Jim Inhofe

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business for such time as I shall consume.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, let me respond to a couple of the remarks of my good friend from Illinois. I listen to this all the time, people talking about during the Bush administration, the costs that have gone up, the deficits and all this stuff. I appreciate the fact that the Senator from Illinois did state that the situation was a little different when President Bush came into office because, of course, 9/11 happened and we ended up in a couple wars. But that is understating the situation. Right after the Clinton administration--I remember it so well--I was a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee at that time and actually was a member of the House Armed Services Committee when President Clinton first came in. The euphoric attitude everyone had at that time was that the war is over. Remember we talked about the peace dividend and all this stuff. The war is over and we no longer need to have a strong national defense. That is what they were saying, though they used different words. They started cutting our defense system. I have a chart that shows what happened to--the demise of our ability to defend ourselves during the Clinton administration. We went through the same thing back during the Carter administration. People remember the hollow force at that time. During the Clinton administration, we started degrading our military. It was reduced by 40 percent from what it was when he took office during those 8 years. When I say 40 percent reduction, I am talking about end strength, military expenditures. The problem President Bush had when he came into office was not just that two wars broke out, but they broke out when we had a defense system that had been reduced by 40 percent. The second thing that happened during that time--and this is by admission--I remember Senator Gore had made the statement prior to that that the recession actually started in March of the previous year before the second Bush administration started. It is kind of an interesting thing. People forget that for every 1 percent drop in economic activity, that translates into about $40 billion of lost revenue. Turning that around, for every 1 percent increase in economic activity, that increases revenues about $40 billion when that happens. Of course, we started out with a reduced military, negotiating two wars, and with a recession at the same time. Obviously, that had very adverse effects. Before I get carried away with the remarks of the Senator from Illinois, that he voted against going into the Iraq war, let me remind my fellow Senators that I happened to have been privileged, right after the first gulf war--that was when Saddam Hussein--all the atrocities had taken place, and we had what we called the first freedom flight. That is when we went back into Kuwait to see what the situation was in Kuwait. It was so close to the end of the war that the Iraqis didn't realize the war was over. They were still fighting. You remember they were burning the oilfields and the wind would shift. All of a sudden, it would be daytime, and it would turn into night. I remember going back there. I was with nine other people. There were some Democrats. Tony Coelho, former whip of the House, was there. Alexander Haig, a man we revere, the man I always thought should have been President, was there. We were watching and looking to see the remnants of the first gulf war. I had a young girl with me who had fled Kuwait. She was a royalty. She was going back. She wanted to see if a palace on the Persian Gulf was still there. When we got there, we found out that it had been used by Saddam Hussein as one of his headquarters. She wanted to go up in her bedroom. She was 7 years old, and she wanted to see if her animals were still there. They had used her bedroom for a torture chamber. There were body parts stuck to the walls. A little kid had his ears cut off because he was caught carrying an American flag. I can remember the mass graves. We looked at the mass graves where Saddam Hussein had tortured these people. When he had them sentenced to death, some begged to be dropped--eased into the acid vats head first so they would die quicker. I mean, this is the type of thing that was taking place. Here is a guy who had actually murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people up in the Kurd area by the most painful way of dying. So to suggest we should not have gone back in to finish him off I think is unacceptable. Before I finish responding to the comments made by the Senator from Illinois, I would only mention, when he talked about how George W. Bush came into office and he cut taxes for the rich and all that, I recall one time in history--actually, it has happened several times in history; it happened right after World War I--they passed tax increases to support the war and when the war was over, they said, we can now repeal the taxes. They repealed the taxes, and it didn't reduce revenue, it increased revenue. That is something that was kind of forgotten until one of the great Presidents came along, John Kennedy. During the Great Society days he said we are going to have to have increased revenue to pay for all of these Great Society programs. He said the best way to increase revenue is to decrease marginal rates, so he did. Remember, he dropped them down from I think 90 percent to 70 percent or something like that, and during the next 6 years taxes went down and we had the increase in the revenue, which was phenomenal. The last time I checked, President John Kennedy was a Democrat, not a Republican. So I don't know how they forgot that along the way. We saw when Reagan came into office, he actually made those dramatic cuts as well. I remember--I am going from memory now--but the amount of money that came in from marginal rates in 1980 when President Reagan took office was $244 billion. When he left office, it was $488 billion. It doubled in that period of time, the largest tax reductions in history. Revenues increased when tax reductions went down. Anyway, that all ended when the Clinton administration came in. We all remember the 1993 tax increases, the greatest tax increases in about four decades. That is when they increased them on everything. The bottom line is, yes, he did cut taxes and that had the effect of increasing revenues. I think when we talk about the deficit, as the Senator from Illinois mentioned, that was inherited by this President, President Obama, we have to remember that the deficits during the Bush administration, if you add them all up, were a little bit more than the deficit in the first year of the Obama administration. As far as his comments about the $787 billion stimulus bill, that wouldn't have been that bad of an idea. I opposed it, of course, but it didn't stimulate. It had all of this social engineering in there, all of the equal distribution of wealth, yet I tried to add an amendment on there which was cosponsored by Senator Boxer to increase, quadruple the amount of money that went into roads and highways. It didn't work. They defeated it. So it could have had the opportunity to do something. The last thing I would say about the government-run system is I thought it was interesting when the Senator from Illinois talked about the wonderful opportunities I have and he has in choosing from the private sector good coverages. I think what he is describing is what we have today. I agree with what he said in that respect. But when you talk about a system that is very similar to the Canadian system, all you have to do is go up in the northern part of the United States, go to Mayo Clinic and look at the number of people there who have come down from Canada because they can't get the health care they want in that kind of government-run system. So I would agree with my friend from Alabama when he was talking about describing what we are up against. That is not why I came to the floor this evening. I have come to introduce a bill. (The remarks of Mr. Inhofe pertaining to the introduction of S. 3095 are located in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced bills and Joint Resolutions.'')

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I come to the floor this evening to announce the introduction of a bill, S. 3095. It is called the Honest Expenditure Limitation Act of 2010. It spells HELP. It is the HELP Act of 2010. On February 1 of 2010, President Obama released his fiscal year 2011 budget with a funding request of $3.8 trillion. In it he announced a 3- year freeze on discretionary spending for all nonsecurity-related agencies at the fiscal year 2010 levels, which amounts to a total spending level of $460 billion each year for those agencies. Nonsecurity spending is defined as all agencies except the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of State, and one of the national security-related agencies in the Department of Energy. The administration's Office of Management and Budget estimates this initiative will save $250 billion over the coming decade. Keep in mind, that is $250 billion from where it started, which I will address in a minute. On the surface, this proposal gives the President the appearance of being fiscally prudent--something the American people have been demanding of their government, especially in recent months. But when you look closely at the numbers he has presented, it is clear as day why he is able to offer this spending freeze without batting an eye. For one, discretionary spending has increased by 20 percent in 2 years. Secondly, the massive $787 billion stimulus package provided a substantial spending cushion for nearly every agency, making a spending freeze such as the President's inconsequential. Let's stop and look at that. We are talking about $787 billion in a stimulus bill, but we are also talking about having increased from fiscal year 2008 to fiscal year 2010 by 20 percent. So what he is doing here is raising it 20 percent and then freezing it. What he ought to do, if he had to raise it 20 percent, is start bringing it down. Additionally, this spending freeze proposal does too little to improve the long-term fiscal aspects of our Nation. We all know we stand at the edge of disaster. Doug Elmendorf, who is the Director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, recently testified about our Nation's fiscal outlook before Congress and he didn't deliver very good news. I will tell my colleagues what he said. He said that last year our budget deficit was a staggering $1.4 trillion. Remember, just a minute ago I said if you add up all of the--well, let's say that is actually more than all of the last 6 years of the Bush administration deficits. That amounts to less than the $1.4 trillion. So he said last year our budget deficit was a staggering $1.4 trillion, which represented about 10 percent of the total economy. He expects 2010's deficit only slightly lower at $1.3 trillion or 9.2 percent of GDP. Looking further out, the average deficit between now and 2020 is forecast to be $600 billion per year. This is all coming from Elmendorf. This is the CBO we are talking about. Additionally, CBO estimates the amount of debt held by the public will skyrocket to $15 trillion by 2020. If it sounds like a staggering number, that is because it is. When you consider the amount of interest we will be paying to China and Japan and others, it is embarrassing: $700 billion each and every year until 2020 and beyond if we do nothing about our rising deficit levels. In other words, if we keep on what we are doing right now with this administration, with the help of the Democratic legislators in both Houses, it is going to be $700 trillion. Let's do the math and put that in perspective. If $700 billion of interest were paid evenly by every household in the United States today, it would amount to more than $6,000 per household. That is kind of interesting. I always try to do my math. When I was fighting the effort by this administration to have a cap-and-trade bill which would have been somewhere between $300 billion and $400 billion, whether you are talking about the McCain-Lieberman cap-and-trade bill of 2003 or the McCain-Lieberman bill of 2005 or the bills of 2008, or later on the Boxer-Sanders bill, or even going back to Kyoto, it is going to cost somewhere between $300 billion and $400 billion. I understand when we talk about billions and trillions of dollars what we are really talking about. So I do my math all the time and say, How much is this going to cost my average taxpaying families in my State of Oklahoma? It amounted to $3,100 a year. This would have been, if they had been successful in passing a cap-and-trade bill--it is all dead now. They are not going to do it. I don't care what Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator John Kerry say, it is history now. People are not going to pay that kind of thing to get nothing for it. Back when we were talking about the $700 billion interest that would be paid every year, that is what is going to happen by 2020 with this administration if we let it continue. That would cost each tax-paying family in the United States of America $6,000 per household each and every year after 2020. Put another way: The entire financial industry bailout--remember the famous bank bailout? I know Republicans were partially responsible for that too. That happened. That vote took place in this Senate on October 1 of 2008. It was back during the Bush administration. It was back when Hank Paulson came in and told everybody that he was going to save our Nation and so Republicans bought into it and many of my good conservative Republican friends voted for a $700 billion bailout. I did not and a few others didn't, but a vast majority did. That is kind of interesting because that $700 billion is the same figure we are using right now that it will cost people by the year 2020--just the interest alone. But the $700 billion that we could spend on interest in 2020 happens each and every year. We don't get anything for it. It is the cost of living having this much debt in the first place. At this rate, it will become more and more difficult for the government to fund priorities we truly think are important, such as national security and infrastructure spending. For some reason, nobody around here wants to spend money on infrastructure. I know I get criticized. I am considered to be a conservative. I have been rated the No. 1 most conservative Member of the Senate some time ago by the American Conservative Union and just last week by the National Journal. So you are looking at a conservative, but I am a big spender on some things. One is protecting America. That is what we are supposed to be doing around here. The other is infrastructure. We have a crumbling infrastructure system. Look what happened with some of the bridges crumbling down. I guess that was in Minnesota. People died up there. Our infrastructure is crumbling. It is aging. We need to do something about it, but I can't find anyone who wants to spend money on infrastructure. Instead we are spending money on social engineering. To combat this, several proposals have been recently introduced that I support. In the House, Congressman Pence and Congressmen Hensarling introduced a constitutional amendment that would cap the Federal spending at 20 percent of the economy--20 percent of GDP. It is one way of doing this. I think it is a good idea. I am all for it. Additionally, Senator DeMint introduced an amendment requiring a balanced budget. I am all for that. Some of my colleagues are supporting a year-long earmark moratorium. That is kind of phony. It was reported on Monday that Speaker Pelosi has suggested a year-long earmark moratorium as well. My colleagues need to consider a couple of issues in talking about earmarks. One, an earmark moratorium does nothing to combat the increasing government spending. In other words, if you have a moratorium on earmarks, it doesn't save a cent. Funding that would have been spent in earmarks will simply be spent by the Obama administration, by their bureaucrats. I suppose it should come as no surprise that Speaker Pelosi supports the Democratic administration fully funding its own priorities. Secondly, last year's earmarks accounted for only 1.5 percent of discretionary spending--1.5 percent. Where is the focus on the other 98.5 percent? Where is the focus on what I call bureaucratic earmarks? Here is what happens. If you stop earmarks--if you read the Constitution, article I, section 9 of the Constitution, it says what we are supposed to be doing here in the House and in the Senate. We are supposed to be making priorities. We are supposed to be doing the spending, and our Founding Fathers recognize that we do a better job knowing what our needs are in the local communities than the central government does. If we let the President and the President's budget dictate everything and then we try to make changes within that, people will say, Oh, that is an earmark. Well, wait a minute. If you don't do that, then you are having the unelected bureaucrats in government in the Obama administration do the earmarking. So the President earmarks too. If you don't believe it, look at the Appropriations Conference Report, where the focus is on the vast majority of discretionary spending which is doled out every year by unelected bureaucrats. I wish more people would understand this, because I find that a lot of the people who hammer and demagog the earmark mantra are the ones who are the biggest spenders and it is a nice way of deviating from your behavior. I think something needs to be done immediately and seriously. So today I am introducing the HELP Act, as I mentioned. It is called the Honest Expenditure Limitation Program Act of 2010. The bill does three things. One, it places caps on nonsecurity discretionary spending which I define exactly as President Obama's budget does. I do this because I wish to show the similarities between what he said he wants to do and what I want to do. The second thing is it enforces the caps by sequestering any spending above the cap through across-the-board cuts, a process that currently applies to mandatory spending, but not to discretionary. Three, it disallows Congress from evading the sequestration cuts through a 67-vote point of order against any attempt to exempt new spending from this legislation. That is going to make it pretty tough to get through. Rather than simply freezing the spending as the President wants to do at the 2010 levels--let's keep in mind, first, he increased discretionary spending for a year by 20 percent, and then he wants to freeze it there. Instead of doing that for 3 years and then allowing spending to explode again, which is what his proposal does, my bill would actually cut discretionary spending for nonsecurity agencies, the same exemptions he has, back to fiscal year 2008 levels. It is cutting it back by 20 percent of what he tries to do, about $400 billion a year. Spending would be frozen for 5 years--not 3 years but 5 years, through 2020. Rather than simply freezing spending levels for only 3 years and at an artificially high level, as the President's proposal does, my initiative would hold the Federal Government more accountable for the next 10 years by creating real, meaningful spending cuts and then placing the cap at reduced levels. The difference in savings between my plan and President Obama's plan is clearly displayed on this chart. If we look at the chart, the blue bars represent how nonsecurity- related discretionary spending levels will rise over the next 10 years if allowed to increase. This is according to OMB's numbers. The red line illustrates the impact of Obama's plan and what will happen if spending is allowed to increase following the 3-year freezing on the estimates of OMB, the Office of Management and Budget. They are nonpartisan, by the way, and very accurate. Clearly, the $250 billion in savings is not substantial when spread over a 10-year period. It really does not tighten the belt at all. My proposal is represented in the green bars. These are the spending levels. Watch as they go down over the period of time from 2010 to 2020. We phase down spending levels from the high point in 2010 to a more reasonable level between 2011 and 2015 and then stay flat thereafter. My plan, when compared to the blue bars of doing nothing, will save more than $880 billion over the next 10 years. Let me say that again. By reducing nonsecurity discretionary spending levels, using the same definition of ``nonsecurity'' as the President is using, to 2008 levels and then holding them there through 2020, our Nation can save nearly $1 trillion. When I compare my plan directly with President Obama's, my plan saves $634 billion more than his. I have made my estimates using the methodologies of the Office of Management and Budget, and they are probably conservative. First off, if you look at the history of discretionary spending, annual increases are far greater than what they assume they are here. Second, we do not estimate how much we would be saving in interest by not having to borrow the spending we are cutting. Overall, this proposal will likely save much more than the nearly $1 trillion we estimate. If we do nothing to curtail skyrocketing government spending or merely freeze it at an artificially high, elevated level for a few years, as the Obama administration is trying to do, we will find ourselves in a tragic situation. The clock is ticking. Congress is going to have to act. Some of my colleagues will probably attack this proposal because the hardest thing to do around here is cut spending. Without cutting spending, we only leave one alternative, and that is massively raising taxes. That is not what the American people want, and it would harm our economic recovery. Around these halls, we seem to forget. Most of the Members of the Senate have forgotten the recess last August when they had all the tea parties out there and people were yelling and screaming and people wanted to get involved. People were getting involved in politics who never had been involved before. They were concerned primarily about two issues. At that time, it was government-run health care and cap-and- trade, which would have been the largest tax increase in the history of this country. Right now, the Obama administration is saying: I don't care what anybody says, we are going to stay with it; we are going to be tough; we are going to have this government-run health care system and bring back cap-and-trade. They have just completely forgotten what happened. I have to agree with Senator McConnell. I hope people remember that all the way through the election because that is going to repeat what I remember in 1994. Others may charge this proposal will harm the government's ability to help citizens in their time of need. But what is important to realize about this spending reduction is that it will have no impact on mandatory spending programs such as unemployment benefits, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those programs are in need of reform, but this bill does not do that. This bill only affects the agencies identified by President Obama as nonsecurity. My bill, the HELP Act of 2010, would take President Obama's proposed spending freeze and truly make an impact. Rather than merely freezing spending at the inflated 20-percent increase of the 2010 levels, this would bring it back down to 2008. I think this can be done. I really do believe the American people are going to start getting involved. They have not forgotten. I was giving a speech in Florida. This particular group was actually Club for Growth. Their group is concerned about spending. I told them some of the things we could be doing, some of the things to watch out for. Watch out for those who say you can have a moratorium on earmarks and somehow affect--if you affected all of that, it would be something like 1.5 percent. My bill affects the other 98.5 percent. We are going to have to do it right now. If we wait, each month that goes by--as I said, the budget he increased and his deficit was as much as the last 6 entire years of the Bush administration. This is the HELP Act. It is one that will work, and it is one that has come along at the right time. Now is the time to act.

Mr. INHOFE

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

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I cannot express how frustrated I am with Washington politics, as a result of, I believe, irresponsible behavior on the part of Democrats and Republicans, in the House and in the Senate. The Federal Highway Administration shut its doors on Monday, furloughing 2,000 employees, putting projects across the country at risk and stopping the highway program from paying States the money they are owed. I have been in constant communication with Gary Ridley, Oklahoma's transportation secretary--I think the best one in the country. He flew here this week to help resolve this crisis. He told me if it is not worked out by Friday, there will be very serious consequences in my State of Oklahoma. There will be jobs that will be shut down, work that has already been contracted out that will be under default. I understand some of the Democrats are trying to make political hay out of this, but I want to set the record straight that a lone Republican Senator is being singled out for the blame, but in reality there is plenty of blame to go around. Last week the Senate passed a jobs bill that included a number of tax cuts and long-term extension for the highway program. The House Democrats were divided on the bill and their leadership could not pass the bill. Given the chaos in their caucus, they passed a 30-day extension of the highway bill late last week. Because of this 30-day extension, it would add about $10 billion to the outrageous $13.2 trillion national debt. A Republican Senator said he would only agree to it if it was offset. Senate Democrats refused to offset the package. Nobody was willing to back down. We find ourselves in this situation today. Not only is there ample blame to go around on why Congress allowed the highway program and the FHWA to shut down, I think there is equal blame to go around on why it has taken us 6 months to pass a long-term extension. We tried on numerous occasions to pass the extension. Frankly, this should not come as a surprise to anyone. I have been sounding the alarm for this ever since last July. We learned in July that there are a couple of Senators who are, frankly, opposed to the Federal Highway Program and want to see it underfunded, as has been the case this fiscal year. I often said--there is no secret to this, even though I am considered to be quite a conservative--in some areas I have been a big spender. One is national defense. The other is infrastructure. That is what we are supposed to be doing here. On the last day of the fiscal year before the 2005 highway bill expired, Senator Boxer and I, right here on the floor, attempted to pass a long-term extension of the highway program. Unfortunately, we were not successful. The same group of Senators who opposed the highway program demanded that the bill be offset. They suggested unobligated stimulus funds, but the Democrats objected to this. The chairman, that is Barbara Boxer, and I were working hard to find offset. Senator Boxer got Democratic leadership to agree to use TARP as an offset. I was very excited about this. I remember I thought that night--it was a Wednesday night, it was getting close to midnight. We had to do something or everything was going to fall apart. I thought we had it resolved. Unfortunately, many Republicans and some Democratic Senators object to this offset. As a result, we were stuck with a 30-day extension on the continuing resolution which funded the program at $1 billion a month more than 2009 levels. I have to say--and I now blame Republicans for this--I have often said one of the bad things that happened to this Senate happened on October 1 of 2008, when they passed the $700 billion bank bailout bill. That is the TARP funds we are talking about. A lot of conservative Republicans objected to offsetting the TARP because that would be an admission that that money probably was not going to be repaid anyway. I think a lot of Republicans were trying to tell people back home--I didn't vote for this, by the way, but they did. Those who did--don't worry, everything is going to get paid back. It is all going to get paid back. I think we all should have known better. All you had to do was read that bill and that would have been the case. So then it was the Republicans who refused to use that. The money was there. It could have been used and we wouldn't be facing this dilemma. We could have the 1-year loan extension. We would have time to put together a highway program, which is what we--we--want to do. Unfortunately, some do not. So it is clear the only way to get a long-term highway extension done is for Senator Reid to dedicate a week of floor time to overcome the objections of two or three Republicans who opposed the highway program. To that end, all the chairmen and ranking members of the committees involved sent a bipartisan letter to Senator Reid pointing out the problem we were facing and asking for floor time to overcome the objections. Senator Reid ignored this request until 2 weeks ago when he abandoned the bipartisan Baucus- Grassley jobs bill in favor of his own bill that included a long-term highway extension. I wish to point out that this maneuver cost the highway extension the bulk of Republican support. I wish to caution that it is very dangerous to turn a bipartisan issue such as this into a partisan one. Because the highway bill was included with a number of other issues, it got caught up in the House Democratic and second stimulus bill politics unrelated to the highway program. This just reinforces that it should have been done as a stand- alone measure. Let me conclude by reading an excerpt of a Tulsa World editorial-- that is Tulsa, my hometown. It states: What's up with those geniuses in Congress? First they scurry around to get massive stimulus funding in the pipeline in an effort to quickly jump-start the economy, and then they fiddle around and let regular transportation funding that would further aid the recovery lapse. Not a good recipe for ensuring that the recovery will continue. The editorial concludes: Inhofe blamed the funding snafu on politics, which comes as no surprise. Apparently it was just too much to ask of our leaders to put politics aside for once in favor of rescuing the economy and thousands of jobs. Let me tell you that editorial was from October of last year. It is amazing that Congress has allowed the months to go by since that time. Right now, what we are facing in my State of Oklahoma is about $415 million a week that is going to cost us. We have contracts that are already let, and we are in a dilemma now to know what to do. We are going to have to resolve this problem by, I would say, Thursday or Friday or it is going to be chaotic. I suggest it is not just my State of Oklahoma that has this problem; many other States do. I hope people set everything aside and try to get this thing done and do one of the things we are elected to do and do something about the infrastructure. Right now, it is in crisis. We are going to have to resolve it. I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce The Small System Drinking Water Act of 2009. This is the third Congress that I have introduced this bill which would assist water systems throughout the country comply with the ever growing number of federal drinking water standards. I am pleased to be joined by Senators Mike Crapo, James Risch, John Barrasso and David Vitter as cosponsors of this legislation. My bill will require the Federal Government to live up to its obligations and require the EPA to use the tools it was given in the 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act amendments, SDWA. My goal here is to ensure that small towns across the country have safe, affordable drinking water and that the laws are fair to small and rural communities. Currently EPA assumes that families can afford water rates of 2.5 percent of their annual median household income, or $1,000 per household. For some families, paying $83 a month for water may not be a hardship but for so many more, it is nearly impossible. There must be some flexibility inserted into the calculation that factors in the ability of the truly disadvantaged to pay these costs. Forcing systems to raise rates beyond what their ratepayers can afford only causes more damage than good. EPA needs to look more closely at how it determines affordability. My bill directs EPA to take additional factors into consideration when making this determination. These include ensuring that the affordability criteria are not more costly on a per-capita basis to a small water system than to a large water system. In EPA's most recent drinking water needs survey, Oklahoma identified a total of over $4.1 billion in drinking water needs over the next 20 years. $2.4 billion of that need is for community water systems that serve fewer than 10,000 people. The $4.1 billion does not include the total costs imposed on Oklahoma communities to meet federal clean water requirements, the new Groundwater rule, the DBP II rule or the Long Term 2 Enhanced Surface Water Treatment Rule. Oklahoma continues to have municipalities struggling with the 2002 arsenic rule. Many of our small systems are having difficulty with the Disinfection Byproducts, DBP, Stage I rule, and small systems who purchase water from other systems and did not have to test, treat or monitor their water must now comply with DBP II. EPA estimates that over the next 20 years, the entire country will need $52.0 billion to come into compliance with existing, proposed or recently promulgated regulations. My bill proposes a few simple steps to help systems comply with all these rules. First, it reauthorizes the technical assistance program in the Safe Drinking Water Act. The DBP rules are very complex and involve a lot of monitoring and testing. If we are going to impose complicated requirements on systems, we need to provide them with help to implement those requirements. The bill creates a pilot program to demonstrate new technologies and approaches for systems of all sizes to comply with these complicated rules. It requires the EPA to convene a working group to examine the science behind the rules in order to compare new developments since each rule's publication. Section 1412(b)(4)(E) of the SDWA Amendments of 1996 authorizes the use of point of entry treatment, point of use treatment and package plants to economically meet the requirements of the Act. However, to date, these approaches are not widely used by small water systems. My legislation directs the EPA to convene a working group to identify barriers to the use of these approaches. The EPA will then use the recommendations of the working group to draft a model guidance document that states can use to create their own programs. Most importantly this bill requires the federal government to pay for these unfunded mandates created by laws and regulations. In 1995, Congress passed the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act to ensure that the Federal Government pays the costs incurred by State and local governments in complying with Federal laws. My bill is designed to ensure that EPA cannot take an enforcement action against a system serving less than 10,000 people, without first ensuring that it has sufficient funds to meet the requirements of the regulation. Since the 108th Congress, I have coauthored and cosponsored legislation to provide additional resources to communities through the State Revolving Loan Funds. Unfortunately, not much has changed. We still have too many regulations and not enough money to pay for them. Funding legislation is important but until that money becomes available, it is unreasonable to penalize and fine local communities because they cannot afford to pay for regulations we imposed on them. I thank my colleagues and look forward to their support of this commonsense proposal.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce The Small System Drinking Water Act of 2009. This is the third Congress that I have introduced this bill which would assist water systems throughout the country comply with the ever growing number of federal drinking water standards. I am pleased to be joined by Senators Mike Crapo, James Risch, John Barrasso and David Vitter as cosponsors of this legislation. My bill will require the Federal Government to live up to its obligations and require the EPA to use the tools it was given in the 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act amendments, SDWA. My goal here is to ensure that small towns across the country have safe, affordable drinking water and that the laws are fair to small and rural communities. Currently EPA assumes that families can afford water rates of 2.5 percent of their annual median household income, or $1,000 per household. For some families, paying $83 a month for water may not be a hardship but for so many more, it is nearly impossible. There must be some flexibility inserted into the calculation that factors in the ability of the truly disadvantaged to pay these costs. Forcing systems to raise rates beyond what their ratepayers can afford only causes more damage than good. EPA needs to look more closely at how it determines affordability. My bill directs EPA to take additional factors into consideration when making this determination. These include ensuring that the affordability criteria are not more costly on a per-capita basis to a small water system than to a large water system. In EPA's most recent drinking water needs survey, Oklahoma identified a total of over $4.1 billion in drinking water needs over the next 20 years. $2.4 billion of that need is for community water systems that serve fewer than 10,000 people. The $4.1 billion does not include the total costs imposed on Oklahoma communities to meet federal clean water requirements, the new Groundwater rule, the DBP II rule or the Long Term 2 Enhanced Surface Water Treatment Rule. Oklahoma continues to have municipalities struggling with the 2002 arsenic rule. Many of our small systems are having difficulty with the Disinfection Byproducts, DBP, Stage I rule, and small systems who purchase water from other systems and did not have to test, treat or monitor their water must now comply with DBP II. EPA estimates that over the next 20 years, the entire country will need $52.0 billion to come into compliance with existing, proposed or recently promulgated regulations. My bill proposes a few simple steps to help systems comply with all these rules. First, it reauthorizes the technical assistance program in the Safe Drinking Water Act. The DBP rules are very complex and involve a lot of monitoring and testing. If we are going to impose complicated requirements on systems, we need to provide them with help to implement those requirements. The bill creates a pilot program to demonstrate new technologies and approaches for systems of all sizes to comply with these complicated rules. It requires the EPA to convene a working group to examine the science behind the rules in order to compare new developments since each rule's publication. Section 1412(b)(4)(E) of the SDWA Amendments of 1996 authorizes the use of point of entry treatment, point of use treatment and package plants to economically meet the requirements of the Act. However, to date, these approaches are not widely used by small water systems. My legislation directs the EPA to convene a working group to identify barriers to the use of these approaches. The EPA will then use the recommendations of the working group to draft a model guidance document that states can use to create their own programs. Most importantly this bill requires the federal government to pay for these unfunded mandates created by laws and regulations. In 1995, Congress passed the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act to ensure that the Federal Government pays the costs incurred by State and local governments in complying with Federal laws. My bill is designed to ensure that EPA cannot take an enforcement action against a system serving less than 10,000 people, without first ensuring that it has sufficient funds to meet the requirements of the regulation. Since the 108th Congress, I have coauthored and cosponsored legislation to provide additional resources to communities through the State Revolving Loan Funds. Unfortunately, not much has changed. We still have too many regulations and not enough money to pay for them. Funding legislation is important but until that money becomes available, it is unreasonable to penalize and fine local communities because they cannot afford to pay for regulations we imposed on them. I thank my colleagues and look forward to their support of this commonsense proposal.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. INHOFE. Madam President, this afternoon it is my understanding we are going to have one more vote. It is going to be on the Travel Promotion Act. I have opposed this in the past. I have already voted against it three times. I am not going to hang here and waste the whole day just to vote against it a fourth time. I ask unanimous consent that I make a very brief statement and it be printed in the Record immediately following the vote that takes place this afternoon.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I have no real strong feelings about this bill other than that I do not think this country needs to create another corporation, a corporation that would be authorized to impose an annual assessment on U.S. members of the travel and tourism industry represented on a board of directors of the corporation established in the Department of Commerce, Office of Travel Promotion. I do not believe we need another office in this bureaucracy, so I will be voting against this bill. I voted against it on June 22 of last year, September 8 of last year, and September 9 of last year, so my vote would have been the same this year.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I have a unanimous consent request.

Mr. INHOFE. I ask unanimous consent that at the conclusion of the remarks of the Senator from New Hampshire, I be recognized for up to 3 minutes.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, when the Senator from New Hampshire talks about what we can and can't do to our children, I remind my fellow Senators, I happen to be blessed with 20 kids and grandkids. I am probably more concerned than anyone else here about future generations. Let me say, to redeem myself in advance, I am a conservative. I have been ranked No. 1 by the ACU, Man of the Year by Human Events. Yet I think we are supposed to be doing something when we come here to Washington. I have always said, when I run for office, that the two main things we are supposed to do are defend America and infrastructure. Yes, I am the ranking member on the Environment and Public Works Committee. I was the sponsor of the bill in 2005, and I am proud of it because we had to do something about infrastructure. I don't know, maybe there aren't any roads in New Hampshire, but I can tell you, don't buy into the argument that this is all debt. We are talking about $12 billion. This bill actually does two things. It has some very good reductions in taxes. I remember so well that John Kennedy, when he was President, said we have to raise more revenue. The best way is to reduce marginal rates. From 1961 to 1968, it went from $94 billion to $153 billion. That is in this thing. But the main thing here I am concerned about is we keep doing nothing about roads and highways and infrastructure. That is what we are supposed to do. I know the Senator is sincere when he comes up with this, but where was his concern back when he voted to give an unelected bureaucrat $700 billion? That wasn't offset. We can say that was a loan, but we all know better. There are some things we are supposed to be doing in America, and the second most important thing, in my view--I know others don't share this view--is to do something about infrastructure. This bill does it. This carries it on to the end of the fiscal year, about 11 more months. If we don't do it, it is costing about $1 billion a month by inaction. If we try to do this by extending it month by month, each one of us in this body is going to lose a lot of money that goes to roads and highways and infrastructure. Last week had a crumbling bridge in Oklahoma where no one was killed, but it came very close to that. We saw what happened up in Minnesota. We have to do something, instead of spending all of our money, as this administration is doing, on social engineering. We need to start building bridges and roads and repairing them.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, today I want to highlight several recent media reports uncovering very serious errors and possible fraud by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. First of all, let me define what we are talking about here, because it has been around for a long time but a lot of people have forgotten. Way back in 1988, the United Nations formed the IPCC--the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The whole idea was to try to determine whether manmade gases--anthropogenic gases, CO2, and methane--caused global warming, and if in fact global warming is taking place. It is hard on a day such as today, and the last few days, to be talking about global warming. I often say: Where is it when you need it? But nonetheless, you need to know three things about the IPCC: No. 1, the Obama administration calls it the gold standard of climate change science; No. 2, some say its reports on climate change represent the so-called consensus of scientific opinion about global warming; and No. 3, the IPCC and Al Gore were awarded the Nobel prize in 2007 for ``their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about manmade climate change.'' Put simply, what this means is that in elite circles the IPCC is a big deal. So when ABC News, The Economist, Time magazine, and the Times of London, among many others, report that the IPCC's research contains embarrassing flaws and that the IPCC chairman and scientists knew of the flaws but published them anyway--well, you have the makings of a major scientific scandal. In fact, when Climategate first came out and it was discovered that they had been cooking the science at the IPCC, the UK Telegraph said: This is very likely the greatest scientific scandal of our generation. So where to begin? Well, how about with the IPCC's claim that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. It is not true. That is right; it is simply false. Yet it was put into the IPCC's fourth assessment report. These assessment reports come out every year, and that is what the media normally get. They are not scientific reports, they are assessments that are made for policymakers. Here is what we know: According to the Sunday Times, the claim about the Himalayas was based on--keep in mind we are talking about their statement that by 2035 the glaciers would melt--that claim was based on a 1999 story in a news magazine which in turn was based on a short telephone interview with someone named Syed Hasnain, who is a very little-known Indian scientist. Next, in 2005, the activist group World Wildlife Fund cited the story in one of its climate change reports. Yet despite the fact that the World Wildlife Fund report was not scientifically peer reviewed, it was still referenced by the IPCC. It was still in their report. Third, according to the Times: The Himalayan glaciers are so thick and at such high altitude that most glaciologists believe it would take several hundred years to melt at the present rate. Some are actually growing and many show little sign of change. Lastly, when finally published, the Sunday Times wrote: The IPCC report did give its source as the World Wildlife Fund study but went further, suggesting the likelihood of the glaciers melting was ``very high.'' The IPCC, by the way, defines this as having a probability of greater than 90 percent. So there you have that. But there is more. According to the Times: The chairman [Rajendra Pachauri] of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit. We all remember that Copenhagen summit in the middle of December. I was there for 2 hours; many were there for 2 weeks. Now to continue to quote from the Times article: . . . [he] was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited 2 months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists. So why was the Himalayan error included? We now know from the very IPCC scientist who edited the report's section on Asia that it was done for political purposes. It was inserted to induce China, India, and other countries--this was at Copenhagen--to take action on global warming. According to the UK's Sunday Mail, Murari Lal, the scientist in charge of the IPCC's chapter on Asia, said this: We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policymakers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action. In other words, that is the motive she did it for. In other words, the Sunday Mail wrote that Lal ``admitted the glacier alarmism was indeed purely to put political pressure on world leaders.'' This is what we have suspected and has been documented in the recent Climategate scandal. But there is still more. The glaciologist, Dr. Hasnain, who originally made the alarmist 2035 claim, works for Dr. Pachauri at his think tank in India. According to ABC News: The glaciologist now works at the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi, whose director is none other than Rajendra Pachauri. Could this explain why Pachauri suppressed the error in the Himalayan passage of the IPCC report for so long? Specifically, after the meeting in Copenhagen. So what has the IPCC done to correct this fiasco? I went into the IPCC report to see if a correction had been made. Well, the 2035 claim is still there. It is still there now. It has been denied, but it is still there. There is a note attached that says the following: It has, however, recently come to our attention that a paragraph in the 938-page Working Group II contribution to the underlying assessment refers to poorly substantiated estimates of rate of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers. In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly. I had to read this twice to understand what it said. The IPCC says the glacier alarmism came about because of poorly substantiated estimates. Well, that is one way of putting it. To me, from what we know now, the leadership of the IPCC lied about the Himalayas. They knew it was false, but for political purposes they kept it in. I could go on and on, but let me cite a few more examples. The UK Telegraph recently uncovered more problems. This is the entity that said that is probably the greatest scientific scandal of our generation. The IPCC's report from 2007 found observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps, and Africa--all caused, of course, by global warming. In an article entitled ``UN Climate Change Panel Based Claims On Student Dissertation and Magazine Article,'' the Telegraph reported the following: One of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them. The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master's degree at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps. So that is the source they had. The article further reveals: The IPCC report made use of 16 nonpeer reviewed WWF reports. One claim, which stated that coral reefs near mangrove forests contained up to 25 times more fish numbers than those without mangroves nearby, quoted a feature article on the WWF website. In fact, the data contained within the WWF article originated from a paper published in 2004 in the respected Journal Nature. In another example a WWF paper on forest fires was used to illustrate the impact of reduced rainfall in the Amazon rainforest, but the data was from another Nature paper published in 1999. On top of this, we find that the IPCC was exaggerating claims about the Amazon. The report said that 40 percent of the Amazon rain forest was endangered by global warming. But again, as we have seen, this was taken from a study by the WWF--the World Wildlife Federation--and one that had nothing to do with global warming. Even worse, it was written by a green activist. That is the statement they made--40 percent of the Amazon rain forest was in danger. So again, we have the gold standard of climate research and a body that was awarded the Nobel prize of 2007. How can the world's preeminent climate body fall victim to such inaccuracy and, it must be said, outright fraud? I am sure for many in this body this information is shocking, but for me I am not at all surprised. Five years ago, I sent a letter to Dr. Pachauri specifically raising the many weaknesses in the IPCC's peer-review process, but Dr. Pachauri dismissed my concerns. Here is how Reuters reported his response: In the one-page letter, [Pachauri] denies the IPCC has an alarmist bias and says ``I have a deep commitment to the integrity and objectivity of the IPCC process.'' Pachauri's main argument is that the IPCC comprises both scientists and more than 130 governments who approve IPCC reports line by line. That helps ensure fairness, he says. Here is Dr. Pachauri defending it. Given the significance of the reports, Dr. Pachauri should come clean and respond directly to the numerous charges made against himself and the IPCC. And given that Dr. Pachauri has testified before Congress, including the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, we should hear directly from him as soon as possible as to how he can salvage the IPCC's vanishing credibility. How did we get to this point? I have been documenting deceit of this kind for several years now. But I must say that a great turning point occurred just a few months ago, when thousands of e-mails from the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit, or CRU, were leaked to the media. The CRU is one of the world's most prestigious climate research centers. The e-mails appear to show some of the world's preeminent climate scientists manipulating data, violating information disclosure laws by deleting e-mails, and blocking publication of research contrary to their own. They published only the research that would verify their positions interms of global warming, in other words. This revelation sparked several investigations, including one by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office. The office recently concluded that the CRU broke the UK's Freedom of Information Act. However, as the Times of London reported: The Information Commissioner's Office decided that UEA failed in its duties under the Act but said that it could not prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too late . . . The ICO is now seeking to change the law to allow prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months after a breach. It is a little late but none the less a good change to make. The Times further reports on the details, noting: In one e-mail, Professor Jones [former director of the CRU who has now stepped down because of the scandal] asked a colleague to delete e-mails relating to the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He also told a colleague that he had persuaded the university authorities to ignore information requests under the act from people linked to a Web site run by climate sceptics. Climate skeptics, so you understand the terminology that is used here, those are people like me who have looked at this and realize the science is cooked. I think most people agree with that now. As we know, Climategate is just the beginning. Time magazine reported--let's keep in mind, this is Time magazine; the same magazine about a year ago that had a picture of the last polar bear standing on the last ice cube saying: It is coming and you ought to be real worried about it. As we now know, Climategate was just the beginning. Time magazine reported that `Glaciergate' is a ``black eye for the IPCC and for the climate-science community as a whole.'' In the article posted online from Thursday, January 21, 2010, Himalayan Melting: How a Climate Panel Got It Wrong, Time reports: The mistake is a black eye for the IPCC and for the climate-science community as a whole. Climate scientists are still dealing with the Climategate controversy, which involved hacked e-mails from a major British climatology center that cast doubt on the solidity of evidence for global warming. The Economist newspaper, which had accepted the IPCC climate ``consensus,'' essentially claimed that it had been duped by the IPCC. Here's the Economist: The idea that the Himalaya could lose its glaciers by 2035--glaciers which feed rivers across South and East Asia-- is a dramatic and apocalyptic one. After the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said such an outcome was very likely in the assessment of the state of climate science that it made in 2007, onlookers (including this newspaper) repeated the claim with alarm. In fact, there is no reason to believe it to be true. This is good news (within limits) for Indian farmers--and bad news for the

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, first, let me identify and agree with the remarks of both the Senators concerning Iran and consider myself as part of that program. I believe it is already the order, but in the event it is not, I ask unanimous consent that I be recognized for up to 25 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, last week I came to the floor to talk about an issue that has kind of been drowned out by a lot of other things that are going on, other conflicts and disasters around the world. This is having to do with northern Uganda. It is something I have been on the floor talking about for several years now, and I have had occasion to be there several times. For over two decades, a guy named Joseph Kony has led what they call the LRA, the Lord's Resistance Army, in violence all throughout northern Uganda, in that whole Great Lakes Region of east and central Africa. They have killed tens of thousands--little kids--displacing over 1 million, and terrorizing and kidnapping over 30,000 little kids, forcing them to fight. It is this child soldier thing a lot of people are aware of, but not nearly enough people are aware of it. With all the problems there are in Africa--people are more concerned about Zimbabwe. They hear about that. They have heard about Somalia, Sudan. Everyone knows about that. But nobody says anything about the Lord's Resistance Army and what they have been doing in that area of Africa for 25 years. I have been there. I have been all the way up there to Gulu in northern Uganda. Let me share the problem that exists up there. This madman, kind of a spiritual leader, by the name of Joseph Kony has taken advantage of all the unrest and the disasters by going into villages and kidnapping, taking young people and training them to be soldiers. We are talking about little kids, little boys. They are from 11 to 14 years old. Once they train them to be soldiers, they actually give them AK-47s. I do not have my chart now, but I have pictures of that. They train them to be soldiers, and then they have to go back to their villages and murder their parents and their siblings. If they do not do that, then they will dismember them. They will cut their noses off, cut their ears off, cut their lips off. This has been going on for a long period of time. Quite frankly, I have gotten to know President Museveni in Uganda quite well, President Kagame in Rwanda, and President Kabila in Congo, and all of them agree that we need do something about this monster Joseph Kony. It happens that two of the three Presidents I mentioned--President Museveni from Uganda and President Kagame from Rwanda--are Presidents who have really come to power in the bush. They are warriors. These are people who really are reluctant to admit they cannot go after one guy and get him. Well, they have finally all gotten together. What we are trying to do--well, we have already introduced it; the author of the bill is Senator Feingold of Wisconsin--is to go after these people, and this bill provides about $35 million to help these kids who have been brutalized, as well as to give whatever assistance we have to give to these different countries in order to bring this guy to justice. During one of the trips I made up to northern Uganda, to Gulu, I ran into three young men. They are college-age types--Bobby Bailey, Lauren Poole, and Jason Russell. They have started a documentary on Joseph Kony. They have gone around to universities, and we now have thousands--tens of thousands--of young people who are rallying around this thing, trying to get us to do something as a nation. These young people have become very effective. This week, this Senate has an opportunity to act in unison to shine the light on this forgotten place and to begin to bring relief to these children. The Great Lakes Region in Africa has suffered from years of devastating fighting between tribes, and as a result the area is home to massive numbers of displaced people who are vulnerable to this type of treatment. So those are the conditions that allow Joseph Kony and his LRA rebels to thrive. Kony preys on the weak. He gets little kids who cannot defend themselves. He gets young girls. He sells them to be sex slaves and these kids to become murderers. In December of 2008, the Government of Uganda, Southern Sudan, and the DRC--that is the Democratic Republic of the Congo--launched a coordinated offensive against the LRA. It was called Operation Lightning Thunder. During the operation, over 300 rebels were killed, over 40 were captured, and more than 500 kids who were abducted were rescued. So we are making some headway in doing this. According to estimates by the U.N., between September of 2008 and June of 2009, the LRA killed over 1,300 civilians, abducted 1,400 more boys and girls, and displaced nearly 300,000 others. I know something about this because I took the time to go to--you hear a lot about western Congo--Kinshasa and the problems there. This is eastern Congo that butts up against Rwanda and then, further north, Uganda. In going to Goma, we thought that was where Joseph Kony was at the time. We thought we had an effort that could get him, but we barely missed him. He went north on a tirade, after that, going up toward Sudan and murdered thousands of people during that short period of time. It averages out, he murders or mutilates about three kids a day. That is why this is important. We can get this guy. We cannot do it if we just try the way we have tried it before because it has not worked and it is not going to work. Well, anyway, we have watched this take place. It is spreading now to other areas. I would anticipate before too long, if left unchecked, it would go not just to the Central African Republic but also maybe back into Sudan and maybe even Ethiopia. So it is very serious. In 2009, a total of 186 people were killed by the LRA just in Southern Sudan. One survivor describes his experience and the murders of his family at the hands of the LRA. This is a quote. This is actually what this person said: We were eating dinner outside of our hut when several LRA-- That is the Lord's Resistance Army-- rebels appeared and told us in broken Lingala-- This is their local language-- to get inside of our hut. They looted our food, locked us inside our hut and burned it. There were 10 of us; my whole family was inside. When I realized they were burning us alive, I started to push against the door, forcing it open. One rebel standing outside of the door tried to hit me with a heavy club but I dodged it and ran in the bush. They shot after me but missed. Apparently they shot or hit everyone else in my family who tried to come out. Except for one other person, everyone else was burned alive. This is the type of thing we have documented that has been happening for a long period of time. What we are trying to do with this--as I mentioned before, the cost is not great. This, by the way, is not any appropriation. This is an authorization bill, to authorize probably what the CBO says is about $28 million to get this done. It is not offset. When the bill first came out, it was offset by a reduction in certain types of military expenditures. I disagreed with that, so it is not offset at this time. But of all the efforts out there right now, this is something that absolutely has to happen. Just by contrast, we had a bill, the other African bill, just a couple years ago, called the PEPFAR bill. That was one that actually had about $35 billion--much larger than this--and it sailed right through. So I would say, if we were willing to do that, we ought to be willing to do this. By the way, we have a lot of cosponsors now. I do believe we are going to be successful in getting this bill passed, and I will be bringing this up, I am guessing, probably either Wednesday or Thursday. So with that, I will yield the floor and hope that any of the other Members of this body who are not already a cosponsor to this bill--it is S. 1067--we would like to get a few more cosponsors on here if at all possible. With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be recognized as in morning business for 15 minutes.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, today I pay tribute to LTG Herbert J. Carlisle, former Director of Legislative Liaison for Office of the Secretary of the Air Force and the current Commander of 13th Air Force, Hickam Air Force Base, HI. A command pilot with more than 3,400 flying hours in the T-38, AT-38, YF-110, YF-113, and F-15 Eagle, LTG ``Hawk'' Carlisle has commanded at the squadron, group, wing, and now Numbered Air Force levels. He has participated in Operations Restore Hope, Provide Comfort, and Noble Eagle, and his selection to lieutenant general and commander of the Jungle Air Force is a testament to his exceptional airmanship, leadership, and judgment. General Carlisle graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1978 and was selected to attend pilot training at Williams Air Force Base, AZ. He excelled in pilot training and was selected to fly the Air Force's premier air superiority fighter, the F-15 Eagle. Stationed at Bittburg Air Base, Germany, with the 525th Fighter Squadron, the Bulldogs, during the heart of the Cold War, then-Captain Carlisle again excelled in the air and on the ground as a pilot, flight lead, instructor pilot, and examiner pilot. His prowess in the air earned him a selection to attend the Air Force's Fighter Weapons School, and upon completion of the course he joined an elite team of fighter weapons school instructors. He became the chief of weapons and tactics at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, only to be brought back to Nellis Air Force Base to become part of a recently declassified Air Force training program in which he flew Soviet fighters as adversaries against U.S. pilots to increase their capability and survivability in combat. Selected for promotion, Major Carlisle departed Nellis Air Force base for Maxwell Air Force Base, AL, to attend Air Command and Staff College and then deployed to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as the chief of air operations, U.S. Central Command Forward from 1991 to 1993. In 1993, now-Lieutenant Colonel Carlisle returned to the F-15 Eagle, as operations officer of the 19th Fighter Squadron and then commander of the 54th Fighter Squadron at Elmendorf Air Force Base, AK. Following command, Lieutenant Colonel Carlisle attended Army War College in 1996, was selected for promotion to colonel, and returned to the Pacific in the F-15 Eagle as the Deputy Commander, 18th Operations Group at Kadena Air Base, Japan. Following Kadena, Colonel Carlisle was selected to command the 1st Operations Group at Langley Air Force Base, VA, then the 33rd Fighter Wing at Eglin Air Force Base, FL, and finally, after a short staff tour, the 3rd Wing at Elmendorf Air Force Base. General Carlisle has served several tours on the Air Staff to include chief of the plans and programs directorate, director of the operational planning, policy and strategy, deputy chief of staff for air, space and information operations, plans and requirements, and two tours in the Legislative Liaison Division, as deputy director and director. It was in these positions that I witnessed firsthand General Carlisle's adept ability to handle a myriad of complex issues that directly impacted our national security. General Carlisle's engagement with Congress during his tenure as both deputy director and director of the Legislative Liaison Division was faultless. Under General Carlisle's leadership, the Air Force developed a comprehensive congressional notification plan, ensuring timely and accurate passage of information on the Air Force's most difficult issues including the $40 billion KC-X acquisition program, creation of Air Force Cyber Command, force structure changes, and creation of Air Force Global Strike Command. General Carlisle prepared over 200 announcements to the Hill, cleared of over 500 witness statements, transcripts, inserts, and questions for the record through the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Office of Management and Budget, and managed over 1,000 Congressional travel events to all 7 continents including 100 congressional Member visits to the Central Command Area of Responsibility. Finally, General Carlisle led the drive for what I consider the Air Force's most pressing issue: recapitalization. Through General Carlisle's leadership, the Air Force secured a budget of $1.7 billion for bomber and air-to-ground weapons, yielded $8.2 billion for fighter and munitions programs, and laid the foundation for $200 million in supplemental munitions funding. The leadership, insight, and dedication of General Carlisle have been instrumental in building lasting and trusting relationships with the U.S. Congress, resulting in an overall increase in U.S. national security. The breadth and depth of General Carlisle's assignments and the professionalism with which he has carried them out reflect a keen intellect and an unrivaled grasp of national security policies developed through both personal experience and academic instruction. General Carlisle earned a master's degree in business administration from Golden Gate University in San Francisco, attended the National Security Management Course at Syracuse University, the Seminar XXI-- International Relations programs at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Executive Course on National and International Security at George Washington University. While he has received many distinguished awards and decorations, it is General Carlisle's commitment and sacrifice to this Nation that make him stand out among his peers. Today, General Carlisle is once again at the tip of the spear, leading our service men and women as commander of 13th Air Force, commander of Joint Task Force--Support Forces Antarctica, Operation Deep Freeze, and the Pacific Command's Joint Forces Air Component commander. On behalf of Congress and the United States of America, I thank Lieutenant General Carlisle, his wife Gillian, and their daughter Summer for their continued commitment, sacrifice, and contribution to this great Nation. I congratulate Lieutenant General Carlisle on his recent promotion to lieutenant general and wish him Godspeed as he leads our military in protecting this great nation and its way of life.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 15 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, a lot of times attention is drawn to terrible things going on around the world. We hear a lot about Sudan, and we hear about Zimbabwe, with a president who has taken that country from the breadbasket of the world to one of the most impoverished nations around. But there is one area nobody talks about. I have been trying for quite some time to get attention drawn to this area. We have a bill that is introduced by Senator Feingold, myself, and others, which is called the LRA Disarmament in Northern Uganda Recovery Act. This essentially does one thing. It directs the administration to develop a research strategy to apprehend a guy named Joseph Kony and the top LRA commanders throughout the country and protect the civilians. The reason this is important--and I have been dealing with this issue for 10 years, or perhaps more. I have had occasion to spend time with President Museveni of Uganda, President Kagame of Rwanda, and President Kabila of Congo, and others in that area. Twenty-five years ago, Joseph Kony--he is kind of a spiritual leader in that eastern African area. He is a deranged person. He decided to start a thing that some people have heard of, called the ``child's military'' or the ``children's army,'' where he goes out and abducts little kids. For more than 20 years, he has led this Lord's Resistance Army. He has done it primarily in the area of northern Uganda. I have been there several times to Gulu, which is the headquarters area. Many of the kids who have survived him are up there now in hospitals. His way of doing things is to go into villages and abduct children, young children--I am talking about 11, 12, 13-year-old children--and teach them to be soldiers, with AK-47s, the whole thing. Then they have to go back to their villages and murder their parents and all their siblings. If they do not do that, they cut their ears off and cut their noses off and cut their lips off, as we can see in this picture. Here are these young, little guys. That little boy is about 10 years old with an AK-47. The tribes in that part of Africa, Hutus and Tutsis, have been fighting forever. We are all familiar with the genocide that took place in Rwanda and the millions of people who lost their lives and the torturing that went on. The things that have happened are just mind- boggling. Yet all the time that was happening, nobody realized what was going on in that area. Millions of people have fled their homes over time and have been in displacement camps in the areas I just described. A vast nation in the heart of Africa, the DRC--the Democratic Republic of Congo--has strived to recover from lengthy civil wars. It goes back to many years ago, back when Congo got its independence from King Leopold II. Anyone with an interest in Africa at all should read a book. It is called ``King Leopold's Ghost.'' When you read this book, you will find out what really happened, what the true story is not just of the Congo but all of Africa. This area was in the Congo. The wars started back in 1960 and then the most recent started in 1990. Joseph Kony would go into these areas of displaced people and capture the young people. We made an effort, as we tracked him from one area to another just about 6 months ago, to Goma--that is a fairly large city in Eastern Congo. That is where he was last seen. He left before we got there. As he went north up toward the Sudan, he mutilated 900 people, most of them young people, on that route. One might ask the question, Why is it these countries are not able to eradicate this person, to do something about him? The problem is that we have a very fine President in Uganda, President Museveni. Museveni used to be a warrior. I think there is a reluctance of the warriors who become Presidents of African nations to want to say: We cannot handle the security ourselves; we are going to have to depend on other countries, the United States or other countries, to do it for us. He has been somewhat resistant. President Kagame from Rwanda is--I think everyone agrees--one of the greatest leaders in Africa. He is the one, in the genocide of 1994 that wiped out most of his population, who was able to go back. As you go down from the airport to the capital area of Rwanda, you would think you are in an American city. In fact, it is much cleaner than many American cities. He has been able to bring it back up. He also came from the bush as a warrior. Again, he is a great person. As I said the same thing about President Museveni, there is a reluctance to admit they cannot handle these problems themselves. President Kabila is President of Congo. Congo used to be called Zaire. It is a gigantic area. We remember the stories of explorers who went over there and were able to get all the way across the Congo, taking months and months to do so, many of them losing their lives. Back when the Congo was having serious problems, President Kabila, Sr., was there. He was actually killed, and his son Joe Kabila took the reins of the country. Joe Kabila also has a military background. So we have three Presidents. They respect each other. They are not at war with each other. They all have one thing in common; that is, they want to eradicate this monster called Joseph Kony. They have not been able to successfully get that done. What we are doing with this legislation is recognizing, because we never hear anyone talking about it, that there is this serious problem that is taking place. We all want to do things to help people who are downtrodden, but this is one that has been overlooked. Finally, this bill would give everybody throughout the world an understanding that this is now a U.S. priority and that we are going to finally do something to get rid of this Joseph Kony. It is easy to say that is another part of the world until you get over there and see. These are kids from 10 to 12 years old being forced to murder people in their own village. They brutally torture these children and maim them for life. That is what this guy has been doing for 25 years. We have an opportunity to do something. We never had an opportunity before. We tried to introduce it. This bill is one that is out of the Foreign Relations Committee now. It is sponsored primarily by Senator Feingold. I did not support it at first because it does require about $30 million to $35 million. He had it offset by taking money out of the Air Force. I did not like that. I think this President is going to go down as the most anti-defense, anti-military President in history. We punished the military enough, and I am not going to take any more money out of that budget. They agreed to pull that out in committee. The money should come from USAID, from existing State Department funds. We do not know that yet, but we do know this is going to come to the floor. We want it to come to the floor. There is a hold on it now. In fact, the hold is by my junior Senator. I hope we are able to get this bill. When we look at how many years something like this has been going on, this unspeakable type of behavior--we don't know of anyplace else in the world. It is a very small price to pay, a small effort to let us take the lead with other nations. I can assure my colleagues that other nations will follow. I have given talks in Canada and some of the other places about the problems we have with Joseph Kony. People say we just need to have somebody come in and say: If you can get together the Presidents of these countries of Rwanda, Uganda, Congo, Sudan, and the Central African Republic, these five countries, then we will come in if you lead the way. That is what we want to do. There are so many things going on right now. We have people who, when we had the PEPFAR bill--that was a bill to send money to countries, primarily African countries. That bill was on the floor of the Senate. It had been funded previously at $15 billion. Just 6 months ago, that bill was down here. They raised it from $15 billion to $50 billion. They raised it $35 billion. That is going to go to Africa with very few controls on it. We do not know where the money is going to go. This is less than one-thousandth of that amount to defend these kids. There is a group I ran into up in Gulu in northern Uganda. It was about 3 years ago. I wish I could remember their names. Young college kids recognized this was going on. They went up there with camera crews and took pictures. They have been here and rallied the support of literally thousands of college kids who have become familiar with these atrocities that are taking place. I applaud them for doing it. They wonder why we cannot do something. If you can increase your PEPFAR funding for Africa by $35 billion and you don't want to spend one-thousandth of that amount, $35 million, to save those kids--30,000 kids over the years have been mutilated like this--then there is something wrong with this country. We are going to make every effort--Senator Feingold is one of the more liberal Democrats, and I am one of the most conservative Republicans. This crosses all these concepts. I know my time has expired, but I only want to say I want to do everything I can to get this legislation through. I am going to ask our conservative friends to listen and do something that is right on this legislation. I believe, with the 51 cosponsors we have right now, we ought to be able to get the bill passed if we can get it to the floor. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, I commend Mr. Steve McCraw on his appointment to become the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety. Mr. McCraw is a native of El Paso, TX, and holds a bachelor of science degree and a master of arts degree from West Texas State University. Mr. McCraw began his career in 1977 as a State trooper and sergeant narcotics investigator for the Texas Department of Public Safety prior to his appointment as a special agent with the FBI in 1983. As an FBI special agent, Mr. McCraw was assigned to the Dallas, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Tucson, and San Antonio field offices. His FBI Headquarters assignments included Unit Chief of an organized crime unit; an Inspector; Deputy Assistant Director; Assistant Director of the Office of Intelligence, which was established in February 2002; and Assistant Director for the Inspection Division where he was responsible for strategic planning, internal investigations, and bureau-wide performance evaluations. He also served as the Inspector-In-Charge of the South East Bomb Task Force and the Director of the Foreign Terrorism Tracking Task Force, which was established by the President in October 2001. After his retirement as an FBI Assistant Director in August 2004, Texas Governor Rick Perry appointed Mr. McCraw as the director of the Governor's Office of Homeland Security. Mr. McCraw has been instrumental in leading the State's homeland security efforts and spearheading emergency efforts and responses to a variety of security threats to the State and emergencies. His extensive background in the law enforcement and intelligence fields enabled him to make well-informed decisions in preparing for and responding to all hazards and threats in Texas. On 17 July 2009, Mr. McCraw was selected as the Director of Texas Department of Public Safety which is a capstone to his law enforcement career as he returns to lead the department of over 8,500 commissioned and noncommissioned personnel. I congratulate Mr. McCraw on this appointment and his long public service and substantial law enforcement career.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, on Monday morning at 1 a.m., I voted no on the cloture motion to the latest Reid managers' package, which was only made available Saturday, because I am adamantly opposed to this $2.5 trillion government-run health care system with its $\1/2\ trillion increase in taxes on Americans and nearly $\1/2\ trillion in cuts to Medicare to help pay for it. I am opposed to public financing of abortion this bill allows. I am opposed to a facade of health care reform that in no way seriously addresses tort reform and will only increase premiums and the cost of health care for all Americans. I am opposed to the special deals for only certain States in this bill to buy off votes. I am opposed to the special deals for only certain States in this bill to buy off votes. I am opposed to the increased burden of at least $26 billion on States including Oklahoma mandated under this bill. I am opposed to no serious effort at all to include any amendments from Republicans. Republican amendments to block tax increases, block cuts to Medicare, impose tort reforms, try to impose some kind of discipline on the government take-over of health care in this country, among other amendments and motions have failed by nearly party-line votes. I am opposed to this bill, and most importantly, the American people are opposed to this bill. They know this bill is a complete disaster. The next few votes leading up to the final vote on this package are all procedural votes, and I will be opposed to them all. But all 60 Democrats will vote for them. Democrats do what they are told. The votes include accepting this new Reid managers' package, cloture on the original Reid substitute, accepting the original Reid substitute, cloture on the underlying bill, and finally the final passage of his colossal mistake. Since I am opposed to each one of these votes, I will not remain in Washington to vote against these procedural maneuvers since that will have the same effect as voting no, and will return to vote against final passage of this bill.

Mr. INHOFE

Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, this morning I will vote no on the cloture motion to H.R. 3288. I oppose H.R. 3288 and will not be able to be present to vote no on final passage. The reason I will not be here is that tomorrow my wife and I will be celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary with our 20 kids and grandkids.

Mr. INHOFE. Indeed, she is.