, India would be doing its thing, and Mexico. I have contended if we are regulating these in the United States, it could actually have the effect of increasing the emissions because, as we chase our manufacturing base overseas to find energy, they would be going to countries such as China and India where they don't have the regulatory restrictions we have in this country. So the Utility MACT is second only to the greenhouse gas regulations in terms of what it would cost, in terms of costing the people in terms of jobs and money. Actually, the regulatory thing would be worse when we are talking about greenhouse gases because under the bills that were introduced starting in 2003--that was the McCain-Lieberman bill, going all the way forward to the Waxman-Markey bill--the assumption has been that they would regulate industries and emitters that were over the 25,000 tons a year. Now, if we do it through regulation, as they are trying to do it right now, the Clean Air Act has a limit of 250 tons. So we would be talking about regulating virtually every church, school, and hospital in America and not just the very large utilities. So that is where we were on that issue. On oil, President Obama has been congratulating himself on decreasing the imports of oil from the Middle East, but he fails to mention his policies have been consistently against oil and gas. In fact, he and people in his administration have said they want to do away with fossil fuels. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said they wanted to ``boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.'' Well, that is $7 or $8 a gallon. Right now we are looking at $4 a gallon, and that is what they want to do. What is their motive? To do away with fossil fuels. He claims to care about energy security, yet he stopped the Keystone Pipeline. I am very proud of a lot of Senators in here who have talked about it. Senator Hoeven, for example, is very familiar with it because of the production in his State. We are talking about the sands up in Alberta and bringing them down through the United States. I am interested in this because Cushing, OK, happens to be one of the intersections that is there for the pipeline. So here is something there is absolutely no reason to do away with except to kill oil because we know the pipeline is going to bring oil down into the United States through, I might say, my State of Oklahoma down to the coast where it can be used. A lot of people don't understand this because they have been told things that, quite frankly, are not true. In terms of oil, gas, and coal, the United States of America has the largest recoverable reserves in the world. People keep saying over and over again: Well, we only have 3 percent of the reserves. Yet we use 25 percent. Quite frankly, they are talking about proven reserves. You can't get a recoverable reserve until you drill. If they don't let us drill because of the policies of this administration, then, obviously, we would be stuck with just the very small amount we could produce. Nonetheless, it is out there. We are the only country in the world that our politicians don't allow us to explore and recover our own reserves--the only country in the world. Natural gas. We know it is happening right now. We know in areas like New York and Pennsylvania with the Marcellus debate, we have opportunities we have never had in this country. We have the opportunity to recover more natural gas. When the President made a statement in the State of the Union Message about being supportive of ``all the above,'' talking about natural gas, he slipped in one little statement: Well, we don't want to poison the Earth--or something like that. What he is talking about is they have spent countless hours trying to regulate a process called hydraulic fracturing--a process that started in my State of Oklahoma in 1949. There has never been a documented case of ground water contamination since they have been using hydraulic fracturing. And we can't get into these tight formations without hydraulic fracturing. It can't be done. So the President can get by with saying he wants to produce the natural gas we have locally, and at the same time take over the regulation of hydraulic fracturing by the Federal Government. We know what that would mean. I think the best evidence of that is President Obama in his current budget is doubling the funding for the antifracking agenda in the 2013 budget. Nuclear? That is agreed. If we believe in ``all of the above,'' you have to have fossil fuel as coal, oil, and gas, but also nuclear. It is a very important component. It is interesting that only yesterday President Obama sent his Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, to Georgia, to take credit for the 5,800 jobs that will be created when two new nuclear reactors are built there. As Secretary Chu said yesterday: In his State of the Union Address, President Obama outlined a blueprint for an American economy that is built to last and develops every available source of American energy. Nuclear power is an important part of that blueprint. Yes, nuclear power is so important that President Obama forgot to mention it in his very long State of the Union message. To send Secretary Chu to Georgia is kind of ironic, given that Chu is the one who said that nuclear power is the ``lesser of two evils.'' It was the President himself who designated a Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who had been leading the antinuclear energy group for quite some time. In fact, Chairman Jaczko tried to delay the progress on licensing the very reactors in Georgia that they went up to try to take credit for. We see this over and over again. What does this all mean? President Obama knows he needs to talk the talk on domestic energy because people have caught on. I think people know now that we have the recoverable reserves to be completely free from the Middle East. All we have to do in a short period of time is develop our own resources. I know my environmental friends are already saying, about the CRA on the Utility MACT--the NRDC jumped on the story today with the headline ``Let Loose the Defenders of Mercury Poisoning.'' Nothing could be further from the truth. I remember in 2003 and 2005 when we had the Clear Skies bill. The Clear Skies bill would have had mandatory reductions--keep in mind we are talking about 2003--mandatory reductions on mercury emissions by 70 percent by 2018. It was a matter of a few years from now, that would be reality. Think about it, 6 years from now we would already have a 70- percent reduction if the Democrats had not stopped the bill. The reason they did is because we refused--we want to have SOX, NOX, and mercury, which are the real pollutants, reduced and reduced in a rapid fashion, faster than President Clinton or anybody else has tried to do it. They held it hostage because they also wanted CO2 included in it, so we got none of the above as a result of it. The EPA's Utility MACT is designed to destroy jobs by killing off the coal industry. EPA admits itself that the Utility MACT rule would cost an unprecedented $11 billion to implement. Of course these costs will come in the form of higher electricity rates for every American. Importantly, the EPA also admits that the $11 billion in costs will yield a mere $6 billion in direct benefits. Do the math. It means the agency has by its own admission completely failed the cost-benefit test. It has the advantage of reducing emissions without killing jobs and the Utility MACT would do little for the environment but destroy millions of jobs. Why did Clear Skies fail? As I said, it was held hostage because they didn't want us to just lose SOX, NOX, and mercury, the real pollutants. They wanted to include CO2. Before Obama's decision to halt the ozone rule, which would have put hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk, then-White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley asked: What are the health impacts of unemployment? That is a good question. What are the health impacts of skyrocketing electricity rates which hurt the poor the most? What are the health impacts on children whose parents will lose one of the 1.4 million jobs that will be destroyed by the EPA's rules on powerplants? The Senate needs to focus on promoting policies that improve our environment without harming our economy. The EPA's Utility MACT does the opposite. My CRA, I think, is one of the things about which they say: You will never get it done. I have criticized people for bringing a Congressional Review Act up against regulations where I know the votes are not there. It takes just 51 votes. The reason I think the votes should be here now is if the people at home care enough to put the pressure on. That is exactly what happened on the ozone requirements. They said the President was committed to ozone changes. He changed his mind because of that. Remember the farm dust rule? The President was going to have a farm dust rule on emissions that would hit the air. I always remember, I had a news conference in my State of Oklahoma, in the western part of the State. We had a couple of people there from Washington who had never been west of the Mississippi. We got down there in this area of Oklahoma. We were talking about farm dust. I said: You see this brown stuff down here? That is dirt. You see that round green thing? That is cotton. Hold your finger up in the air--that is wind. Are there any questions? There is no technology to do that, yet the expense to each of my farmers in a farm State like Oklahoma would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and not accomplishing anything. We were able to get the public to write in to complain about that. As a result of that, the President pulled back. I hope enough people are concerned about Utility MACT and its devastating effect on our economy and on jobs in America that they will join in and apply the pressure necessary to help the people in this Chamber understand that we should pass this Congressional Review Act and do away with this particular, very harmful regulation that is before us. I have often said--a lot of people do not understand this--but Presidents are the ones who put the budgets down every year. A lot of times they try to blame the House or Senate, Democrats or Republicans. No. It doesn't matter. Who is in the White House, they are the ones who determine what the budget is. During the Bush years there was a total of $2 trillion of deficits in 8 years. However, after this budget came out last week, in the Obama 4 years the increase has been, in deficits, $5.3 trillion. That is $5.3 trillion in 4 years as opposed to $2 trillion in 8 years. As bad as that is, I contend that the regulations of this administration are actually more expensive to the American people than servicing this debt. So I think it is important that we talk about this, talk about not just Utility MACT but all of these. Utility MACT is where we should draw the line, however, because that is one that directly affects our ability to provide energy for America, for our manufacturing jobs. We are right now a little bit under 50 percent dependent upon coal for our ability to run this machine called America. If you do this, we would lose, it is anticipated, 20 percent of our generation capacity and that translates into a lot of money, as I have noted. That is what we have introduced today. I encourage my Democratic and Republican colleagues to join us in passing the CRA.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I want to announce that I introduced a resolution of disapproval just a few minutes ago under the Congressional Review Act. A lot of people don't know what the Congressional Review Act is, but it is an act that will allow Congress to look at some of the regulations. If there is something they don't believe is in the best interest of the country, they are able to introduce something to rescind that. It would call for a vote, and the vote would be a 51- vote. So it is one that has not been used very much, but it is a measure that would prevent, in this case the Obama EPA, from going through with its Utility MACT. MACT is the maximum achievable control technology. That is used quite often because there are sometimes requirements in these EPA rules that require different industries to do things where there is no technology available to allow them to get that done. So the Utility MACT is one of the most expensive environmental rules in American history, second only to President Obama's cap-and-trade rules, which he was unable to achieve legislatively. Left untouched, the Utility MACT would destroy over 1 million jobs and cost the American economy billions of dollars. My CRA, the Congressional Review Act, will be the moment of truth for a majority in this body who understand how harmful the Obama EPA regulatory agenda will be for their constituents. Remember, last year at this time 64 Senators voted in different ways to rein in the EPA's destructive greenhouse gas regulations. I had a bill to take away the jurisdiction from the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases. It was called the Energy Tax Prevention Act. At the same time, there was another I call a cover vote. Sometimes when you want to tell people at home that you are against something, you can have a less maybe severe vote, and there happens to be a cover vote that takes place. The bottom line is 64 of the 100 Senators voted to do something about the overregulation that is coming out of the Environmental Protection Agency. That particular one was on the regulation that would be the most expensive of all. The Utility MACT I am offering the CRA on now is probably the second most expensive. But to refresh your memory, in order to have the EPA have jurisdiction of the greenhouse gases, they had to somehow come up with an endangerment finding. They did, and they based it on the IPCC science that gave rise to the concern that was exposed in climategate. I think everyone understands that was flawed science. But, nonetheless, that is what they used. That is why we were able to get two-thirds of this body to object to the EPA regulating greenhouse gases. I think the bottom line now is that there are more than a dozen Senate Democrats who have claimed they want to rein in the EPA because they know the devastating impact the Agency's regulatory train wreck will have at home. The Senators understand if their constituents lose their jobs as a result of these overregulations, they might lose their jobs. So today the Senate can look forward to having one more opportunity to stand up to President Obama's war on affordable energy. They can vote for this CRA which will put a halt to one of the Obama EPA's most expensive and economically destructive rules. Under the Utility MACT, it would cost American families--and nobody disagrees with this--the range is between $11 billion and $18 billion in electricity rate increases. That is over an 11-percent rate increase on average that it would cost if we were to pass this Utility MACT under the regulations of the utilities. This would send ripple effects throughout the economy, causing approximately 1.4 million net job losses by 2020. And it is not just jobs in the coal industry that would be affected. Dr. Bernard Weinstein of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University has estimated EPA's air rules could endanger 1 million manufacturing jobs outside of the coal and utility industry losses. Workers recently laid off in Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia are feeling the devastating impacts of the rule. Sadly, these lost jobs are all part of Obama's wider war on coal and fossil fuels. You might remember that he admitted this was his goal in the campaign of 2008 when he said: If somebody wants to build a coal-fired plant they can. It's just that it will bankrupt them. And under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. When the cap-and-trade failed, Obama began aggressively pursuing these goals through an executive regulatory barrage of unelected bureaucrats. So companies such as Solyndra got big cash payoffs while a regulatory train wreck was unleashed by the EPA to destroy America's fossil fuel industry. The political climate is much different now than it was in the days when global warming alarmists could bask in their historical gloom-and- doom predictions about the end of the world. Now, President Obama wouldn't dare say anything like that because the American people no longer are buying it. Instead, he has begun touting oil and gas development and saying he is for an all-out, all-of-the-above energy strategy. In an election year, he knows the American people want the hundreds of thousands of jobs and affordable energy prices that come with domestic oil and gas. But he is clearly still determined to achieve his global warming agenda. His war on affordable energy is moving underneath the radar and wrapped in lies about protecting public health. Make no mistake, the train wreck will achieve all of Obama's global warming objectives, and it will severely undermine our Nation's economy in the process. So I will spend just a moment on that. When President Obama could not achieve cap-and-trade through legislation, he said he would just do it through regulations. EPA's greenhouse gas regime will cost American families between $300 billion and $400 billion a year. This is important because no one has refuted this. We have gone through the Kyoto convention, and that was a range that was given to us by the Wharton econometrics survey at that time. And several others chimed in--MIT chimed in, CRA chimed in. So the cost of regulating greenhouse gas would be about $300 billion to $400 billion a year. When we talk about billions and trillions of dollars, I am like everybody else. I have a hard time seeing how that really affects us. In my State of Oklahoma, I regularly determine each year how many families in my State of Oklahoma are going to file a tax return, and then I do the math. This particular one, at $300 billion a year, would cost each family filing a tax return in my State of Oklahoma about $3,000 a year. Now, that is not just once, that would be every year. What do you get for it? And this is the thing that I think is important, and the American people finally have caught on. They have admitted that through the EPA, when you ask them if we were to pass one of these things regulating CO2 through the cap-and-trade legislation that we have defeated, would this reduce greenhouse gases, the answer from the Administrator of the EPA is, no, it wouldn't because this only would affect the United States of America. This isn't where the problem is. China would still be doing its thing, India would be doing its thing, and Mexico. I have contended if we are regulating these in the United States, it could actually have the effect of increasing the emissions because, as we chase our manufacturing base overseas to find energy, they would be going to countries such as China and India where they don't have the regulatory restrictions we have in this country. So the Utility MACT is second only to the greenhouse gas regulations in terms of what it would cost, in terms of costing the people in terms of jobs and money. Actually, the regulatory thing would be worse when we are talking about greenhouse gases because under the bills that were introduced starting in 2003--that was the McCain-Lieberman bill, going all the way forward to the Waxman-Markey bill--the assumption has been that they would regulate industries and emitters that were over the 25,000 tons a year. Now, if we do it through regulation, as they are trying to do it right now, the Clean Air Act has a limit of 250 tons. So we would be talking about regulating virtually every church, school, and hospital in America and not just the very large utilities. So that is where we were on that issue. On oil, President Obama has been congratulating himself on decreasing the imports of oil from the Middle East, but he fails to mention his policies have been consistently against oil and gas. In fact, he and people in his administration have said they want to do away with fossil fuels. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said they wanted to ``boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.'' Well, that is $7 or $8 a gallon. Right now we are looking at $4 a gallon, and that is what they want to do. What is their motive? To do away with fossil fuels. He claims to care about energy security, yet he stopped the Keystone Pipeline. I am very proud of a lot of Senators in here who have talked about it. Senator Hoeven, for example, is very familiar with it because of the production in his State. We are talking about the sands up in Alberta and bringing them down through the United States. I am interested in this because Cushing, OK, happens to be one of the intersections that is there for the pipeline. So here is something there is absolutely no reason to do away with except to kill oil because we know the pipeline is going to bring oil down into the United States through, I might say, my State of Oklahoma down to the coast where it can be used. A lot of people don't understand this because they have been told things that, quite frankly, are not true. In terms of oil, gas, and coal, the United States of America has the largest recoverable reserves in the world. People keep saying over and over again: Well, we only have 3 percent of the reserves. Yet we use 25 percent. Quite frankly, they are talking about proven reserves. You can't get a recoverable reserve until you drill. If they don't let us drill because of the policies of this administration, then, obviously, we would be stuck with just the very small amount we could produce. Nonetheless, it is out there. We are the only country in the world that our politicians don't allow us to explore and recover our own reserves--the only country in the world. Natural gas. We know it is happening right now. We know in areas like New York and Pennsylvania with the Marcellus debate, we have opportunities we have never had in this country. We have the opportunity to recover more natural gas. When the President made a statement in the State of the Union Message about being supportive of ``all the above,'' talking about natural gas, he slipped in one little statement: Well, we don't want to poison the Earth--or something like that. What he is talking about is they have spent countless hours trying to regulate a process called hydraulic fracturing--a process that started in my State of Oklahoma in 1949. There has never been a documented case of ground water contamination since they have been using hydraulic fracturing. And we can't get into these tight formations without hydraulic fracturing. It can't be done. So the President can get by with saying he wants to produce the natural gas we have locally, and at the same time take over the regulation of hydraulic fracturing by the Federal Government. We know what that would mean. I think the best evidence of that is President Obama in his current budget is doubling the funding for the antifracking agenda in the 2013 budget. Nuclear? That is agreed. If we believe in ``all of the above,'' you have to have fossil fuel as coal, oil, and gas, but also nuclear. It is a very important component. It is interesting that only yesterday President Obama sent his Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, to Georgia, to take credit for the 5,800 jobs that will be created when two new nuclear reactors are built there. As Secretary Chu said yesterday: In his State of the Union Address, President Obama outlined a blueprint for an American economy that is built to last and develops every available source of American energy. Nuclear power is an important part of that blueprint. Yes, nuclear power is so important that President Obama forgot to mention it in his very long State of the Union message. To send Secretary Chu to Georgia is kind of ironic, given that Chu is the one who said that nuclear power is the ``lesser of two evils.'' It was the President himself who designated a Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who had been leading the antinuclear energy group for quite some time. In fact, Chairman Jaczko tried to delay the progress on licensing the very reactors in Georgia that they went up to try to take credit for. We see this over and over again. What does this all mean? President Obama knows he needs to talk the talk on domestic energy because people have caught on. I think people know now that we have the recoverable reserves to be completely free from the Middle East. All we have to do in a short period of time is develop our own resources. I know my environmental friends are already saying, about the CRA on the Utility MACT--the NRDC jumped on the story today with the headline ``Let Loose the Defenders of Mercury Poisoning.'' Nothing could be further from the truth. I remember in 2003 and 2005 when we had the Clear Skies bill. The Clear Skies bill would have had mandatory reductions--keep in mind we are talking about 2003--mandatory reductions on mercury emissions by 70 percent by 2018. It was a matter of a few years from now, that would be reality. Think about it, 6 years from now we would already have a 70- percent reduction if the Democrats had not stopped the bill. The reason they did is because we refused--we want to have SOX, NOX, and mercury, which are the real pollutants, reduced and reduced in a rapid fashion, faster than President Clinton or anybody else has tried to do it. They held it hostage because they also wanted CO2 included in it, so we got none of the above as a result of it. The EPA's Utility MACT is designed to destroy jobs by killing off the coal industry. EPA admits itself that the Utility MACT rule would cost an unprecedented $11 billion to implement. Of course these costs will come in the form of higher electricity rates for every American. Importantly, the EPA also admits that the $11 billion in costs will yield a mere $6 billion in direct benefits. Do the math. It means the agency has by its own admission completely failed the cost-benefit test. It has the advantage of reducing emissions without killing jobs and the Utility MACT would do little for the environment but destroy millions of jobs. Why did Clear Skies fail? As I said, it was held hostage because they didn't want us to just lose SOX, NOX, and mercury, the real pollutants. They wanted to include CO2. Before Obama's decision to halt the ozone rule, which would have put hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk, then-White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley asked: What are the health impacts of unemployment? That is a good question. What are the health impacts of skyrocketing electricity rates which hurt the poor the most? What are the health impacts on children whose parents will lose one of the 1.4 million jobs that will be destroyed by the EPA's rules on powerplants? The Senate needs to focus on promoting policies that improve our environment without harming our economy. The EPA's Utility MACT does the opposite. My CRA, I think, is one of the things about which they say: You will never get it done. I have criticized people for bringing a Congressional Review Act up against regulations where I know the votes are not there. It takes just 51 votes. The reason I think the votes should be here now is if the people at home care enough to put the pressure on. That is exactly what happened on the ozone requirements. They said the President was committed to ozone changes. He changed his mind because of that. Remember the farm dust rule? The President was going to have a farm dust rule on emissions that would hit the air. I always remember, I had a news conference in my State of Oklahoma, in the western part of the State. We had a couple of people there from Washington who had never been west of the Mississippi. We got down there in this area of Oklahoma. We were talking about farm dust. I said: You see this brown stuff down here? That is dirt. You see that round green thing? That is cotton. Hold your finger up in the air--that is wind. Are there any questions? There is no technology to do that, yet the expense to each of my farmers in a farm State like Oklahoma would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and not accomplishing anything. We were able to get the public to write in to complain about that. As a result of that, the President pulled back. I hope enough people are concerned about Utility MACT and its devastating effect on our economy and on jobs in America that they will join in and apply the pressure necessary to help the people in this Chamber understand that we should pass this Congressional Review Act and do away with this particular, very harmful regulation that is before us. I have often said--a lot of people do not understand this--but Presidents are the ones who put the budgets down every year. A lot of times they try to blame the House or Senate, Democrats or Republicans. No. It doesn't matter. Who is in the White House, they are the ones who determine what the budget is. During the Bush years there was a total of $2 trillion of deficits in 8 years. However, after this budget came out last week, in the Obama 4 years the increase has been, in deficits, $5.3 trillion. That is $5.3 trillion in 4 years as opposed to $2 trillion in 8 years. As bad as that is, I contend that the regulations of this administration are actually more expensive to the American people than servicing this debt. So I think it is important that we talk about this, talk about not just Utility MACT but all of these. Utility MACT is where we should draw the line, however, because that is one that directly affects our ability to provide energy for America, for our manufacturing jobs. We are right now a little bit under 50 percent dependent upon coal for our ability to run this machine called America. If you do this, we would lose, it is anticipated, 20 percent of our generation capacity and that translates into a lot of money, as I have noted. That is what we have introduced today. I encourage my Democratic and Republican colleagues to join us in passing the CRA.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Will the Senator yield for a question.

Mr. INHOFE. Even though we haven't ironed out how to handle time, we have a Senator who wanted to speak 20 minutes ago, and if we could, I would love to get back into the dialog.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I am not sure, I say to my good friend Senator Boxer, she is going to be too excited about some of the things because what I wish to do is establish what is unique about this bill. There is a committee in the Senate. It is not like any committee in the House. In the House, they have two separate committees. It is called Environment and Public Works. So it is two almost unrelated committees. Our committee has more jurisdiction than any other committee in the Senate, but it handles things that are totally different. I will sound a little partisan right now, but I am very concerned about President Obama and what he has done to this country in terms of the deficit. A lot of people do not realize that the budgets actually come from the President--not the Democrats, not the Republicans, not the House and the Senate. Those budgets have had deficits of around $4\1/2\ trillion. I have been very upset about that. I am upset about what the President is doing with the military right now. If we have to go through the sequestration as is planned, we are going to lose about $1 trillion in defense spending over the next 10 years. The third area is in energy. We have the opportunity to be totally energy self-supporting just by developing our own resources, but the problem is a political problem. The fourth area is over regulation. I say this because my good friend, the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, would disagree with me in all those areas because we do not agree. I look at the regulations and the fact that, in my opinion, they are driving our manufacturing base overseas. I see the crown jewel of all regulations is cap and trade. They tried their best to do it. They had the McCain-Lieberman bill in 2003 and again in 2005. We had the Boxer bill--several Boxer bills that Senator Boxer was involved in--certainly Waxman-Markey. We defeated them all, and now what the President is trying to do is do through regulation what he could not do through legislation. I only say that because I am in agreement with the chairman of the committee, Senator Boxer, on most of what she just said because of the significance of this. I am going to repeat what I said yesterday, I guess it was, or the day before. When rankings come out, historically since I have been in the House and the Senate--I came to the Senate in 1994--I am always ranked among the most conservative Members. My good friend Senator Boxer is ranked among the most liberal Members--progressive, liberal. But what I appreciate about her is that she is a sincere liberal. She understands that. In her feelings, she believes government should be involved in more things than I do. I hasten to say this again, that while I have been historically considered the most conservative Member, I am a big spender in two areas. One area is national defense--I am very concerned about what is happening in national defense--the other area is infrastructure. Way back when I was in the House and on the Transportation Infrastructure Committee, at that time we worked very hard for a robust bill, for reauthorizing the transportation system. We were successful. That was back in the good-old days, I say to Senator Boxer, when we always had surpluses in the highway trust fund. The highway trust fund probably goes down as the most popular tax in history because people know, since 1953, it has been a trust fund where people pay their 18 or so cents per gallon, and it goes to maintaining those roads they are driving on. So it is directly related to the gasoline purchased. Then some things happened. First of all, I can remember when we had surpluses. So everybody who had their own deal wanted to get in on surpluses, and they started expanding the highway trust fund expenditures beyond just maintaining and building roads. That was one of the problems. Then along came a lot of the changes. When they talk about electric cars, whether one is for them or against them, and mandating gas mileage, that reduces the proceeds dramatically. In the beginning, I think they probably should have had the highway trust fund geared to a percentage instead of cents. Now fast-forward to recent times and we have a deteriorating system. I was proud of the Environment and Public Works Committee I have been talking about. In 2006, prior to the last election, I was chairman because the Republicans were in the majority. At that time, we did the 2005 highway reauthorization bill, and it was $286.4 billion--a very robust bill. Yet we could pretty much document that we didn't do anything new in that bill. We just maintained what we had. It expired in 2009. Since then, we have been operating on extensions. This is significant. Before I get on to operating on an extension, I will mention what we are talking about, Senator Boxer and I. Our Environment and Public Works Committee has the jurisdiction over the highway title of the bill. Some things are controversial. Not many. I don't know of anything controversial in the highway title. The Commerce Committee with Senator Rockefeller as chairman and Senator Hutchison as ranking member, the Finance Committee with Senators Baucus and Hatch, and the Banking Committee--that is Tim Johnson and Richard Shelby from Alabama--have done their work now. Ours is the highway title. In my State of Oklahoma, because of the condition of the bridges and highways--the last time I looked, I think Missouri and Oklahoma tied at dead last in the condition of our bridges--we had a young lady--and I have told this story many times; this is most compelling. This young lady--a mother of three small children in Oklahoma City--drove under one of our bridges and a chunk of concrete dropped off and killed them. These are serious matters. So bridges have dropped, just as one did in Minnesota and down in south Texas. We have had so many times when crumbling infrastructure has given way. I remember when they considered Oklahoma--since we became a State in 1907, we are one of the newer States--people didn't think we had infrastructure problems. They thought that was just confined to California, New York, and the older parts of the country. That is not true anymore because in many of those older parts the infrastructure has been rebuilt while some of the newer States have been ignored. That is why in Oklahoma it is critical. People say they don't want earmarks. Senator Boxer said: We don't have earmarks. I would like to discuss that because I am a strong believer as opposed to the people who don't want us to do what we are supposed to be doing when we were sworn to uphold the Constitution, article I, section 9--we should be the ones, the House and Senate, to do the appropriating and the authorization. By saying we are not going to do it and defining earmarks as appropriations and authorization, I can see why Democrats lined up to do away with earmarks in a recent vote because that turns it over to President Obama, and he was very supportive of that. Some Republicans are going to talk about that again. This is not something that is a problem with this bill. In this bill, we have things that come from the needs of our States. We have a secretary of transportation in Oklahoma who has been before our committee numerous times because that secretary of transportation has been in that job for many years now. Before that, he was director of transportation for, I think, 30 years. There is nobody who is more knowledgeable on that issue. So we checked--and I do--with the department of transportation in Oklahoma on their prioritizing of projects. We have a system--and I wish all States had this system. We have transportation districts and chairmen of the districts. They can use the same criteria throughout Oklahoma, and they determine what should be fixed and where the money should be spent. So it is not a political decision, a decision where we are doing what most people consider to be earmarks and trying to help our friends. That is not what we do in Oklahoma. This system, frankly, works very well. So now we go back to the extensions. Here is the problem with extensions. Our 2005 bill expired in 2009. We have now gone through eight extensions. The problem we have with extensions is that we cannot do anything creative. We cannot change, reform the system. We just have to take the money that is available and try to use it as best we can. But we cannot not reform a system that needs to be reformed. I have said some things that were not all that complimentary about my partner--in this case, Senator Boxer. We have served together for years in trying to overcome these obstacles. On the highway title of the transportation bill that we are going to be voting on, we have done a good job. When I think about the reforms--and I compliment Senator Boxer. She has been in a real tough position with some of the more liberal members of her party and in some of the things to which she has agreed. We sat down and worked out the differences in a lot of these problems. State flexibility, we have that in this bill, which we have never had before. I have always been a believer that we are the guys who are in the best position to determine the needs of the States. I have often said I have served on the State level of government; I have been mayor of a major city. I believe the closer you get to the people, the more responsible government is. I believe that to be true. That is what we have done. We have done that in the flexibility that we have given the States in our program. Senator Boxer mentioned that we cut down the number of programs by two-thirds. We are down to one-third in the number of programs we had before. That is major reform. NEPA: We have done streamlining, which is something we have tried to do for a long time. Let me mention the one area of reform that I want everybody to listen to because this is significant. We have had a friendly disagreement, Senator Boxer and I, on transportation enhancement. These are things we could argue do not affect transportation directly. I have always believed these things we spend money on that comes from the highway trust fund should go into transportation projects. But they have not. Two percent of the highway funding is required to go to enhancements. That equates to 10 percent of the surface transportation money. So we can use 10 percent or 2 percent, depending on which one we are applying it to. If we take 2 percent of the total funding, that is a lot of money. Enhancements are things people criticize us for. I think that criticism is just. How did we handle this situation and get a highway bill in the highway title portion? We sat down and worked out something right here on the floor of the Senate and said there has to be an answer. In Oklahoma, we don't even want enhancements. How can we handle this? We worked out an agreement that a State, at its own decision level, is able to use this 2 percent of the total highway funding that would go to enhancements in any way they want to do it, and primarily in taking care of some of the unfunded mandates, the requirements there, where the government is saying to people in Oklahoma that this is what they have to do--some endangered species stuff and those things, they can use it this way. In my State, we cannot have any of the 2 percent going to enhancements. Other States feel differently. This is not one size fits all. So we have the opportunity that they can do what they want. These are reforms. We never had reforms like those before. I am proud we are able to do it. I compliment the chairman of the committee for being willing to do this, for taking the time to talk to her colleagues and say: All right, the choice is not do we want a perfect bill for Democrats or do I want one for Republicans. I think we have a pretty near perfect bill for Republicans on the highway title. I am very proud of what we have come up with. Nonetheless, it has been heavy lifting. I applaud the chairman of the committee. I want to go back to this extension. If we were to continue to operate on extensions, the amount of money we would be spending on highways would reduce by about 34 percent, about one-third. If we talk to Gary Ridley in Oklahoma as to what that would do in terms of our program that we already have online, we would have to default on some contracts. We would have to be in a situation where we are not able to do the things that are in our 5-year plan in Oklahoma. We think things out in Oklahoma. We go over the State and make determinations. It is done outside of the political system by people charged with different transportation districts. I can tell you now that it will be--it is a life-threatening issue. If we are dropping down by 34 percent, it will be a serious problem. I suggest to every Member of the Senate, before they make final decisions on the bill, call their director of highways in their States and talk to them. Talk to your State legislators, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals alike. This is the one area where they will agree. In Oklahoma, they are in agreement. They want to have a highway bill. They look to constituents and say this is life threatening and we have to do a better job. This is a partnership thing. We are going to have more flexibility for State programs, streamlining, and are not going to be encumbered by mandatory enhancements. I don't know of one member of the Oklahoma House or Senate who doesn't want this. What is wrong with doing what the people at home want? I used to work as mayor of the second largest city in Oklahoma. My phone rings off the hook about programs that need to be completed in our highway system in Oklahoma. I sometimes look at people who demagog the issue and talk about: Oh, no, we don't want to spend all this. There is one area where conservatives and liberals alike should be spending--two areas-- national defense and infrastructure. I remember when Congresswoman Bachmann was talking around the country about the spending during the earmark argument. They got back to Minnesota and talked about the needs for transportation. She said, ``I am not talking about transportation.'' That is the point we need to get across. Of course, I throw in national defense, but that is not in this discussion. Transportation infrastructure is something we have to do. In Oklahoma, we are going to do our part, do everything we can to get with the bill. It is not going to change anything except for the fact that it is going to be able to handle that. Oh, I didn't see--but I am managing the time. By the way, I want to comment, Mr. President----

Mr. INHOFE. Maybe I am not.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the junior Senator from Kentucky be recognized for up to 7 minutes. He has been trying to get on for quite some time. I think that is agreeable with everyone.

Mr. INHOFE. We are both doing it. All right. What I am saying is that shouldn't really be a Democrat-Republican management here because there are a lot of Democrats who agree with me and a lot of Republicans who agree with Senator Boxer. But we do have the junior Senator from Kentucky here who wants to be heard.

Mr. INHOFE. No. I just wanted to say that this should be very visible to everyone. How could you and I agree and feel so strongly about infrastructure in America when we have such diverse opinions philosophically? My case rests.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I see the junior Senator from Connecticut in the Chamber. If he wishes to speak, it is my understanding this is Democratic time now. If he wishes to go before me, that is perfectly all right. I ask unanimous consent that at the conclusion of his remarks I be recognized in morning business because I do want to talk about the transportation bill that is coming up.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, we are going to be considering today--and I think the rest of this week, and probably into next week--one of the most significant things we are supposed to be doing here. I wish to start off by saying--in endorsing and encouraging a highway reauthorization bill--I want people to know this is coming from someone who is a conservative. I think there are a lot of conservative organizations out there that have mistakenly thought of this as being a big spending bill without realizing this has been, since its inception back during the Eisenhower administration, an approach to building roads, highways, infrastructure that is necessary in this country, and to have that as a top priority. There are some problems that have come up with the highway trust fund, and I want to share that with my colleagues but, first of all, make sure everyone knows, who might be watching--and particularly some of the organizations that are conservative organizations--that these words are coming from me. I have probably been recognized as the most conservative Member of this body as much as anybody else has, maybe more. Yet, I have always said--even though I am a leading conservative--there are two areas where I am a big spender. One is in national defense and one is in our infrastructure. For that reason, I say to the Presiding Officer, when I was first elected back in 1994, I selected two committees to be on. One was the Armed Services Committee, where I could try to keep a strong national defense. The other was the Environment and Public Works Committee. I am now the second ranking member on the Armed Services Committee and the ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee. Back when the Republicans were a majority, I was actually the chairman of that committee. That is when we did our last bill. Our last highway reauthorization bill was in 2005. It was one that went through the process and was very successful. Conservatives and liberals alike joined and said this is a major function of America. This is what we are supposed to be doing here. A strong defense and our infrastructure system are not going to be done by anybody else. It is going to have to be done by us. If we want to make sure we maintain a strong national defense, which this President has not been doing with the cuts he has made--actually, we could have as much as $1 trillion in cuts in our defense budget over the next 10 years, all due, quite frankly, to one person. That is President Obama. So he does not care that much about defending America in putting the resources there. Here is a President who, in his own budget, has proposed a deficit each year, for four budgets, of over $1 trillion each year. You would think, with these huge deficits, we would not be having a problem in defense spending, as well as in our roads and highways, in coming up with a bill that would be a transportation reauthorization bill. The transportation reauthorization bill for 2005--where I was the sponsor of it because I was chairman of the committee--was a $286.4 billion bill. It was one that even at that time barely maintained what was out there already. Certainly I do not have to tell the occupier of the chair from West Virginia that I have been through his State and there is a lot of room for improvements in the road system, and I know he is a strong supporter of this. This is certainly true in my State of Oklahoma. It happens that my State of Oklahoma is tied, the last time I checked, with Missouri as being dead last in the quality of our bridges. We have actually had deaths in Oklahoma. We had a lady not too long ago in Oklahoma City, the mother of three small children, who was driving and a chunk of concrete came off a bridge and killed her. This is serious stuff. This is what we are supposed to be doing here. So we had this bill back in 2005. Since that time, we have been operating on extensions. We have done eight extensions. It is kind of complicated, but I want to explain how this works. The proceeds of the highway trust fund come from the gas tax. About 18 cents, when you buy gas at the pump, goes to maintenance of the highways and bridges in that program. The problem has been that in recent years--it started about 10 years ago--we had surpluses in the highway trust fund, and with other people who wanted to get their deal in on the highway trust fund, we have things that have nothing to do with transportation that are there. That is one of the problems we have. But the other problem we have is that through the efforts to encourage people to use electric cars and get better mileage and all that, we do not have the proceeds we had in years past. I think probably if we had been smart initially, we would have had the highway trust funded by a percentage as opposed to a ``centage.'' If it is 18 cents, it does not make any difference, it is going to be 18 cents. But if the price of fuel goes up, if it had been a percentage, then we would not be faced with the situation we have today. So that is what we have. I applaud, I thank Senator Harry Reid, the leader of the Senate, for wanting to give it the attention, the priority in getting it on the floor so we can talk about it. In a minute, I will also be very complimentary of Senator Boxer from California. This is something that is kind of interesting that is unique in transportation only. Here I am ranked always as one of the top three most conservative Members. Senator Boxer from California is a very proud liberal. One thing: I do not mind people being liberals if they are proud liberals and admit it. Well, she does. She is a liberal. She feels the government should have greater control of some of the things we do. Consequently, she is doing essentially the same thing as the current chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee as I would be doing if I had still been chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee; that is, coming up with a highway bill. Well, we are looking at it right now. I have to share with my colleagues on the right--the Republicans, the conservatives--what we are looking at. A lot of people do not realize the bill that is coming up is a bill of compromise. We actually passed this out of the committee unanimously. All the Republicans and all the Democrats voted for it. It is a bill where, I have to say, Senator Boxer worked very closely with us. We have reforms in here. Going back to my comment about extensions, if we do not pass a bill, we have to operate on extending the current legislation, the current bill, the remnants, I might say, of the 2005 transportation reauthorization bill. Now, if we do that, we do not get any reforms. So one of the things we did in this bill that gained the support of the Republicans on the committee, and most of the Republicans here, was the reforms we had. For example, in this bill we gave--the bill that is up for consideration now--more flexibility to the States. I have long believed--and I served many years ago in the State legislature--the closer you get to home the more responsible government is. And I can tell you right now, giving the flexibility to the States to make these determinations--who are we to say that we, in our infinite wisdom and knowledge in Washington DC, are smarter than they are at the State level? We are not. Certainly, we do not know the needs like the States know the needs. So we have the situation in this legislation where we are giving more flexibility to the States. We are reducing the number of programs. This is a big thing. I cannot tell you exactly how many programs there are because I do not have that in my notes. But I do know we have reduced the number by eliminating and consolidating programs that might be duplicative of each other by two-thirds. In other words, we only have one-third of the programs we had before. That is in this bill. That is a major improvement. Now, looking, also, at the streamlining of project delivery, we have something called NEPA. NEPA looks after the environmental concerns when we are building roads and bridges. This bill expands the number of categorical exclusions available under NEPA and allows for steps within the lengthy NEPA process to be combined so we can get things done. You have heard the stories--I am sure you have--of problems with everything from endangered species to other environmental concerns that cause these things to drag on and on and on, and the expense is so much greater. Well, we are eliminating a lot of those categorical exclusions. We are increasing the number so that we will be able to get that much more done. Another thing in this law--this is very complicated--is called enhancements. I opposed it back years ago when they started putting enhancements on the highway bill. I have always said it is a moral issue. When people pay their 18.4 cents a gallon, and it goes into the highway trust fund, they are led to believe that money is going to be going to transportation, for improving the roads and the bridges. That is not quite true because other deals have kind of moved in so that they are involved with it. So they passed this thing called enhancements where 2 percent of the total highway funding would have to go to what they called transportation enhancements. A lot of people say 10 percent. It is 10 percent of the States' surface transportation funding or 2 percent of the total highway funding. I would like to do away with the enhancement program altogether. Unfortunately, that means we could not get a highway bill. Working with Senator Boxer and with the Democrats in the committee, we came up with the perfect solution. We do not have to eliminate enhancements because the solution under this bill will allow the States to make the determination as to how they are going to spend that 2 percent of their total highway funding. Instead of using it for museums and other things that have nothing to do with transportation, we are, under the provisions of this bill that we are talking about, able to use that money for any other requirements for unfunded mandates--and there are plenty of them there, such as endangered species mitigation, storm water runoff, wetlands mitigation. They are a part of every project. So we can take that 2 percent, and instead of applying it to enhancements, we can offset the requirements that are there. So for all practical purposes, like in my State of Oklahoma, we are not going to have any of that 2 percent for enhancements. It is not there. We have solved the problem. But we put that in the hands of States. So there will be amendments that would want to do away with enhancements. I would say we do not have to do that now because we have reformed that process. It is a little bit complicated because we are merely saying that we have a block of money which constitutes 2 percent of the total highway funding, and instead of that going to things that we hear about that have nothing to do with transportation, we do not have to do that anymore. That will be up to the States. However, some States may feel differently. If they do, that is not their problem; that is not my problem. So that is the type of thing we are doing in this bill that has not been there before. If we do not do it, we would be cutting highway spending down to the highway trust fund receipts. That calculates into a 34-percent cut to the States' road and bridge funding. Right now--to put this into perspective so that people will, hopefully, understand and listen--we need, and we are in the process of getting, an additional $7.2 billion in order to be able to fund this bill as we passed it--$7.2 billion. Stop and think about that. If we go back to the $800 billion stimulus bill that President Obama had--I know Senator Boxer agreed with me-- more of that should have gone to highway funding. Only 3 percent of it--3 percent--went to highway funding. So we are talking about $800 billion which was spent. We are trying to come up with $7.2 billion. I have to say this and bring it up. We all remember the $700 billion bailout. A lot of Republicans ended up voting for that, and right now we are down to--the cost is probably going to be leveling out at $130 billion. That is the bailout that was passed. Well, $130 billion, when all we are looking for now is $7.2 billion, we cannot say it is not there. As I said when I opened, this President, in his budget, has had over $1 trillion in deficit each year for 4 years. Again, that is not the Democrats, not the Republicans, it is not the House, it is not the Senate. That is President Obama. That is his budget. That is the way it works. I have often said when we look at the hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars--and yet one of the prime functions we have is roads and highways, and we are just $7.2 billion short. I think they have come up with it. I applaud the Finance Committee which has been working on this and recognized it in terms of priority that we ought to be able to do it. They have come up with a package now that--again, this is not in my end of it; this is the Finance Committee. A lot of people think the highway bill is all in the Environment and Public Works Committee. It is not. We have the Commerce Committee, the Budget Committee, the Finance Committee, and our committee. But that end of it is in the Finance Committee. They have worked diligently. I appreciate the hard work that has came from the Democrats and the Republicans on that committee. Now, in the event that we do not do this, we are going to go back--it will be our ninth extension. When we have an extension, none of these reforms I just talked about, none of them will end up being done. It will just be major cuts in programs. I would only ask this: I would ask any Member of the Senate, before you draw yourself into a box where you are going to be opposed to this, what you need to do is call your State departments of transportation. Talk to them about it. Talk to the chambers. Talk to the labor unions back in your States. See what they think. This is one of the few issues where they are all in agreement--labor, chambers, all of them. They realize we have to have infrastructure in America. I know my State is not the only State that has road problems. But I am more familiar with them because that is where I live and raise my 20 kids and grandkids. So I would hope that we look at the opportunities that we have in what is called MAP-21. That is the transportation reauthorization bill that we have under consideration at this time, and that we will do the responsible thing. If we do rely, by the way, on extensions, our highway trust fund will be totally depleted by this next summer. Then we are going to have to do an extension or be forced to bail out the highway trust fund. We do not want that to happen. We can preclude that from happening. All we have to do is be responsible today. Again, this is one of the few areas where back home organized labor as well as business is all for it. Here we have the extremes, such as Senator Boxer from California and myself. We both agree this is one of the two primary functions of government. This is our opportunity to do it. I hope there will not be people on the outside looking at this and completely disregarding these hundreds of billions of dollars that, in my opinion, have been wasted and not pay attention to one of the prime functions of government; that is, doing the infrastructure for the United States of America. I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Tester.) The clerk will call the roll.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, we are going to have a number of votes on amendments this afternoon. I think it is important that we look at this in historic perspective. I am referring to the amendments and the meaning of the Toomey amendment, which I think is very significant. As most people think about earmarks, yes, we want to do away with this. I am the first to admit that there has been a lot of abuse in the earmark process. I don't want to take sides between authorizers and appropriators, but I can remember several times here on the floor when appropriations bills are coming through, when people are legislating on appropriations bills, when they are swapping out deals. That is the kind of thing we want to stop. I think we have an opportunity to do that today. I have an amendment. It is my understanding, the way the amendments are stacked up, there is going to be a vote on the Toomey amendment and then a vote on my amendment. Let me talk a little bit about how long we have been working on this issue. Way back in 2007, I gave a talk to the Grover Norquist group. It was on July 25, 2007. I gave the Senate history of the 200-year fight between appropriators and authorizers. In 1816 responsibilities between authorizing versus appropriating had been debated. In that year the Senate created the first 11 permanent standing committees. I think most people understand that we in the Senate, each one of us is on at least two standing committees. Many of these are authorizing committees or appropriating committees. Mine happened to be authorizing committees. My two major committees I have been on since serving in the Senate are the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Environment and Public Works Committee. Both are authorizing committees. What is significant about this is that there has always been a fight. This is not a new fight. People think this is just going on today. This has been going on literally since 1816. In 1867 the Senate created the Appropriations Committee. The purpose of that was to have the tax writing put in the Finance Committee and then have the appropriating committee as a separate committee--keeping those functions divided. Here it is now a couple of hundred years later and we are still trying to do the same thing. Today may be the day we can do it, and my amendment actually would do that. In 1921--I am reading notes from the speech I made in 2007 at the Grover Norquist event--in 1921 the Senate passed the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921. The Senate tried to ensure that authorizing had to take place in a separate committee. There we go. That is what we are talking about today. My amendment actually resolves the problem because it defines an earmark as an appropriation that hasn't been authorized. In a minute, I am going to talk about that because there is a lot of support for that currently that should be considered. Let me use my committees as an example. If we were to do away with all earmarks as they are described in the House bill, the earmarks would actually be defined as any appropriation or authorization. That gets into the huge question we will talk about in a minute--what our Constitution says. It says we, the House and the Senate, should do the spending or the appropriating. This has been this way for a long time. I am hoping Members will go back and read Joseph Story and some of the great people in the past who have talked about why it is necessary for all the authorizing and the spending to take place in this body, in the Senate and in the House. If that does not happen, we are going to be in a position where we are giving our function to the President. We are ceding our constitutional obligation to the President--in this case, President Obama. Back in the time I was making this speech initially, I talked about such things. I mentioned this on the floor yesterday. A lot of people do not understand. The budget that comes to us is a budget from the President. It is not from Congress, not from the House, not from the Senate, not from the Democrats, not from the Republicans, it is from the President. The President is the guy who sends the budget down. I am so critical of this President because every one of these budgets now-- we have just gotten the fourth budget--has a deficit of over $1 trillion. Unheard of. I can remember back in the days--1996 was the first $1.5 trillion budget. That was during the Clinton administration. I remember coming down to the floor and saying: We cannot sustain this level of spending. That was $1.5 trillion to run the entire United States of America. What President Obama has sent down is $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion in each of his budgets, just deficit alone. We can't continue to do that. I am on the Armed Services Committee. It is an authorizing committee. It is a committee staffed with experts in every area--missile defense, strike fighters--all of that having to do with defending America. Of course, when the budget comes down, historically--I am talking about historically from 100 years ago--we have taken that budget and analyzed that budget. The Chair is fully aware of this because she sits on that committee. We determine what is the best way to spend the given number of dollars that come down in the budget to best defend America. The example I used yesterday was in one of the first budgets that came down. I think it was the first budget from President Obama. It had one item that was a $330 million item that was for a launching system that was referred to as a box of rockets--a good system, I might add, but with the scarce dollars we made a determination in the Armed Services Committee that we could take that same $300 million and instead of spending it on a launching system, spend it on six new F-18 strike fighter aircraft. And we did that. That is what we should be able to do. But if you have an earmark ban, then you would not be able to do that. It depends on how it is going to be interpreted, but the way I interpret it, it would mean we cannot change what the President sends down because that would be called a congressional earmark. Some might argue and say: No, it is that only if it happens to be in your district or something like that. That is not what it says, though. The way it is defined is anything that would be an authorization or an appropriation. So we had the example there in the Armed Services Committee, and one of the unintended consequences would be--I will just use this as an example. I can remember back in the days, I am old enough to remember back when Reagan was President and nobody believed we would ever have a problem with people sending over a missile with some type of a weapon on it that would be very destructive to America, nor did they believe it would be possible, if a missile were coming in, that we could knock down that missile. Well, we have now settled that. Everyone knows you can hit a bullet with a bullet. We have done it before. We are doing a good job. We also know after having gone through 9/11 that we should have at the very top of our concern as representatives of this country to defend America and to have an enhanced system. So we had a policy that we wanted to have a redundancy in all three phases of missile defense. In missile defense, you have three phases--a boost phase, a midcourse phase, and a terminal phase--and we want to have that. So when we are addressing that, if the President comes in with something that doesn't follow that redundancy, we could be in a position where we would not be able to do what is in the best interests of the country. I am not the only one who believes that when we say we want an outright ban on all spending--and that is what we are saying, an outright ban on all spending--there is an article that I took out of the Hill Magazine--that would have been about 3 or 4 years ago--saying ``Lobbyists Hitting Up Agencies As Earmark Rate Drops.'' In other words, as we quit spending here, it does not save a cent. That money goes back into the bureaucracy, and they are spending it at that point. So that puts us in the position of, admittedly, what they are talking about--they are actually lobbying the bureaucrats as opposed to Members because that is where all the power is. In other words, we have ceded that power. I can see a lot of the Democrats wanting to pass an all-out ban on congressional earmarks because they are supporting Obama. Obama wants to do the spending. They want him to do that. I understand that, and I heard from some of the Democrats who do not agree with that, and I appreciate their making that statement on the floor. But I think as we address this and go back to things that we did on the floor a year and a half ago--this was November 2010--we talked about the Constitution and how it restricts spending only to the legislative branch and specifically denies that honor to the President. We take an oath of office-- I am reading now from a statement I made on the floor a year and a half ago. We take an oath of office to uphold the Constitution of the United States. That means that we take an oath of office to uphold article I section 9 of the Constitution. What does that say? That says that the spending in our government should be confined to the legislative branch. That is us. If you go and look in the Federalist Papers, it talks about this. Over and over, judges without exception have reinforced this as the constitutional obligation we have. Sometimes I miss Senator Bob Byrd more than other times, and this is one of the times I do. I can hear him standing on the floor saying: Why is it we are giving up our constitutional right? Remember he used to carry around the Constitution? He would hold it up. I wish he were here today so he could talk about article I, section 9 of the Constitution and how we are ceding that authority to the President. I mentioned yesterday that one of the problems I have with a permanent moratorium without a definition of what an earmark is--one of the problems we have in giving the President, ceding our authority to him--and there is no better example--a lot of us got quite upset in this body when the President had his $800 billion-or-so stimulus plan. Remember the stimulus plan that didn't stimulate and he spent all this money? And when he signed it, he was talking about how this was going to stimulate. As it turned out, only 3 percent went into roads, highways, and so forth, and only 3 percent into defending America. When he signed it, President Obama said: What I am signing then is a balanced law with a mix of tax cuts and investments. It has been put together without earmarks or the usual porkbarrel spending. So, anyway, we had such examples of earmarks. In fact, I remember on Sean Hannity's program, he had the 102 most egregious earmarks. In those earmarks was $219,000 to study the hookup and behavior of female college co-eds in New York; $1 million to do fossil research; $1.2 million to build an underpass for deer crossing in Wyoming. There were 102 egregious earmarks and not one of them was a congressional earmark. They are all bureaucratic earmarks. We ceded that so the President, through our action, was able to do all those things he could not otherwise do. I have a longer list that I ask to be made a part of the Record at this point in my presentation, which includes about 10 or 15 other egregious earmarks.

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

Mr. INHOFE. I ask unanimous consent that I be recognized for as much time as I consume and that at the conclusion of my remarks, the Senator from Ohio be recognized for such time as he consumes.

Mr. INHOFE. As it turned out, the President was the one who did the earmarks of the $800 billion stimulus program. Again, getting back to article I, section 9: No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law. The law, that is us. We are the legislative branch of government. That is what we are supposed to do. I think everyone understands that. It is unintended, and I know a lot of people out there would say, well, we want to kill all earmarks, without stopping to think that that is all spending and that is our constitutional duty. I would say if we continue on making permanent and current moratoriums on congressional earmarks, then we are limiting our ability to govern with the President. If all we are doing is handing the President pots of money and requiring that he have competitive grants to disburse the funds, then we are washing our hands of the outcome. There is no light or transparency inherent to the Federal grant-making process. So what we are doing is giving up our constitutional responsibility in ceding that to the President. It could be that things are going to be refined, with further definitions, and I have no objection to that. But I am saying we have one very simple solution to it. When the votes come up today, I will announce right now, if we don't have a definition of earmark, then I would vote against a permanent moratorium on earmarks because that is our constitutional responsibility. My amendment is a little bit different, because what I do is define what an earmark is, and an earmark is defined as an appropriation that has not been authorized. I was very proud--2 days ago Senator Toomey said that some earmarks ought to be funded, but they ought to be funded in a transparent and honest way subject to evaluation by an authorizing committee. That is exactly what my amendment does. I talked to Senator Toomey, and I appreciate the fact that he is very open about this. I will repeat that: Some things ought to be funded, but they should be funded in a transparent and honest way subject to evaluation by an authorization committee. That is my amendment. A definition of an earmark is spending or appropriating without authorizing. Last year Senator Coburn said: ``It is not wrong to go through an authorization process where your colleagues can actually see it. It is wrong to hide something in a bill . . . .'' Amen. I agree with that. I said earlier, and I said yesterday, I can remember Democrats and Republicans on consideration of appropriations bills sitting on the floor, swapping out deals, making deals back and forth. That is what we want to do something about, and this is not a partisan thing. This is something that has been going on, and we have a way now of doing it. Senator McCain was kind enough to endorse a freestanding bill I had that does the very thing of defining an earmark as an appropriation that has not been authorized. Senator McCain said: Some earmarks are worthy. If they are worthy, then they should be authorized. Authorized, there is the key, and Senator McCain is exactly right. If you authorize it, then that is the process we want. When an earmark is considered by an authorization committee before it is appropriated, real transparency is brought to the process. In fact, I remember it was Senator Coburn who said on the floor--and this is about a year and a half ago--he agreed with me and said one good thing about requiring an authorization before an appropriation is that then if it is a bad one, we have two chances to kill it. Senator Coburn is right. We can kill it in the authorization phase or we can kill it in the appropriations phase. The example I use is a good example in terms of what we and the Armed Services Committee should be doing and are not doing. But I would say to you that this afternoon when we have these votes--it is my understanding we are going to have around 20 votes. A lot of these will be voice voted, I am sure. But the two votes I am concerned about are, No. 1, the vote on the Toomey bill, which I support, but I support it if you can define it and make real transparency set in by having the authorization process in place. I would only say that we go back to the Constitution. As I mentioned, let's go back to the statements that were made by Senator Toomey, Senator McCain, and Senator Coburn, that we want transparency and we don't want to cede the power of our constitutional duty as Members of the Senate to the executive branch. I know some in here would probably want to do that. Some are stronger supporters of Obama than I am. I am very critical of what Obama has done in terms of the deficits, which we have already talked about, in terms of what he is doing to the military. Some trillion dollars over a period of 10 years would be taken out of our military. When you add his budget to the sequestration, that is something that should not happen. With energy, right now the President is going around talking about how he is for developing energy in this country, and yet he is the obstacle to the development. He is the one who has in his budget the various things that make it very difficult, if not impossible, to get our resources that we have out there in oil and gas. In fact, it is kind of humorous and very clever of the President. Last week during his State of the Union message the President was talking about wanting to exploit all of our natural gas when he slipped in a little phrase that hardly anyone heard. I know Senator Boxer heard it because she was next to me, and we disagree on this whole issue. He said: We want to go after this type of formation, all the shale that is out there, but we don't want to poison the ground at the same time. Well, what he is talking about there is hydraulic fracturing. If you take away hydraulic fracturing, as he is trying to do, and put that in the hands of the Federal Government, then you might as well say goodbye to all these types of formations, oil and gas. We would not be able to do it. So I am critical of him in that respect. In the fourth area, in addition to what he is doing to the military, the deficit spending, and energy in this country is regulations. I am the ranking member of the Environmental and Public Works Committee, with all of these MACT programs--that is MACT, maximum achievable control technology. He is trying to do away with emission requirements where there is no technology to get into that type of requirement. So it is very expensive. The other thing he is trying to do--and I know this is the most controversial issue among liberals and conservatives--and that is we were able to successfully stop this whole global warming cap-and-trade legislation that has been out there ever since we refused to ratify Kyoto. It was made very clear that there is one thing nobody argues with--we know it is true--if you were to have legislation for cap and trade, the cost would be between $300 billion and $400 billion a year. We know that is true. That has come from the MIT, it has come from the CRA, and it has come from the Wharton School. That is the range they talk about. However, now this President is trying to do by regulation what we have voted down in legislation. Right now in this body of 100 Senators, there are at the very most 25 Members of the Senate who would vote for cap and trade, and yet he is trying to do that through regulation. I have to say that would be the largest amount of money in terms--that would probably exceed the obligations we have to pay back even the deficits he has had. We will talk more about that later, but the issue right now is the two votes that are coming up. I would encourage us to vote for my amendment, which would define an earmark as an appropriation that has not been authorized. I have read to you quotes from virtually everyone in here who would agree with that, except for those individuals who want to cede this power to the President of the United States. I yield the floor, and I understand under unanimous consent that the Senator from Ohio would be the next speaker.

Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, I wanted to inquire, is there any time remaining?

Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that I be recognized for 1 minute.

Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, first of all, I appreciate the opportunity to be heard. I agree with what the author, Senator Toomey, is trying to do in terms of what most people think of as an earmark. The problem is this: You can vote for this if you are voting for and are against all earmarks as it is defined. It depends on how you do it. In the House, it is defined, under their rules, and it has been defined here as any type of appropriation or authorization. I would suggest to you, if you get the Constitution and look up article I, section 9, it says that is what we are supposed to be doing here. So if I knew that my next amendment would pass, which defines an earmark as an appropriation that has not been authorized, which I know Senator Toomey and several others agree would be a good idea, then I would be wholeheartedly in support of this. So obviously we should have had that vote first. So I would vote against this even though I agree with what they are trying to do. But my next amendment is going to be the one that is necessary.

Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, I have the utmost respect for Senator Toomey and what he is trying to do. To me, this amendment is compatible with what he is trying to do. It merely defines an earmark as an appropriation that has not been authorized. My junior Senator said on the Senate floor a year ago that, in a way that is good, because if a bad earmark comes up, we have two shots at it--one on authorization and one on appropriation. Senator Toomey, Senator McCain, and others have been supportive of the idea that we should go back to authorizing. We have been fighting this battle since 1816, and it is time we end it. This is a way of doing it, merely defining it as an earmark that hasn't been authorized. I retain the remainder of my time.

Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, I further say that after the stimulus bill, all of the 102 most egregious votes last year--or earmarks, not one was a congressional earmark. They were all bureaucratic earmarks. If we don't do our constitutional job under article I, section 9 of the Constitution, the President will be doing our job.